Three Things Conservatives Wrote This Week That Everyone Should Read

http://thinkprogress.org/politics/2014/06/06/3444647/conservatives-post-15/



1. “Steve Jobs: The Spoiled Child as Tech Guru” — Bruce Frohnen, The Imaginative Conservative
Over at the Imaginative Conservative, Bruce Frohnen has been working on a multi-part series critiquing the influence of Steve Jobs on modern culture. His first entry, drawing largely from Walter Isaacson’s biography, is a pretty brutal takedown of what Isaacson sees as the vacuous and asinine values Jobs was inculcated with by his post-baby-boom liberal upbringing in the San Francisco Bay suburbs. This week, Frohnen expanded that critique into the ways Jobs shaped American attitudes towards technology.

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2. “The Right, the Left, and Reform Conservatism” — Yuval Levin, National Review Online
The “reform conservatism” movement — exemplified by writers like Ross Douthat, Reihan Salam, James Pethokoukis and others — is back in the blogosphere after the recent publication of Room to Grow, a batch of policies aimed at building a new conservative agenda to appeal to middle-class voters. That in turn provoked a series of critiques from left-leaning writers that reform conservatism is in tension with the anti-government nihilism of the Tea Party, and can only succeed to the degree it pushes mainstream conservatism and the Republican Party leftward.

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3. “The Good of Government” — Roger Scruton, First Things
Also on the subject of conservatives’ philosophy of government, Roger Scruton showed up at First Things this week with a long and thoughtful piece pushing back at the tendency within conservatism to see government as a sort of alien imposition on natural human social relations. He criticizes the “frontier” individualist strain in much right-wing thinking, pointing out that “the human individual is a social construct,” that individual freedom emerges out of our relations to others, and that government is a natural emergent property of this impulse “to hold each other to account for what we do.”