You are right to say that asking for the policy implications of Eric Voegelin and Russell Kirk is a bit silly and reveals a surprisingly shallow understanding of those thinkers, but I think that Bramwell is right that a lot of contemporary conservative discourse is caught up in grand narratives and abstractions like the “the crisis of the West,” etc. Even if their authors didn’t intend them in this way, these ideas function as abstractions and get in the way of thinking through problems.

Thinking about policy, testing ideas and figuring out how they cash out in practice would seem to be an eminently conservative activity, perhaps, even a necessary corrective to the ideological politics that drives many neo-conservatives. If only the architects of the war in Iraq had thought about how their desire to spread democracy would translate on the ground in Iraq.