That is certainly my takeaway from the essay by the NYT columnist David Brooks in The Atlantic. Some excerpts, with interspersed commentary:
The first great project of the national conservatives is to man the barricades in the culture war. These people have certainly done their homework when it comes to cultural Marxism [sic]—how the left has learned to dominate culture and how the right now needs to copy their techniques. If I’d had to drink a shot every time some speaker cited Herbert Marcuse or Antonio Gramsci, I’d be dead of alcohol poisoning....
On the other hand, if he had to drink a shot for each person there who had actually read Marcuse or Gramsci, he would be a teetotaler.
The first interesting debate among the NatCons is philosophical: Should we fight to preserve the classical-liberal order or is it necessary to abandon it?
Funny, the Germans had that "philosophical debate" in the early 1930s, and it wasn't merely "philosophical."
Some of the speakers at the conference were in fact classical liberals, who believe in free speech, intellectual debate, and neutral government. Glenn Loury gave an impassioned speech against cancel culture, the illiberal left, and the hyper-racialized group consciousness that divides people into opposing racial camps. Loury asserted that as a Black man he is the proud inheritor of the great Western tradition: “Tolstoy is mine! Dickens is mine! Milton, Marx, and Einstein are mine!”....
But others argued that this sort of liberalism is a luxury we cannot afford.
I'd love to know who the "we" is that can't afford the "luxury" [sic].
The country is under assault from a Marxist oligarchy that wants to impose its own pseudo-religious doctrine. If you try to repulse that with pallid liberalism, with weak calls for free speech and tolerance, you’ll end up getting run over by those who possess fanatical zeal, economic power, and cultural might.
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