Jonah: You are correct that there’s no straight line between Taft and Goldwater, though it’s also important to recognize that Taft was the first really important postwar politician who can be considered a conservative in any meaningful way. (He actually insisted he was a liberal, but these were early days and “conservative” was still a pejorative.) The fact that Viereck opposed Taft is revealing, especially when it’s combined with his opposition the McCarthy and Goldwater and his support of Stevenson.

And when Viereck blasted conservatives, he wasn’t merely concentrating his fire on the nutty Birchers. In the Weekly Standard, Fred Siegel recently reviewed a reissued Arthur Schlesinger book, and spent a good chunk of his essay discussing Viereck (yet another example of conservatives remembering their intellectual ancestors, despite the New Yorker’s bizarre and silly claim). Siegel includes this line: “In his 1962 introduction for a new edition of The New Conservatism, an overwrought Viereck denounced the political populism of the William Buckley/Barry Goldwater brand of conservatism as ‘a facade for either plutocratic profiteering or fascist style thought control nationalism.’” I didn’t check Siegel’s source on this one, but when he says this astonishing line was directed at WFB/BG, I believe it.