A brief thought about The Letter and political alignments, occasioned by Tyler Cowen's comment here:
marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolu…
marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolu…
I would say the de facto message of the signatory list is more along the lines of, "this is a battle within liberal institutions, and we represent an alliance of liberals and left-wingers against the emergent orthodoxy." With conservatives therefore less excluded than irrelevant.
Tactically this makes a certain amount of sense: Conservatives (at least those of us to the right of the letter's rightmost signatories) really are somewhat epiphenomenal to current battles over the direction of academia or media or pop-culture discourse ...
... and adding a bunch of Catholics or libertarians, to say nothing of IDW types or proud populists, might have made the Letter a less useful statement of principles for a conflict that's primarily within the liberal intelligentsia.
That being said, strategically it's a problem for would-be defenders of liberalism as a practice, a set of neutral procedures for debate, if they're only engaged with the cultural left; it means that almost inevitably they will be pulled in its direction, willingly or not.
This is not a new problem for liberalism, obviously: Forged in struggles against the ancien regime it's always tended to see any kind of traditionalist right as its essential enemy, the left, however radical, are just allies in a hurry.
But if at a given moment you are a liberal concerned about what the left is doing to your institutions, setting up an grand-coalition-for-liberalism that runs from Noam Chomsky to David Brooks means you're setting the center on ground that fundamentally favors your opponents.
So that's an issue for the Letter's organizers. A different issue, though, confronts conservatives. Obviously left-versus-liberal battles like this one have historically created neoconservatives. But is there any possibility that the right is prepared to receive such converts?
Many thinkers on the right have spent the last few years arguing about whether the small-l liberal and libertarian portions of conservatism are responsible for the right's long defeat. Among the many questions raised by this debate is ...
... how a conservatism reconstituted to be more skeptical of liberalism (or at least neoliberalism) would receive converts from an intellectual class that is itself, well, liberal.
Put another way: If there is an incipient neoconservatism in public life, it's relationship to intellectual trends on the actual American right is unclear in the extreme. (More to say, but I'll leave this thread there.)
