In 1950, author and critic Lionel Trilling wrote: In the United States at this time liberalism is not only the dominant but even the sole intellectual tradition. The Anglo-Irish 18th-century statesman Edmund Burke is typically held up as the spokesman for the enduring conservative sensibility, and such prominent postwar American conservatives as William F. Buckley Jr., Russell Kirk and George …
If you're like most people, you haven't followed the twists and turns of conservative intellectual efforts to gin up a new account of American conservatism distinguishing it from Trumpism. The Reagan coalition united economic conservatives focused on "smaller government"—i.e., lower taxes and regulations—and religious conservatives intent on preserving traditional morality, which boiled down mostly to sex they don't like. Even …
Ours is an age awash in reactionary fever. ‘Death of expertise’ Oakeshott wrote in his Notebooks: “Anyone touched with the sense of mortality will be apt to be a conservative in politics.” Our present reactionaries exhort and inflame their societies and the thin veneer of civilisation around them as if they were immortal. Whereas conservatism is an attitude towards life …
