Now I know what you’re thinking, and you’d be wrong: the first rule of Conservative Fight Club is that you never shut up about Conservative Fight Club! In this recent lecture for the William F. Buckley Jr Program at Yale (originally titled “Varieties of Conservative Experience” in homage to the famous William James title), Steve Hayward explains the five major subdivisions on the right, and how they differ from—and argue with—one another. In addition to the theoretical differences, Steve explains how you can keep them straight by what kind of fiction they read: traditionalists read Jane Austen; libertarians read science fiction (when they aren’t reading Ayn Rand); neoconservatives read Saul Bellow and Philip Roth; religious conservatives read C.S. Lewis and Tolkien; American conservatives read Mark Twain, and take in the western films of John Ford.

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  1. Taras Coolidge
    Taras
    @Taras

    That’s Jane Austen with an “e”.

     Also, that social psychology paper that had to reverse itself didn’t accuse conservatives of being psychotic, but of showing “psychoticism“.  Here’s part of the erratum, quoted by Ronald Bailey in his Reason blog, 6/10/16:

    “Specifically, in the original manuscript, the descriptive analyses report that those higher in Eysenck’s psychoticism are more conservative, but they are actually more liberal; and where the original manuscript reports those higher in neuroticism and social desirability are more liberal, they are, in fact, more conservative.”

    Bailey continues:

    ”Whoops! In their errata, the chagrined researchers deploy a cloud of social-science-speak to obscure the fact that the dataset they use actually shows that it is liberals who tend to have a deep and wide mean streak. That is what uncooperative, hostile, troublesome, socially withdrawn, manipulative, and lack of feelings of inferiority means.”

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