In the closing weeks of 1969, a debate broke out in the pages of National Review about how American conservatives should respond to the threat posed by the New Left—the expanded universe of socialists, civil rights activists, anti-war protesters, feminists, environmentalists, and other lefty radicals then making political waves. Fifteen months earlier, police and demonstrators had met in a bloody clash outside the Democratic National Convention. The year before that had seen the storied "summer of love," coverage of which drove home for many Americans the sweeping cultural changes that were afoot.
For an ornery political science professor named Donald Atwell Zoll, the implications of these developments were clear: Conservatives must reject liberalism's thanatos, or death wish—"its preference for extinction (with its ideological purities preserved) as against adaptation or revision." By purities, he meant commitments to pluralism, individualism, and proceduralism, the "rules of the game" by which liberals were convinced opposing groups could coexist in peace.
