props to will for a couple of genuinely amusing zingers (especially at bartlett's expense). a remark and a question . . . <div>On 2/28/06, Doug Henwood <<a href="mailto:dhenwood@panix.com"> dhenwood@panix.com</a>> wrote:<blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;"> Jeffrey Hart's "Making of the American Conservative Mind" is a relaxed amble along conservatism's path to the present. Bruce Bartlett's "Impostor" is symptomatic of the way many conservatives developed a thirst for fights over ideological purity during the wilderness years, and today slake that thirst by fighting one another. They do so partly because liberalism, in its current flaccidness, offers less satisfying intellectual combat than conservatives can have intramurally.  </blockquote></div> a tangentially related anecdote: this reminds me of graduate school. in my later years, a student arrived from st. john's (the annapolis st john's -- the leo strauss st. john's) who was a smart guy and quite conservative. he and i got along, despite our political differences and differences of approach (i was busy being deconstructive, he, um, came from a strauss school), probably mainly because we were the only two people in the medieval studies program working on philosophy. i was always trying to organize him into geso (the grad student union), and he was always resisting. i was always tearing apart conservative politics, and he wasn't buying, but we could (or more importantly, wanted to) read "the categories" and "on interpretation" together, so we got to like each other despite these differences. after he'd been there i think most of two years, i ran into him accidentally in front of sterling memorial library, not having seen him for a while. he appeared irritated, and out of nowhere he says to me, "why are all the smart people here liberals [sic], and all the conservatives are stupid?" i don't draw a general conclusion about "liberalism" or conservatism from this, but it certainly says something about yale and something about him. he wanted to be on the other side, and it drove him nuts that everyone on his side basically sucked. beyond my nostalgic recollections of graduate school, when i didn't have to do anything but organize and think Big Thoughts, i have a question: === Sometimes Bartlett is a tad too robust. His chapter "Why the Bush Tax Cuts Didn't Deliver" might be more convincing were the economy not in the fifth year of a humming expansion. === are we prepared here to agree with that claim of will's? j -- "lo que decimos no siempre se parece a nosotros" - borges