[Newspoetry] footnote to "Seeing Things, the liberal truth"

[DL Emerick]

http://www.intellectualconservative.com/article3489.html
IC's Top 25 Philosophical and Ideological Conservative Books
No. 14 - Lionel Trilling: The Liberal Imagination
by Dr. Enrico Peppe
3 June 2004


"Lionel Trilling saw literature as a corrective to politics, offering a more
subtle and realistic account of human existence. ... 

"His most important collection of essays is found in the book under review.
In his preface, he states,


'In the United States at this time liberalism is not only the dominant but
even the sole intellectual tradition. For it is the plain fact that nowadays
there are no conservative or reactionary ideas in general circulation...the
conservative impulse and the reactionary impulse do not...express themselves
in ideas but only...in irritable mental gestures which seek to resemble
ideas.'"



The article is a reminder of how the Neo-cons came from the extremes of the
Left.  Of the peril of power, then, when it breaks free of the bonds of self
reflection and becomes "salable" in the corridors of power, self confident
in its assertions, proud and arrogant, and no longer believing in the
possibility of its own fallibility.


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