Wherefore is the Decent Right?

[elfs]

It helps, if you're trying to make sense of the world, to collect points of view from all across the spectrum. Certainly, I don't think that one needs to dip too much into the "We are all puppets on the ends of Satan's strings" mindset, and we can leave behind the scientologists, Larouchites, and 9/11 Truthers. But one of the things that I've started to notice is that my RSS reader lacks something important. Wisdom is the collection of useful arguments from both sides springing from a shared set of principles: acquiring it means listening to differing points of view.

There was, a year or so ago, all sorts of blather in the punditocrisphere about "The Decent Left," a supposed cross-section of the left wing that could virtuously claim it never supported the war in Iraq yet earnestly wanted to do the right thing by the Iraq people. These are the people who are now earnestly worked up by Burma and yet for the most part will give you a blank stare and a "Who?" if you mention Robert Mugabe.

One thing that currently frustrates me, however, is the lack of a Decent Right. There doesn't seem to be among even the ivory tower set writers who can consistently quote Edmund Burke, Adam Smith, and John Stuart Mill without making my gut twist. David Brooks was on my list for a while, but when he wrote that "government should be limited, prudent, and conservative... " and then justified our war in Iraq on the grounds that Saddam was none of those things, well... it was just time to pull the plug. For a while, I was enamored of Victor Davis Hanson and Thomas Sowell, but Hanson became a water-carrier for the current administration and Sowell, well, Sowell is so possessed of Ayn Rand that he sometimes seems to have inherited the laser-eyes with which she burned her opponents to a crisp. (I have strong suspicions that the Randians are for the most part correct in their analysis, but their unapologetic use of the guru's confrontational language makes it hard to take them seriously; it's like dating a chick who's hot in bed but whose laugh is so horrifically hyena-like that your friends don't come around anymore.)

Are there any writers of the conservative or classically liberal bent still around, or is anyone normally willing to wear that badge now duck-and-covered against the terrible falling rain of blame?

Comments

Re: Oh, lots of 'em.

[srmalloy.livejournal.com]

If you ignore the way such legislation would take away a woman's right to control her own body, I would love to see legislation passed giving a fetus all the same rights as any other person... if only to see what kind of excuses and how much finger-pointing ensues when our legal and law enforcement systems grind to an absolute halt under the burden of the police having to investigating every miscarriage to determine whether or not the death of the fetus was a homicide, with all of the things that a pregnant woman can do that might have contributed to the miscarriage pushing many of them into the courts. And the subsequent tapdance as the legislators have to justify either jacking up taxes to pay for the additional costs, repeal the law they just passed, or violate the Constitution by taking a class of persons and legally defining them to be second-class citizens with fewer rights.