Sublime

In a sense, Cantwell can be regarded as validation of the left’s critique of the New Right. He was effectively the slippery slope made flesh. He went from making provocative jokes to freely using racial slurs in a humorous context to becoming a full-fledged Alt-Right white nationalist—heavy on the anti-Semitism.

in the advanced political cultures of the Enlightenment tradition the creation of knowledge can and should be paramount, and the idea that representative government depends on proportionate representation in the legislature is unequivocally a mistake.

the claim that comparatively “retarded” Americans should not have their views heard in political discourse is still precisely how both progressives and National Review conservatives regard populists to this day.

Ortega held the process to be the driving force of history. The “reciprocal action between the masses and select minorities,” he wrote, “is the fundamental fact of every society and the agent of its evolution for good or evil.” Ortega’s masses we now call the public. By “select minorities” he meant the admirable few: elites who, at their best, lavi

Many conservative thinkers see Rousseau as having gone full circle from a promising start to creating what we now think of as the political left.

Gopnik stresses the need for conversation and debate. This is the marketplace of ideas, in which better ideas eventually win out, allowing society to advance. This stands against the conservative position that some ideas are sacred (literally or otherwise) and must not be challenged and against the postmodern position that some ideas are dangerous

The only poll that I’ve seen about journalists is that they are basically narcissistic and left of center. Look, what people call “left of center” doesn’t mean anything—it means they’re conventional liberals, and conventional liberals are very state-oriented, and usually dedicated to private power.

For Lee Kuan Yew,26 the aspirational ideal was to become, as Confucius urged more than two thousand years ago, a junzi, which has been variously translated as an “exemplary person,” or “gentleman.” This was someone who is27 “loyal to his father and mother,” “faithful to his wife,” “brings up his children well,” and is a “loyal citizen of his empero