'The fateful move'

Profound, and more prophetic than Rossiter, himself a conservative, ever imagined:

When a conservative once decides, as many articulate conservatives seem to have decided in explosive America, that the best of all possible worlds was here yesterday and is gone today, he begins the fateful move toward reaction and ratiocination that turns him from a prudent traditionalist into an angry ideologue.

--Clinton Rossiter, Conservatism in America: The Thankless Persuasion, 1955

Comments

[Janicket]

Depressingly prescient, I'd call it.