In the fight for the mantle of 'conservatism', the ideologues won and then destroyed it

The New Republic - Conservatism Is Dead

A long article that is written from a historical perspective displaying two conflicting strains of thought in 'conservatism'; on one side an ideological movement of anti-big-government and on the other, an earlier side that focuses on the conservation of civil society and traditions. Tanenhaus identifies the father of conservatism as Edmund Burke, a writer who sought not to return power to monarchies but to instead mix the new liberating movements (revolution) into what was good about the existing civil society-- instead of going with ideologies in favor of scrapping the entire previous order. Tanenhaus traces this thinking to Whittaker Chambers, a thinker who saw the inevitable acceptance of big-government even among staunch social reactionaries and imparted this vision to William Buckley Jr. Against this stance were the ideological conservatives, like Russell Kirk and Willmoore Kendall, who in the 1950s argued against big government as extending statist reach. These debates took place through the 1960s and into the 70s, until Nixon and Watergate, where the movement ideologues became strident and blamed Nixon's downfall on large liberal government bureaucracy and the main-stream media. This ideology took 'liberal elites' as the ideological enemy and sought to make a new conservative movement that was pure and confrontational rather than compromising. This gave way to Reagan and his true predecessor, GW Bush, who crashed this ideological position in his two-terms and now leaves the movement in the wilderness.