These were a few things I enjoyed.
Instead of a political conversion, I had the sensation of discovering more vivid renditions of my own inchoate feelings, and more elegant articulations of what I had already believed. And I found I had joined a political community.
This echoes my own experience of recent months and years of discovering the Old Right / libertarian / Austrian economics community.
"If you have ever worked on a farm, nothing else seems like work." -- quoting John Maynard Keynes.
The more I learn about Keynes, the less I care for him, both personally and economically, but he seems to have nailed this one. Richard and I and our sister grew up on a small family hog and grain farm in southeast Indiana. There are many memories, but one is of Dad rousing us early on Saturday mornings to "move the hogs" from one field to another.
Based on my wife and children's experience this year and last with detasseling hybrid seed corn plants for Pioneer, detasseling gives farming a run for its money, other than its not being a year-round project.
"You know," I confided one day to one of my conservative friends on campus, "it was important for the baby boomers to secure abortion rights and the right to die -- that way, they can kill off both their offspring and their aging parents. No one will ever have to depend on them." All very unfair of me, no doubt.
Conservatives, they [ liberals ] say are always looking for an enemy -- and when they can't find one they fabricate one. It's a short step from there to believing that threats are imaginary, and enemies non existent, which is the great modern liberal temptation.
After watching my country go abroad in search of "monsters to destroy" nearly full-time for my whole life, in apparent ignorance of John Quincy Adams' warning in 1821, I am inclined to agree that the liberals fear is a greater concern here.
John Quincy ~Adams's Warning Against the Search for Monsters to Destroy
This is too good not to quote a bit. JQA writes, "Wherever the standard of freedom and Independence has been or shall be unfurled, there will her heart, her benedictions and her prayers be. But she goes not abroad, in search of monsters to destroy. She is the well-wisher to the freedom and independence of all. She is the champion and vindicator only of her own. She will commend the general cause by the countenance of her voice, and the benignant sympathy of her example. She well knows that by once enlisting under other banners than her own, were they even the banners of foreign independence, she would involve herself beyond the power of extrication, in all the wars of interest and intrigue, of individual avarice, envy, and ambition, which assume the colors and usurp the standard of freedom. The fundamental maxims of her policy would insensibly change from liberty to force.... She might become the dictatress of the world. She would be no longer the ruler of her own spirit...."
Amazon.com: Why I Turned Right: Leading Baby Boom Conservatives Chronicle Their Political Journeys: Mary Eberstadt: Books
1 comment:
Interesting read!
Post a Comment