From Rod Dreher at Crunchy Con comes a quote from political philosophy John Gray. It expresses quite nicely my own frustration with what passes for conservatism in today’s United States.
Conservative thought, in this new historical circumstance, is likely to be a mixture of fashionable techno-utopianism — such as the proposition, recently seriously advanced, that the virtual communities of the Internet can replace the local communities that free markets have desolated — and opportunistic fundamentalism. This is not a form of thought from which enlightenment or guidance can reasonably be expected. The enduring human needs which conservative philosophy once acknowledged are not now addressed by conservatives, partly because meeting them entails radical and — for today’s conservatives — unwelcome changes in current economic institutions. Meeting these human needs — for deep and strong forms of common life, fulfilling work and a rich public environment — demands re-embedding the market processes which neo-liberal policy has emancipated from any kind of political control or accountability in the cultures and communities they exist to serve. And this is a project, little short of revolutionary in its implications, that no form of conservative thought today is willing to contemplate.
Jeff Gissing 