Defunct Newspapers Journals TV channels Websites Other Congressional caucuses Economics Gun rights Identity politics Nativist Religion Watchdog groups Youth/student groups Miscellaneous Other Peter Robert Edwin Viereck (August 5, 1916 – May 13, 2006) was an American writer, poet and professor of history at Mount Holyoke College.

Peter Viereck's article ... argued for a "new conservatism" to counter the "storm of authoritarianism" in Europe and Moral relativism in the USA.

He claimed communism and Nazism were utopian and would sanction the murder of oppositions (as in anti-semitism) and that liberalism shared a naive belief in progress and humanity's essential goodness.

[4]Viereck's essay was deliberately provocative – "I have watched the convention of revolt harden into dogmatic ritual", he wrote of the Marxists who he said presided over campus life – but it also contained a sincere entreaty.

Published as the Nazi armies were invading Denmark and Norway, it called for a "new conservatism" to combat the "storm of totalitarianism" abroad as well as moral relativism and soulless materialism at home.

—Tom Reiss[5]His beliefs are difficult to categorize as they raise questions about what "conservative" really means: Mr. Viereck's brand of conservatism shunned extremism of either stripe.

He was an admirer of the New Deal, a supporter of Adlai Stevenson and an anti-communist who made it clear that he had little use for Sen. Joseph McCarthy ... —Chicago Tribune[6]According to Tom Reiss, Viereck was right, as he wrote in Conservatism Revisited (1949), that he "had 'opened people's minds to the idea that to be conservative is not to be satanic.'

Is it not humorless, or else blasphemous, for this eloquent advocate of Christianity, an unworldly and anti-economic religion, to enshrine jointly as equally sacrosanct: "Adam Smith and Ricardo, Jesus and St.

Psychologically, they unite to make America's typical pseudo-conservative rightist ... [ Russell Kirk ] and perhaps half of the new conservatives are bankrupt ... How can one attribute bankruptcy to a growing concern?