Politics & Power Quote by Daniel Okrent

Okrent’s sentence is an editor’s scalpel: calm, qualifying, and quietly strategic. “I think” signals judgment rather than decree, a rhetorical softener that also protects the speaker from being pinned down. Yet it’s not timid. It’s the verbal equivalent of moving a person on a political map and then stepping back so the reader notices the repositioning.

The key move is the split between “libertarian” and “conservative in the conventional sense.” Okrent isn’t just classifying Tierney; he’s policing categories. “Conventional” does a lot of work here, implying that modern conservatism has a recognizable party-line shape - culturally traditional, institution-defending, maybe populist - and that Tierney doesn’t quite fit the uniform. By contrast, “more libertarian” suggests a different center of gravity: suspicion of regulation, preference for markets, an individualist reflex. It reframes the person as motivated less by heritage and moral order than by autonomy and anti-bureaucratic instinct.

As subtext, it’s also a reputational edit. In many media contexts, “conservative” can read as tribal or reactive; “libertarian” can read as principled, contrarian, even intellectually tidy. Okrent’s phrasing offers a way to understand Tierney’s positions without collapsing them into partisan identity. Coming from an editor - someone trained to separate argument from label - the intent feels less like ideological cheerleading and more like a bid for precision: don’t treat this figure as a predictable culture-war avatar when his instincts run toward freedom-from rather than tradition-for.