Some readers took my piece on metropolitan conservatives to be an attempt to
split of yet another faction of hyphenated conservatism. I have ever since
been trying to disabuse people of that notion, by e-mail, in The Corner, and
To quote from the last: “Conservatism to me is a bit like atheism – defined
by what it does not believe. Conservatism is anti-ideology.” Just to make it perfectly plain: My interest in theological hair-splitting about
X-conservatism or Y-conservatism is ABSOLUTELY ZERO. I wouldn’t know a
Straussian from a Rothbardian if you painted them different colors. Well,
now someone has pointed out that this attitude is, by itself, a species of
conservatism: a sort of know-nothing-conservatism, nihi-conservatism, or
apatho-conservatism. Is it? Whatever. I give up.