A few days ago I asked the question “Where are the conservative intellectuals?” I posed the straightforward question, but also gave a reason why I, as a person who is generally on the left, asked: I used to be challenged by conservatives, but not these days, and wonder if there are any out there who are still challenging. I received interesting replies.
Michael suggested the Heritage Foundation, and Alex suggested Tyler Cowen’s Marginal Revolution Blog and Kosmos, a career networking site for classical liberals. I found the Heritage site very predictable. The Cowen site an interesting place for the discussion by conservative economists, or more precisely classically liberal economists, and Kosmos a networking site for like minded people. Scott later pointed me in the direction of American Conservative Magazine, Reason Magazine, and sometimes the Frum Forum: a site of traditional conservativism, one for significant libertarian thought, and a kind of Huffington Post for conservatives.
So there are places to explore, but as a looked around, I didn’t find anything that challenged me. Where are the conservatives who have ideas that I must consider because of their intellectual power and insight?
Scott poses a hypothesis why I am having a problem. He wrote:
I think there are conservative intellectuals, but they use their brainpower however towards electioneering and must necessarily for the most part remain in the background. That is, they can’t be public intellectuals, or at least appear to be intellectual in public, but follow their own narrative which says that the elitist intelligentsia is out of touch with the majority of Americans.
This is ironic. There are conservative intellectuals, but because of their practical commitments and principled convictions that intellectuals are dangerous, they dare not show their faces, nor their ideas. In the past, they avoided this problem by calling themselves “men of letters,” reserving the label of intellectuals for despised leftists. This was the position of Paul Johnson in his book, Intellectuals: From Marx and Tolstoy to Sarte and Chomsky.
Now, apparently, or at least according to Scott, . . .