Neos and Paleos

What do you mean, you're not conservative at all?

If you prefer to mind your own business and wish other people would mind theirs, you're one of us!

Other than that we're a pretty diverse lot.

Though many of us are Jewish, we don't have the unquestioning loyalty to Israel the Neos tend to have, or the preference for Likud within Israeli politics.

Though some of us went through a Marxist, or generally radical phase, we got over it sooner and more thoroughly. The Neos have Trotskyite delusions of world revolution, or what they think of as world revolution. (Actually more like the French Revolution than the Russian, and imposed by American arms. Precisely Napoleonic delusions.)

But what do we have in common? We all admire Burke, not just for his critique of the French Revolution, but for his support for the American, and for Catholic emancipation, and his bitter opposition to British imperialism in India. (I am an Irish American married to an Indian.)

We tend to refer to Richard Weaver's 1948 Ideas Have Consequences as what we mean by conservatism, a book much admired by people who wouldn't think of themselves as particularly conservative. And to Oakeshott's Rationalism in Politics for its analysis of what makes us nervous, its description of the conservative disposition -- and its wonderful essay on poetry.

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