Great Andrew Norton post - esp for thinking lefties

Andrew Norton strikes again, (I say in the nicest possible way).  "Carlton’s lone classical liberal" wrote a great post recently on progressives, conservatives and liberalism, stimulating a series of comments well worth reading, by both self-styled righties and lefties.  In particular, I draw approving attention to his own comment (No 19), and am compelled to quote from it:

I had in mind more intellectual critiques of markets as driving out non-market values or causing change that is too rapid. Conservatism and leftism can both be seen as reactions to the forces unleashed by a liberal market society - Andrew Norton - 2008-04-04

However, I would also point to my olde post ("Unrecognized Allies?" 2007-05-08, which got a Missing Link mention) which includes:

In two major domains of society, religion and economics, traditional enemies are now natural allies, but are yet to recognize their common cause and join forces. It is hard to describe, but simpler to call the new divide as the sophisticates versus the barbarians. The barbarians are predators and their dupes.

Andrew Norton’s piece was in response to Don Arthur’s Club Troppo post: "The Coming Realignment" (2008-04-02).

Personally, I think Don Arthur piece as going a bit far, and suggest that rather than an alliance based on party membership and voting patterns, progressives from both left and right should and will join forces on an issue-by-issue basis.

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See Also:

• Two posts in which I argue that the sort of education beloved of traditional conservatives promotes lefty, or at the very least progressive, positions ("Do the classics create people with progressive politics?" Parts One and Two), which includes…
  

  We must rally behind the catchry of Cicero (my all-time favorite politician): “Concord of the orders”, which called for people of good-will, whether patrician, knight or pleb, to join together against self-serving demagogues and corruption.

• A good example of an archetypal conservative that lefty progressives admire, Edmund Burke, in "A 1777 conservative critique of the Iraq war" drawn from his famous "Letter to the Sheriffs of Bristol on the Affairs of America"