Ugh, some liberal readers are angry. To clarify: I didn’t say — and do not believe — liberals don’t read books. For all I know they read more books than conservatives do. I’m referring to the kinds of books they read. Liberals are not very interested in liberal intellectual history in the way conservatives are (and I’m not talking about liberal PhD candidates and other academics either).

At a similar liberal confab, college kids would be told to read books about Abu Ghraib or Love Canal or George Lakoff’s latest twaddle. But not books by John Dewey or Herbert Croly or Charles Beard. Of course, this is a gross generalization, but any discussion of the sociology of very large movements and groups is going to be a generalization. Anyway, I first brought this up over a year ago here in the Corner and, I’m happy to say it sparked a very nice and lively debate around the web (and even a new column at the American Prospect). I also followed up on this with a long piece in the May 23, 2005 edition of National Review some of you might have missed because you foolishly refuse to subscribe.

Here’s my original post on “Liberal Roots” and here’s a good cross-section of reactions. And here’s what EJ Dionne had to say on this point (quoting from my NR piece):

E.J. Dionne noted in Stand Up Fight Back that “liberals and Democrats tend not to view themselves as the inheritors of a grand tradition. Almost on principle, they are suspicious of such traditions, of too much theorizing, of linking themselves too much to the past.” Of course, liberalism doesn’t lack intellectual giants — Herbert Croly, John Dewey, Reinhold Niebuhr — but, Dionne concedes, “not one of them is routinely celebrated by today’s liberals.”

And now I’m off to lunch.