What’s In A Name?
The website where you’re reading this is called “The American Conservative,” as is the magazine with which it is affiliated. I admit to being ambivalent about the name – partly for my own personal reasons (I don’t particularly identify as a conservative these days) and partly for marketing reasons (I’d like us to reach an audience beyond self-identified conservatives and opinion journalism junkies, and I think the name gets in the way of that – in a way that a name like, say “The American Scene,” where I used to write, would not).
But we have that name for a reason: because the magazine is dedicated to framing itself as a coming from a conservative perspective. We writers all disagree on precisely what that might mean, and we also may disagree on how much it matters whether a perspective is so defined – but to those who edit and publish the magazine, it matters a lot.
All of which is a roundabout way of getting to my whine that, in a post entitled “Can Conservatives Be Persuaded To Raise the Minimum Wage” there’s no recognition that a year ago “The American Conservative” published a big piece by the publisher calling for a substantial rise in the Federal minimum wage, and followed it up with many subsequent pieces on the same subject.
We’re not going to persuade anyone, after all, if people don’t remember what we’ve argued.
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