When Christopher Buckley, the novelist, writer, and son of the founding editor of National Review, first penned his endorsement of Barack Obama in Tina Brown’s new web venture, The Daily Beast, he, no doubt, thought that he’d make a stir—but one probably confined to the media gawkers. “Sorry Dad, I’m Voting for Obama.” He consciously didn’t pitch the piece to NR … [Read More]

Before the site is glutted with debate commentary, a word on Rod Dreher’s latest C11 column. Its title, and much of its substance, is taken from the last page of After Virtue, but a couple of Dreher’s comments on Benedictine monasticism are misleading. The paragraphs I’m talking about (all emphases mine):For some time now, Julie and I have been talking with … [Read More]

Today’s Republican Party is no longer the conservative party of Barry Goldwater and Ronald Reagan. It has morphed significantly in regard to the two main questions of concern to me: foreign policy and constitutional philosophy. In the area of foreign policy, Reagan vindicated Goldwater’s lonely stand in the early-1960s Senate with such fellow “extremists” as John Tower and Strom Thurmond on … [Read More]

Austin Bramwell and Gerald Russello have taken different sides on whether American conservatives need a “canon of great books” to guide them. While Bramwell has disputed the value of this project, Russello aided by Dan McCarthy has argued on its behalf. Despite my forty-year involvement as a scholar dealing with the American Right and, more recently, the faux Right, I find … [Read More]

Recently at Takimag, there have been a number of critiques by the articulate, provocative, and acerbic Austin Bramwell. Bramwell questions the idea of the “conservative canon” as something of a put up job by the conservative establishment, and argues that many of the canonical conservative authors would not be in print—must less read—without the support of their respective coteries. Bramwell asks … [Read More]

Dan McCarthy addresses one of the several questions I posed in my last post—“Is the conservative movement worth conserving?”–namely, “To what extent would anyone read the authors of the movement conservative canon (Russell Kirk, Frank Meyer et al.) if a conservative movement did not exist to promote their works so relentlessly?” Dan responds that the movement hasn’t in fact promoted its … [Read More]

Paul Gottfried’s a lot more patient than I am, if he’s willing to spoon through thousands of pages of Marxist analyses to find the chunks of edible meat that float in the spoiled soup. If I see that an argument is based on false premises, I rarely spend time tracing its every convolution through to the end, in case the author … [Read More]

In view of the numerous responses to my announcement of the death of paleoconservatism and my discussion of the transition from a paleo to a pospaleo opposition to the neoconservative-liberal media, there may be need for these further clarifications. One, the postpaleos’ indifference to the post-World War II conservative movement is a decided advantage that they enjoy in relation to their … [Read More]

In a recent blog Helen Rittelmeyer cites a new publishing celebrity for the New York Post and a Doubleday expert on the American Right, Ross Douthat, whose gripe is that American conservatives had actively supported segregation. Douthat is certainly not the only authorized intellectual who has been saying this. One of Helen’s respondents, who has taken the pen name Tobias, likewise … [Read More]

At the end of the Cold War, conservatives found themselves in a state of disunity and intellectual ferment. The neoconservative faction demanded a continuation of the Cold War model of interventionist foreign policy and rejected the domestic small government conservatism popular in the South and West.  Neo-nationalists, such as Pat Buchanan, pushed for a turn inward, the rejection of various liberal … [Read More]