Benjamin Storey and Jon A. Shields at Persuasion:
Giving students an occasion to discover the divergence between the depth of the conservative intellectual tradition and the shallowness of the contemporary online right is one of the major attractions of teaching conservatism for one of our session leaders, Emory’s Frank Lechner. Lechner said that one typical student “had expected a class dealing with the likes of Tucker Carlson and Candace Owens” but instead “got something much more interesting and serious.”
One reason is that conservatives are often, paradoxically, devoted to the liberal order. Partly because liberalism is our most important tradition, American conservatives are often consumed with preserving what is best in it, not burning it down like the online right. That also means many conservative intellectuals are hard to put into a tidy philosophical box. UNC’s Rita Koganzon, another of our seminar leaders, reported that teaching conservative intellectuals reveals “that no really good writer is merely conservative, just as none is simply a liberal. They all have strange, heterodox, often politically uncategorizable ideas.”
More here.
Enjoying the content on 3QD? Help keep us going by donating now.