Elf Sternberg

purely from listening to NPR coverage of buckley, while he was eloquent in his discussions on conservatism, he did seem to come around to something of a more libertarian stance. It sounded as if once he tossed aside the racist opinions he was brought up with, he saw the need for racial equality, and supported various economic protests of the civil rights movement, since they were an effort to use market forces to structure civil society, and not just getting equal rights by shouting loudly enough. (much paraphrasing there, but...)

Something here puts me in mind of Neal Stephenson's "Diamond Age" and the highly successful neovictorian society which dominates. There's a passage in which the characters compare themselves with the first victorians, what they kept, and what they didn't. The society is very conservative, but has a marked tendency to stagnate. New ideas, creativity, and art tend to come from new members who see the superiority of joining that phyle, but come from outside it.

Any philosophy needs some degree of flexibility in order to survive, of course. Fundamentalist ANYTHING doesn't work in the long run, and the neoconservatives aren't terribly accepting of anybody with a view that isn't their own. Modern conservatism seems to have stagnated, admitting no new ideas, nor any old ones they've previously tried, but aren't currently in the current vogue. Maybe this is why the modern types aren't making any headway.

The biggest conflict with conservatism (in my mind) is that the world changes every day, and you either change with it or get left behind. You can't hold it back, and while mining the past for good ideas will often yield some quite nice ones, sometimes you need to be open to a new idea when all of the old ones run out. None of the Big Name Conservatives today seem to want to hear that, and often go out of their way to mock anybody who says differently.