Conservatism Isn’t What It Used to Be
by Paul Craig Roberts
[Subscribe online to Chronicles: A Magazine of American Culture. Click here for details].
When I was in the Reagan administration, America had a lively press that never hesitated to take us to task. Even the “Teflon President” received more brickbats than George Bush and Dick Cheney.
The lively press disappeared, along with its independence, in the media concentration engineered during the Clinton administration. Shortly thereafter, all the liberal news anchors disappeared, as well. Today, the U.S. media serve as propaganda ministry for the government’s wars and police state. Yet, some conservatives continue to rant on about “the liberal media.”
That other conservative bugaboo, liberal academia, has also been crushed. Universities once controlled their appointments, but no more. Recently, the political science faculty at DePaul, a Catholic university, voted to give tenure to the courageous scholar and teacher Norman Finkelstein. The department was unable to make its tenure decision stick over the objections of the Israel lobby and their conservative allies, who were able to reach in over the heads of the political science department and the College Personnel Committee, and force DePaul’s president to block Finkelstein’s tenure.
Finkelstein, a Jew, had angered the Israel lobby with his criticisms of Israel’s misuse of the holocaust sufferings of Jews to oppress the Palestinians and to silence critics.
On Sept. 14, 2007, the Los Angeles Times reported that the appointment of the distinguished legal scholar Erwin Chemerinsky as the dean of a new law school at the University of California at Irvine had been withdrawn by the university’s chancellor, Michael V. Drake, who gave in to the demands of conservatives outside the university. Conservatives are outraged at Chemerinsky because he criticized Attorney General Gonzales. In withdrawing Chemerinsky’s appointment, Drake told him, “I didn’t realize there would be conservatives out to get you.”
Gonzales is the attorney general who wrote memos justifying torture and denying that the Bush administration was bound by the Geneva Conventions. Gonzales told a stunned Senate Judiciary Committee that the U.S. Constitution did not provide habeas corpus protection to American citizens.
To experience an attorney general of the United States fiercely attacking the U.S. Constitution, rending its every provision, is the most frightening experience of my lifetime. That the head of the legal branch of the executive, sworn to uphold the Constitution, would turn against it in order to enhance unaccountable executive power is a clear impeachable offense. If anyone anywhere in the world deserved criticism, Gonzales did. But when Chemerinsky unbraided the despicable Gonzales, conservatives rushed to Gonzales’ defense, not to the defense of the American Constitution.
It seems only yesterday that conservatives were complaining about the liberties that liberals took with the Constitution. Liberals were expanding rights, fancifully perhaps. But today conservatives are curtailing long-established rights, such as habeas corpus and protection against self-incrimination. Conservatives abandoned “original intent” and all of their constitutional scruples once they had a chance to cram more power into the presidency.
In my conservative days as an academic, I experienced some liberal blackballs. But liberals did not attack academic freedom per se. The new conservatives despise academic freedom and have created organizations to monitor departments of Middle East studies in order to lower the boom on scholars who follow the truth instead of neoconservative ideology or Israeli policy. Today, academic freedom has disappeared, just like the independent media. No one but powerful organized interest groups has a voice. In the media, truth can only emerge on comic shows like The Colbert Report and Jon Stewart’s The Daily Show.
In years past, conservatives were often shouted down on university campuses by left-wing students. But today speakers disapproved by powerful interest groups are simply disinvited in advance. Even Harvard University has fallen to the new censorship. On Sept. 14, 2007, the Harvard Crimson reported that the Israel lobby was able to force Harvard University to disinvite three speakers—an Oxford University professor, a DePaul professor and a Rutgers professor—because they had criticized Israeli policy.
In America today, speaking your mind in the media or in academia is a thing of the past. A country that has no voices independent of powerful interests is a country in which freedom is dead.
COPYRIGHT 2007 CREATORS SYNDICATE INC.
[Subscribe online to Chronicles: A Magazine of American Culture. Click here for details].
1 Comment by Sid Cundiff on 20 September 2007:
Conservatism isn’t what it used to be because “Neoconservatism” isn’t conservatism at all, but the Hamiltonian-Whig persuasion.
The press and the universities aren’t “liberal” (Cultural Marxist) anymore? Mr Roberts hatred of the Hamiltonians has utterly blinded him to reality. When Nurse Ratched takes over in 2009, maybe he’ll be cured of this blindness.
And, were one to argue that the Neocons are Marxists (and Mr. Roberts to his credit isn’t so arguing) would be fathomlessly stupid. Simple minds can think only of one enemy. Simple minds lose battles.
2 Comment by robert reavis on 20 September 2007:
” And, were one to argue that the Neocons are Marxists (and Mr. Roberts to his credit isn’t so arguing) would be fathomlessly stupid ”
Sid,
Perhaps, but they do have very similar attributes to cultural Maxists and I would say for the most part, they are more marxist than conservative or traditonalist. Although in some matters of economics they tend towards freedom and oligarchy.
As for nurse Ratched ? I believe it was little Bill Kristol who said, ” Between a Buchanan and a Kerry, I would prefer Kerry. ” I am sure he would think you exaggerate the danger of Mrs. Clinton.
On this one I believe Mr. Roberts is right and you are the one blinded by desire. Say it ain’t so, Sid. Say it ain’t so !
3 Comment by Mickey Droney on 20 September 2007:
Mr. Roberts obviously hasn’t attended a university in a long, long, long time. Being in my 20s, I can attest to the cultural marxism I experienced in the form of “liberation theology,” “queer studies,” and “re-defining gender roles,” etc. I never once saw any faculty support for Bush or any other neo-cons. The professors thought them to be the jack-asses that they are, albeit maybe for reasons that are different than mine.
4 Comment by Bernie on 20 September 2007:
“But liberals did not attack academic freedom per se. ”
Larry Summers? Michael Levin? Philippe Rushton? Hans Hoppe? Arthur Jensen? Jim Gilchrist? Stuart Nagel?
5 Comment by Nicholas G.P. MOSES on 20 September 2007:
“But liberals did not attack academic freedom per se.”
Excuse me. I do not know how things are in economic departments, but as a history major, I have found academic historians to be rabid leftists who are both condescending and dismissive toward any historicist conservatism (which by the way, is quite different from the “neoconservatism” PCR quite rightly despises), and who cannot help but presume to stick their noses into issues that do not touch their area of specialty.
Mr. Droney and Mr. Cundiff are right. The enemy of our enemy is DEFINITELY not our friend when our enemy is Bush. Modern academics, by excluding conservatives from the circle, only drive them out of the arms of sensible pragmatic traditionalism and into the arms of the radicalized G.O.P. They are part of the problem.
6 Comment by G.S. on 20 September 2007:
“In my conservative days as an academic, I experienced some liberal blackballs. But liberals did not attack academic freedom per se.”
Yeah … as others have noted, PCR is getting carried away.
I do agree with him re/ his fondness for The Colbert Report, however:
Madame First Lady, Mr. President, my name is Stephen Colbert and tonight it’s my privilege to celebrate this president. We’re not so different, he and I.
We GET it.
We’re not brainiacs on the nerd patrol. We’re not members of the factinista. We go straight from the gut, right sir?
That’s where the truth lies, right down here in the gut. Do you know you have more nerve endings in your gut than you have in your head?
You can look it up.
I know some of you are going to say “I did look it up, and that’s not true.”
That’s ’cause you looked it up in a BOOK.
Next time, look it up in your gut. I did. My gut tells me that’s how our nervous system works.
Every night on my show, the Colbert Report, I speak straight from the gut, OK?
I give people the truth, unfiltered by rational argument.
I call it the “No Fact Zone.”
Fox News, I hold a copyright on that term.
I’m a simple man with a simple mind. I hold a simple set of beliefs that I live by.
Number one, I believe in America. I believe it exists. My gut tells me I live there.
I feel that it extends from the Atlantic to the Pacific, and I strongly believe it has 50 states. (And I cannot wait to see how the Washington Post spins that one tomorrow.)
I believe in democracy. I believe democracy is our greatest export.
At least until China figures out a way to stamp it out of plastic for three cents a unit.
In fact, Ambassador Zhou Wenzhong, welcome. Your great country makes our Happy Meals possible.
I said it’s a CELEBRATION.
I believe the government that governs best is the government that governs least.
And by these standards, we have set up a fabulous government in Iraq.
7 Comment by robert reavis on 20 September 2007:
Mickey,
“Being in my 20s, I can attest to the cultural marxism I experienced in the form of “liberation theology,” “queer studies,” and “re-defining gender roles,” etc. I never once saw any faculty support for Bush or any other neo-cons. The professors thought them to be the jack-asses that they are..”
Yes, our institutions have all become occupied territory. But if you can find a teacher, somewhere, somehow, a few days with a good one is worth weeks with the ninety — nine others. One must search, travel and diligently look. They are out there, just not very many of them. Don’t despair you can always learn a little Latin and Greek and just read. It is better ,however, to have a teacher. Usually the older and more ostricized he or she is by the other faculty members, the better they are, but not always. Socrates learned from the old woman, Diotima ; Plato from the old man, Socrates, and Aristotle from Plato. St. Dominic founded the Order of Preachers but wrote little, himself. St Francis wanted to be a knight, but became a beggar instead. Mother Theresa suffered desolation for twenty year. Nathan Bedford Forest was one of the better Confederate Fighters but was never recognized as such until it was too late. ( His Mother and Father taught him ) They are around us and sometimes in obscure places. I hope you find one. rr
8 Comment by Mickey Droney on 20 September 2007:
RR,
Thanks for the advice. I graduated about five years ago, but I have no intentions of donating any more of my money to another neo-Marxist “re-education” camp. I prefer to persue my continuing education through reading, travel, and life experience. My preoccupation now is with taking care of my family, which is just about all that is within your power after your realize nothing can be changed.
9 Comment by Djordje on 20 September 2007:
For once Sid is right. Neocons are not Marxists- they are Trotskyites.
10 Comment by Aldebanlohoperaldi Huffghaffson on 20 September 2007:
Israeli Control of the Mass Media & the 9-11 Cover-Up
By: ChristopherBollyn
http://www.rumormillnews.com/cgi-bin/forum.cgi?read=108923
The government and controlled media have lied to the public about 9-11 for 6 years.
Those who have discerned and exposed the lies about the “false flag” terror attacks
and the fraudulent “War on Terror” have been treated like madmen and criminals.
It’s time for this criminal nightmare to end.
11 Comment by Sid Cundiff on 20 September 2007:
re: #2 Mr. Reavis, I do not exaggerate the danger of Nurse Ratched. I haven’t forgotten Waco. Think the Patriot Act is bad? Just wait.
Instead of trying to say the Neocons are Marxist or Trotskyite, let’s enumerate their 5 point program, the same program that the Republican Party has always had, the same program of the Henry Clay Whigs, the same as Hamilton, the same as the English Whigs of 1688, if not of the Exclusion Bill of 1679:
1. utter centralization into a massive nation-state, with substates as just franchises of the central state: e.g. the Act of Union of 1707, the United Kingdom of 1801, Lincoln’s War, etc.
2. Total control of the currency and banking, with a central bank issuing fiat money: e.g. The Bank of England c. 1689, the Bank of the US 1791, the National Banking Act of dishonest Abe, the Fed of 1913.
3. corporate welfare e.g. Clay’s “internal improvements”, Dishonest Abe’s tariff, wars for Haliburton, etc.
4. imperial expansion: e.g. The East India Company, Lincoln’s War against Dixie, the annexation of Hawaii, The Spanish-American War, etc. Often acting as proxy for another state: Britain, France, etc.
5. opposition to the Catholic Church and the High Anglicans: The Exclusion Act, the Latitudinarian ascendency after 1689, the Test Act (or did the Tories do this?), opposition to Irish immigration, “Rum, Romanism, and Rebellion”, no diplomatic recognition of the Vatican, etc.
Folks, these ain’t Marxist or Trotskyite policies, bad as they are, at least not in their “deep structure”. The Republican Party hasn’t changed. It was the Democrat that changed, from the Jeffersonian party to the Socialist. Who’s to blame? Dial W for Woodrow.
12 Comment by James on 20 September 2007:
PCR is both right and wrong about the academy.
In the academy these days, one can be as ardently neo-conservative as he wants, just so long as he doesn’t touch the third rail of race, gender and sexuality. The so-called radical left is perfectly happy to ignore a student’s or a scholar’s desire to incinerate Persian women and children, for instance. But there would be blood in the streets if someone on campus refused to genuflect after saying something that was deemed “racially insensitive,” or even suggested that women shouldn’t be in the army.
So bombs away on Iran! Just make sure blacks and women and other “minorities” can get in on the act.
13 Comment by Nicholas G.P. MOSES on 20 September 2007:
“But there would be blood in the streets if someone on campus refused to genuflect after saying something that was deemed “racially insensitive,” or even suggested that women shouldn’t be in the army.”
Or that the French Revolution was a grave error. Or that modernist and postmodernist architecture are both undeserving of their lavish praise and horribly overused. Or that the U.S. and U.K. committed war crimes against civilians while fighting a very evil foe in World War II. Or the historical travesty of selling out Eastern Europe to the Bolshevists.
You are correct about the neoconservatives, but only to a point. They make up a tiny minority of academics, enough to be insignificant in faculty senates and the campus’ general political atmospheres (even if they channel their influence collectively into the Republican Party apparatus). And PCR is correct about the increasing corporatization (coinciding, perhaps not coincidently, with increasing unaffordability) of the university.
Still, to insinuate that all this constitutes a sinister turn to the right, as enemies of tradition doubtlessly will, is insane.
14 Comment by Nicholas G.P. MOSES on 20 September 2007:
“Still, to insinuate that all this constitutes a sinister turn to the right, as enemies of tradition doubtlessly will”
The subordinate clause should read, “as enemies of tradition doubtlessly will twist his words to do.”
15 Comment by René on 21 September 2007:
Why not point to the real cause of academic progressivism?: human rights.
On my faculty (social science) their is only one religion that unites everyone (marxists, socialists, liberals, neocons), the religion of natural rights. Everybody seems to have accepted the ‘liberal premise’: every human being is equal and on behalf of that equality he/she can claim his/her ‘natural rights’ from anyone on the face of this earth regardless of time and place. It was only a matter of time before this dangerous philosophy would burst out the nation-state framework and expand to the rest of the world. Hence: the need for world-government.
Little do the philosophical radicals know that they are actually serving not the interests of a mythical ‘humanity’ but those of big money. Take the EU for instance: is started out as a French attempt (on behalf ot its steel-industry) to get acces to the German coal-industry in the Ruhr-area. Now we are moving forewards to a European empire based on the spread of human rights. which, in the future, will likely be dominated by tthe French and Germans (and Turks?). How does one fight such interests? The proces does not just end by removing liberals or neocons from the academic world.
Greetings from the Netherlands.
16 Comment by Simon Newman on 21 September 2007:
The cultural Marxist ‘liberals’ absolutely do attack academic freedom per se. In fact the neocon attack on academic freedom often piggybacks on the foundations laid by the cultural Marxists.
17 Comment by Nicholas G.P. MOSES on 21 September 2007:
René is absolutely correct. I can only add that, through their willful blindness, leftist academics cannot escape accountability for the lies that they have propagated. As for removing lefties and neocons from the academy, it’s a start, and it will eradicate in large measure the intellectual base from which they spout such evil.
18 Comment by R. E. G. on 21 September 2007:
To Mr. Cundiff (#11): Thanks for a very well-compiled list of offenses against liberty.
To Mr. Moses (#13): The Cultural Marxists have made academia a difficult place indeed. However, it becomes all the more worth it to see the look of apoplexy on their faces when you confront them a litany of materialist injustices. Try it sometime. You’ll be glad you did.
19 Comment by Andy Kornkven on 21 September 2007:
We no longer have a liberal media; we now have a Zionist media.
I never thought I’d say this but I almost miss the old liberal media.
20 Comment by Sid Cundiff on 21 September 2007:
#18. You’re welcome
21 Comment by René on 21 September 2007:
Nicholas GP Moses said:
“As for removing lefties and neocons from the academy, it’s a start, and it will eradicate in large measure the intellectual base from which they spout such evil.”
But how can this be done? To be able to remove all leftist professors conservatives would have to use serious power either via the state (limiting academic freedoms as ‘revenge’) or via building the same influential interest-group structures trough wich the current cultutral-marxist elite upholds its position, which will take ages. Do we have such time? Will the west be dead by then?
22 Comment by Mickey Droney on 21 September 2007:
Just a little quote that illustrates the real problems with our media:
“We are grateful to the Washington Post, the New York Times, Time magazine and other great publications whose directors have attended our meetings and respected the promises of discretion
for almost forty years. It would have been impossible for us to develop our plan for the world if we had been subject to the bright lights of publicity during those years. But, the world is now more
sophisticated and prepared to march towards a world-government. The supranational sovereignty of an intellectual elite and world bankers is surely preferable to the National autodetermination practiced in past centuries”
–David Rockefeller in an address to a Trilateral Commission meeting
in June of 1991
23 Comment by Aldebanlohoperaldi Huffghaffson on 21 September 2007:
if you can switch public opinion in the u.s. overnight from supporting germany in ‘world war I’ to supporting england… just because balfour of england promised palestine to jews if they could do that…via their newpaper hegemony back then… anything can be done today… and they are doing it. [Once moving-pictures hit the scene stalin famously said, give me movies and i'll rule the world.]
the point to KNOW is that you/we, especially the ‘people’ are INEVITABLY (it’s biological) conceptual creatures…what we conceive and conceptualize we inevitably act out or act upon…it’s the human factor. Frankly speaking animals are incapable of being THAT stupid.
So if you KNOW this and yet you do not have your own press or seize it back again…then why sqwak about how you are ruled from jerusalem, and are their manservants. If they accepted this reality first, organized and acted upon it, then, that’s in Fact what YOU Are, and also more so in not redressing the grievance. “Hello, manservants… Sorry, time for you to go die…again…have a nice day. and don’t forget the Media says it’s us who are the victims not you-so it must be true. god bless. And look at the bright side, now you can ALL be ‘like’ jesus.”
24 Comment by Ed Roberts on 22 September 2007:
Dr. Roberts sees a difference between Likudnik neoconservatives and Marxist democrats in their control of media and academia. I can discern no significant difference between the two camps and, in fact, view them as two sides of the same coin.
Their pretense at opposition to each other is drawn strictly along party lines, in an attempt to gull watchers into the belief that there are actually two parties in American electoral politics.
25 Comment by Nicholas G.P. MOSES on 22 September 2007:
There were a few Marxists who genuinely cared about people. I’m not sure if the same can be said of any heretofore unrepentant neocon.
Ideologically, of course, both movements are bankrupt.
26 Comment by Bob Tyndale on 22 September 2007:
At least we still have Chronicles!
27 Comment by Sesom P. G. Salohcin on 22 September 2007:
“Ideologically, of course, both movements are bankrupt.”
All “isms”, “anities”, “ams”, etc. are.
28 Comment by Iliya Pavlovich on 22 September 2007:
It’s just my luck. I never really got to know the Academia in the U.S. – probably out my own phobia of being disilusioned too fast. But if anybody asks you about Academia in the U.K. it’s flaming (PINK) – to me flaming pink is a little more red than RED, but it tens to be a little more gentle (metrosexual).
Something else has been bugging me these days. How come we never had a public execution of Osama Ben Ladin’s “handlers”?
Wasn’t he in our corner for quite some time? If he was – which one of our morons failed to see that he’s setting himself to hod both sides against the middle? That type of a carelessness deserves a public execution.
Same way I would want our Supreme Court to investigate any leach (Clinton) and with the intended result in eternal humiliation have him jog naked on the White House lawn (with the full security detail in line, and all the major networks). The French would love us, the Brits would love us, The Ruskies would love us. We became a nation shackled in some idiotic hesitancy. We don’t know what we are saying, we hedge, we “negotiate” eternaly, we simplify, we quantify……. I’m pretty sick of much of it, short of a public justice (just like the Sharia – which I oppose on different grounds) – cruel and unusual punishment. We don’t need that level of cruelty but the other elements we can use.
29 Comment by Iliya Pavlovich on 22 September 2007:
It’ll be a cold day in Hell when I start getting off my high horse and using spell-check. But let’s all have a good laugh at “it tens” instead of “it tenDs”.
30 Comment by Iliya Pavlovich on 22 September 2007:
Thank God for Dr. T. who is here to reverse the odds.
31 Comment by Yankee Doodle on 22 September 2007:
I think the points brought up here nicely address what I understand to be the difference between true Conservatives and “Neo-cons”.
To my way of thinking, the Republican Party is getting taken for a ride by the Neo-cons in much the same way as the Democratic Party got hijacked by a loose coalition of extremists and then became Clintonized.
I think what we will see is a resurgence of people in both parties who increasingly disagree with the big names in their own parties, and who find that they actually have more in common with some of those who are “across the aisle” than with radicals and criminals who claim to be on the same side of the aisle.
I think it will boil down to honesty and integrity from both sides against corruption, hypocrisy and opportunism on both sides.
“A country that has no voices independent of powerful interests is a country in which freedom is dead.”
True, but we’re not there yet.
Great article!
32 Comment by Nicholas G.P. MOSES on 23 September 2007:
#27: Including nihilism.
33 Comment by Sesom P. G. Salohcin on 23 September 2007:
“Including nihilism.”
Right. “Movements”. “To belong” crap. Herds.
34 Comment by Clyde Wilson on 23 September 2007:
The Republican party could not have been “hijacked” by the neocons if it were not already beyond redemption.
35 Comment by Philip Candido on 23 September 2007:
Am I the only one who finds that Dr. Roberts seems to go to the opposite extreme? Recently he was arguing that Iran was perfectly fine as a country and we have no business invading them. Now he is saying the media and academia aren’t really that liberal.
It seems to me he is seeing the facts correctly but not interpreting them correctly. For instance, he is right that we have no business in Iran anymore than Iraq, and that Bush and co. are committing treason and shredding the Constitution. He is right that neo-conservatives and the Israeli lobby are exerting more pressure than they ought. However, it doesn’t follow that Iran is good, liberals are good, or that the media isn’t red (or pink as the case may be) just because the neo-cons are bad. I’ve been in and out of academia both as a student and a teacher, and I can guarantee you that it is a liberal institution, dominated by leftist talking points, in the anti-family pro-socialist mold. I’m at the point where I have to say unless one is entering the applied sciences college is a waste of time.
Most of the media votes democrat, and it is obvious when papers claiming to be unbiased endorse democratic candidates. The media promotes the destruction of the family, unrestrained atheistic capitalism and the consumerist society that is rotting our soul as a “nation”. I’d say culture but we do not really have that. Methinks Dr. Roberts needs to not go off the deep end when rightly criticizing today’s evils.
36 Comment by Nicholas G.P. MOSES on 23 September 2007:
Ah, yes, “herds.” That would explain why Mr. “Salochin” cannot think of anything better than to do except to rip off my name and repeat the same rantings spouted off by Nietzschean idiots on college campuses. Either way, radical individualism is still an ism.
Re: 31, “flaming pink” is a pretty fair assessment of the modern academy, even in the U.S., actually.
37 Comment by Bede on 24 September 2007:
I generally like PCR. His articles critical of free trade, for instance, are superb.
But this time he seems to have lost it. He concludes from the fact of neocons exerting undue influence in academia that the entire system is left wing. How simplistic.
I’ve worked in academia for a number of years and it is thoroughly left-wing. The only reason neocons have prominent positions in academia is because they are left-wingers themselves, albeit of a different stripe. Leftist administrators would prefer to shadowbox with neocons than to appoint real conservatives.
38 Comment by Dieudonne on 28 September 2007:
Ideological tides ebb and flow all the time. Each ebb and flow adds a new permutation but from related roots spring related errors.
As a classical liberal I feel a responsibility to own up to the intellectual and ideological abortions the we whelp from time to time. If you toss names Ward Churchill or Chairman Mao in my face I’ve little choice except to say – Yes! When deeply unbalanced individuals grasp at small kernals of truth and then pursue them to wildly inappropriate ends bad things can happen.
I’ll gladly own up to being part of a stream of thought that occasionally produces these nutcases but I then oppose those forces and nutcases within my own sphere of influence.
Afterall – constant vigilance is the price proudly paid for freedom.
Now on to part of what makes me so uncomfortable about the discussion I see here….
I see none of the same acknowledgement on the part of classical conservatives here. There seems to be no acknowledgement that there are errors and intellectual abortions to which conservative thought is prone and that one of them moves under the name Neoconservatism.
Instead you disclaim and disown it. “This isn’t conservative.” “This has nothing to do with me.” I see people declaim ing ANY connection between authentic conservative thought and neoconservative freakery.
If one doesn’t acknowledge that we all whelp monsters and abortions from time to time how do you deal with them in anything other than a terminally destructive manner?
39 Comment by Nicholas G.P. MOSES on 30 September 2007:
Dieudonne makes an interesting point. In this country, at any rate, “Paleoconservatives” seem to comprise the moralist end of conservative thought.
Even so, we can argue that sin and flouting of morality has existed throughout the history of Christendom, but never until the “Enlightenment” have elaborate systems of self-justification attempted to argue that this was anything but an aberration.
Moreover, the founding fathers of neoconservatism did not begin as conservative heretics; they began as leftists, adopted some neo-liberal economics and a few traditional positions, and then became accepted by the masses.
40 Trackback by Eric on 30 October 2007:
Eric…
Not quite clear about the post metion above…..