I have one stray thought in the wake of Yuval’s outstanding post. There’s a glitch in these sorts of discussions because we have two related, overlapping, but ultimately distinct groups: the left and liberals. Whenever I argue with liberals about these sorts of things and I cite, variously, Kirkpatrick Sale, the neo-Luddites, various leftwing defenses of the Unabomber, opposition to biotech food, feminist rejection of innate difference and so on, liberals will say “Oh, that’s the left, that’s not me.” This is fair, to a point. But it can also be a dodge. Liberals spend very little time or energy criticizing leftwing luddites and others of that ilk. Indeed, liberals often defend the leftist radicals in their midst usually with a version of anti-anti-Communism. They’ll say they don’t like Ward Churchill, to pick a non-science based example, but the conservative witch hunt against such figures is outrageous and hypocritical. In other words they serves as a sort of liberal shield to the leftist sword. Meanwhile, on the right we have no such thing as the liberal-left distinction. Conservatives are rightwingers, rightwingers are conservatives. As a conservative, I can’t say “oh that’s not me, that’s ‘the Right.’”

Indeed, in a sense “the right” doesn’t reflect the depth of the intellectual spectrum but its width. With liberals the further to the extreme you move the more leftwing you are. With conservatives (at least among ourselves) we tend to use the Right to define the breadth of our coalition. Libertarians, for example, are not further to my right, but they are members of the Right. Whittaker Chambers — a Hegelian to the end — famously denied he was a conservative, preferring to call himself a “man of the Right.”

Normally this predicament doesn’t bother me that much as I’ve got no real problem calling myself a rightwinger or a conservative (though I certainly prefer conservative). But it can be a real handicap in debates since one label covers a vast amount of ideological terrain.