This is the crisis now facing the right and principal reason I wrote this book. The movement has exhausted itself and depleted its resources.
While I think the role of "intellectuals" is far more peripheral than Tannenhaus would insist it should be, nevertheless his central point should have been clear to any observer of our national politics since 2005 or so.
Coming down squarely in a modern conservative tradition rooted in Buckley's attempt to wed a certain Catholic sensibility to an political philosophy largely foreign to the American experience, Tannenhaus forgot one of Buckley's other achievements. Far more than almost any other conservative leader in their years in the wilderness, Buckley rooted out anti-Semitism from post-WWII American anti-liberalism.
While the picture of Chambers Tannenhaus draws is more than a little generous - I cannot picture the bloated, alcoholic, former Communist who managed to slander Alger Hiss (and the entire American foreign policy establishment in the process) sitting around and reading French novels - his take on the very sorry state of contemporary conservatism is spot on. It is nice that some, at least, on the right are noticing this fact, even if there is little, at the moment to commend this view to the too-public voices of the American right.
