National Review rode an impressive postwar tide of conservative intellectual work that, wrote an observer, “would tax the dialectical agility of a thirty-third degree Trotskyite.” They believed that the bulwark of any civilization was not industry or riches or men under arms, but ideas. The West was imperiled because it was infected by error: by materialism, in the philosophical sense of the word, believing the world to be wholly composed of ordinary physical matter and of valuing physical well-being as an ultimate end. And materialism’s handmaids: humanism and egalitarianism, which assumed
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