Eric Charles wrote:
Frankly, the failure to replace conservative academics as they retire
has created HUGE problems in this country. The conservative
movement used to have decent group of hard-core academics and public
intellectuals as a key part of it.
While the obvious and most painful to many of us aspect of the current
whitelash/MAGA/Trumpian capture is the damage to liberal democracy as
well as Liberal Democracy, the complementary space of oldSkool or
"traditional" Conservatism (or conservatism) is already deeply in an
existential crisis.
I am nominally a Liberal/Progressive socially by many measures with a
foundation of Anarcho-Primitivism personally.
What "we" have lost aside from significant direct control is a righteous
"Loyal Opposition" to help us define our best selves.
<background anecdote worth skipping>
I was raised on rural/conservative even (soft) Calvanist ideals,
meaning primarily that everyone i knew or met before I was 13 lived,
ate, breathed and wallowed in not being wasteful or profligate and
not seeking change for the sake of change. My parents (who
eventually became very mainstream Conservative) were nominally the
most Progressive and Liberal people I knew. They chose to have
(only) 2 children because Zero Population Growth, they were never
intolerant of anyone for their gender, race, religion, etc. that I
could detect (and rarely even for their behaviour unless
outrageous). They talked of their own experience growing up a few
miles north of the Mason Dixon line with Grandparents who would have
remembered the Civil War, and being proud to be called Yankee in an
area were your cousins were as likely to still be whistling Dixie
and wearing a Johnny Reb Cap. They both had innocent encounters
with blacks as children where they were caught off guard by their
own parent's prejudice. Most women I grew up around did wear
dresses or skirts, but seeing them in jeans was not a surprise and
most rode horses, mended fences, and bucked hay, even if they didn't
wrestle steers, dehorn or brand them (that I knew of). Men might
not have always treated women as equals, but often did, depending on
them to handle competently many of the things they did routinely.
I joined semi-rural/small-urbanism at 13 with a residual component
of this kind of self-reliance evident but also overlapping a fairly
modern 60's Pop-Culture and a border Mexican/American
alternative-traditionalism where the women were still highly
competent but gender roles were more distinct with a whole different
dynamic between parents and children within and across genders.
Then on to a small university town (NAU/Flagstaff AZ) where a whole
new suite of exposures were available. By that time (mid 70s) I was
a vegetarian and a peacenik by most standards, a bit past proper
hippy era but informed (sorry Nick) by all that. Somehow I still
managed to think helping Reagan oust Carter was a good idea. 6
months in I realized I'd been duped.
</baws>
It didn't make me overtly a Democrat, and I HAD been sympathetic with
Carter's actions, just bamboozled into thinking we needed a "Harder
line" on things than he was up for.
But I began to recognize the deep and enduring value of Political
Pluralism and in particularly in a 2 party system of the "Loyal Opposition".
An adult lifetime of encountering people and cultures and religions and
political systems from round the world has lead me to respect what I
hope is the deepest/broadest sense of Pluralism which as I think the
through line here reflects that DEI is at best a weak proxy or mild
measure of such Plurality?
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