Sublime

So here is the truly odd political choice that we are given today: a sick version of a higher level versus a healthy version of a lower level—liberalism versus conservatism.

2002, and compare the result with the information accumulated from

It’s easy to caricature Jones as a lunatic or a clown. But Jones subtly and consistently preaches several essential New Right ideas. The first is that politics is often a public sideshow, a distraction that grants the illusion of choice when actual decisions are made covertly and secretly without even the pretense of public input. The second is tha

This paternalist treatment of the Arabs, denying them agency and responsibility as adults, disgusted me. So, too, did the tendency to single out Israel. Any liberal, democratic state could be criticized, of course, but never more so than its monarchical and tyrannical neighbors.

For many right-wingers, there also came a realization that Andrew Breitbart was correct. “Politics is downstream from culture,” and electing the correct people was the consequence of the right strategies and not the goal. One of the great techniques used by the evangelical left is its claim that all decent, sane people are basically progressives at

the ways that information overload generates the need for informational triage. That environment also creates the need for moral triage: for straightforward binary decisions about whether we admire or despise a given person. Admiring is easier when a person embodies values that stand high on our list of priorities—especially if we think that those