I’m not much for these tag games, but I like the Contentious Centrist so I will comply and shut up…

Here are my tasks:

1. Pick up the nearest book.
2. Open to page 123.
3. Find the fifth sentence.
4. Post the next three sentences.
5. Tag five people, and acknowledge who tagged you.

I’m tagging Elder of Ziyon, the Kvetcher, Modernity Blog, Ben Neill, and Sultan Knish.

Not sure if they will all respond but what the hay.

The nearest book to me is George Nash’s, The Conservative Intellectual Movement in America: Since 1945. It’s the last required book in my course on twentieth century American history. The class also read Lizabeth Cohen’s Making a New Deal: Industrial Workers in Chicago, 1919-1939 and Van Gosse’s Movements of the New Left, 1950-1975: A Brief History with Documents, among other things.

Here is the quote:

The leaders of the new conservatism are not now, nor will they be, identified with the American business community. They are clearly identified with natural law philosophy and revealed religion. The seat of the new conservatism is not a hereditary aristocracy which America lacks, but the Churches and theological faculties which are playing an ever more important role in American life.

This is from conservative historian Stephen Tonsor of the University of Michigan, who was vigorously rebutting Schlesinger’s persistent attempts to link conservatism with the business class in the U.S. This quote is from 1955.