re: #780 jaunte

On the conservative / liberal divide:
I encourage everyone here to read Thomas Sowell’s book, A Conflict of Visions.
Peter Robinson reviewed it in Forbes, and this excerpt will give you a sense of his thinking, if you haven’t already read it.

I would like to read the book.

I have to say, though, that many of the things I believe that are seen as ‘liberal’ as well as the ones that are ‘conservative’ grow out of a ‘constrained vision’, albeit maybe not quite the one Sowell envisions.

I think, also, that the contrast between the English Americas and France goes back farther than the eighteenth century. The English were practicing creating a law-based society of assigned rights and limited powers well before the Magna Carta. The revolutionary generation inherited centuries of scaffolding that allowed them to make a leap further without the chaos that followed in France.