Ross Douthat on a conservative classic
The Quest for Community in the Age of Obama: Nisbet’s Prescience
The whole thing is a gem (as is Nisbet's book) but i thought these two passages help explain why Romney is struggling:
Many conservative politicians have been better friends to big business—ignoring Nisbet’s warning that “decentralization is just as necessary in the operation of the other great associations of modern society”—than they have been foes of big government.
The Ayn Rand Express is just a fast track to defeat.
Worse still, since Obama’s elevation to the presidency, America seems once more divided between “the party of the state” and “the party of the individual.” Conservatives are cracking open Atlas Shrugged and shouting about socialism, but they seem to have lost the appetite for thinking through the problem of community in an individualistic age—which is, of course, precisely the problem that make socialism so appealing in the first place.
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