Before this learning experience I had assumed that with regard to programs that sought to help people out of poverty the political world was essentially divided into two camps: conservatives who opposed these for a variety of reasons and liberals who supported them.
It's been quite an experience being conservative and living in the North East.
I haven't been as wild with my money as somebody like me might have been. I've been very safe very conservative with investments. I don't blow money. I don't have a ton of houses. I know things can go away. I've already had that experience.
It wouldn't be fair to say that conservatives cherish property the way liberals cherish equality. But it would be fair to say that the takings clause is the conservatives' recipe for judicial activism just as they say liberals have misused the equal protection clause.
I think an old style of addressing environmental problems is ebbing but the rise of the so-called conservative political movement in this country is not a trend towards the future but a reaction to this very broad shift that we are undergoing.
What is the conservative movement? It's pretty straightforward. We believe that the way prosperity is created is when people have the freedom and the opportunity to pursue their dreams.
The people of South Carolina support conservatives who are trying to push real change and the people of South Carolina expect their presidential candidates to back them up when they show courage.
Both conservatives and liberals watch 'Parks and Recreation ' and they each think the show is for them which is really cool. 'SNL' was totally different. It was exciting because everyone was paying attention. Political humor works when people know what you're talking about.
Maybe that first gigantic deficit the Reaganites piled up was an accident just a combination of deluded 'supply side' tax cuts and a huge bag of good stuff for the Pentagon. But pretty quickly conservatives discovered that deficits when done correctly did something really cool: deficits defunded the Left.
We have to struggle against the conservatives from all sides not only the right-wingers but also the left-wing conservatives who don't want to change anything.
The idea of the sacred is quite simply one of the most conservative notions in any culture because it seeks to turn other ideas - uncertainty progress change - into crimes.
The central conservative truth is that it is culture not politics that determines the success of a society. The central liberal truth is that politics can change a culture and save it from itself.
The great fear that hung over the business community in the 1970s was death by regulation and the great goal of the conservative movement as it rose to triumph in the 1980s was to remove that threat - to keep OSHA the EPA and the FTC from choking off entrepreneurship with their infernal meddling in the marketplace.
We as conservative intellectuals should not be in the business of making excuses for bad parliamentary decisions by Republican leaders in Congress.
Take those chances and you can achieve greatness whereas if you go conservative you'll never know. I truly believe what doesn't kill you makes you stronger. Even if you fail learning and moving on is sometimes the best thing.
'Summer of Love: Art of the Psychedelic Era ' the Whitney Museum's 40th-anniversary trip down counterculture memory lane provides moments of buzzy fun but it'll leave you only comfortably numb. For starters it may be the whitest straightest most conservative show seen in a New York museum since psychedelia was new.
And I think there's something about conservatives frankly - and the Left when it comes to their channels of persuasion are unpersuasive. They are most of them are hate-filled obscenity-clogged rants of anger and hatred.