This is not a conservative administration. For dangerous innovation, it bids fair to compete with the French in the Revolution. For fetishizing abstract principle, it runs with the simplificateurs terribles of Marxism.
Commitment to capitalists--must it really be said again?-- has nothing to do with a commitment to capitalism: indeed, they are well-nigh antithetical.
Adherence to the Constitution is conservatism.
As Hume so rightly demonstrates, our rights as citizens are the hard-won achievement of a long and much-contested tradition. Habeas Corpus is so important that it is in the Constitution itself--we didn't have to wait for the Bill of Rights. As Cardozo says, not lightly regarded are the decisions of quiescent years.
The alliance of Christianity and torture is, I admit, not unexampled, but it has been pretty much out of fashion since Napoleon abolished the Inquisition.
The alliance of Christianity and holy war is also, I admit, not unexampled, but it has been pretty much out of fashion since the Venetians invaded Constantinople in the Fourth Crusade.
A corollary principle here involves the place of Democrats in the search for responsible centrism. I suspect that one reason why the wingnuttery works so hard to demonize Clinton and Carter is not their "leftism," but precisely the contrary: their capacity to seek, and even to achieve, a meaningful middle ground. Clinton on welfare, Carter on deregulation, to take just two examples: lefties will never forgive them, but ironically, the wingnuttery is no kinder. Their crime is not that they demonstrated the failure of centrist government: rather, that they exemplified its success. Nothing is more inimical to the purposes of the nihilist right than the experience of seeing something go really well.
There, everything clear now?
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