E. J. Dionne Jr. – A Historian Who Saw Beyond the Past

“No intellectual phenomenon has been more surprising in recent years than the revival in the United States of conservatism as a respectable social philosophy,” the distinguished commentator wrote.

“For decades, liberalism seemed to have everything its way,” but “fashionable intellectual circles now dismiss liberalism as naive, ritualistic, sentimental, shallow. With a whoop and a roar, a number of conservative prophets have materialized out of the wilderness, exhuming conservatism, revisiting it, revitalizing it, preaching it. . . .”

Thus wrote that lion of American liberalism, Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., in 1955, long before the Reagan and Gingrich revolutions. Here was a historian whose understanding of the past afforded him remarkable perspective on the future. …

Schlesinger worried about “the classical condition of private opulence and public squalor.” He said of the 1950s: “We have chosen in this decade to invest not in people but in things. We have chosen to allocate our resources to undertakings which bring short-run profits to individuals rather than to those which bring long-run profits to the nation.” The new public priorities, Schlesinger said, should include schools, medical care and “energy development.” Meet the old agenda; same as the new agenda.