Actions Have Consequences (1) (update)

By Rick Perlstein
December 4th, 2008 - 12:13pm ET

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I was heading somewhere in my post on Tuesday; today, here, I hope to get there. I was writing about how a favorite conservative bromide—"ideas have consequences"—also applies to them, and in spades. The saying is marshaled, self-righteously, as a way for conservatives to "argue" that everything bad in modern life, from Mao's Great Famine to Susan Smith driving her children into a lake, can be traced back in origin to awful liberal intellectuals—say, Emmanuel Kant, arguing that humans can derive moral codes from our faculty for reason.