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Quotable: "The boldness and eloquence with which Kirk made his claims for a serious conservative intellectual tradition drew the grudging respect of some on the left. But the effect on the right was enormous. "Russell gave the conservative movement its name," says Lee Edwards, a senior fellow at the Heritage Foundation, a leading conservative think tank. "If you look at what people in our movement were calling themselves before 1953, you find words like 'individualist,' 'classical liberal,' 'libertarian,' and so on," he says. He gives two examples to illustrate the point. In 1951, he says, when William F. Buckley published God and Man at Yale, he identified himself as an individualist, not a conservative. And Barry Goldwater, when first elected to the Senate in 1952, "called himself a progressive Republican or a Jeffersonian Republican ... but not 'conservative.'" By the middle of the decade, though, both had adopted the label that Kirk helped put into circulation." Posted by Greg Ransom | TrackBack