From as
conservative point of view -- James Antle, in Pat Buchanan's
The American Conservative.A good article altogether on the history of Conservatism since FDR.
http://www.amconmag.com/11_17_03/cover.htmlHere's a taste:
Pick up copies of the mainstream conservative and libertarian magazines and compare them today. In their treatment of the Bush administration, Attorney General John Aschroft, the Iraq war, and the Republican leadership, the libertarian magazines will read much more like the Nation than conservative outlets like the Weekly Standard. There have been increasingly testy exchanges taking place between the writers of National Review and Reason over such issues as the Patriot Act.
Also consider that in two recent cases where popular conservative figures have been embroiled in personal controversies — when the Washington Monthly and Newsweek reported on William Bennett’s substantial gambling habit and Rush Limbaugh disclosed that he was addicted to painkilling drugs — libertarian commentators piled on with the same relish as their liberal counterparts. FoxNews.com columnist Radley Balko lambasted Bennett as a hypocrite on his Web site: “Your vices — sinful, regretful, damnable. My vices — not so bad. The guy lost $1.4 million in one two-month stretch. But he doesn’t have a problem. Cancer patients who want to smoke marijuana — they’re the ones who have problems.” Reason editor Nick Gillespie wrote how conservative defenses of the pre-eminent radio talk-show host were ruining the “otherwise enjoyable story of Rush Limbaugh’s exposure as a pill-popping hypocrite.” This hostility is partly attributable to Bennett and Limbaugh’s high-profile disagreement with libertarians over drug legalization and greater willingness to use government in the service of conservative ends in general. But it also shows the degree to which many conservatives and libertarians no longer see themselves as being on the same team.
The combination of libertarian and traditionalist tendencies in modern American conservatism was due in part to the need to gather together that ragtag band of intellectuals lingering outside the New Deal consensus who were opposed to the rising tide of left-liberalism. An alliance made out of political necessity, it drew some measure of intellectual consistency from the efforts of the late National Review senior editor Frank Meyer. He argued for the compatibility of innate individual freedom with transcendent morality, emphasizing that liberty has no meaning apart from virtue, but virtue cannot be coerced. Meyer saw libertarianism and traditionalism as two different emphases within conservatism, neither completely true without being moderated by the other. In fact, he held either extreme to be “self-defeating: truth withers when freedom dies, however righteous the authority that kills it; and free individualism uninformed by moral value rots at its core and soon brings about conditions that pave the way for surrender to tyranny.”
--bkl
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