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Aug
5
Has to be one described like this:
As I grow older, I avail myself more and more of the ancient prerogatives of old men. I hitch my pants high, shake my head at the barbarous young and drive a stone-cold 55 on the highway. I’m risk-averse and dress as I please. (In my beginning is my end: I’ve evolved from slob to hipster slob to ironic slob back, finally, to slob.) I distrust change, labor unions and Al Sharpton and believe that at high enough rates income taxes become confiscatory. In short, I am white, privileged, middle-aged and boring. But one thing I am not, and never will be, is a conservative. The recent essay anthology “Why I Turned Right: Leading Baby Boom Conservatives Chronicle Their Political Journeys” (Threshold Editions, $23) has given us liberals a chance to think about why, even in our calcifying stodginess, American conservatism remains a nonstarter for us, a stack of loyalty oaths we’d never be tempted to sign.
Read the rest of the New York Times Book Review, called, “The Road to Rightville.” More about the book here.
Some of the featured voices:
David Brooks
Peter Berkowitz
Richard Starr
P.J. O’Rourke
Stanley Kurtz
Joseph Bottum
Heather MacDonald
Dinesh D’Souza
Rich Lowry
Wow, look at all those women and minorities (Simon & Schuster’s website seems to be down so my hunt for the rest of the essayists has been halted for now).
Vessels Sarcasm Alert Scale (soon to be shortened to VSAS): 6
By Jill Miller Zimon at 7:57 pm August 5th, 2007 in Politics
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I so enjoyed that well written review! PJ O’Rourke et al regarding children; I was never fortunate enough to be a parent, however, this insults me anyway lol
At your link to the Conservative Book Club site, I found this quote included in the review recounting the rightward shift:
“And, in addition to these and other motives, nearly all the authors represented were provoked into conservatism by the rigid political correctness they found in academia.”
We don’t exactly have demographic profiles of conservatives vs. liberals, but we do of Republicans vs. Democrats. I find it interesting that Republicans are more likely to be among the college-educated than Democrats, even though college professors, themselves are much more likely to be Democrats than Republicans.
Must-read for Lefties
Stephen Metcalfe’s review might also be a must-read for “righties.” One conservative, John Podhoretz, describes Metcalf’s review as “startlingly vicious.” Another, Stanley Kurtz, characterizes it as “the usual hack-job tactic of assembling isolated quotes and casting them in the worst possible light.” (I’m a lot less exercised; I’d just call the review “unsurprising.”)
BTW, readers may notice that both of the links I’ve referenced are to The Corner, a group blog for the conservative magazine, National Review. Some progressives might even find The Corner and associated blogs interesting. (Markos (Kos) Moulitsas is quoted as saying, “I do like the blogs at the National Review — I do think their writers are the best in the [conservative] blogosphere.”)
For those for whom it matters, The Corner’s editor is a woman (Kathryn Jean Lopez).
Wow, look at all those women and minorities. [...] Vessels Sarcasm Alert Scale (soon to be shortened to VSAS): 6
OK, I just can’t resist.
In today’s Washington Post there’s an article titled “A Diversity of Opinion, if Not Opinionators: At the Yearly Kos Bloggers’ Convention, a Sea of Middle-Aged White Males.” To quote from the article:
Walking around McCormick Place during the weekend, it became clear that only a handful of the 1,500 conventioneers — bloggers, policy experts, party activists — are African American, Latino or Asian. Of about 100 scheduled panels and workshops, less than a half-dozen dealt directly with women or minority issues.
How can this possibly be at a convention of progressives?!? (VSAS: TBA)
Anon From 12:04pm: Honey, ya got me. If you search WLST blog for mentions of “kos” you will not find much positive. I just wrote more about that over here:
http://www.nixguy.com/?p=2802
I also blogged about women at Kos a couple of days ago. Or the wariness about how it might go for women there, I should say.
Jill, thanks for the link and reference to the earlier blog entry.
My fundamental point was that “a lack of diversity” is not exclusively a conservative problem. (Or maybe that “progressives” aren’t necessarily all that progressive.)
FWIW, I also just noticed that my Washington Post quote includes a dangling participle. My fifth-grade teacher would not have been amused.
Well, if my daughter hadn’t just gotten home with four bags of laundry from three weeks of overnight camp (I cringed to learn that although she used the special mesh bag to deposit all her dirty socks, she never turned in that bag with her other laundry and went sockless for the last 10 days!), I’d write more – maybe for a future post.
Lack of diversity afflicts the right more than the left, IMO. The Kos crowd is a very specific element of the left, and in general further to the left than I am – depending on how far back you go with this blog, there’s a reader I won’t name who wanted the Progressive Women’s Blog ring to remove me from their list because the reader doesn’t think I’m progressive enough. And yet I originally was going to be one of the main contributors to As Ohio Goes, which is also generally more left of my ideas.
Maybe the people along the center to left spectrum just speak up more, but I really don’t witness all that much coming out of a variety of points along the center to right spectrum. I would be happy to be corrected.
And that’s part of the problem – if such people/minds/beliefs exist on the center to right spectrum, how is it that they feel they either don’t want to voice their position, can’t voice it – or what? Why squelch the fact that there is diversity? Would you argue that they think they’re being served just fine? I really am not well-studied on how that’s argued.