The leading thinkers of this school, the young William F. Buckley and the more established conservative thinker Russell Kirk, were both antiliberal on the issues of the day, and although Buckley claimed to be fighting against what he and others regarded as the distortions and excesses of modern American liberalism—to stand “athwart history, yelling Stop!”—it was not alleged liberal excesses but the core of American liberalism that he and his colleagues opposed.
