From
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/08/05/books/review/Metcalf-t.html?pagewanted=print"August 5, 2007
The Road to Rightville, By STEPHEN METCALF
'... one thing I am not, and never will be, is a conservative. The recent essay anthology Why I Turned Right: Leading Baby Boom Conservatives Chronicle Their Political Journeys (Threshold Editions, $23) has given us liberals a chance to think about why, even in our calcifying stodginess, American conservatism remains a nonstarter for us, a stack of loyalty oaths wed never be tempted to sign. ...
...the comforting solecisms flow forth unregulated. When the left is being idealistic, it is nave, utopian, technocratic and meddling. When the right is being idealistic, it is idealistic. Thus Lyndon Johnsons war on poverty reveals the left to be hopelessly overreaching, as David Brooks assures us, while George W. Bushs war in Iraq "is one of the noblest endeavors the United States, or any great power, has ever undertaken."
Democrats fail essentially; Republicans fail incidentally. Conservatives have been playing this game of "heads I win, tails you lose" for roughly a generation. Ever since Ronald Reagan twitted Jimmy Carter with "there you go again," the American right has carried itself with a swagger, confident the crowd will have its back. ...
Here we near the answer to our riddle: how privileged college graduates, while fronting for the interests of corporations and the rich, speak the language of angry populism, and with such depth of conviction. ... In Rich Lowrys essay, the point is finally driven home. "If high school had been an ape colony, we would have been those antisocial unattached males lingering on the fringes, envying the dominant males with their mates."
To be genuinely humiliated is to know how to tap into the humiliations of others. Rejecting tout court a culture of cool that prevails against him, a certain sort of person turns to campus politics. Because these conservatives were, by and large, low-status males (or the feminism-disdaining women who loved them) in high school and college, they know instinctively how to connect with the culturally dispossessed. And so it was that the workers of the world did unite, but with the bow-tie-wearing nerds at the Cato Institute. Ad hominem? Juvenile? Needlessly provocative? Maybe I could turn right after all.'