The Power Line Show, Ep. 97: Conservative Fight Club!

Just in time for the weekend, by popular demand (or at least the social media pleadings of show fanboy Seth Root), another special episode of the Power Line Show featuring—me.

Now I know what you’re thinking from the title, and you’d be wrong: the first rule of Conservative Fight Club is that you never shut up about Conservative Fight Club! In this recent lecture of my series on conservatism for the William F. Buckley Jr Program at Yale (originally titled “Varieties of Conservative Experience” in homage to the famous William James title), I set out to explain the five major subdivisions on the right, and how they differ from—and argue with—one another. In addition to the theoretical differences, I show how you can keep them straight simply by noting what kind of fiction each kind reads: traditionalists read Jane Austen; libertarians read science fiction (when they aren’t reading Ayn Rand); neoconservatives read Saul Bellow and Philip Roth; religious conservatives read C.S. Lewis and Tolkien; American conservatives read Mark Twain, and take in the western films of John Ford.

There’s much more to it than this, though, but I thought this is a bingo-card style shorthand way of getting at it. As usual, please subscribe to Power Line in iTunes (and leave a 5-star review, please!), or by RSS feed.

Oh, by the way, this edition of the podcast inaugurates a new feature during the closing segment: Provocation of the Week. I started off with a fairly innocuous topic—which is the best burger chain the country. Though I suspect this will generate more heated commentary than a thread about single-payer health care.

Now back to assembling the Week in Pictures, which is also going to be epic again.

 

JOHN adds: Hey, man: we traditionalists are sticklers for spelling. It’s Jane *Austen*.

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