Q: I grew up reading conservative icon William F. Buckley. I remember him saying that his main goal was to keep all extremists, madmen, fanatics and racists out of the conservative movement. You may well remember this, given your own association with him years ago. When you reflect on the wide arc of history, and your new book explores that arc, when did intellectual conservatism - the conservatism of ideas - begin to transform into today's know-nothing populism? When did the cracks develop? I mean, I was at the 1992 Republican National Convention in Houston when Pat Buchanan and his gallows brigade overshadowed Bush and Reagan.
Will: You are right to focus on the '92 convention, but there have been others. Let me jump to that excellent question. Conservatism began to grow after World War II as a philosophical and ideological movement rather than as a civic business push. It was a remarkably bookish movement, early post-war conservatism - Bill Buckley's "God and Man at Yale" and Russell Kirk's "Up From Liberalism," "The Conservative Mind" - but even before these, there was Richard Weaver. from the University of Chicago, which published a book entitled "Ideas Have Consequences." And that was canonical text for conservatives because conservatives rightly believe that only ideas have big and lasting consequences. To follow Margaret Thatcher's saying, "First you win the argument, then you win the election", and first they wanted to win the argument. It grew to the point of the late 1970s when Pat Moynihan, who would eventually become one of my closest friends, and yes, is a good New York New Deal Liberal Democrat, but said, “Something momentous has happened. : The Republican The party has become the party of ideas in America! "
