Follow-up on the Last Post

I should note that, last night, I left a cordial but critical comment on a column by a certain "Daily Mail" columnist. I took issue with his claim that neoconservatives were "uninterested in greater social and cultural issues". The comments on his site are monitored and, somewhat oddly, I didn't notice that he had published my comment on his blog. I'll just say here, then, that anyone familiar with the politics outlined in Irving Kristol's "Neoconservatism: The Autobiography of an Idea" knows neoconservatism began largely as a reaction to the secularized Burkeanism of Michael Oakeshott; it was precisely because the "intellectual" conservatives like Oakeshott and the Rockefeller Republicans were unwilling to confront the great moral questions of the era and because the populist conservatives of the South thought the great moral issue of the era was the protection of segregation that neoconservatives saw the need to find a third way for conservative politics; a third way that could criticize the moral catastrophes of the mid-twentieth century not from the perspective of the Romanticized Last Man of Yesterday or the Utopian New Man of Tomorrow but from the perspective of the informed mind of the present who could judge current crises according to the wisdom of the past while also avoiding its failures. Neoconservatism, once again, made present issues into moral issues.