“It is well and good to revere a heritage, but a more serious concern for posterity will insure its continuance.”

When I first became associated with ISI, in 1953, it was called the Intercollegiate Society of Individualists. ISI had only a handful of members so I began visiting college campuses in an effort to bolster membership. It was amazing how many students gleefully informed me, of what I already knew, that an Intercollegiate Society of Individualists was an oxymoron. The name also posed some problems for fund raising since many potential contributors had to first be convinced that ISI was not a group of student radicals. Consequently, the name was changed to the Intercollegiate Studies Institute. That name does not carry any baggage and is more descriptive of ISI’s focus on college students and their education within the matrix of knowledge and values that form our heritage of Western Culture and our American patrimony.

However, many people are enamored of the term individualist, especially in times of bloated government, and we are now and then chided even at this late date for having surrendered the term. I must confess that I was not in agreement with its philosophical roots from the outset. Alexis de Tocqueville held that egotism and individualism were related. “Egotism,” he wrote in Democracy in America, “blights the germ of all virtue: individualism, at first, only saps the virtues of public life: but, in the long run, it attacks and destroys all others, and is at length absorbed in downright egotism.” In Ideas Have Consequences, Richard M. Weaver noted that “individuality signifies a cutting-off or separation. . . . A more accurate designation would be personality, for this recognizes the irreducible character in every person . . . that little private area of selfhood in which the person is at once conscious of his relationship to the transcendental and the living community. He is a particular vessel, but carries some part of the universal mind.”

I have been asked to write an essay on “Why I am a Conservative.” In mulling over this question I wondered if I wanted to confess publicly to being a Conservative. If that meant subscribing to Russell Kirk’s six canons of conservative thought in The Conservative Mind it would be easy. But conservatism is so hyphenated at present that no one has any idea of what one is signing on to. The reason I believe this to be the case is that conservatism has been overly politicized. Kirk alluded to this in his Foreword to the seventh edition of The Conservative Mind when he wrote:

Being no leader of the crowd, the author was surprised to find that he had contributed through the power of the word to a large political movement in America—to a movement which, within a few years, would supplant in power America’s latter-day liberalism.

These words were written in the mid-eighties when Ronald Reagan was president whom I greatly esteemed for his wisdom and his actions concerning the panoply of issues, events, and crises he dealt with in his eight years in office. However, Kirk also writes that “The Conservative Mind describes a cast of intellect or a type of character, an inclination to cherish the permanent things in human existence . . . to join in resistance to the destruction of old patterns of life [and] damage to the footings of the civil social order. . . .” I believe that would be a fair description of Ronald Reagan, and, if I may be bold, of me. We were both formed in a different era, a time when parents, and even public schools, taught spiritual norms and the historic beginnings of our nation. The fact remains, however, that one administration, no matter how great, does not constitute a rout of latter-day liberalism. Time and events since then tell a different tale.