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I’ve Grown to Like Reprobate Leftists
Well, not really, but I don’t think there are as many of them as I once assumed
“I do not want to be fair. I want the art I hate to go away. . . . I am not in favor of art — I’m in favor of the art I like.” David Hickey.
I fear I picked up a lazy and stultifying mental habit in my early adult years: I habitually assumed every academic and artistic person is a reprobate leftist.
It was a habit largely inculcated in me by Paul Johnson’s Intellectuals, but there were other things. William F. Buckley’s observation that he’d rather be governed by the first 2,000 people in the Manhattan phone book than the faculty of Harvard. The degenerate leftism that largely was French intellectual life after World War II. Alfred Kinsey.
Sure, I made exceptions all the time, once I was shown that Mr. X was a solid family man or Ms. Y actually entertained a few right-leaning sensibilities or was a fairly serious Catholic. But I always had that assumption, which made me avoid them — their articles, their interviews, their ideas — in general.
Life’s short. Why waste time on reprobate leftists?
