In a way, I’m glad to have been pre-occupied with the book stuff today, because I don’t know that I have the constitutional wherewithal to have entered the fierce fray Joe Carter opened up at First Things with criticism of certain aspects of the Front Porch Republic ethos. Carter:

Since 2008, FPR has been a fascinating project. But the fusionism of self-sufficient and freedom-loving localists with monarchists and socialists can’t last forever. Either the various groups will go their separate ways or Porcherism will eventually be dismissed as a bizarre philosophy that has no connection to American life in the twenty-first century. It would be a shame if Porcherism failed. We need an attractive presentation of traditionalism that can inspire the masses, not another fantasy ideology that appeals only to quirky academics.

Carter’s attack makes clear why I find it increasingly difficult to sympathize with conservative defenders of liberalism, who praise mass culture yet fret over socialism, who worry about relativism for a living yet dismiss concerns about uglification as reflecting the mere opinions of elitist aesthetes.  A conservative liberal is somebody who encourages the prevailing progressive view that the past was benighted and is best forgotten, but then demands respect for the Ten Commandments and the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution — and to boot casually drops ten-dollar words like “polis” with unintended irony.