1. We are conservatives who stand outside the conservative mainstream; therefore, we can see things that matter more clearly. 2. Modern conservatism has become too focused on money, power, and the accumulation of stuff, and insufficiently concerned with the content of our individual and social character. 3. Big business deserves as much skepticism as big government. 4. Culture is more important than politics and economics. 5. A conservatism that does not practice restraint, humility, and good stewardship—especially of the natural world—is not fundamentally conservative. 6. Small, Local, Old, and Particular are almost always better than Big, Global, New, and Abstract. 7. Beauty is more important than efficiency. 8. The relentlessness of media-driven pop culture deadens our senses to authentic truth, beauty, and wisdom. 9. We share Russell Kirk’s conviction that “the institution most essential to conserve is the family.” 10. Politics and economics won’t save us; if our culture is to be saved at all, it will be by faithfully living by the Permanent Things, conserving these ancient moral truths in the choices we make in our everyday lives.

Fukuyama is best known as the author of The End of History and the Last Man, in which he argued that the progression of human history as a struggle between ideologies is largely at an end, with the world settling on liberal democracy after the end of the Cold War and when the Berlin Wall fell in 1989. Fukuyama's prophecy declares the eventual triumph of political and economic liberalism. Fukuyama's thesis in this first book was based on a misprision (a "creative misreading" or "distortion") of Kojeve and Hegel's thesis that history in the limited sense of the struggle of ideologies had ended in the 19th century.[1] Fukuyama's work presumes that human nature is governed by a desire for recognition, and since only liberal democracy provides a way of satisfying the need for recognition, liberal democracy provides the end point of history.

There was a time, before the College Republicans became the biggest and often the only conservative group on campus, when students on the Right could be expected to know who Kirk and Weaver were. Young Americans for Freedom, the pre-eminent conservative youth adjunct of the Goldwater and Vietnam eras, was activist in orientation. But it included an intellectual component strong enough that members could identify the brands of conservatism to which they subscribed with such figures as Kirk, Ludwig von Mises, Ayn Rand, and Frank Meyer.