Cato vice president for research Brink Lindsey tries to be a uniter, not a divider. In his much-discussed “Liberaltarians” article for the New Republic, Brink held out an olive branch to liberals. TNR’s Jonathan Chait was, well, less than enthusiastic.
In his “A Farewell to the Culture Wars,” recently published in National Review, Brink does much the same for conservatives, advising them to seek to conserve the “great American heritage of limited government, individual liberty, and free markets,” instead of, say, exclusively heterosexual marriage and a not-so-Mexican America. Perhaps unsurprisingly, NR’s Ramesh Ponnuru has declined the advice. Brink’s rejoinder, published online this Tuesday, is smart and effective:
Ramesh Ponnuru concedes the main point I was trying to make. Specifically, he admits that “[i]t really is pointless to pine for the social order that existed prior to the late 1960s,” and that “most conservatives would not want to go back if they could.”
Ramesh makes this concession almost casually, as if it were no big deal. But I’m sorry, it’s a very big deal indeed. After all, a great deal of intellectual and emotional energy on the right has been expended over the years in precisely the kind of pining Ramesh now regards as pointless. Conservatives have defended, with great conviction and moral passion, positions on race relations, the role of women in society, and sexual morality that most conservatives today would disown as ludicrous or offensive. I don’t think it suffices to dismiss these glaring errors of judgment with an Emily Litella-like “Never mind.”
While commentators left and right may be hesitant to pick up what Lindsey’s laying down, that doesn’t mean he’s about to stop trying to transcend the stale terms of yesterday’s political dialectic.
Tune into Cato Unbound on Monday, where Brink will kick off a fresh round of discussion on “The Politics of Abundance” with a panel of blogosphere luminaries. On the left, we’ll have The Atlantic’s Matthew Yglesias. On the right, National Review’s Jonah Goldberg. And in the … middle? … Reason contributing editor Julian Sanchez.
