Looking to avoid talking heads who have made the culture war most of their identity. In fact, i’d like to avoid talk of that altogether if possible. Just looking for serious, thoughtful conservative thought and discussion. Mainly interested in US, but other areas might also be interesting.
I’m not Republican or Conservative but I always thought if I wanted to understand the other side, I needed to read their arguments and understand their positions.
I gotta say, it’s really hard to find a Republican/Conservative who isn’t deeply entrenched in the “culture war” BS or who is acting in good faith in their arguments in the modern era. In the past, you could at least see a semblance of logic to conservative ideas, and some of them were indeed quite brilliant, despite me disagreeing with their positions.
Anyway, while I personally find both of these people reprehensible for a litany of reasons, I would argue they at least presented arguments that were rooted in reality enough to have a reasoned debate with them, if push came to shove. My top two suggestions would be Milton Freidman (although his politics aren’t strictly “conservative”) and William F. Buckley Jr. I hate these guys, but I have a harder time believing that everything they presented was in bad faith (Okay Buckley I can buy it a bit, but Freidman at least seemed sincere in his positions).
I’m not a fan of BBC commentators like Andrew Neil, who is a staunch conservative, but you can see the drastic comparison between Neil and his US counterparts with this interview he did with Ben Shapiro, in which Shapiro has a total fucking meltdown and doesn’t seem to understand that Andrew Neil supports similar political positions as himself and is just trying to appear to be a semi-serious journalist (something I would argue Neil is not). However, the way they present themselves is clearly wildly different with Neil at least attempting to appear to be moderately neutral.