Intellectual conservatism, RIP
I was once a young neoconservative. The word meant something different then, before it was hijacked by extremists
was a friend of Bill Buckley and an employee of Irving Kristol for several years in the early 1990s, as executive editor of the National Interest, the foreign policy journal published by Kristol and brilliantly edited by Owen Harries. A neoconservative of the older, Democratic school, I broke with the right in the early 1990s and warned about where right-wing radicals were taking the country in my book “Up From Conservatism.” The train wreck I predicted occurred during the Bush years, and the postmortems have begun. One is Sam Tanenhaus’ indispensable and just-published study “The Death of Conservatism.” Another is found in a May 10 blog post by Richard Posner: “My theme is the intellectual decline of conservatism, and it is notable that the policies of the new conservatism are powered largely by emotion and religion and have for the most part weak intellectual groun