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April 10, 2026

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"We shall never understand the natural environment until we see it not as just so much air, water, and real estate, but as a living organism. Land can be healthy or sick, fertile or barren, rich or poor, lovingly nurtured or bled white. Our present attitudes and laws governing the ownership and use of land represent an abuse of the concept of private property. Land is treated like a commodity when it is in fact a trust. Not so long ago our society permitted one human being to own another — to exploit him and even work him to death and not go to jail for it. This is no longer considered acceptable behavior, either by society or by the law. Yet in America today you can murder land for private profit, as is being done, for example, on a vast scale in the southern Appalachians. You can leave the corpse for all to see, and nobody calls the cops. This situation is what is known in history as a "cultural lag." It has occurred because our understanding has not caught up with our technology: a familiar complaint that has become almost a cliché in reference to dramatic modern inventions like the atomic bomb. It is equally true in respect to less spectacular forms of destruction. You can kill land by skinning it alive or by by slowly poisoning it, and it is murder all the same. In the modern world, no one should have life and death control over his land any more than he does over another human being."

- Paul Brooks

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"You're asking to crawl inside the mind of the Nixon supporter. I'm unable to. The man, to me, incarnated the figure of the American jerk: the guy who's always clumsy, who sweats inappropriately, who knocks over his saucer when he goes to pick up the coffee, who has no redeeming virtue save a kind of stamina, an ability to last. In the Navy they called him 'hard bottom' because he'd play cards after everybody had left. And that seemed to be his one virtue. He persisted like a bad cold. And the jerk is a numerous species. Anybody in high school remembers him. All of us at some time were him. And I think Nixon spoke to the jerk, and he said: "That's all right, that's all right. You can be awkward and ungainly and uncouth and unscrupulous, just like me. And you can be full of hatred and unarticulated bitterness, just like me. And you don't have to feel guilty about anything, because I don't feel guilty about anything." And he sent a message to jerks all over the country that their hour had arrived. "Enough of this idealism. Enough of this Kennedy uplift. We're gonna have our day; the day of the jerk, of the 'silent majority'"—which is the apotheosis of jerkhood. Madison and Jefferson would've turned over in their graves to think that silence would be dignified as a democratic virtue. But that's the jerk's virtue, and in Nixon the jerk found his president."

- Jack Beatty

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"The labels liberal and conservative used to mean something fairly clear. A liberal used to mean somebody who believed in the individual, who believed in the free market, who believed that you should break down all the barriers toward individual self-expression. If this meant destroying the church or weakening the power of parents within their family, destroying social classes, all sorts of conventions, this is what liberals were in favor of. What conservatives were interested in doing was preserving a kind of cultural order, preserving a tradition, preserving a sense of sacredness—even if they weren’t particularly religious themselves, they had to preserve that sense of the sacred. And what happened in the 1940s and 50s is that conservatism got defined as what used to be called liberal. In other words, the free market is everything, the individual is everything. Forget family—forget everything, essentially, but the marketplace and the defense of the nation, because the old liberals were also great colonialists. And the people who called themselves liberals were in fact socialists or worse. What was somebody with something like a conservative worldview going to do? There was no place. There was no label. There was no party. There was no movement. It’s like being a conservative environmentalist today. The greatest environmental thinker, the most powerful philosopher of conservation today, is Wendell Berry, who is a conservative. He lives on his little farm in rural Kentucky. He writes books about managing his own little family farm. He’s a Christian, he’s a traditionalist, but he’s on the board of the Sierra Club. Why? Because there’s no conservative organization that would welcome Wendell Berry; they think he’s the devil incarnate. And that, in a nutshell, is the failure of American conservatism—not to make a place for the real social, cultural, and moral conservatives who have surfaced from time to time. Jack Kerouac was a conservative and nobody knew that at the time. Why was he a conservative? He thought of himself as a man of the right. He thought he was a patriot. He was a rugged, old-fashioned individualist, but he loved America. He hated this rise of America-bashing of the 60s, and he’s quite an interesting person. Obviously, he was a moral anarchist in some sense, but way down deep he had the...impulses of a Baudelaire, who was also a conservative."

- Thomas Fleming (political writer)

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