George Nash on Jeffrey's Hart's The Making of the American Conservative Mind
As a corrective to ideological hubris, Hart’s morality tale is instructive. But prudential conservatism teaches more than one lesson. “The politics of reality,” unchecked, can be a snare. Realism itself can become a confining ideology. Adjustment to “actuality” carries its own peril in a too-easy assumption that the future must always resemble the present.
Hart extols Ronald Reagan as a prudent conservative, and Reagan certainly was not reckless. But he was also an optimistic, proactive, and quintessentially idealistic conservative, determined to alter the reality of the Cold War. And he did.
American conservatism at its Reaganite best is a combination of impulses — of realism and idealism, of prudence and hope, of worldly sobriety and faith-based aspiration.
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