Anti-Climacus

LINK: Interesting post from Brownie at Harry's Place on the importance of still identifying with the left. I share the Christopher Hitchens view on this, that one shouldn't fight hard over a term; rather, one should get the arguments right and not worry about the rest.

I say this in part because I recognize that I've developed a few generally conservative principles over the last few weeks and months. Nevertheless, I'm trudging through Homage to Catalonia, and the political sections don't seem entirely foreign to me (I can't quite manage to buy into the bits on socialism as a formal political system, but I think I'll always remain a socialist insomuch as I believe that the material, moral and spiritual problems that occur singly and commonly in mankind are society's to solve, collectively (I'm just agnostic on the question of whether the government should be doing that collective solving)), and I can still read and largely appreciate Trotsky, Irving Howe and Mary McCarthy, rightists none of them.

But then again, I found myself over break reading the letters section of The Nation, and I realized they were on all the same topics people had written letters about four years ago: electoral fraud, the idiocy and evilness of Bush, the stupidness of red state voters, the encouraging signs for progressive candidates in local elections, the possibility of a resurgence in the labor movement. It's a bit depressing to see that nothing much has changed for them in the last four years, even about the way they think on issues.