Franz Neumann famously wrote, “No greater disservice has ever been rendered by political science than the statement that the liberal state was a ‘weak’ state. It was precisely as strong as it needed to be in the circumstances.” An analogous point could be made, I think, about the relationship between ideas and conservatism. While it’s fashionable to bemoan the lack of great thinkers and deep thinking on the right today—the passing from the scene of a Friedman or a Hayek, a Kristol or a Buckley, and their replacement by whatever it is that passes for conservative thinking and writing today—the truth is that conservative ideas are precisely as strong, its thinkers always as deep, as the movement needs them to be in the circumstances.