This chapter tracks the changes to the American conservative movement that have unfolded since the heyday of William F. Buckley, who founded the conservative magazine National Review in 1955. Centered on Buckley’s defiance of all things left wing and on his provocative writings on welfare, critiques of the New Deal, and Cold War anxieties, this chapter shows the conflicted relationship many contemporary American conservatives have with his legacy. "Serious conservatives" who place themselves in Buckley’s lineage find themselves alienated in the contemporary media landscape, which, although displaying the same incendiary spirit as Buckley’s essays and his television show Firing Line, lacks the intellectual seriousness that many found in his writings. More generally, this chapter identifies the recurrent themes in conservative writing and dwells on the agitational poetics of conservative essayism.

Focusing on the birth of the postwar era to the early 1960s, this chapter reconstructs the widely held critical view that even though New Deal liberalism was the dominant political order in the United States, the most celebrated literature of the period was derived from Anglophone modernism, an aesthetic movement embodied by writers including T. S. Eliot, William Faulkner, and Ezra Pound, whom prominent critics such as Lionel Trilling perceived as anti-liberal at best and reactionary at worst. The chapter also reveals how the correlation between highbrow literature and conservative politics accorded not only with the early conservative movement’s neo-Burkean conception of empirical complexity over abstraction, but also the carefully cultivated self-image conservatives had of themselves as guardians of high literary culture.