Focus on a tireless combatant …

… Neal Freeman’s National Review | The American Conservative. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

As Lionel Trilling would famously put it in The Liberal Imagination in 1950, “In the United States at this time liberalism is not only the dominant but the sole intellectual tradition. For it is the plain fact that nowadays there are no conservative or reactionary ideas in general circulation.”

In 1955 Bill Buckley challenged that premise by gathering an eclectic group of thinkers and activists around him at his new magazine—James Burnham, former spokesman for Leon Trotsky in North America, whose book The Managerial Revolution remains a classic today; Frank Meyer, an ex-communist who lived with his family in Woodstock, New York, slept during the day and worked through the night, frequently calling some of us at 2 or 3 a.m. to discuss book reviews and political happenings; Whittaker Chambers, suffused with pessimism and a haunting sense of tragedy; Russell Kirk, living in a manse in Mecosta, Michigan, author of the magisterial The Conservative Mind (1953), published by Henry Regnery. Regnery, incidentally, the publisher of Buckley’s God and Man at Yale, nearly single-handedly kept conservative literature alive through the 1940s and ’50s, much in the manner of a medieval abbot preserving Christian manuscripts.