Glenn Loury’s calls for personal responsibility in the black community, his defense of patriotism—even his disposition—indicate that he is a conservative. Yet he remains hesitant to adopt the “conservative” label, and especially the “black conservative” label. When I ask him about this reluctance, he replies with characteristic sense of humor. Social pressure, he answers, makes it difficult for professors to come out as conservatives. “When they get finished with you on Twitter for being a black conservative,” he laments, “there’s not very much left of your reputation.”
There has been a significant increase in recent years of posts and articles which mull over the precision, or lack thereof, in political taxonomy. Is you is or is you ain’t? Max Boot’s recent book notwithstanding, this seems to be largely one-way traffic; if there are dozens of examples of conservatives wondering if they have suddenly become liberal or been liberal all along, I’m unaware of them. I figure this correlates with the leftward lurch over the same period known as the Great Awokening, which abruptly stopped the music and left many liberals standing without a seat to endure the jeering of their former peers. Well, throughout history, exile has often produced great poetry and literature. So far, we’re only getting a lot of navel-gazing and linguistic quibbling, but we can hope.
Personally, I find David Warren’s schematic to be as useful and accurate as any: rather than left and right, fashionable and unfashionable; rather than red vs. blue, a color wheel. It sounds almost facetious at first, but as Bertie Wooster would say, he has rung the bell. I examine it narrowly and I find no flaw in it. It is the goods. From now on, I identify as hexcode #587b56.