Common Sense Conservative

About Me

I’m Burton Pines, a venerable conservative who, for nearly 17 years, was a Time Magazine correspondent and associate editor, then for 11 years (including the Reagan era) a senior executive of the Washington-based Heritage Foundation, supervising its policy staff, lectures and seminars and initiating and editing its studies and publications.  In that position, for more than a decade, I sometimes was jokingly referred to as “commissar of ideology.”

I’ve belonged to some of the most well-known conservative organizations and a few deliberately not-so-well known. 

I’ve launched a handful of activist conservative groups, becoming chairman of some, serving on the boards of others.  My grad school work focused sharply on understanding the roots of conservatism in Europe and here in America, while my dissertation analyzed the failure of traditional German conservative parties to block the ascent of Hitler and Nazism. 

My first book, Back to Basics (William Morrow, 1982), described and analyzed the resurgent American conservatism, which brought Ronald Reagan to power and sustained the Reagan Revolution.