Excellent essay by Professor C. Bradley Thompson diagnosing prominent strains of the weird left and the sometimes-weirder right, both deeply anti-liberal, anti-Enlightenment, and anti-American-founding. Link.
the principles and institutions of the American Founding are now under assault from the nattering nabobs of both the progressive Left and the reactionary Right. These two ideological antipodes share little in common other than a mutually-assured desire to purge 21st-century American life of the founders’ philosophy of classical liberalism.
Thompson is author of the new and important America’s Revolutionary Mind: A Moral History of the American Revolution and the Declaration That Defined It.
Related:
Conservatives Are *Not* Free-market Capitalists. The previous generation’s big-name conservative intellectuals who set the stage for this generation’s.
Conservatives: Get Over the Dark Ages. On those conservatives who, in rejecting modernity and the Enlightenment, wish to rehabilitate the Dark Ages.
Is Postmodernism Neo-Marxist? Yes, No & Sort Of. On that segment of the left that is, in part, old rotgut in new bottles and, in part, original strategy.
Hazony Attacks the Enlightenment. A conservative’s head-on attack on the Enlightenment. My seven-point response.
And I like this meme someone made:
