Hey!

Paul Krugman has essentially re-written my piece on the absence of conservatives in Academia. Oh well. The more the merrier.

Anyways, the Volokh conspiracy has taken issue with Krugman's piece (am I not good enough? :) ). Juan and Orin Kerr do their best, but it really is a pretty shoddy set arguments they produce. First, they get confused between the "supply side" argument (conservatives don't get into academia) and the political argument (academics don't vote Republican). These really are two sides to the same coin: serious intellectuals do not become conservative because conservativism is not intellectually serious. Then the Volokhsters whine that Krugman is being mean to conservatism in general by painting them with a broad anti-intellectual brush. Well if the shoe fits......

Oh, and Kerr makes a snide crack about readers living on the Upper West Side and Cambridge who have might one day "meet a conservative" realizing that they are intellectually credible after all. Hey Buddy, I grew up in the Deep South, and I have met precious few conservatives who knew what a good argument was. Typically all they had to say was some combination of "that's just my belief" or "the bible says so" or "why do you hate America?"

So my (and Krugman's) basic point remains: academics are not conservative Republicans because no one who learns how to think is likely to end up a conservative Republican, not because there is some bias in the academia against hiring right wingers. Find me a cogent right winger, and we'll hire him. The problem is that we can't find one.

One last thing: conservatives have been making a big deal lately about how left wingers don't talk books, i.e. they are disengaged from their own philosophical tradition. The right, on the other hand, is obsessed with theirs. I find this pretty amusing, given that the people who write all the serious books are liberals. There hasn't been a conservative political philosopher of note since Nozick, and he wasn't that much of a conservative.