Read this review of Susan Neiman’s new book, Moral Clarity. It’s one of many books about how the left eschewed virtue and how the right cornered the market on it, for good and for bad. Neiman is a “progressive,” but she takes progressives (read: liberals) to task in the same way conservatives always have:

Neiman, an American philosopher who runs the Einstein Forum in Potsdam, Germany, worries that American progressives have drifted away from the values and intellectual traditions of the West, stretching from classical antiquity to the Enlightenment (this is the larger narrative). She is vexed that contemporary conservatism has staked an uncontested claim to these traditions. When George W. Bush was re-elected in 2004 (this is the more local narrative), she recalls, “I was stunned by the claim that voters chose George Bush because they cared about moral values. Either they had been bamboozled or the left had dramatically failed.”

This quote reveals the typical liberal condescension that a conservative couldn’t possibly have the moral high ground. “How dare they claim it!”

Why have moral values become the property of the right? Her diagnosis, in part, is that “Western secular culture has no clear place for moral language, and its use makes many profoundly uncomfortable.” She also connects the “rightward turn in American culture” to the reshaping of American conservatism as an intellectual rather than an anti-intellectual movement. As the principle-driven progressive politics of the ’60s petered out, the American right discovered the power of ideas.

A good review.