Moving beyond the usual mix of empty rhetoric and ideological babble, John Howard's most insightful words at the AEI's 2008 Irving Kristol Lecture were in fact a quote attributed to AEI's founder:
"I know that it will be hard for some to believe that ideas can be so important. This underestimation of ideas is a peculiarly bourgeois fallacy, especially powerful in the most bourgeois of nations, our own United States. For two centuries, the very important people who managed the affairs of this society could not believe in the importance of ideas--until one day they were shocked to discover that their children, having been captured and shaped by certain ideas, were either rebelling against their authority or seceding from their society. The truth is that ideas are all-important. The massive and seemingly-solid institutions of any society--the economic institutions, the political institutions, the religious institutions--are always at the mercy of the ideas in the heads of the people who populate these institutions."
What, then, can be said of those who seek to challenge such institutions?
"I know that it will be hard for some to believe that ideas can be so important. This underestimation of ideas is a peculiarly bourgeois fallacy, especially powerful in the most bourgeois of nations, our own United States. For two centuries, the very important people who managed the affairs of this society could not believe in the importance of ideas--until one day they were shocked to discover that their children, having been captured and shaped by certain ideas, were either rebelling against their authority or seceding from their society. The truth is that ideas are all-important. The massive and seemingly-solid institutions of any society--the economic institutions, the political institutions, the religious institutions--are always at the mercy of the ideas in the heads of the people who populate these institutions."
What, then, can be said of those who seek to challenge such institutions?
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