George Nash’s definitive history The Conservative Movement in America Since 1945 explains that the early conservatives, most of whom were or wanted to be “sublimely superfluous” trans-Atlantic intellectuals, cultivated an “aristocratic aloofness from vulgarity.” These genteel men of means and aspirant idle philosophers were essentially Henry James characters come to life, keenly aware of the “infinite vulgarity of things” and the self-evident “virtue of keeping one’s self unspotted by it.”