THE FIRST CONSERVATIVE.(Peter Robert Edwin Viereck)

In the winter of 1940, The Atlantic Monthly invited Peter Viereck, a twenty-three-year-old Harvard graduate who had won the college's top essay and poetry prizes, to write about "the meaning of young liberalism for the present age." Viereck responded with a five-thousand-word manifesto entitled "But I'm a Conservative . . . ," which appeared in the magazine's April issue.

"Why should any young man want to be a conservative, on a globe where so much needs changing?" Viereck began. His defensiveness was understandable. Conservatism as a formal political doctrine didn't exist in America in 1940. The word "conservative" was associated primarily with fringe groups--anti-industrial Southern agrarians and the anti-New Deal tycoons who led the Liberty League. Even arch-isolationists, such as former President Herbert Hoover and Senator Robert Taft, of Ohio--two of the most right-wing figures in the Republican Party--insisted on being called liberal. "In the United States at this time, liberalism is not only the dominant but even the sole intellectual tradition," Lionel Trilling observed in 1950, in the preface of his book "The Liberal Imagination." "There are no conservative or reactionary ideas in general circulation."

Viereck's essay was deliberately provocative--"I have watched the convention of revolt harden into dogmatic ritual," he wrote of the Marxists who he said presided over campus life--but it also contained a sincere entreaty. Published as the Nazi armies were invading Denmark and Norway, it called for a "new conservatism" to combat the "storm of totalitarianism" abroad as well as moral relativism and soulless materialism at home. Nazism and Communism were fundamentally utopian, Viereck argued, sanctioning the murder of any person or group perceived to be an obstacle to a perfect society, and because liberalism suffered from a milder version of the same flaw--a naive belief in progress and humanity's essential goodness--it was an inadequate defense against foreign tyranny.

"Political anti-Semitism is no isolated program," he warned. "It is the first step in an ever-widening revolt of mob instinct against all restraints and liberties. It is the thin opening wedge for the subversion of democracy, Christianity, and tolerance in general." Only a conservatism based on the "rooted" values of America's Judeo-Christian heritage and an understanding of "the inner unremovable nature of man as the ultimate source of evil" could protect Western civilization from attempts to undermine--or perfect--it. The United States, Viereck wrote, should "everywhere answer illegal force with force-in-law, returning words for words and bullets for bullets."

Viereck became a historian, specializing in modern Russia, and a Pulitzer Prize-winning poet. But, in a series of books published during the late nineteenforties and early nineteen-fifties (which have recently been reissued by Transaction), he continued to develop his political philosophy. He gave the conservative movement its name and, as the historian George Nash, the author of "The Conservative Intellectual Movement in America," says, he "helped make conservatism a respectable word." Moreover, Viereck's belief that the United States could be a moderating influence, confronting the forces that threaten freedom and democracy without succumbing to liberal optimism, became a central tenet of conservative thought and, with the arrival of neoconservatives in positions of power in Washington, beginning in the nineteen-eighties, of American foreign policy.

Yet Viereck never became a rallying figure. Conservatism remained largely an intellectual movement during its first several decades, from the late nineteen-forties to the late nineteen-seventies--a loose affiliation of scholars and writers who had little more in common than a hatred of liberalism and Communism, which they increasingly saw as indistinguishable. Even in this context, Viereck was an anomaly, insisting on a moral distinction between the moderate and the totalitarian left and, as conservatives began to attain political influence, denouncing what he perceived as the movement's demagogic tendencies. Conservatives, he wrote in 1955, are "trying to overthrow an old ruling class and replace it from below by a new ruling class. . . . The new would-be rulers include unmellowed plebeian Western wealth"--here he singled out Texan oil money--"and their enormous gullible mass-base."

In 1962, he published an attack on conservatives in The New Republic, titled "The New Conservatism: One of Its Founders Asks What Went Wrong," in which he depicted a movement infiltrated by religious fundamentalists, paranoid patriotic groups, and big-business leaders, united in their loathing for the cosmopolitan elites on the nation's coasts. "American history is based on the resemblance between moderate liberalism and moderate conservatism," he wrote, and this tradition, which had saved the United States from Europe's violent fate, conservatives now threatened to destroy. Viereck's vision strikingly resembles the description of the contemporary Republican Party in last year's best-selling book by Thomas Frank, "What's the Matter with Kansas?" He anticipated the radicalism of the George ...