Good piece Ben! But i wonder if there isnt a form of Obamas Right Side of History still going on here. If conservatives had successfully maintained a sense of tradition and order would conservatives even need to argue against liberal movements in good faith.
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On the contrary, I think "ad hoc exceptions based on personal prejudice" have proved very appealing to political masses, but I see your point on the actual principles of an intellectual tradition as opposed to a political movement.
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sry, should have qualified my final statement. I find exceptions based on personal prejudice appealing as well, provided it's my prejudice. in the long run tho this lacks widespread intellectual appeal and isn't coherent enough to provide an alternative to liberalism
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hence the common complaint that conservatives have failed to conserve those things that matter most and have instead negotiated a protracted retreat
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The safe middle class suburbia of order and good-paying non-college jobs that so many rank and file right-wing Republican voters desire is certainly lost, but it seems foolish to pretend it was an long-held tradition in America, as opposed to a result of New Deal liberalism.
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If you think I'm drawing up a strawman, feel free to point to broader decline in Christianity, community, etc. But I think a lot of right-wing voters saying "Paul Ryan hasn't conserved a damn thing!" are correct and yet have far less higher ambitions than you do.
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I don't necessarily disagree with you here, except to note that both new deal liberalism and what republican voters desire are effects as well as causes
End of conversation
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And THAT problem points to the large and difficult problem of what the relation really is between "the history of ideas" and "history." Certainly, I think, in the former, "extremism wins," especially in a democratic age à la Tocqueville, when people struggle with any but the
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most general ideas. But history isn't simply the unfolding of the logic of ideas (a far from "conservative" idea in itself). Man is a rational animal (or so I believe), so what he thinks matters, but whether he really thinks what he thinks he thinks, whether and how he acts on
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what he thinks he thinks—this is shaped by circumstances, themselves not simply a function of will or ideas (a more genuinely conservative idea).
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I have a hard time with some of the catholic accounts of liberalism as a force leading to some determined point, rather than a "paradigm" within which debate over things which take place within the "forces of history" - ofc existing within such a paradigm has consequences
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But it's jarring to hear the latest fad sometimes explained as the inexorable endpoint of "liberalism"...
End of conversation
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