> It all put me in mind of my own brief career as a movement
> conservative, long ago. (Details here and here.) I was converted from
> being a high school commie into a college freshman reactionary by
> reading Milton Friedman’s Capitalism and Freedom, William Buckley’s Up
> From Liberalism, and Friedrich Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom. These
> books were not free of right-wing crackpottery, but they were written
> at a fairly high level of seriousness. Kids these days come to
> conservatism by reading Bill Bennett and Ann Coulter or listening to
> Rush Limbaugh. (They also read an old-timer, the execrable Ayn Rand;
> we in the Party of the Right hated her as a vulgar authoritarian.)
> What an amazing intellectual devolution.
>
> Not, of course, that the left is exactly kicking ass intellectually.
> But the right has gone totally braindead.
Speaking of braindead right-wingers, Jonah Goldberg once actually said something that was pretty plausible on this score. He said conservatives all have a common corpus of Great Classic Works of conservative political philosophy, like the ones you mention above, whereas liberals or "progressives" have nothing like that. Who is the great thinker of American liberalism? I mean that contemporary liberals actually recognize and cite as a maître à penser of their own?
SA