F.H. Buckley - Progressive Conservatism: How Republicans Will Become Americas Natural Governing Party

Francis Buckley is the closest thing America has to a Jonathan Swift.

SPENGLER (David Goldman)

F. H. Buckley is a national treasure.

STEPHEN B. PRESSER

His prose explodes with energy.

JAMES CEASAR

Praise for this book

F.H.Buckley shows us how a seeming contradiction can lead to the healing of a fractured country.

ROGER L. SIMON, award-winning novelist and editor, Epoch Times

Praise for THE REPUBLIC OF VIRTUE

This is Buckley at his colorful, muckraking best - an intelligent, powerful, but depressing argument laced with humor.

GORDON S. WOOD, Pulitzer Prize winner

Praise for CURIOSITY

You are our Montaigne!

CHRISTOPHER DEMUTH

Praise for THE WAY BACK

Frank Buckley marshals tremendous data and insight in a compelling study.

FRANCIS FUKUYAMA

Praise for THE ONCE AND FUTURE KING

Penetrating iconoclastic. No US political scientist has achieved what F.H.Buckley does in this ambitious book.

TIMES LITERARY SUPPLEMENT

PROGRESSIVE CONSERVATISM

HOW REPUBLICANS WILL BECOME

AMERICAS NATURAL GOVERNING PARTY

F. H. BUCKLEY

NEW YORK LONDON

2022 by F. H. Buckley

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written permission of Encounter Books, 900 Broadway, Suite 601, New York, New York, 10003.

First American edition published in 2022 by Encounter Books, an activity of Encounter for Culture and Education, Inc., a nonprofit, tax-exempt corporation.

Encounter Books website address: www.encounterbooks.com

Manufactured in the United States and printed on acid-free paper. The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992 (R 1997) (Permanence of Paper).

FIRST AMERICAN EDITION

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

Names: Buckley, F. H. (Francis H.), 1948 - author.

Title: Progressive Conservatism: How Republicans Will Become Americas Natural Governing Party / F. H. Buckley.

Description: First American edition. | New York: Encounter Books, 2022. | Includes bibliographical references and index. |

Identifiers: LCCN 2022000676 (print) | LCCN 2022000677 (ebook) | ISBN 9781641772532 (hardcover) | ISBN 9781641772549 (ebook)

Subjects: LCSH: Republican Party (U.S.: 1854-) | ConservatismUnited States.

Classification: LCC JK2356 .B89 2022 (print) | LCC JK2356 (ebook) | DDC 324.2734dc23/eng/20220210

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022000676

LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022000677

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FOR ESTHER

The Four Quadrants in 2016

Source: Source: Lee Drutman, Political Divisions in 2016 and Beyond: Tensions Between and Within the Two Parties, Voter Survey Group (June 2017).

Edmund Burke

Studio of Sir Joshua Reynolds
National Portrait Gallery, London

Benjamin Disraeli

Men of mark: a gallery of contemporary portraits of men distinguished in the senate, the church, science, literature and art, the army, navy, law, medicine, etc. Photographed from life by Lock and Whitfield, with brief biographical notices by Thompson Cooper.

Wellcome Collection. Public Domain.

Abraham Lincoln in Illinois, 1858

Abraham Lincoln, head-and-shoulders portrait, facing front. T Painter Pearson, photographer. Between 1885 and 1911, from ambrotype taken Aug. 26, 1858.

Library of Congress. Prints & Photographs Division.

The damned cowboy in 1885

Theodore Roosevelt. George Grantham Bain, photographer. Presidents of the United States: Selected Images from the Collections of the Library of Congress.

Prints & Photographs Division.

Dwight Eisenhower in Kansas, 1907

National Archives, Eisenhower Presidential Library, Abilene, Kansas

Sen. Margaret Chase Smith

Image courtesy of the U.S. Senate Historical Office. Public Domain.

Gouverneur Morris

The Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Division of Art, Prints and Photographs: Print Collection, The New York Public Library.

Gouverneur Morris, The New York Public Library Digital Collections.

https://digitalcollections.nypl.org/items/6boefb7o-cd44-9c8e-eo4o-eooa18o65a96

Ambrogio Lorenzetti, The Allegory of Good Government, Palazzo Pubblico, Siena. Fresco (1338-1339).

A S WE AGE, we slip softly from one country to another, and what began in innocence led down a path littered with betrayals and smelly compromises. Charles Pguy understood how it happens. After defending Alfred Dreyfus, he found himself allied to unscrupulous and opportunistic politicians. Everything begins in mystique and ends in politics, he wrote. But the dreams of our youth never quite die, and without quite knowing it we continue to yearn for something we had lost along the way. And that is purity.

For Americans, purity is a dream of republican virtue, a shining city on a hill free from baseness and corruption and peopled by secret romantics who are hard on the outside and soft on the inside. Our heroes arent kings or princes but common folk, the knights-errant of the dusty trail and mean streets in search of their private grail. When surrounded by cynics, they keep their integrity, like John Wayne in Stagecoach and Humphrey Bogart in Casablanca.

Like them, our country was touched by grace. We knew there was something special about America, that this was the country of the Declaration of Independence, of equality and liberty, where lingering injustices are in time corrected. We were the country of the American Dream, the idea that, whoever you were, wherever you came from, you can flourish and know that your children will have it better than you did. In any struggle, wed always be on the right and winning side.