B.S.

For some reason, Andrew Sullivan quotes this crap favorably. It's from Jeffrey Hart, a conservative professor at Dartmouth:

"'Like the Whig gentry who were the Founders, I loathe populism,' Hart explains. 'Most especially in the form of populist religion, i.e., the current pestiferous bible-banging evangelicals, whom I regard as organized ignorance, a menace to public health, to science, to medicine, to serious Western religion, to intellect and indeed to sanity. Evangelicalism, driven by emotion, and not creedal, is thoroughly erratic and by its nature cannot be conservative. My conservatism is aristocratic in spirit, anti-populist and rooted in the Northeast. It is Burke brought up to date. A 'social conservative' in my view is not a moral authoritarian Evangelical who wants to push people around, but an American gentleman, conservative in a social sense. He has gone to a good school, maybe shops at J. Press, maybe plays tennis or golf, and drinks either Bombay or Beefeater martinis, or maybe Dewar's on the rocks, or both.'"

Look, I know plenty of people who probably think like this. They generally have the good sense not to say so explicitly, however. The idea that "true conservatism" is reserved to an economic elite who wore blue blazers at their prep schools and were drilled in Latin conjugations is ridiculous -- not to mention hostile to the very idea of intellectual inquiry. An "ism" should be based on rational observations of human affairs. It should not be the intellectual facade for what is, in reality, a glorified clique of rich kids and phony etiquette.

Seriously, is this the conservative alternative to religious evangelicalism? I a secular type of guy, but if I had to choose between a party that glorifies inherited privilege and one that espouses fundamentalist Christian morals, I'd choose the Christian party in a heartbeat. At
least the fundamentalist Republican party does not make any phony assumptions of a person's worth based on his type of cocktail.