posted elsewhere

I don't think it makes sense to use liberal and conservative in this context anymore, if it ever did. Most self-styled conservatives are what used to be called economic liberals, and most liberals are individualists. Rauchway refers to liberals' refusal to accept claims of authority but that's far from true. Liberal technocracy devolves quickly into argument from authority. Related to that, there's the question of the liberal arts, which in themselves are less liberal by design than by default, while those who study them are more and more the opposite. The arts are an example of Burkean liberalism: negotiating the tensions between individual and community, not resolving them. Scorsese and the Italian American community, including of the mob: Celebration or condemnation? Either or both? There's nothing new, its pretty standard stuff. Shakespeare? Jane Austen? Freshman Comp? How much do we make our own lives? How much are we made by them? What disgusts me [that's a fair description] about the discussion of culture here and at related sites is that it inevitably hinges on the a philosophy of methodological individualism that the arts themselves oppose. It's bizarre. Or not, considering the sort of marginal culture ancillary [and ancillary is all it is] to the intellectual life of proud technocracy.

Is Richard Posner conservative? Is Brian Leiter liberal? Is Dan Dennett? Do any of these three actually respect democracy and what underlies it? Stephen Bainbridge is a vulgar materialist, a gourmand with a cross around his neck and a Porsche. You can see the photos on his blog. I guess it's fair to call him a conservative, but not a serious one. I read Clive Crook on torture and he was better, more direct, more clear, than most liberals. Someone called Russel Fox a conservative but on the old Political Compass graph page he was proud to test as an "authoritan leftist," and he has a quote from Norman Mailer on the right margin of his page.

"Mailer was a Left Conservative. So he had his own point of view. To himself he would suggest that he tried to think in the style of [Karl] Marx in order to attain certain values suggested by Edmund Burke..."
(The Armies of the Night [The New American Library, 1968], 185)

You tell me what it means. I take these contradictions for granted, and I don't try to pretend they don't exist. The division between those who pretend they don't, or that they shouldn't, or that they can be ignored, and the rest of us, that's the division that I worry about.