At times I mention that I read views alternative or opposed to my own. I read Andrew Sullivan’s The Conservative Soul and want to copy out a paragraph here. But first I will comment on the quotes I put around conservative. They are so necessary we not only crook two fingers of each hand when we enunciate certain words like this one, we have even concocted a new word for it, “air quotes”. We have to do this b/c the times require it. To call someone a conservative means absolutely nothing unless you gauge everything by the evening news where Lindsey Graham is a conservative and so is Rand Paul and so is Rick Perry and so is Pat Buchanen and so is Queen Elizabeth.
Anyway, to Sullivan. On p. 230 he says: “The radical alternative to all these options (he offers a pithy goal for all the isms) is conservatism. As a politics, its essence is an acceptance of the unknowability of ultimate truth, an acknowledgement of the distinction between what is true forever and what is true for the here and now, and an embrace of the discrepancy between theoretical and practical knowledge It is an anti-ideology, a nonprogram, a way of looking at the world whose most perfect expression might be called inactivism. “
Yes, I can see Lindsay Graham embracing that.