Hayward entirely missed the draw of Palin. But Adam Brikley, one of Palin’s early and avid supporters got it right when he attributed Palin’s meteoric rise in Republican circles to “the hand of God playing a role in choosing her” and concluded his observation with the profound remark that “something else was at work.”

(If I remember correctly the last person ‘chosen by God’ to run America didn’t work out too well.)

As far as I’m concerned, Glenn Beck is an intellectual dynamo of conservative though.

It may be but they are having a great deal of success at instilling fear in others…at keeping them arguing over crumbs while they themselves commit grand larceny.

There were some, but they’re similarly dead now. Russell Kirk, for example.

Having read Allen Bloom’s The Closing of the American Mind not long after it came out, although this is merely an opinion of mine, and not a fresh one, my conclusion at the time was that it was a case of an intelligent old man being extremely, highly, cranky, and wrongheaded. And that the book got much much worse in its argumentation as one proceeded further into it.

As I, admittedly somewhat vaguely at this point, recall, he started out on the point that the “Great Books” had a great deal of value; I’m fine with that. But it went downhill from there into rants about the mindlessness of Sixties leftist though –where he still had some point up to a point — into claims that liberal philosophy inevitably led to such a crisis of philosophy and failure, and got worse from there. Not long thereafter he was ranting about the sex lives of students, the evils of rock music, and generally sounding like Al Capp in his late years. Bloom wanted all the kids and leftists off his lawn.

On a point of fact, Bloom disclaimed being a conservative:

[...] Although Bloom was characterised as a conservative in the popular media, Bloom explicitly stated that this was a misunderstanding, and made it clear that he was not to be affliated with any conservative movements:

“ “I am not a conservative – neo or paleo. Conservatism is a respectable outlook… I just do not happen to be that animal… I differ from both theoretical and practical conservative positions.”[2]

I’m perfectly willing, however, to concede that Steven Hayward knows quite a bit about being brain-dead.

I guess my difference with Fukayama is that societies can still go backwards into authoritarianism, theocracy, whatever. Reaching LRD does not guarantee LRD into the future–we must always fight to keep the system from collapsing, but until a fundamental change in the nature of humans (transhumans, post humans, machine life) this is the best system possible as a political system.