CONSERVATIVES: are people who are identified with the same political movement as Bill Buckley. They include former communists (Frank and Elsie Meyer, Whittaker Chambers), former Trotskyites (James Burnham, John Chamberlain, Max Eastman, Willmoore Kendall), former college radicals (Philip Abbott Luce, David Horowitz), former Black Panthers (the late Eldridge Cleaver), tweedy but brilliant college professors (Russell Kirk), people passionately committed to a society of opportunity and optimism (Ronald Reagan, Jack Kemp, George "Dubya" Bush), people who despise communism for all of the good reasons (Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Michael Novak, Pope John Paul II), people who have made brilliant contributions to the theory of human freedom (Ludwig von Mises, Friedrich von Hayek, Robert Nozick, Thomas Sowell, Walter Williams), people who have courageously defended Western Civilization as jurists (Antonin Scalia, Clarence Thomas, William Rehnquist, Robert Bork), people who understand that the purpose of the military is to kill the bad guys and break their things (Generals George S. Patton, Douglas MacArthur, Creighton Abrams, Dan Graham, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld), people who have understood the evils of public indoctrination or government schooling (every homeschooling parent in America and many who send their kids to the right sort of private or religious schools or actually create such schools), people who have waged war against racial hucksters and scam artists (Ward Connerly); people who understand the importance of religion in American public life (Fr. Richard Neuhaus, Bishop Fabian Bruskewitz, Rev. Mr. Jerry Falwell, Rev. Mr. Pat Robertson); social traditionalists and counter-revolutionaries (Phyllis Schlafly, Connie Marshner, Senator Rick Santorum), those rare cultural leaders who make films in defense of the West and its values (John Milius, Mel Gibson), brilliant young commentators (Dinesh D'Souza), brilliant and lovely young commentators (Ann Coulter, Laura Ingraham), brilliant and lovely and chronologically maturing commentators (Peggy Noonan), Brilliant commentators who have made history rather than merely discussing it (Norman Podhoretz, Midge Decter, Irving Kristol, Gertrude Himmelfarb, Bill Kristol), old left novelists who eventually saw the light (George Orwell, John Steinbeck, John Dos Passos); elected leaders of spine and ideology (Tom Delay, Dick Armey, Don Nickles, George Allen, Melissa Hart, Judd Gregg, Charles Grassley, Jeff Sessions, Jim Bunning, Fred Thompson, and many others), Gary Bauer, Sean Hannity, Rush Limbaugh, the entire Right to Life movement, etc.
NOT CONSERVATIVE: Pacifists, people who resist a war effort when troops are fighting in the theater of war, people devoted to the notion that there is a raciual component to conservatism (blood and soil) and that it therefore is not a universal movement, self-described "paleo-conservatives" (who are neither)(the Rockford Institute, the John Randolph Society, Chronicles, Justine Raimondo, antiwar.com, Thomas Fleming, assorted Serbian foreign policy obsessives of murky ideology associated with the Rockford Institute, UpChuck Percy, former Rep. Paul Findlay, former Rep. Pete McCloskey, Joseph Sobran, Samuel Francis, and the scant handful of their associates). Also: the "Conservative" Citizens' Councils which used to be known as the White Citizens' Councils (or blow-dried Klan), the Libertarian Party types who reduce all of political theory to a few cliches out of John Stuart Mill or Ayn Rand, moral equivalency mavens, etc. We know them when we see them. That's why we used to throw their books off the school bus, one by one, every few blocks. They have yet to get over it.
Fleming, Chronicles, Samuel Francis, Raimondo, and Sobran call themselves paleo-cons in a pathetic attempt to make believe that the tail can wag the dog. They are the rump caucus of formerly conservative malcontents whose views, habits and associations were too exotic, eccentric and flat out wrong to make them or their ilk good candidates for employment in the Reagan administration. Therefore, in 1986, as Frum's article outlined, they labored to bring forward at a Philadelphia Society annual meeting the misbegotten bastard child of the crank wing of conservatism known as "paleo-conservatism" as an expression not of reality but of their grave disappointment that they were socially and ideologically unacceptable to the greatest conservative president in generations. Rule or feebly and futilely attempt to ruin, don't ya know?
Sorry, can't agree. The fact that I like nearly all of those people and have known many of them does not make them all conservatives. I'll give you a few examples (of many) -- Whittaker Chambers explicitly denied being a conservative, and called himself a "man of the right." Hayek likewise -- he called himself a liberal (but the European kind). Mises -- interesting you put him on this list since Lew Rockwell (one of the damned) runs the Mises Institute. Podhoretz, Kristol, Decter, Himmelfarb and Bill Kristol are THE leadership of neo-cons (and interestingly, two married couples and one of their sons :-) ) They are a distinguished addition (to say the least!) but do not arise from the mainstream conservative movement or from the American tradition of constitutionally limited government.
A list that could include an opportunistic Maoist like Phillip Abbott Luce (who disappeared almost as fast as he arrived 30-odd years ago) might have a little more respect for a cultural conservative like Fleming or a highly intelligent Catholic like Joe Sobran, who was a very early opponent of abortion and still one of the compelling voices on the subject. It could also acknowledge the historical conservative aversion to foreign entanglements and war -- always the greatest spur to socialist government expansion -- without blasting people who hew to those principles as "unpatriotic."
Again, this thread is showing that labels are altogether too slippery for serious discussion. But there is no such problem seeing who's the enemy or lumping together all of the socialist family of ideologies. They all have the same -- false -- premises, and that is what we should be refuting.