The Conscience of a Conservative

"I think I was 12 or 13 when it came out, in the run-up to the 1964 elections. I remember someone giving it to me and, I hate to say it, but I think it was someone who was associated with the John Birch Society, in Sparks, Nevada. I read it and I wasn’t a Bircher, in fact I was with William Buckley on the issue of the Birchers. I remember reading it and just being blown away. I was a westerner – he spoke in a western vernacular and he spoke about things that as westerner I felt familiar with – and it was a rip-roaring good read. I was a conservative and a Republican before. I was stealing down to the Sparks library to read the National Review and I was a complete nerd. Do you remember the first time you had civics class in fourth or fifth grade and you had to write an essay? I wrote mine on the Theory of Dialectical Materialism. I was a complete nerd. But it to me was highly energetic and highly motivating. I think it is worth reading. It doesn’t have the relevance today that it had then, because a lot of it is of a topical nature, the things that were of the time. In many ways it’s incomplete, but it really strikes a defined note of individualism. There are more balanced books that talk about the moral side of conservatism, or there are books that talk about the economic side of conservatism, there are books that talk about the scepticism towards centralised authority better than this. There are books, one of them is Witness, that talk about totalitarian and utopian philosophies better than this one does. But for an impressionable young kid, for a teenager, this was heady stuff, really powerful. I have to admit I was a little disappointed. It’s one of the reasons I liked Buckley so much, because he clearly wrote everything. I had a first edition copy – long lost unfortunately – of Profiles in Courage [by John F Kennedy] and of course that turned out not to have been written by the author, and then Goldwater… But it is Goldwater’s voice, and I do feel Bozell listened carefully to what he said and how he said it."