The Good Prince

Smells Like Team Spirit - Matt Yglesias

Yglesias does have a point here. A good conservative or a good liberal should tend to stick with other conservatives or liberals. That is to say, bucking the ideology doesn't seem to enhance the solidarity of the ideological group. However, if your purpose were to improve the ideology then bucking the trend is exactly what you should do. More to the point, an ideology cannot stay static, it must move with the times and the culture. Certainly there are aspects of any ideology that can apply to almost any period of time but one should worry about which aspects those are. If they last then they last, otherwise you are attempt to graft an ideology of a different time onto the modern world and that just doesn't work too well. Ideological purity does have its advantages but standing the test of time is not one of them. So the division is really between the good conservative or liberal and the person or ideas good for conservativism or liberalism.