On Sun, 21 Aug 2005 13:08:29 -0600 Michael Pugliese
<michael.098762001 at gmail.com> writes:
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>
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> http://www.amconmag.com/2005/2005_08_29/cover.html
> Defining Conservatism Down
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> As the Right’s popularity has grown, its intellectual
> challenge
> to the Left has diminished.
> by Austin Bramwell
A not uninteresting piece. Certainly, American conservatism was intellectually at its most vigorous state back in the 1950s and 1960s when people like William F. Buckley, James Burnham, Max Eastman, Russell Kirk, Milton Friedman etc. were waging a fullscale assault on the then prevailing New Deal consensus. To do that sort of thing, they were forced to develop penetrating critiques of New Deal liberalism and social democracy. They were helped by the fact some of the leading conservative intellectuals of the time were themselves ex-leftists like Burnham and Eastman.
Now a days, the political landscape is quite different and New Deal-style liberalism has long since ceased to be hegemonic. In this changed landscape, it is the right-wing that is in danger of becoming intellectually flabby. As Bramwell noted, the right is now quite adept at mass producing pundits who tow the conservative line and who can propogate their views in print, on TV, and on the Internet, but is no longer so evident that they are able to produce creative thinkers who can rethink conservative ideology the way that people like Kirk , Kendall, Friedman, Hayek etc. had been able to do in the past.
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> (Too many of these â€Å" glitches so click the URL.)
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> Also the latest The American Prospect has a piece on the new
> conservative publishing imprints.
>
> --
> Michael Pugliese
>
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