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Persons of a reflective bent all too often underestimate the enormous strength that truly abysmal [[ignorance]] can bring. [[Knowledge is power]], of course, but—measured by a purely Darwinian calculus—too much knowledge can be a dangerous weakness. At the level of the social phenotype (so to speak), the qualities often most conducive to survival are [[prejudice]], simplemindedness, blind [[loyalty]], and a militant want of curiosity. These are the virtues that fortify us against [[doubt]] or fatal hesitation in moments of crisis. [[Subtlety]] and [[imagination]], by contrast, often enfeeble the will; [[ambiguities]] dull the [[instincts]]. So while it is true that [[American]] political thought in the main encompasses a ludicrously minuscule range of live options and consists principally in [[slogans]] rather than ideas, this is not necessarily a defect. In a nation’s struggle to endure and thrive, unthinking obduracy can be a precious advantage.
Even so, I think we occasionally take it all a little too far.
Not long ago, in an op-ed colum...

What an opening salvo! I shouldn't trust someone more for writing like this, but it is honed to hit my weak spots.

Many other good quotes:

Any day now in [[Sweden]], it seems, free dentistry will mutate into a secret state-police apparatus and a sprawling archipelago of reeducation camps.

Just as we Americans have succeeded in turning “[[Christianity]]” into another name for a system of values almost totally antithetical to those of the Gospel, I have every confidence that we will find a way to turn “[[socialism]]” into just another name for late-modern [[liberal]] [[individualism]].

Contrary to conventional wisdom, Christianity has never really taken deep root in America or had any success in forming American consciousness; in its place, we have invented a kind of Orphic mystery religion of personal liberation, fecundated and sustained by a cult of Mammon.

What remains of that tradition now I cannot say with any certainty. To some extent, it was always a dream of an impossible future sustained by fantasies of a nonexistent past. And some of its aspects, however well-intended—those overly rosy views of class distinction, for instance, or that gauzily gleaming pre-Raphaelite medievalism—are not worth preserving or reviving, except perhaps in radically qualified form.