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Field conservatives in So Cal academy

Following up on the blogosphere brouhaha over David Brooks' NY Times article on conservatives in the academy, my friend Tom Smith has a provocative post over at The Right Coast on the difference between house and field conservatives:

Brooks is a house conservative. He is careful never to say anything that would overly upset liberals. He is oh so nice on the Leher News Hour. For this reason, he is less interesting than Mark Shields, who really is knee-jerk liberal, but at least he's a two fisted one.

I like red meat as much as the next guy, especially from a polemicist, but the behavior of field conservatives often calls to mind the best line from the Brook's article:

"Conservatives are people who teach the value of prudence but are incapable of exercising any," says Mark Lilla, a politically unclassifiable professor at the University of Chicago.

There are times when being a firebreather is prudent and times when it isn't; if the trouble with house conservatives is that they never think its the right time to be a bomb thrower, the trouble with field conservatives is that they often seem to have no other mode of operation! Field conservatives, moreover, tend to devote at least as much time to squabbling with other conservatives as they do with liberals and moderates. This Taki column on David Frum is a hysterical example of the phenomenon, BTW. Hey, for that matter, so is this post!