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IN THE NEXT CENTURY, because of both need and opportunity, American conservative scholars and intellectuals must work to develop the coherence of conservative moral and political thought. Indeed, a generation of mid-career scholars is ready to accept this challenge.1 But before such an opportunity can be fully realized, conservative scholars must be prepared to answer three vexing challenges.
First, they must be able to respond to the charge that America, with its revolutionary background and liberal political institutions and norms, is singularly ill-suited to embrace ideas associated with a supposedly alien political doctrine like conservatism. Remarkably, such a charge is leveled against conservatives not only by self-described liberals, but also by intellectual allies who themselves are taken to be conservative by the liberal intelligentsia.2 In their defense of a conservative American past, conservative scholars must be prepared to confront liberal and neoconservative detractors who question their very legitimacy as Americans.
This difficulty draws attention to a second issue that conservative scholars must confront if, in the next century, they are to move conservative political and moral thought to a new level of coherence. That is, without becoming unduly sectarian, conservatives must identify a core set of principles as constituting the essential ground of American conservative moral and political thought. After much debate and careful scrutiny, those whose commitments place them outside the borders of this consensusfor example, thinkers who effectively are disgruntled liberals who seek to shore up liberalism's tottering foundations or misguided public policies-must not be permitted to take an active role in shaping an American conservative political vision.
The world of politics is, however, another matter and there a more relaxed standard of inclusion must be expected. But still, conservative scholars need to describe more fully how and where the world of conservative ideas and that of political action are to intersect. Conflicts are surely unavoidable; they must be better anticipated. This issue area forms the third set of concerns which conservative scholars must negotiate if they are to meet the opportunity that awaits them in the century ahead.
Let us acknowledge that American conservative scholars must confront a past that is replete with events that seem at first glance anything but conservative. For example, wasn't our nation's birth a moment of revolutionary...