The closing paragraph in Jeffrey Hart’s New York Times obituary is a quote, one given by Hart to a former pupil of his, from a 2006 interview. It reads: My conservatism is aristocratic in spirit, anti-populist and rooted in the Northeast. It is Burke brought up-to-date. A “social conservative” in my view is not a moral authoritarian Evangelical who wants to push people around, but an American gentleman, conservative in a social sense. He has gone to a good school, maybe shops at J. Press, maybe plays tennis or golf, and drinks either Bombay or Beefeater martinis, or maybe Dewar’s Read more