I'm so confused. I thought the Wolcott Rule stated that if your name is James Wolcott, and you write for Vanity Fair, there is a greater than average chance that you are a pompous ass.

I have posted a little bit about this subject here.

It reminds the Republicans to remember the middle.

You can't win elections with only a base.

Ask the Democrats.

Wolcott seems to believe that repeating yourself is fine, but that telling anyone that you are repeating yourself is pomposity.

I'm not sure I follow the logic, but I think it's a cultural thing; perhaps he could show a bit more respect for cultural diversity.

Not that I'd want to demand that, of course. It would be insensitive of me.

I think it's important to remember that while most americans are *personally* socially conservative, most americans also don't care what other people do, as long as it doesn't harm other parties.

Most pople don't care if two guys get married. But then again most people don't want to subsidize that with their tax dollars. Same thing goes for prostitution, drug use, and a whole host of other 'immoral' but 'harmless' activities.

It is possible to be both a liberal (in the classical sense) and a conservative. Don't let the extreme left drive a wedge between us.

You make a mistake in assuming that there are so many variations on religion as you imply with "there are people who believe that various collections of written words (which they attribute to God) should supersede individual autonomy". When you start talking about religion, especially in America, you are perfectly allowed to simply assume Christianity. The numbers support that kind of bald generalization, and Christianity is not so fractured as all that. They all read more or less the same Bible, and they all understand more or less the same moral lessons.

Personal autonomy is fine and dandy, but personal autonomy without stricture is unfocussed and likely dangerous (unless you're of a Rousseauian bent and believe in the inherent goodness of Man). Those strictures have to come from somewhere, and pure humanistic determinism has, thus far, only offered Nazism and Marxist/Leninism as alternatives. The worldview built on fundamentalist, homophobic, chick-repressing Christianity has, for the most part, been pretty successful. To toss it all off as mystical hooey is, to my mind, premature and a bit myopic.

Nazism and Marxism/Leninism? You left out Ayn Rand's Objectivism (which is far from being determinist). Eric is right, as always. Individual autonomy is a moral value, if not the highest moral value, or that which all moral value presupposes. As to the theological presuppositions behind individual autonomy and moral values, I hold to polytheism. There is also Judaism, so, no, Christianity is far from being the only religion. And, in fact, Christians do interpret the Bible in vastly different ways.

Rousseau was wrong about the goodness of man, and particularly about the wisdom of the masses. There is only a potential for goodness. Virtue, moral value, nobility, is an achievement. There is also a potential for the bad, for baseness. This baseness was well expressed by those who voted for all those anti-homosexual amendments.

The reason for the conflict within the Right is that the Right, i.e., the anti-Left, is divided into sides holding opposite moral premises. In other words, the spectrum has at least two dimensions. The Right has won over the Left. The choice now is whether to go up or down, up to the heights of individual freedom consistent with law and order or down to the ant-heap of totalitarianism.

Or, to put it another way, the Left's relativism has given way to the absolutes of those on the Right. But those on the Right hold diametrically opposite absolutes. There are the collectivists, the Satanorumites, and Osama bin Laden on the one side, and individualists like Eric Scheie, Jeff Soyer, Pim Fortuyn, Theo van Gogh, and Camille Paglia on the other side. I choose to hold to my own absolute values, my holy dogmas, the polytheistic Godliness of sexiness and of the self as the fountainhead of all values. Up With Beauty!

I've been chewing on Bainbridge's commentary since Glenn linked it. I'm going to have short sharp caustic words of few syllables for that man when I finish chewing on them.

M. Simon is correct: the doctrinaire Republicans would do well to not alienate the libertarian/conservatives too early in this game. Their margain wasn't *that* big, nor the mandate *that* strong this time around.

Bainbridge writes that “The American people want their laws to reflect their morals and values. Conservatives get that; libertarians don't.”

Oh, I guess most libertarians “get it.” They’re just appalled by it.

The Supreme Court struck down the practice of segregated schools and prohibitions on interracial marriage. Much of the public was furious because they want their laws to reflect their morals and values, and those morals and values are bigoted. What’s not to “get”?

Liberals get this, too. The Democrat party agreed to embrace the elitist idea of civil rights for minorities not because they were ignorant of popular “morals and values” - heck, they were the party of the South, after all - but in spite of them. Many a Democrat acknowledged that supporting civil rights would alienate the South. And they did it anyway.

The party of Lincoln might have been expected to join forces in supporting civil rights. And many Republicans did, to their undying credit. Alas, Nixon was only too willing to pursue a “Southern strategy” of appealing to latent racism and resentment against outside ideas being forced down their throats. Lo and behold, demagoguery works! Even today, “Willy Horton” adds, whisper campaigns about McCain’s black daughter, and gay-baiting typify Republican politics.

You can call bigotry “natural rights” and you can put lipstick on a pig, but I don't know what it accomplishes. Civil rights for minorities will rarely be popular with majorities. To protect those rights, we need some standard articulating where the public interest ends and individual liberty begins.

Both conservatives and libertarians get this principle of civil rights as applied to majorities. Libertarians make the radical leap to apply this principle to the rights of minorities as well. That's something conservatives just don't "get."