It wasn’t my distinction, pedantic though it may be, but Chambers’ (which is why, if memory serves, Chambers wouldn’t join NR’s masthead or resigned from it). As for my own view of Chambers, yeah sure I think he’s a conservative speaking loosely, but I was just giving you a hard time.

Speaking seriously, I think Chambers’ argument that he was not a conservative was actually quite profound and offered an important insight into the role technology plays in society and conservatism’s difficulty in dealing with it. This is something I’ve written about and wrestled with quite a bit. His fondness for toil with the soil is a regular theme in a lot of conservative writing, but it’s not one I’m hugely sympathetic too myself. I understand the idea well enough, I think. But I also think intellectuals are prone to a level of condescending romanticization of back-breaking labor so long as they get to do it as a hobby of some kind, or not at all. We see this more often on the left, of course. Where we’re told that indigenous cultures choose soul-crushing poverty as a way of life that white men have no right to judge.

But ultimately, I think it’s difficult to extrapolate from such a profoundly idiosyncratic guy’s personal behavior and preferences a lot of sweeping generalizations about conservatism or “the Right.” If it were, we’d certainly have to discuss the man’s sex life, which I have no interest in doing — especially when we can discuss Jessica Simpson’s instead.