I came across this in Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn’s Lefitism Revisited: From de Sade and Marx to Hitler and Pol Pot while in a coffee shop today (all the while trying to look dark, brooding, and mysterious–like a modern day Heathcliff):

The Right stands for liberty, a free, unprejudiced form of thinking; a readiness to preserve traditional values (provided they are true values); a balanced view of the nature of man, seeing in him neither beast nor angel, insisting on the uniqueness of human beings which cannot be transformed into or treated as mere numbers or ciphers. The Left is the advocate of the opposite principles; it is the enemy of diversity and the fanatical promoter of identity. Uniformity is stressed in all leftist utopias, paradises in which everybody is the same, envy is dead, and the enemy is either dead, lives outside the gates, or is utterly humiliated. Leftism loathes differences, deviations, stratifications. The only hierarchy it can accept is functional. The word “one” is its symbols: one language, one race, one class, one ideology, one ritual, one type of school, one law for everybody, one flag, one coat of arms, one centralized world state.

Lest you think I am pinning a GOP pin onto my lapel and turning up the volume to Fox News as I type this, let me say this: Republicans (the Evil and Stupid Party) manifest no signs of true conservatism. Most Recent Example: The manner by which America hooted and hollered after the assassination of bin Laden reveals a stupidity and debasement not worthy of a true conservatism. I try to avoid labels, pretending them to be Mormon missionaries who always visit an *empty* home. However, if you were to bribe me with a bottle of Jim Beam (shucks, any bottle of bourbon will do) and the prospect for a decent conversation (though, that might have to come before the bourbon–eh, maybe not), I would claim a form of conservatism that falls somewhere in the midst of Russell Kirk and Herman Melville and (St. ?) Dorothy Day.