"[T]he conservative movement is enfeebled, intellectually and in backing, at the very hour of its popular ascendancy. (By the way, America’s bigger men of business, with very few exceptions, never have been of any help to really conservative causes; if they think of politics at all, it is much as they think of professional sports teams: 'Winning is the name of the game.') This may become a fatal impoverishment. ...
I am not implying that conservative folk should set to forming a conservative ideology; for conservatism is the negation of ideology. The conservative public man turns to constitution, custom, convention, ancient consensus, prescription, precedent, as guides—not to the narrow and fanatical abstractions of ideology. I am saying, rather, that unless we show the rising generation what deserves to be conserved, and how to go about the work of preservation with intelligence and imagination—why, the present wave of conservative opinion will cast us on a stern and rockbound coast, perhaps with a savage behind every tree. Conservative leaders ought to declare, with Demosthenes, 'Citizens, I beg of you to think!' ...
So it is that thinking folk of conservative views ought to reject the embraces of the following categories of political zealots:
Those who urge us to sell the National Parks to private developers.
Those who believe that by starving South Africans we can dish Jesse Jackson and win over the black vote en masse.
Those who would woo the declining feminists by abolishing academic freedom through a new piece of 'Civil Rights' legislation.
Those who instruct us that 'the test of the market' is the whole of political economy and of morals.
Those who fancy that foreign policy can be conducted with religious zeal, on a basis of absolute right and absolute wrong.
Those who, imagining that all mistakes and malicious acts are the work of a malign or deluded 'elite,' cry with Carl Sandburg, 'The people, yes!'
Those who assure us that great corporations can do no wrong.
Those who discourse mainly of the Trilateral Commission, the Bilderburgers, and the Council on Foreign Relations.
And various other gentry who abjure liberalism but are capable of conserving nothing worth keeping."
-- Russell Kirk, 1986 (here)
