Jonathan Rauch at Persuasion: In November, James Lindsay—an independent scholar, author, and sometime prankster—decided to test his observation that the American right’s illiberalism and irrationalism have, bizarrely, converged with the woke left’s illiberalism and irrationalism. He grabbed verbiage from the Communist Manifesto, changed left-wing valences to right-wing, and submitted the result to an online conservative journal. He did not have high confidence in going undetected; after all, his opening sentence (“A rising spirit is haunting America: the spirit of a true Christian Right”) is a blatant rip-off of one of the most famous sentences in world literature.
He did not have high confidence in going undetected; after all, his opening sentence (“A rising spirit is haunting America: the spirit of a true Christian Right”) is a blatant rip-off of one of the most famous sentences in world literature. Nonetheless, American Reformer ran the piece under the headline “The Liberal Consensus and the New Christian Right.