I guess I'm what you'd call a leftist (but I prefer progressive). I read Life+Death and Dark Age Ahead. Jacobs never struck me as conservative, whatever that even means. A preservationist, to be sure. I don't think Dark Age Ahead is going to be handed out at CPAC. Burned maybe.

BTW, what does conservative mean?

Yeah, I’m not sure conservative is the best term because it carries a lot of other baggage especially these days. But favors the status quo, preservationist, change mostly based on community wishes, etc. are all probably pretty fair.

An essay in the 1964 book Ideology and Discontent makes the case that the public isn't qualified to have an opinion and found that shockingly low numbers of people can define "liberal" and "conservative" but (1) that was when hardly anyone went to college and (2) the author had the structuralist view that ideology was a fight between "marxism" and "anti-marxism" and wouldn't really recognize, say, a black nationalist or an ecofeminist as having an advanced ideology.

It's a running gag that liberals don't liberate and that conservatives don't conserve but I think liberals who liberate and conservatives who conserve have something to contribute.

I think Jane's respect for existing institutions, places and organizations that arise out of markets and fear of centralized planning are conservative. It makes me think of how Petroski wrote a whole book about pencils that comes to the conclusion that central planning doesn't work because no individual knows how to make a pencil.

no one really knows