Patrick Allitt

On his book The Conservatives: Ideas and Personalities Throughout American History

Cover Interview of February 25, 2010

Editor’s note

Originally, this interview ran on the Rorotoko cover page under the headline

“Conservatives believe that civilization is complex, precious, delicate, vulnerable.”

We highlighted two quotes.

On the first page:

“The American Civil War was a conflict between two types of conservatism: that of the slave South that wanted to preserve its threatened labor system, and that of the Republican North that wanted to preserve the Union.”

On the second:

“Reviewers and interviewers have all asked me what I make of the current situation, whether Sarah Palin is the future of the GOP, and what will happen next. My answer is: the more you study history, the more you realize how hopeless it is to try to predict the future.”

america / presidency / obama barack / neoliberalism / civil war / republican party / reagan ronald / conservatism / roosevelt franklin d / buckley william /

[T]he Holocaust transformed our whole way of thinking about war and heroism. War is no longer a proving ground for heroism in the same way it used to be. Instead, war now is something that we must avoid at all costs—because genocides often take place under the cover of war. We are no longer all potential soldiers (though we are that too), but we are all potential victims of the traumas war creates. This, at least, is one important development in the way Western populations envision war, even if it does not always predominate in the thinking of our political leaders.

Carolyn J. Dean,
Interview of February 01, 2011

The dominant premise in evolution and economics is that a person is being loyal to natural law if he or she attends to self’s interest and welfare before being concerned with the needs and demands of family or community. The public does not realize that this statement is not an established scientific principle but an ethical preference. Nonetheless, this belief has created a moral confusion among North Americans and Europeans because the evolution of our species was accompanied by the disposition to worry about kin and the collectives to which one belongs.

Jerome Kagan,
Interview of September 17, 2009