Excellent Writers, Facile Thinkers

By RUSSELL JACOBY

Do conservatives write better than leftists?

Why I Turned Right: Leading Baby Boom Conservatives Chronicle Their Political Journeys (Threshold Editions), to be published this month, is a collection of essays by a dozen conservatives on their political peregrinations from left to right. Almost without exception, each essay is lucid and articulate. Would it be possible to assemble a countercollection by leftists that would be equally limpid? Unlikely. Why?

Several answers suggest