ABSTRACT
In turn Gaylord's liberal and avant-garde banalities have now provoked the "new conservative" banalities of Babbitt III; he changes his first name from Gaylord to Cabot in order to sound not civilise but distingue. The new conservatives, too, are producing their owlish yet urbane representatives—chins challenging yet fingernails well groomed—dazzling the dowagers at the campus tea, the church bazaar. Even at its best, even when avoiding its misuse by rightist radicals and the McCarthy-Goldwater nonsense, there remains a central defect at the core of the philosophical new conservatism; this is its rootless nostalgia for roots. New conservatives like Russell Kirk would import from the continental Europe of de Maistre a conservatism that rejects even our moderate native-liberal half of the American liberal-conservative synthesis. Not only liberals but conservatives like Burke and John Adams and John Quincy Adams have fought racism as contradicting the traditional Christian view of man.
