“It is not hard to understand why many serious minds have come to find these things more discouraging than hopeful,” Hofstadter remarked in 1964. “Success that seems to have lost its reality is worse than failure. The large, liberal middle-class audience upon which all this acceptance depends now brings to the work of the intellectuals a bland, absorptive tolerance that is quite different from a vital response” (419). There is no better example of this than the history and historiography of American conservatism. While ongoing for some time, the most current literature on American conservatism dates back to the writings Read more