* Mr. Gelernter’s error: A lot of situations are “communicative” and in these situations both parties must have a say. He may be free to smoke but he mustn’t blow his smoke into another man’s face – or the other man has a right to defend himself.
But in a way this is a classical error – the error of promoting the “rights” of the immigrating (Jewish/transgender) individual to be unconditionally accepted/included in every kind of association; at the cost of other people’s freedom of association (which includes the freedom to not associate).
* Conservatives are supposed to understand barbarism is the natural state of human affairs, civilization is rare and fragile. Liberty is therefore sustainable only in limited amounts, to the extent it does not lead to the dissolution of order. Democracy was a radical departure from conservatism,the founders of the US naively thought they could manage it by reserving the vote to adult males of property who would understand, not libertarianism but conservatism. who would understand the importance of order, authority, hierarchy,tradition, the known over the experimental, the weakness of human nature.
* What makes this funny for me is that I left a comment on National Review (before they went into censorship mode by using Facebook comments) and I said National Review will one day declare that Transgenderism is a conservative value. As expected all the cucks denounced me as being a crazed troll, the only thing I was wrong about was how much sooner their endorsement has arrived.
* It may be inferred again that the present movement for women’s rights will certainly prevail from the history of its only opponent: Northern conservatism. This is a party which never conserves anything. Its history has been that it demurs to each aggression of the progressive party, and aims to save its credit by a respectable amount of growling, but always acquiesces at last in the innovation. What was the resisted novelty of yesterday is today one of the accepted principles of conservatism; it is now conservative only in affecting to resist the next innovation, which will tomorrow be forced upon its timidity and will be succeeded by some third revolution; to be denounced and then adopted in its turn.
American conservatism is merely the shadow that follows Radicalism as it moves forward towards perdition. It remains behind it, but never retards it, and always advances near its leader. . . . Its impotency is not hard, indeed, to explain. It is worthless because it is the conservatism of expediency only, and not of sturdy principle. It intends to risk nothing serious for the sake of the truth, and has no idea of being guilty of the folly of martyrdom. It always when about to enter a protest very blandly informs the wild beast whose path it essays to stop, that its “bark is worse than its bite,” and that it only means to save its manners by enacting its decent role of resistance: The only practical purpose which it now serves in American politics is to give enough exercise to Radicalism to keep it “in wind,” and to prevent its becoming pursy and lazy, from having nothing to whip.
No doubt, after a few years, when women’s suffrage shall have become an accomplished fact, conservatism will tacitly admit it into its creed, and thenceforward plume itself upon its wise firmness in opposing with similar weapons the extreme of baby suffrage; and when that too shall have been won, it will be heard declaring that the integrity of the American Constitution requires at least the refusal of suffrage to asses. There it will assume, with great dignity, its final position.
Robert Lewis Dabney on Conservatism, 1897
