Thank you, wretchard, for posting that link to the Moran article. A good read, and right on target about what is happening today. It took me a few more years than it did Rick Moran to finally figure the Left (and all statists) out, but the Left most fears those who used to be with them and have since left. The ones who used to absorb the culture of socialist thought and even try to repair it, expand it, and improve upon it – who finally realized the futility of it all – are the Left’s most determined opponents.

Like Mr. Moran, Buckley’s and Novak’s thoughts were like the grains of sand in the entrails of oysters.

In the few years before I left the Left in 1987 I voraciously read hundreds of articles and dozens of books to see if anyone else on the Left was taking the arguments of the conservatives seriously and making strong counter arguments. Hardly any. I found that perplexing, and I still do. Today, I cannot find any really groundbreaking thought coming from the broad camp of socialist intellectuals (or what passes for “intellectual” these days over there).

The irony of all of it is that right at the moment when the Left is maybe lapping at its high water mark in American politics concurrently there exists a dreadful poverty of incisive, groundbreaking, searching writing and thought coming from that side. Intellectual poverty juxtaposed with political success. Very strange indeed.