PRESTOPUNDIT -- "It's a team sport, baby!"

Nick Schulz (see above) reviews The New Atlantis: A Journal of Science and Technology. Snippet:

As Levin notes, taboos like incest "all seem to revolve around the avoidance of a deep violation or corruption. … Its rationale is not generally laid out in detail." But in today's modern liberal society, when men and women are "free to choose" (in Milton Friedman's immortal phrase), and when concrete "reasons" usually must be articulated to justify prohibiting free people from doing as they wish, an appeal to a vague sense of "corruption or violation" usually isn't enough. Corrupting or violating whom? And when "rationales" generally aren't "laid out in detail", it's difficult to articulate them in 20-second sound bites on The O'Reilly Factor, or in a sentence (as Rick Santorum discovered) to an AP reporter, or even in a speech before a hostile congressional committee.

"Modern liberal democracy," Levin writes, "… prides itself on its ability and willingness to discuss all public questions openly, and lay them out fully for debate before the democratic citizen. Modern democracy may have a greater sense than any of its predecessors of the importance of separating private and public affairs, but everything deemed public is, at least in principle, fully discussed and exposed. For good and bad, very few things are left implicit or unspoken in the life of a liberal democracy."

Conservatives' most effective emotional, intellectual and rhetorical weapons often take the form of appeals to tradition, to the sacred, to moral sensibilities over cold reasons, to inchoate senses of right and wrong, to the tried and true over the untried and new. Fairly or unfairly, then, political conservatives can be at a distinct disadvantage in defending their views in today's modern liberal democracies that favor the rigor and clarity of concrete reasons over the (by comparison) flabbiness of sentiment or intuition.

As the man says, must reading.

Posted by Greg Ransom