Does Anyone Care about the Truth Anymore?

 David Solway  . . . "Opponents of the Left are regularly denounced as belonging to the “far right.” But what is called the “far right” in the current political environment is a will o’ the wisp, a false construct serving the interests of the demagogic impulse associated with the left, for there is no temporizing with the left’s totalitarian basis no matter how moderate it may appear in some of its presumably acceptable forms.

"What is condemned as the “far right” is actually responsible conservatism struggling to preserve the philosophy and tradition of “classical liberalism” associated with resonant names like John Locke, Edmund Burke, Matthew Arnold, John Stuart Mill and Benjamin Disraeli, and today with Richard Weaver, James Burnham, Robert Bork, Russell Kirk and Roger Scruton.

"For those on the “soft left,” desire is the nub of the issue -- the appetite for outcomes in the absence of reasoned analysis and knowledge of history, justified by a faulty reading of the world. One recalls the philosophical debate that raged for centuries between Duns Scotus and his followers on the one side and the school of Saint Thomas Aquinas on the other. (The word “dunce” derives from “Duns.”) Scotus postulated that the will conditions the reason, in other words, desire seeks its goal first and the mind subsequently proceeds to vindicate its decision. Aquinas contended that reason commands the will, that is, the faculty of purified intellect posits the good, and desire afterwards strives to achieve it. The general run of leftists and liberals are, on this interpretation, earnest neo-Scotists, wanting something very badly -- feminist hegemony, climate purity, socialist equity, sexual license, abortion on demand -- and then abusing their mental powers to defend their error." . . .