Remembering Ed Feulner: The Quartermaster of American Conservatism

As his many obituary tributes have shown, Edwin J. Feulner (Ed to the thousands who knew him as a friend) had an enormous number of political, academic, and social achievements to his credit — the most important of which to him was a long and happy life with his lovely wife, Linda, who encouraged, strengthened, and occasionally restrained his energetic pursuit of an America inspired by an active conservative soul rather than an exhausted liberal conscience. He lived to see this triumphant vision enjoy several decades of dominance in American and world politics and be eventually (and inevitably) challenged by a resurgent progressive movement. At which point he rolled up his sleeves and set about to reconstruct the conservatism needed to solve very different problems from those he had put to flight 20 years before: the decay of America’s confident Tocquevillian society undermined by “free stuff,” broken borders, and a metastasizing bureaucracy, as well as the fragmentation of Western civilization in a hostile disorderly world.

The outcome of that battle remains uncertain, but Ed left us the organizations, the structures, and the links between conservatives of very “diverse” kinds that together give us a rational hope of eventual victory.

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John O’Sullivan

John O’Sullivan is a senior fellow at National Review Institute and a contributing editor of National Review.

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Ed Feulner

As his many obituary tributes have shown, Edwin J. Feulner (Ed to the thousands who knew him as a friend) had an enormous number of political, academic, and social achievements to his credit — the most important of which to him was a long and happy life with his lovely wife, Linda, who encouraged, strengthened, and occasionally restrained his energetic pursuit of an America inspired by an active conservative soul rather than an exhausted liberal conscience. He lived to see this triumphant vision enjoy several decades of dominance in American and world politics and be eventually (and inevitably) challenged by a resurgent progressive movement. At which point he rolled up his sleeves and set about to reconstruct the conservatism needed to solve very different problems from those he had put to flight 20 years before: the decay of America’s confident Tocquevillian society undermined by “free stuff,” broken borders, and a metastasizing bureaucracy, as well as the fragmentation of Western civilization in a hostile disorderly world.

The outcome of that battle remains uncertain, but Ed left us the organizations, the structures, and the links between conservatives of very “diverse” kinds that together give us a rational hope of eventual victory.