Help conservatism: shun the conservative movement!

they speak to the intellectual establishment rather than at it.

Because as we all know, Solzhenitsyn's 1978 commencement address caused American academia to embrace wholeheartedly Ronald Reagan's anti-communism two years later, and the resumption of the cold war. Moynihan's report is of course the ur-text of every African-American Studies department in the land. Evolutionary biology as pioneered by Wilson quickly became the bedrock assumption by the social sciences establishment in the 1980s and is today well-nigh regarded as infallible. Jane Jacobs is practically a secular saint, as every tenured professor of note can be counted on to decry the efficacy of central planning by governments.

I'm a couple of years ahead of Mr. Bramwell (with the bruises to prove it).

His critique is especially true of, and his advice especially sound for, Christians. We (collective we, not all individuals) were drawn into movement politics without a well-grounded political philosophy, only interest in a handful of issues. The result, wholly predictable, is that the philosophical void was filled by the GOP rather than by the Church/Bible. We went in looking more like William Jennings Bryan and now we're hardly distinguishable from Rush Limbaugh. Come out from among them!

Michael Bates: At some point, if you want to turn ideas into political reality, you have to organize. You have to build support for ideas. You have to win elections.

Yes, and to do all those things, conservatives have to take actions which (some) conservatives find very distasteful, like:

- speak to those whom you are trying to convince in language they understand, not in your own particular (esp. religious) rhetoric;
- speak respectfully to / about people with whom you disagree, even as you try to gain their alliance;
- form coalitions with people who are not your "natural" allies;
- Don't be so ready to "throw off the bus" people whose lifestyles or religions offend you;
- Grow a sense of humor;
- Have something which *attracts* people to you in a positive way, rather than focusing so much on the negative ("We're all doomed!")

IOW, read Saul Alinsky's "Rules for Radicals" and realize that you can actually learn something from people very different from you.

Well, good heavens, I think everyone who's posted here, including Rod and Mr. Bramwell, have said something valuable. Each in their own way.

It takes all kinds of talents and all kinds of people to make anything happen. Was it not St. Paul (in one of his letters, can't remember which one) who talked of the many different kind of gifts (or charisms) that are needed to build up the church? As well as the value of being all things to all people?

If you're building a business, you need salesmen, and bookkeepers, and folks with technical skills to make the product or provide the service. A pleasant and efficient person to run the front office. A skillful driver to handle deliveries, etc.

It takes all kinds of people to contribute towards the advance of certain political ideas or "movements" ... and some of them, as Bramwell rightly points out, do it unwittingly. Others, of course, are self-conscious members of a particular "movement." It takes all kinds, and all kinds are welcome.

This is pretty amusing. Maybe all the effective critiques of liberal thought do originate with liberals, as selfcritique. And conservatives, being sterile, thus invariably have to wait for liberals to produce them and then pounce.