Sublime

On en trouve une expression particulièrement aboutie dans un livre de William Riker, Liberalism Against Populism, qui pourrait avantageusement figurer dans notre panthéon des antipopulistes s’il n’avait été publié bien plus tard, en 1982, et s’il n’était la mise en œuvre d’une autre approche scientiste dans les sciences sociales : la théorie du

he is one of the most important political thinkers on earth today.

Whereas Buchanan’s views were informed by a sense of earnestness, humility, and respect, Rothbard’s every breath was laden with irreverence for authority. Buchanan was an Irish Catholic who regarded 1959’s liberalizing Vatican II Council as a surrender of the forces of good (meaning orthodoxy) to those of decadent modernism. Rothbard, on the other

What distinguished his jeremiad from many other conservative screeds was his argument that the greatest threat was posed not by a few “extremists of the left,” but rather by “perfectly respectable elements of society.” The real enemies, he suggested, were “the college campus, the pulpit, the media, the intellectual and literary journals, the arts

Liberals assume their own values are universal values, and then further assume that all they need to do is present the facts and offer policies that support these universal values. But values are not universal. Conservatives have a very different sense from liberals of what is moral, and a difference in fundamental morality is a deep difference.