Trying to curry favor with liberals? Bad idea. Borrowing liberal
arguments to attack fellow conservatives?
Much, much worse:
The upstart who desires to gain a reputation as an "innovative"
thinker is welcome to seek employment outside conservative
politics, if he is not content to find new ways to celebrate old
verities or new arguments with which to eviscerate
liberals.
Instead, what we see over and over -- see [David] Brooks'
disastrously influential "National Greatness" as a textbook
example -- is an enthusiastic race to get ahead of the
Zeitgeist, to become the Promethean author of a new
Welltanschauung, to establish one's place as the founder
of Some Other Conservatism.
Wise men are not deceived by these pretentious intellectual
hustlers. When a self-described conservative begins slinging
around words like "creativity" and "progress" in political
discourse, it is not generally taken as evidence of doughty
resolve. Rather, it is wise to suspect such a person of being
what the Brits would call a trimmer.
That's from a
much longer essay, inspired by Dan
Riehl's discovery that
certain Young Turks are borrowing their ideas from Sam
Tanenhaus, a liberal Democrat whose
advice to Democrats was quite the opposite of what the Young
Turks are trying to do to the GOP.
