Well, maybe it's because I hang around the high domes. I mean, I find the editorial page of the WSJ as risible as does anyone with a brain, but I work downstairs from Richard Posner and Frank Easterbrook, and with a lot of smart right wing U of C law grads. \ I will say this: the basic core of right wing ideas is simple and stupid: markets good, government bad, private property holy, democracy satanic. But then the basic core of left wing ideas is pretty simple too, though we hope not stupid. However, and this is a big however, a lot is in how it is played out and articulated.
Thirty or so years ago, the right hada bunch of embarassing cranks to strut their stuff. Now, they have an elite of smart and articulate people--and I don't mean no-forehead types like Olasky, and no-head types like David Horowitz. I mean the likes of Posner, people who are really interesting thinkers.
Thirty years ago, even twenty, we had a lot of people like that. To the
extent we still do, they are the same people; it's depressing, especially
when you consider that Chomsky is is in mid-70s, for example. Doug, _you_
are one of the brighter lights of the left intelligentsia these days. You
are pretty damn good, but don't you find that a bit frightening? We used to
have Sartre squaring off with Camus and Merleau-Ponty. That was something a
bit like ideological hegemony. Zizek's clever, but "I knew Jean Paul Sartre.
He's no Jean Paul Sartre." --jks
>
>Justin Schwartz wrote:
>
>>It was me who posted the comment about the right on the higfh
>>intellectual ground. And I stand by it. They moved from the Stupid
>>Party to the party bristling with vigorous ideas, all the way from
>>high justificatory theory (Buchanan, Becker, Posner, Epstein,
>>Nozick, etc.) to middle-range policy proposals of the sort cranked
>>out by think tanks, to low brow pundits.
>
>VIgorous ideas? They mainly boil down to markets good, government bad
>- or, in that wonderful line from John Forbes, invoking "necessity,
>meaning what rich Americans want...." Once you get down below the
>level of the high-domes, you're deep in the purest crap - from wild
>assertion to pure lying. I was amazed to learn from today's NYT that
>there's not a single example of a U.S. farm ever being lost to the
>inheritance tax - but the right-wing pundit machine repeated that lie
>endlessly. Unlike EPI, which produces original and serious research,
>the right-wing think tanks pump out little more than propaganda.
>
>Sometimes I worry about you Justin - you take these people far more
>seriously than they deserve. Intellectually, I mean; you've got to
>take them seriously as instruments of power. But as intellectual
>forces, they're modern-day Says.
>
>Doug
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