Within a National Review book review that otherwise focuses on the pathology of British traitors, Michael Walsh offers an interesting paragraph on the modern-day liberal’s approach to the world:
As Robert Frost famously said, a liberal is a man too broad-minded to take his own side in a quarrel, and there does seem to be something in the liberal mind that is constantly at war with its circumstances and surroundings. Now, one can (as liberals surely do) view this heroically, as a perpetual quest for justice in the teeth of an uncaring, unfeeling, unjust society. Or one can (as conservatives generally do) see perpetual rebellion as a form of arrested adolescence that combines imagined moral superiority with a peculiar kind of impotence that manifests itself in the revolutionaries’ willingness to have others die in the millions for their pet causes.
That passage fits well with Daniel J. Mahoney’s argument that a liberal order needs conservative foundations.
