Sam Tanenhaus: The Death of Conservatism - Transcript
There is much to learn from this conversation:
BILL MOYERS: How to explain this long fascination you’ve had with conservative ideas, and the conservative movement. Why this fascination?
SAM TANENHAUS: Well, I think it has been the dominant philosophy, political philosophy in our culture, in America, for some half-century. What particularly drew me first to Chambers and then Buckley is the idea that these were serious intellectuals, who were also men of action. Conservatives have kind of supplied us in their best periods— the days when NATIONAL REVIEW and COMMENTARY and THE PUBLIC INTEREST were tremendously vital publications, self-examining, developing new vocabularies and idioms, teaching us all how to think about politics and culture in a different way, with a different set of tools. They were contributing so enormously to who we were as Americans. And yet, many liberals were not paying attention…