Where are the conservative intellectuals?

Irving Kristol and William F. Buckley once labored to maintain a high tone in conservative debate, giving a cold shoulder to the ranters and kooks, notes Steven F. Hayward, a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, in the Washington Post's Sunday Outlook section. Where, he asks, are such conservatives today?

Ideas provided a few answers in July.

Hayward has his own thoughts. Consider, he suggests, Jonah Goldberg, whose "Liberal Fascism" is "[a]bout the only recent successful title that harkens back to the older intellectual style."

And what about the much-criticized Glenn Beck? Hayward grants that Beck's crying is "unmanly" (that's Hayward's description) and that he can be rather over the top. "Yet," Hayward writes,

Beck's distinctiveness and his potential contribution to conservatism can be summed up with one name: R.J. Pestritto.

Pestritto is a young political scientist at Hillsdale College in Michigan whom Beck has had on his TV show several times, once for the entire hour discussing Woodrow Wilson and progressivism. He is among a handful of young conservative scholars, several of whom Beck has also featured, engaged in serious academic work critiquing the intellectual pedigree of modern liberalism. Their writing is often dense and difficult, but Beck not only reads it, he assigns it to his staff. "Beck asks me questions about Hegel, based on what he's read in my books," Pestritto told me. Pestritto is the kind of guest Bill O'Reilly and Sean Hannity would never think of booking.

Okay, so Beck may lack Buckley's urbanity, and his show will never be confused with "Firing Line." But he's on to something with his interest in serious analysis of liberalism's patrimony.

Whatever else you say, you can't fault his suggestions on the grounds of predictability.