uh...we do that here, too...

In an otherwise adroit piece by Mark Lilla from December (I'm usually always behind in reading periodicals, but the December 26th birth of my daughter made it even worse) about what for convenience sake we'll call "the new French Right", there's this:

"Whether anything politically significant will come out of this activity is difficult to know, given that intellectual fashions in France change about as quickly as the plat du jour. This past summer I spent some time reading and meeting these young writers in Paris and discovered more of an ecosystem than a cohesive, disciplined movement. Still, it was striking how serious they are and how they differ from American conservatives. They share two convictions: that a robust conservatism is the only coherent alternative to what they call the neoliberal cosmopolitanism of our time, and that resources for such a conservatism can be found on both sides of the traditional left-right divide. More surprising still, they are all fans of Bernie Sanders.

The intellectual ecumenism of these writers is apparent in their articles, which come peppered with references to George Orwell, the mystical writer-activist Simone Weil, the nineteenth-century anarchist Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, Martin Heidegger and Hannah Arendt, the young Marx, the ex-Marxist Catholic philosopher Alasdair Macintyre, and especially the politically-leftist, culturally conservative American historian Christopher Lasch..."

Come one dude, you could have just been listing every citation in any random piece written for The American Conservative, American Affairs, The Hedgehog Review, Jacobite, etc. I know that I've personally cited ALL of those thinkers/writers in my writing. 

It's a rich, telling, irony that an American "Leftist" (in the completely outmoded 20th Century sense) has to go all the way to Paris to get a whiff of what's happening every night in Topeka. Or in my case, Maine. I guess media bubbles are a real thing after all. Good grief.