Come to think of it, I've never seen Peter Johnston and Cassandra in a room together...

Peter Johnston warns the Right against hopping on the Left's "autonomy" bandwagon. Fear no verbs:

. . . liberalism delegitimizes unchosen obligations, thereby problematizing inherited relationships. It then promises to fix the resulting rootlessness by creating a world better suited to autonomy. Once citizens buy this liberal vision, they feel themselves more alienated from nature than before, and the reformation of the world in the terms of that alienation becomes urgent, even necessary. . . The message implicit in Obama’s rhetoric is progress through autonomy. It is powerful and elicits an enthusiastic response. Should the right adopt this message in search of similar enthusiasm, it would thereby abandon conservatism, becoming nothing more than an authoritarian version of the left. It adopts autonomy as the solution to the problem of human alienation, but grants that autonomy to the state rather than to the individual.

I would go a step further and say that ceding ground to the Left's separation of the public and private spheres is a different way of making the same mistake. From Postmodern Urbanism:

Loss of faith in working collectively toward a better world has occasioned a turning inward, a privatism, a retreat facilitated by the television, walkman, VCR, and personal computer. In response to the encroachment of the marketplace into our private domain (spawning a society of consumption), the collective idealistic vision of the modernist project has been replaced by a more personal search featuring an increased defense of the self, a romantic "quest for personality," a cult of the family, and a search for origins and roots. Christine Boyer describes the "inversion of values" which has occurred, valuing the private sphere over the public one.

It's hard to tell whether Ellin is more critical of liberalism or conservatism here (where does The Godfather fit in her analysis?), but the "inversion of values" she's talking about — one in which safety, comfort, authenticity, and autonomy are on top — sounds to be of the Left.

I'd be curious to know whether PJ agrees that zealous protection of the private sphere will necessarily make the private sphere so appealing (it's safe! it's personalized! it's immune from all external obligations!) that it ends up crowding out public sphere-related priorities. Hyping a separate realm for private action sounds like a tactic the Left might use to get the Right to agree to its terms on the priority of the self without realizing they've agreed to them. This isn't to say that privacy is nonsensical. Any number of private matters may fail to be fitting or polite in a given context, and most people today could do with being a little less confessional, but the investment of the category "private" with all kinds of political and ethical content is another matter.

In other YDN columnist news, Michael Pomeranz believes that "aristocratic laziness" is nothing without face-to-face involvement with poorer classes, and Yale is nothing without either. Aristocracy, laziness, and flanerie — must be the Ivy League...