Fifty years ago, in the preface to The Liberal Imagination,
Lionel Trilling wrote his once-famous assessment of the place
occupied by liberalism in American intellectual life. This is the key
passage:

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.

Notwithstanding the undisguised condescension in Trilling’s tone—a
condescension toward conservative thought widely shared by liberals
at the time—it was not his purpose in that preface to impugn the
totality of the conservative intellectual tradition. On the
contrary, it was one of Trilling’s ambitions in The Liberal
Imagination to persuade his fellow liberals that they might profit,
morally and intellectually, from a careful consideration of the
ideas of liberalism’s conservative critics. Believing, however, that
there was no contemporary conservative criticism equal to the task
of reforming liberal thought in the ways he wished to see it
reformed, Trilling called upon liberals to perform, in effect, an
auto-critique of their own most cherished assumptions based