… Though heart might find relief if I became a mainstream con …

Dimitri K. worries that I risk alienating Ann Coulter and other mainstream conservatives with my criticisms:

There are soldiers and there are priests; soldiers fight with all means they have, priests guard the decency of the society. Both are necessary, though they can disagree. Priests will win [cannot win?] a battle, and soldiers cannot decide what is appropriate.

Coulter is a soldier in her heart, you are a priest. You both are necessary, both are our defenders. I only hope you don’t make enemies forever—in this case we all will lose. Maybe that is the greatest problem of our time—we keep fighting each other when the enemy is at the gate.

A big fan of yours,
Dimitri

Friends of mine keep imagining that I have a place among mainstream conservatives that I risk losing if I criticize mainstream conservatives. But I’ve got no such place, so I’ve got no place to lose. I’m invisible as far as the conservative establishment is concerned. Given my positions on immigration, on Islam, on race, on feminism, on conservatism, on liberalism, how could it be otherwise? I call things as I see them, trying to move conservatives toward a view that I think is better. That’s all I can do.

By the way, the title of this entry is a paraphrase from the final section of Yeats’s poem “Vacillation,” which I wrote a term paper on in my sophomore year at Columbia, a long time ago.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at March 08, 2007 01:00 AM | Send