Peter Viereck is dead.

Ironically enough the poet, historian and conservative deep thinker shuffled off this mortal coil in South Hadley Massachusetts on May 13th of this year.
well...maybe not so ironically, we are told he loved the landscape of the Commonwealth's "empire lands".
Viereck is nigh forgotten today, but in the 1940's he was one of the conservative movements first serious intellectuals and an eloquent defender of said ideology.
He was agin' socialism and an opponent of revolution in nearly all its forms.
Serious liberals need to read his book "Conservatism Revisited", his case is elegantly Argued sans recourse to shamanism or bombast.
If Viereck had a flaw though, it was embedded in his refusal to become a praetorian.
A critic of McCarthyism who had the bad taste to say some nice things about Adlai Stevenson, Viereck was quietly set aside as modern conservatism fell into the hands of bumptious polemicists like William F. Buckley and bumbling adventurers like Barry Goldwater.
Those were men dedicated to breaking completely with the past and so in some ways they shared ambitions with the Abbie Hoffmans of the world.
Viereck though, would have none of that.
He'd defined conservatism in a way repellent to all modern praetorians...ergo that the irony of conservatism is that is can only justify its existence by conserving and "normalizing" the gains made by liberals.
The Grover Norquists and Karl Roves of 2006 will have none of this, they misidentify themselves as conservative when their real goal is to stage a revolt against past practice in the name of some delusional recreation of 1925.
Ah but Peter Viereck was a man who wrote clearly and made his arguments with skill...ultimately there would never be a place for him in a movement whose rhetoric is defined by ugly pseudo revolutionaries like Michael Savage and grimacing prigs like Bill O' Reilly.