There is a useful quote about conservatism in an article by Stephen Eric Bonner. Bonner says that:

"The defense of western civilization by conservative intellectuals is, unsurprisingly, mixed with anti-Enlightenment and anti-modern prejudices. They obsess about sexual license and the decline of family values, cultural “nihilism” and the loss of tradition, tolerance for divergent life-styles and the erosion of national identity. Their “west” is not the “west” of the Enlightenment."

My own view is that the Enlightenment rationality is an instrumental rationality that has merged with what Marx termed the “commodity form” underpinning capitalist social relations. Everything thereby becomes subject to the utilitarian calculation of costs and benefits. Even art and aesthetic tastes become defined by a “culture industry”—intent only upon maximizing profits by seeking the lowest common denominator for its products. The culture indiustry would noe include the media and entertainment industries.

That is pretty much the view of Adorno and Horkheimer in Dialectic of Enlightenment. It means that the conservative economic liberal position is open to criticism on two fronts, and that the standard liberal attack on conservativism in the name of Enlightenment is questionable. By putting the Enlightenment tradition into question in the name of reason not unreason, Adorno and Horkhiemer show that it is possible to criticize the Enlightenment from the standpoint of enlightenment itself.

This offers an alternative position to the standard one that the only game in town is rejecting the countermovememt of religious reaction, conservative prejudice, and fascist irrationalism whose inspiration derived from what is usually called the “Counter-Enlightenment”.

Stephen Eric Bonner defends the Enlightenment. So how does he respond to Adorno & Horkheimer's criticism of that tradition? As you would expect he responds in a negative fashion. Most people do. So what does Bonner say? What reasons does he give?

What Bonner says is this:

'....Horkheimer and Adorno even talked about writing a sequel that would have carried a title like “Rescuing the Enlightenment”. This reclamation project was never completed, and much time has been spent speculating about why it wasn’t. The reason, I believe, is that the logic of their argument ultimately left them with little positive to say. Viewing instrumental rationality as equivalent with the rationality of domination, and this rationality with an increasingly seamless bureaucratic order, no room existed any longer for a concrete or effective political form of opposition: Horkheimer would thus ultimately embrace a quasi-religious “yearning for the totally other” while Adorno became interested in a form of aesthetic resistance grounded in “negative dialectics.”'

Bonner goes to add that though Dialectic of Enlightenment initiated a radical change in critical theory:

"....its metaphysical subjectivism surrendered any systematic concern with social movements and political institutions. Neither of them ever genuinely appreciated the democratic inheritance of the Enlightenment and thus, not only did they render critique independent of its philosophical foundations, but also of any practical interest it might serve."

True, there was little interest in social movement or political engagement shown by Adorno and Horkheimer, and their critique of the political was thin.

So what does Bonner do? He affirms the the spirit of Enlightenment by which he means an ethos, or an existential stance toward reality, or what might even be termed a “project” uniting the diverse participants in a broader intellectual trend or movement. He also says that appropriating the Enlightenment for modernity calls for reconnecting with the vernacular to arguing clearly and with a political purpose in the tradition of Ben Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, Thomas Paine, and Rousseau,

This gives us a reclamation project of rescuing the Enlightenment”, which Adorno and Horkheimer failed to deliver on. Bonner says:

"We need to consider the actual movements with which enlightenment ideals...Dialectic of Enlightenment never grasped what was at stake in the conflict or interrogated its political history. Its authors never acknowledged that different practices and ideals are appropriate to different spheres of activity or that only confusion would result from substituting the affirmation of subjectivity, through aesthetic-philosophic criticism, for political resistance. Horkheimer and Adorno were....remiss ....in ignoring the institutional preconditions for the free exercise of individual capacities. Striking indeed is how those most concerned about the “loss of subjectivity” have shown the least awareness about the practical role of genuinely democratic as against reactionary pseudo-universalism and the institutional lessons of totalitarianism."

Notice the shift in the argument. Adorno and Horkheimer are not longer working within the enlightenment tradition. They are slowly being slipped outside it without an engagement with Adorno's Aesthetic Theory or any indication that Adorno defended democracy and critique against totalitarianism.

Having sidelined contemporary critical theorists and postmodernists Bonner can them move on to his real concern--- attacking the Counter Enlightenment (authoritarianism, religious reaction, conservative prejudice, and political irrationalism) in the name of the enlightenment. We are back to the main game in town.

No further consideration is gven to how Bonner's criticism of the enlightenment tradition from within is different from, or better, than that of Adorno and Horkheimer other than poiltical critique.