Re: Honest Acknowledgement
[Caleb Stegall  02/28 12:55 PM]

Jonah, well, I was trying to make a charitable point, and in that vein, I’ll leave questions of honesty out of it. However, I think you are blurring terms and avoiding questions in order to muddy the waters and elude the heart of the critique. If we substituted “mainstream Republican” for “mainstream conservative” would that mollify you? If so, I suppose you would have to then concede that the majority of Republicans aren’t conservatives, and maybe that concession would satisfy Rod. Moreover, the point is less the number of articles defending the free market (which, incidentally, I am not interested in replacing with socialism, as Bruce points out) as it is that conservatives can pay lip service to the permanent things all they want but when theyincreasingly fail to defend them against the encroachments of markets and other solvents of modernity (and it is a failure of imagination to imagine that every form of defense must entail action in Washington D.C.), true colors are revealed. All it took was the suggestion that people ought to consider their extended families, their hometowns, and the loyalty owed to their formative “little platoons” before they consider themselves and their need for upward mobility in deciding where to live to get me branded as “stunningly obnoxious” by an NR regular and accused of promoting a crunchy Taliban which was roundly dismissed.