To: Kathryn Lopez
Subject: liberal(s) can be Corner fan(s) too!
Hi Kathryn,
Your ballroom-dancing guy or gal wrote:
“[I am] a conservative, otherwise I wouldn’t be reading the Corner”
harrumph — I’m a liberal (nigh on to a socialist, on economic stuff), and The Corner is my favorite blog, bar none! On politics, I disagree with most of you, most of the time. But the spirit of inquiry and genuine, unabashed interest in ideas at The Corner repeatedly inspires me to be more disciplined and open-minded in my own thought. (I know I’m contradicting liberal conventional wisdom here, but it feels to me like the “shut up, how dare you say that!” censorship-ish impulse comes much more often from the Left than from the Right these days. See Larry Summers, all sorts of God stuff (oh, I’m also an atheist, by the way), all sorts of gender stuff (oh — I’m also a woman!), all sorts of what’s-going-wrong-in-other-cultures stuff. (Though — I will say the Right has been broadly more indignant than I’d like over Iraq war opposition.))
There’s also simply a tendency on the Left (and certainly on portions of the Right) toward a too-cool-for-school, above-it-all snarkiness. I’m an earnest person (even now, 15 years out of college), and I like other earnest people, and I get a lot of that — sincere curiosity and engagement — at The Corner.
I love you guys!