Highbrow vs. Lowbrow

Sonny Bunch had a smart comment on the latest Culture11 postmortem:
Yeah, but this is a problem with the culture writ large, not just in conservative spheres. Example: In my day job, I’m a film critic at the Washington Times, and my boss just came over and talked about the DVD reviews that generate web traffic [...]

Larison Brings the Funny

Here:
The contrast Homans makes between C11 and Big Hollywood is instructive, and tends to confirm my rather jaundiced view of the inverse relationship between success and quality. Essentially, on one site you would find intelligent cultural criticism, and on the other you would find a lot of the cultural whining that seems especially concentrated among [...]

One of them

I was a bit perplexed by this Brad DeLong entry, which purports to criticize Ross Douthat for expressing reservations about hooking up with a girl in college:
From Ross Douthat, Privilege, bottom of p. 184:
One successful foray ended on the guest bed of a high school friend’s parents, with a girl who resembled a chunkier Reese [...]

Better Gatekeepers, Please

TNR has a fun piece on the decline and fall of the (in)famous Pajamas Media blogger network:
Instead, many of the laid-off bloggers have found a different way to express their angst about Pajamas Media’s business strategy: They’re calling the owners of PJM sell-outs. “The initial purpose was to support citizen-blogging as a counterweight to the [...]

Rush Week

I wanted to steer clear of commenting on Rush Limbaugh’s latest, if only because I don’t really pay attention to the man’s show and have no desire to involve myself in the emerging free-for-all. But a commenter at E.D. Kain’s place raised an interesting point: Limbaugh’s attacks on new policy ideas are driven by a [...]

Cosmopolitanism, Rightly Understood

Through the good offices of William Brafford, I’ve discovered the Gadfly, which seems like a pretty neat publication. I do take issue with this post, however:
There is very little of interest in the modern sophisticate, for he is himself interested in very little. The aesthetic sensibility of cosmopolitanism is something akin to five colors of [...]

Wow

It’s rare to stumble across an unambiguously racist comment on a putatively mainstream political website, so I was pretty shocked when this popped up  (emphasis mine):
Setting aside the fact that Israel is a friend to the Western world while many Palestinians would prefer to see us dead, that Israel wants peace and the Palestinians want [...]

Wrong

Reihan Salam says Samuel Huntington’s Clash of Civilizations is “a book that has suffered more deliberate mischaracterization and obtuse misreading than any other I can name.” Judging from this response to Huntington’s untimely death, I’m tempted to agree with him:
Apropos Matthew’s comments about Samuel Huntington, let’s not forget Huntington’s intellectual background. After the publication of [...]

The Secular Right

Derbyshire defends himself as a Man of the Right:
There are many people like us: people who cherish limited government, fiscal restraint, personal liberty, free enterprise, self-support, patriotic defense of the homeland and its borders, love of the Constitution, respect for established ways of doing things, pride in Western Civilization, etc., and yet who cannot [...]

The Spectrum of Foreign Policy Opinion

Daniel Larison has some thoughts on the Right’s inability to recognize differences within our foreign policy establishment. In Hot Air’s bizarro-world, self-described liberal interventionists like Samantha Power are somehow antithetical to mainstream conservatives despite the fact that both groups favor a muscular American presence overseas. Their immediate priorities may differ – Power’s individual forte is [...]

From Milton Friedman to Larry Kudlow

I think Nate Silver is a bit closer to unraveling the conservative psyche than Andrew Sullivan:
This might be the key passage of my interview with John Ziegler on Tuesday, for it is, in a nutshell, why conservatives don’t win elections anymore. It is not that conservatism generally permits less nuance than liberalism (in terms of [...]

Dissent is Conservative

Jonah Goldberg recounts National Review’s clashes with the Bush Administration:
We have criticized the Bush administration from the Right. We were very skeptical about the DHS reorganization, the federalization of airport security, his faith-based initiatives, big-government conservatism and compassionate conservatism. We opposed his signature education bill, No Child Left Behind, his steel tariffs and his [...]

The Moderate Voice

Robert Borosage and Stanley Greenberg have an in-depth look at our emerging center-left majority. Here’s their take on the moderate vote:
The conservative claim to a center-right majority comes from addition. More voters say they are conservative than liberal (by a margin of 34 to 22 in this election). Add conservatives to the 44 percent who [...]

F’ism

Joe Carter has some worthy thoughts on federalism and conservatism:
Adopting a “federalist approach” doesn’t require abandoning such things as encoding protections for life in federal policy. Nor does it require that we buy into the concept that states should become, to use Justice Louis D. Brandeis’ old cliche, “laboratories for democracy” that experiment with different [...]

The Sound of Silence

The David Brooks column everyone is talking about is, I think, one of the best examples of the Republican Party’s unwillingness to grapple with the Iraq War and its aftermath. The impending intra-party fight Brooks describes centers on social and economic policy, with nary a mention of the war or foreign affairs. As an Iraq [...]

Social Justice Is Not a Family Value

Scott Payne takes a look at possible points of convergence between conservatives and liberals on social justice issues. I’m sympathetic to a lot of what he has to say, but it’s worth remembering that while conservatives’ preferred policy outcomes may align with liberal concerns in certain areas, their respective justifications for, say, protecting the environment [...]

The Way Back

The Other McCain is in rare form today:
Conservatives don’t need a global-warming plan, or a poverty plan, or a health-care plan. We ought to be arguing instead that the problems liberals now “plan” to solve are either non-existent (e.g., global warming) or else are largely the result of the last generation’s liberal “plan.” But the [...]

Divided We Stand

NRO’s Mark Krikorian flags this statement from Rep. Thaddeus McCotter:
“We ran into the bailout. The bailout touched upon the larger discussion in the Republican Party,” he said. “It’s not the conservatives versus the moderates, that’s the rather cliched way of looking at it. What you really have are globalists versus traditionalists. Globalists tend to view [...]

Compare and Contrast

The problem with the “elitist” charge is that critics of Bush – and now McCain – give their opponents way too much rhetorical ammunition. Here, for example, is Iowahawk’s send-up of the Obamacons:
But there is an even more compelling reason to support Barack Obama: Sarah Palin.
If you are a conservative like me, you guffawed when [...]

Into the Wild

The track record of parties finding their ideological compass in the wilderness is undoubtedly mixed, but this argument is just stupid (emphasis mine):
It’s amazing that some smart conservatives still cling to the “winning-by-losing” strategy, refusing to surrender the lunatic idea that you can build a party’s strength by reducing its numbers. No movement in U.S. [...]