Posted by David Post: A House Divided, and Strong: What a [1]terrific column by David Brooks in yesterday's NY Times. Spot on, in tone and substance. His main point (inartfully paraphrased -- Brooks can write awfully well) is: the "key to conservatives' success" is that there's been intense argument, among conservatives, about Big Questions, and First Principles: "the order of the universe, and how the social order should reflect the moral order," about the ideas of Burke, Aquinas, Hayek, Hamilton, and Jefferson. I think he's right. The left hasn't had that comparable debate about its First Principles since the 30s -- which was, not coincidentally, just as the left was poised to become the country's dominant political philosophy . One corollary to all this is the irony that the drive for 'political correctness' is (and is slowly being recognized as being) destructive of ideas coming from the left, not of those (its ostensible targets) on the right; the inability of people on the political left to question first principles -- see L'Affaire Larry Summers -- is part and parcel of the whole phenomenon Brooks describes so well.
References 1. http://www.nytimes.com/2005/04/05/opinion/05brooks.html? _______________________________________________ Volokh mailing list [email protected] http://highsorcery.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/volokh
