Liberals Values are Universal
In an interview in the Independent, Roger Scruton, a British conservative thinker, boldly states the bare truth on how liberals and conservatives evaluate each other:"One of the great distinctions between the left and the right in the intellectual world," says Scruton, who has held chairs in aesthetics at Birkbeck and philosophy at Boston as well as a fellowship at Peterhouse, "is that left-wing people find it very hard to get on with right-wing people, because they believe that they are evil. Whereas I have no problem getting on with left-wing people, because I simply believe that they are mistaken. After a while, if I can persuade them that I'm not evil, I find it a very useful thing. I know that my views on many things are open to correction. But if you can't discuss with your opponents, how can you correct your views?"
Yep. Applies equally on both sides of the Atlantic. I've been saying exactly that for years. It's hard to get them to admit it bluntly. Where it comes out strongly, though, is in the printed rhetoric.
This attitude explains, more or less, the reason that so many liberals are simply unable to see the great good of Bush's Iraq policy, despite its imperfect execution – although if they thought about it for 5 minutes they would realize there has never, in the history of the world, been a perfectly executed war plan. Things go wrong as soon as battle is joined. Measuring the war in Iraq with an impossible standard simply undermines the argument, since it points out the desired result –Iraq is a failure and a quagmire – as opposed to a meaningful historical measure. But since Bush and his administration is, by its very nature evil, so too are all his works.
As I keep saying, where conservatives have the advantage over liberals is that, because of the domination of liberalism in all kinds of media and the academy, conservatives understand liberal thinking far better than liberals understand conservative thinking. We've lived it and had to formulate our thinking in response to its overwhelming "consensus" presence in our intellectual environments, where to believe otherwise was an unthinkable heresy. We've had to figure out how to find refuge against it with other dissident thinkers before the invention of the internet (Thanks Al Gore).
In response, many liberals think conservativism is stuck in some kind of 1950s incarnation and thus ascribe to it the same multitude of sins that pertained years and years ago. They keep shoving the pitchfork in, killing the undead as it were, but it has no effect, except to warm the cockles of their own hearts. Simply put, it's a dead thing that describes very little of what animates today's changed conservatism – classical realism, aimed only at preserving the status quo, no matter how corrupt or evil, is, at least for the moment, revealed in its nakedness and consequently dethroned.
posted by Alcibiades @ 11:48 AM
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