Moving Portrait

If you asked the average conservative, any time during the last few decades, to sketch a group portrait of his intellectual leaders, he would probably come up with something like this: on the one hand, Whigs, anarchists, economists. On the other, Tories, ultramontanists, and fans of Gone with the Wind. In the middle, Frank Meyer, trying, like the spars of a Calder mobile, to hold the whole thing together.

The shape of the portrait—the distance of the various wings from the main body, and the eccentricities of their orbits—would vary depending on when it was drawn. In the early Fifties, traditionalism was certainly the most wide-ranging. Southern agrarians disdained capitalism; Peter Viereck spent his time lecturing Americans on the virtues of Metternich and that great home-grown Tory, FDR. T. S. Eliot’s opinions were anxiously consulted. Today, the imbalance lies mostly on the other side; indeed, some libertarian intellectuals have been insisting that they have detached themselves altogether.

About the Author

Richard Brookhiser

Historian Richard Brookhiser is a senior editor of National Review and a senior fellow at the National Review Institute.

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If you asked the average conservative, any time during the last few decades, to sketch a group portrait of his intellectual leaders, he would probably come up with something like this: on the one hand, Whigs, anarchists, economists. On the other, Tories, ultramontanists, and fans of Gone with the Wind. In the middle, Frank Meyer, trying, like the spars of a Calder mobile, to hold the whole thing together.

The shape of the portrait—the distance of the various wings from the main body, and the eccentricities of their orbits—would vary depending on when it was drawn. In the early Fifties, traditionalism was certainly the most wide-ranging. Southern agrarians disdained capitalism; Peter Viereck spent his time lecturing Americans on the virtues of Metternich and that great home-grown Tory, FDR. T. S. Eliot’s opinions were anxiously consulted. Today, the imbalance lies mostly on the other side; indeed, some libertarian intellectuals have been insisting that they have detached themselves altogether.