Back around 1945-55 we can see the rebirth of a number of different views of conservatism. We see the economic views that were far ranging -- Hayek, von Mises, Friedman, the Austrians and others were not in agreement as to how these would be articulated on the political and social side. We see the start-up of libertarian ideology by their great articulators at the same time we see Russell Kirk showing the constant strain of Edmund Burk through many lines of the cultural heritage of conservatism. We see Richard Weaver holding that Burke is too situational and that a full articulation is needed or the two divisions will be fighting forever.
We even have one of the great proponents of a meeting of the minds Frank Meyer and his "fusionism" was a leading light at Nation Review from whence this article arises.
His leadership on the issue was disparaged but it did make many "make nice".
In his last book of collected essays, Russell Kirk recounts how he and others of his era were called the Neo-conservatives first the era marking the close to the old Robert Taft political conservatism and Kirk then rises to the defence of Irving Kristol against disparagement with that same term in the 90s by saying that Kristol, Kirk and Hayek are all probably best described by that term of Hayek's, "old whig."
Also in the 90s, the rhetoric at the time of Kirk's funeral and memorials talked of the two great streams of conservatism, the white nile and the blue nile, and how like the river nile they came from some of the same sources, but by different paths they wound there way to the same destinations at the end.
This article personalizes the six decade distiction very unjustly and makes the matter worse than it needs be today.
We have the last two issues of Modern Age dealing with the little understood positions of Richard Weaver, himself the proponent of a middle way to conservative Rhetoric. This article is proposing that the ordering of Virtue and Freedom as proposed by John Milton is, as Russell Kirk proposed, the best intellectual source of middle ground.
This article does little but mislead and then falsely fill us in on the last twenty years of infighting with more blame assignment.
It serves no real purpose but to try and make the author appear "in-the-know."
Oh, by the way, if you can leave the lingering gunshots from Mannasas behind you for a while, read my 146 in light of the article (the whole thread is typical of this squabble) and tell me if you have read the two parter in Modern Age and can confirm my take on its view of Weaver and Milton.
Great post. I wish had your ability to say alot so briefly, which is the opposite of what was done in the lead article for this thread. You reduced the entire discussion to the essentials.
You're right. Frum is more of an attack dog than a real thinker. He's fighting for his own causes, and he's never been very fair to those he disagrees with. Much of Frum's argument amounts to guilt by association -- the policies he supports must be right because of the connections of some of those who oppose them -- but as Frum himself has apparently come to realize, such an argument doesn't prove that the policies in question are the right ones.
I'm no fan of Rockwell and his crew, and I've gotten disillusioned with Fleming, Bradford, Francis, and Gottfried over time, but what gets left out of Frum's picture is just how much of a new departure Bush's policies were. Right or wrong, they surely merited discussion on their own terms, and not such a string of ad hominem attacks.