I Kicked Myself in the Pants
I Kicked Myself in the Pants
I’m a fairly high-volume writer. I have to be because that is what pays the bills.
After a while of racing to make deadlines, and getting the story, and optimizing your keywords, and planning out your social media marketing strategy, the magic of writing can be lost. Most of the time I write something, read over it, and say “that’ll do.”
For an author, “that’ll do” is pathetic. I needed a kick in pants.
Every now and then, I write something that reminds me why I started writing. Why I’m fighting for free markets and liberty with my keyboard.
Recently on the Values and Capitalism blog, I had one of those pieces. The post, “Five Lessons for Conservatism and Two Voices for Fusionism” explores the tension between conservatives and libertarians. The piece threads together a recent debate on the topic, a panel discussion about William Buckley, and an interview I recently conduced with the ineffable Jonah Goldberg, into a single argument.
“That doesn’t mean there aren’t vestigial bits of dogma that have outlived their utility, but like Chesterton’s fence, the only way to know if they have outlived their utility is to think deeply and contemplatively about why that fence is there in the first place. You can’t just say, ‘I don’t understand why that fence is there, let’s smash it down.’ Those are lessons worth reminding young conservatives of, particularly those of the more libertarian bent who do suffer from a ‘we can start everything new because I have an iPod’ mentality.” -Goldberg
The fence, in Goldberg’s argument, separates liberals from conservatives and libertarians.
In the opinions of Buckley and Goldberg, a long-view conservative strategy requires a reconciliation between libertarians and conservatives. While there may be disagreements between the two, the survival of the free market is at stake. The war for liberty may be lost while libertarians and conservatives battle over degrees of freedom.
Read the entire article here.
Authors love it when we write our own kick in the pants. I feel renewed, time to get back to writing!
