RUSSELL KIRK, author of The Conservative Mind, in the liberal Roman Catholic weekly Commonweal:
UNTIL this century, nearly every American statesman desired to be thought a conservative: Calhoun did, and so did Lincoln. [In this century] the American, vaguely discontented with the shape of society, took for his model liberalism: he imagined that it was some sort of the-middle-way policy, happily splitting the difference between individualism and collectivism. Thus amorphous in its beginning, twentieth-century American liberalism has become almost impossible to describe, embracing a curiour congeries of people. The word "liberal," in such circumstances, has lost...
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