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Says it all! Conservatives have no real intellectuals, they just make excuses for their preferred policies.

There's no such thing as a conservative intellectual — only apologists for right-wing power--From Burke to Buckley to Patrick Deneen, we've seen a 200-year history of defending the indefensible
https://www.salon.com/2023/07/01/theres-no-such-thing-as-a-conservative-intellectual--only-apologists-for-right-wing-power/

#Conservative

"In 1950, author and critic Lionel Trilling wrote:

'In the United States at this time liberalism is not only the dominant but even the sole intellectual tradition. For it is the plain fact that nowadays there are no conservative or reactionary ideas in general circulation. This does not mean, of course, that there is no impulse to conservatism or to reaction. Such impulses are certainly very strong, perhaps even stronger than most of us know. But the conservative impulse and the reactionary impulse do not, with some isolated and some ecclesiastical exceptions, express themselves in ideas but only in action or in irritable mental gestures which seek to resemble ideas.'
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The hundreds of conservative book titles that have geysered out of Regnery, Broadside and other right-wing imprints in recent years are almost invariably distinguished by their numbing sameness: a shrill cry of victimhood, a hunt for scapegoats, a tone that alternates between hysteria and heavy sarcasm, and a recipe for salvation cribbed from Republican National Committee talking points and Heritage Foundation issue briefs. The fact that they sometimes hit the bestseller list is principally due to the well-funded conservative media-entertainment complex's bulk-purchase scam.
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However much modern theorists have elaborated upon the ideas inherent in conservatism during the two centuries since Maistre, they all seem to me to boil down to three simple points:

A desire for hierarchy and human inequality.

This belief derives from the medieval religious notion of the Great Chain of Being, whereby there is a place for everybody and everybody must know his place. It justifies economic exploitation and denial of political rights. Conservative writers propagandize on its behalf with a straw-man argument: Any gain in equality costs society an equal or greater loss in freedom; egalitarianism is the mere soulless equality of the gulag, where we cannot own property and must share toothbrushes. This sentiment pops up consistently in the works of American conservative theorists, from Buckley's "Unless you have freedom to be unequal, there is no such thing as freedom," to David Brooks' hankering for rule by a wise elite. American-style laissez-faire economics and libertarianism are largely based on this idea.

The only acceptable society is based on Christianity.

Never mind the establishment clause of the First Amendment; conservatives will forever try to smuggle in more and more official endorsement of religion until the United States is effectively a theocracy....Translated into the bumper-sticker mentality of American Christian fundamentalism, that means that if people don't believe in God, there's nothing to stop them from running amok and killing people...

We must obey tradition.

For some unexplained reason, our ancestors were infinitely wiser than us, and apparently they get a vote on present affairs. To paraphrase Edmund Burke, if we're going to have democracy, let's extend it to the dead. Scratch someone who fancies himself an educated conservative and you will often find a person who reveres the past; unfortunately they leave out details like slavery, witch burning and childbed fever. Many psychologists consider this mentality to be a cognitive bias in brain function, but whatever its source, the political utility of the attitude is obvious: Utopia only exists in an ever-receding past, progress is impossible, and future generations shall profess bygone superstitions...The idea is well expressed by Buckley's statement that conservatives must "stand athwart history yelling 'stop.'

One can grasp that the three precepts dovetail together in that they all rely on dogmatic assertion, denial of a scientific or empirical basis of reality and reactionary nostalgia. They are also pretty thin gruel for founding an intellectual tradition: there are simply too many departments of knowledge, for instance, much of science, that must be declared off limits to prevent them from tainting the party line. This is why conservatives habitually retreat into mysticism, gut feelings and the wisdom of our fathers when the facts are against them. It is more accurate to say that conservatism is a counter-intellectual activity that sometimes employs the trappings of intellectual discourse."