He was using abusive and obscene language, calling people Conservatives and all that.

A couple weeks ago Matt Yglesias noted the peculiarity of ‘unapologetic liberal‘. (File under ‘catechism of cliche’, ‘what sort of liberal is he?’) I thought I’d dredge up something from the files:

In the 1930’s, when the present author, still a student, was writing an article for the Atlantic Monthly urging "a Burkean new conservatism in America," and to some extent even as late as his Conservatism Revisted of 1949, "conservatism" was an unpopular epithet. In retrospect it becomes almost attractively amusing (like contemplating a dated period piece) to recall how violently one was denounced in those days for suggesting that Burke, Calhoun, and Irving Babbitt were not "fascist beasts" and that our relatively conservative Constitution was not really a plot-in-advance by rich bogeymen like George Washington and the Federalist party. For example, the author’s Atlantic article, written in pre-war student days, was denunced more because the word used was so heretical ("conservative" than because of any effort by the Popular Frontist denouncers to read what was actually said. It was the first-written and wirst-written appeal ever published in America for what it called a "new" conservatism ("new" meaning: non-Republic, non-commercialist, non-conformist). This new conservatism it viewed as synthesizing in some future day the ethical New Deal social reforms with the more pessimistic, anti-mass insights of America’s Burkean founders. Such a synthesis, argued the article, would help make the valuable anti-fascist movement among literary intellectuals simultaneously anti-communist also, leaving behind the Popular Frontist illusions of the 1930’s.

As the liberal Robert Bendiner then put it: "Out of some 140,000,000 people in the United States, at least 139,500,000 are liberals, to hear them tell it … Rare is the citizen who can bring himself to say, ‘Sure I’m a conservative’ … Any American would sooner drop dead than proclaim himself a reactionary." In July, 1950, a newspaper was listing the charges against a prisoner accused of creating a public disturbance; one witness charged: "He was using abusive and obscene language, calling people Conservatives and all that."

When conservatism was still a dirty word, it seemed gallanty non-conformist to defend it against the big, smug liberal majority among one’s fellow writers and professors. In those days, therefore, the author deemed it more helpful to stress the virtues of conservative thought than its faults, and this is what he did in the 1949 edition of Conservatism Revisited. But, in the mood emerging from the 1950’s, blunt speaking about conservatism’s important defects no longer runs the danger of obscuring its still more important virtues. (p. 123-4)

The author is Peter Viereck. The selection is from Book II of Conservatism Revisted: The Revolt Against Ideology [amazon]. (I’m working from a very old edition, but I assume the still-in-print version still contains part II.) He talks about his own book in the past tense because part II was added later, with the subtitle "The New Conservatism – What Went Wrong?" He’s sort of an interesting figure. I just noticed there was an article about him in the New Yorker last year:

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 élites 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.

I gather he was rather ruthlessly excluded from the circle of American intellectual conservatism by Buckley. Reading the passage I quoted above, it is not difficult to imagine why. Still, it was rather prescient to purge him as early as the 1950’s.

That first passage is a nice counterpoint to Yglesias’ point about ‘unapologetic liberalism’; there does appear to have been a watershed shift in the nation’s political sensibility, linguistically speaking, ‘conservative/liberal’-wise.