The Conservative Movement: ‘How Much Wisdom Have We Lost?’

[Draggingtree]

American Greatness

The Conservative Movement: ‘How Much Wisdom Have We Lost?’

By Thaddeus G. McCotter| November 18, 2017

In autumnal weather, one grows wistful . . .

As a member of Generation X, I remember how difficult it was to scrounge up conservative tomes, publications and—above all prizing—broadcasts. Indeed, if memory serves, in the Left’s last-ditch attempt to prevent America’s youth from learning why they instinctively liked President Ronald Reagan, bookstores placed National Review behind the porn.

Undaunted (if delayed), we nonetheless plucked and plumbed this seminal font of conservative philosophy, which led us to William F. Buckley’s television show, “Firing Line”; and, from there, we sojourned to the conservative works of Edmund Burke, Russell Kirk, T. S. Eliot, Thomas Sowell, Allan Bloom, and Robert Nisbet to name but a few. And though Bloom was warning about The Closing of the American Mind, it seemed impossible as we stood upon the shoulders of giants and received the collective wisdom of the species amassed over the generations of human endeavor, failure, and triumph.      

[Draggingtree]

Movement Conservatism Was Dying Before Trump

By Henry Olsen| February 24, 2018

The annual Conservative Political Action Conference is upon us, and its speakers list has caused some longtime conservatives to bemoan the state of the movement. Noting the invitation of French National Front leader Marion LePen, former UKIP head Nigel Farage, and others whose provenance lay soundly in what Steve Bannon called the “economic nationalist movement,” these disaffected conservatives wonder what has happened to their movement. National Review senior editor Richard Brookhiser goes so far to say “the conservative movement is no more. Its destroyers are Donald Trump and his admirers.”

 Well. Far be it from me to question someone whose first piece for the movement’s intellectual flagship appeared 48 years ago, when I was a mere lad and the author was only 15. But I have been active in the movement since the mid-1970s and it seems to me that if the movement is dead, it was destroyed from within, not by Trump and certainly not by his admirers.

That’s not to say there are not serious questions about Trump as a man and as a president.         https://amgreatness.com/2018/02/24/movement-conservatism-dying-trump/