Q: What's a conservative? Answer: A liberal who was mugged by reality.

Keith Thompson picked the day of the Iraqi election to time his break with the Left. After talking about the serious cognitive dissonance on left, where people who once claimed solidarity with the repressed now gleefully wait for the failure of democracy in Iraq and who once believed in free speech now create codes to control speech, Thompson writes:

My larger point is rather simple. Just as a body needs different medicines at different times for different reasons, this also holds for the body politic.

In the sixties, America correctly focused on bringing down walls that prevented equal access and due process. It was time to walk the Founders' talk -- and we did. With barriers to opportunity no longer written into law, today the body politic is crying for different remedies.

America must now focus on creating healthy, self-actualizing individuals committed to taking responsibility for their lives, developing their talents, honing their skills and intellects, fostering emotional and moral intelligence, all in all contributing to the advancement of the human condition.

Absolutely right.

I've seen younger Catholics argue with Pre-Vatican II Catholics over whether Catholicism should be more or less tolerant of sexual heterodoxy. Oddly, it is the younger Catholics who argue for less tolerance and the older Catholics who are still reacting against the moral strictures of their youth, never realizing that the world has changed and that the last thing that a person in his 20s needs is to add gasoline to the fire of serial marriages, "hooking up" and "dating with privileges."

By the way, Thompson is gesturing at nothing more, and nothing less, than Aristotle's idea of "virtue," which argues that fulfillment is to be found in developing those traits that lead to human "excellence"; which goes to show that the great ideas are neither "conservative" or "liberal."

They are "true."

[Via Lane Core.]