Richard Weaver, soon to be a professor of rhetoric at the University of Chicago, felt the same way. For Crouchback, as for his author, this amounted to unconditional surrender of the very principles of civilization for which the West had fought.

It was the Modern Age in arms.”īut at the end of the war Stalin controlled half of Europe with the West’s acquiescence. With Nazis and Soviets on one side and the Christian West on the other, everything was clear to Crouchback: “The enemy at last was plain in view, huge and hateful, all disguise cast off. His outlook was like that of Guy Crouchback, protagonist of Evelyn Waugh’s “Sword of Honor” trilogy of World War II novels, at the beginning of the conflict.

Viereck was “twenty-three years of age, unemployed, short of cash,” yet confident. “In contrast, we conservatives must synthesize the good in the latter, not with despotism, but with freedom-that is, with all our ancient civil liberties, tolerance of minorities, and a peaceful internationalism of Law.” “The success of literal ‘National Socialists’ whether Hitler or Stalin, is in their vote-getting synthesis of romantic expansive nationalism with a planned economy,” wrote Peter Viereck in the April 1940 issue of The Atlantic. Why did conservatism enjoy a revival at this, of all times, even in as unlikely a place as America? War is the answer: specifically, the disillusionment that thinkers of conservative temper experienced as a result of World War II.Įurope’s turn to totalitarianism before the war had already prompted the first stirrings. Observers called this efflorescence of the intellectual right “the New Conservatism.” Not only did books with titles like Conservatism Revisited, The Case for Conservatism, The Conservative Mind, and Conservatism in America appear in rapid succession between 19, but distinctly conservative ideas-not merely pro-business or anti-communist ones-were unmistakable in works by authors such as Richard M. Americans may have had their own kind of conservatism, but they rarely called it that.īut something changed after World War II. The names of our great political parties-Whig, Republican, Democratic-were everywhere else labels for liberal or radical groupings. America’s “Tories,” after all, had been on the wrong side of the Revolutionary War. F or 175 years the United States was not a country known for its self-consciously conservative thought.

The Conservative Mind by Russell Kirk