I am back and should write up my travels. Meanwhile, here is an interesting article by Paul Gottfried on how he has always been on the right but much influenced by the hard left. I quote:
Interesting. At university, when I was trying to find my political philosophy (something I only achieved in the last five or ten years) I found Marxist historians more interesting than liberal ones. I found liberalism two-dimensional. It is hard to write good history if you are a liberal, rather in the way that it is hard to write great novels if you don't believe in God. Now I see liberalism in much darker terms than in the early Thatcher-Reagan era because in the last three decades liberalism has shown how dark it is.
Many years ago, when I was being considered for the directorship of the National Endowment for the Humanities, Senator Jesse Helms, who ended up supporting my candidacy, asked his friend Sam Francis why I had written so often for Marxist publications. Sam answered: “He may be too conservative for conservative ones.”
Interesting. At university, when I was trying to find my political philosophy (something I only achieved in the last five or ten years) I found Marxist historians more interesting than liberal ones. I found liberalism two-dimensional. It is hard to write good history if you are a liberal, rather in the way that it is hard to write great novels if you don't believe in God. Now I see liberalism in much darker terms than in the early Thatcher-Reagan era because in the last three decades liberalism has shown how dark it is.
“He may be too conservative for conservative ones.”
ReplyDeleteThat makes sense to me. Given that virtually all mainstream conservatives are in fact liberals. If you're a critic of liberalism from the Right or a critic of liberalism from the Left you'll have a surprising amount in common.
Yes.
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