The Conservative Negation

...Whose experience counts...

...But just what kind of majority is this Congressional majority that Kendall adores...

...This question brings us to the heart of his theory about American political institutions...

...And Kendall's talk of virtue sounds hollow to anyone aware of the level of Congressional morality...

...One majority is that institutionalized through the President, mobilized every four years in a presidential campaign, liberal and internationalist in policy...

...Conservatism was taken over by social Darwinians-by intellectuals like Sumner or practical men like Carnegie-but their ideas foundered in the economic and political turmoil of the 20th century...

...But rarely does he apply these words to the practical questions of politics and government today...

...But he develops no necessary relation between his ideology and institutions and specific government policies...

...This is the majority of "Presidential Democrats or Republicans," as I would call them: men like Roosevelt, Eisenhower and Kennedy...

...And when someone like Clinton Rossiter has come along to dress up conservatism in an attractive and saleable package, "real" conservatives have tumbled over one another in the rush to repudiate it...

...It is a heterogeneous majority, arriving at decisions through deliberation among "virtuous men" representing different values and interests...

...5.95 Reviewed by JAMES MACGREGOR BURNS Professor of Political Science, Williams College: author, "The Deadlock of Democracy," "Congress on Trial" As A systematic body of thought, conservatism has not found a congenial climate in America...

...Can the great number of people, as embodied in a popular majority, contribute to, and gain from, public truth as well as a small body of aristocrats...

...the more they withdrew from society to work out a unified and consistent doctrine, the more detached they became from the nation's actual political battles, governmental and political machinery, and class and sectional struggles...

...But now that chasm has been bridged-at least part way...

...Calhoun shaped a theory that tied dogma to section and slavery, but this theory, as a practical program for government, was blown to bits 100 years ago...

...It is a continuous majority, constantly being refreshed as members of Congress visit and consult their constituents, as compared with the discontinuous and sporadic sanctions of the Presidency...

...As for the continuous majority, this is precisely what the President seeks to sustain through his speeches and actions...

...It is essentially aristocratic, responding to structured communities with established hierarchical relations of superordination and subordination...

...It is unfinished in a literal sense: It is essentially a collection of earlier writings, and ends with 125 pages of previously published book reviews (oddly, with no specific indication of which review appeared in what publication, and when...

...Where Kendall most disappoints the reader, however, is in his failure to hook up his ideological and institutional factors to practical measures and policies...

...One could excuse this in Kendall except for his maddening habit of tossing around words-justice, civility, tradition, etc.-that supposedly have implications for program and policy...

...Most voters, in fact, do not know even the names of the Congressional candidates in their districts...

...In the past, real conservatives have seemed unable to cross the chasm which separates conservative thought and political reality...

...In obliquely opposing the Federal government's civil rights policies, for example, he raises the question of whether the Negroes' "criminality" and other failings, as he sees them, can be "explained in large part in terms of specifically biological inheritance," long after it has been clearly shown that such qualities are simply not inherited in the usual sense of the word...

...For he is less concerned with defending his kind of majority than in proving that two majorities exist...

...Most Congressional constituencies do not form a community, as compared with the national community serviced by national news media, national politicians, and national economic and political agencies...

...Kendall makes this connection in the second chapter of The Conservative Affirmation-the most important and original chapter in the book-called "The Two Majorities in American Politics...

...It reached some of its sharpest expression in men like Fisher Ames at a time when the wave of republicanism and democracy was making their views outmoded and irrelevant even while being uttered...

...This he does unanswerably - although I must dissent from his notion that the same constituency votes for both majorities...

...The national debate between presidential candidates is far more meaningful, coherent, and specific than the cloudy statements put out in the typical Congressional election...

...In this he emulates his idols, the Founding Fathers-especially the authors of the Federalist, who, whether classified as conservatives or liberals or whatever else, demonstrated with dazzling talent the relation between political ideas and governmental institutions...

...But how pursue this public truth...

...This Madisonian or legislative majority depends on the ability of Congressmen "to make sound judgments regarding the virtue of their neighbors, not on their ability to deliberate on matters of policy...

...It is essentially elitist, though Kendall does not use this word...

...The plight of American conservatism has been that the more conservatives refurbished their doctrine to make it relevant to American society, the more their offerings lost coherence and conviction as structures of thought...

...He assaults Mill and later civil libertarians for their separation of the right to speak from the duties implied in that right, for their moral absolutism, for their "dispersal of opinion" into irresponsible extremes...

...Kendall's preferred majority is the kind that Madison favoredneither a "plebiscitary" presidential majority nor the "popular movement that snowballs through the [legislative] constituencies...

...It would be easy to demonstrate other, less savory facts about this majority, as compared with the presidential majority...

...Kendall has written The Conservative Negation...

...So his book has a disappointingly unfinished quality...

...I hope that Willmoore Kendall writes it...

...Where he does make the effort, he stumbles painfully...

...The other majority is a legislative or Congressional majority-conservative in fiscal policy, negative (or at least anti-presidential) on welfare measures, more isolationist and protectionist in foreign policy, less libertarian (as in the case of the Un-American Activities Committee...

...He repudiates those who define conservatism as liberalism minus 30 per cent...

...he opposes broadened immigration, big foreign aid appropriations, heavy governmental spending, and so on...

...The Conservative Affirmation remains to be written...

...but his own practical views add up to little difference with the kind of conservatism that is watered-down liberalism...

...This vagueness also marks Kendall's handling of his main issue, free speech...

...Kendall prefers the "measured, aristocratic overtones" of the pursuit of a "public truth...

...Willmoore Kendall understands the political context in which his conservative ideas gain meaning...

...It is doubtful, though, that if pressed on these matters Kendall would put up much of a fight...

...He bridges one chasm only to fall headlong into the next...

...Rarely in history have political thinkers devised a machinery that was so perfectly suited to serve their intellectual presuppositions as did the men of 1787...

...To be sure, the reader gathers that Kendall shares the usual conservative views: He favors less government, more conservative fiscal policies, stronger internal security measures, a tougher line toward Russia and China...

...Despite some remarks about the special role of the scholar, in The Conservative Affirmation Kendall simply fails to come to grips with the question that most occupies him...

...In more recent times men like Irving Babbitt, with their concern for natural aristocracy, simply wrote against the American intellectual and social grain...

...The most effective pages of this book demonstrate that the legislative majority is not just a few conservatives occupying key positions in Congress, but a whole political apparatus empowered by strong ideological and institutional forces...

...But it is even more unfinished in that Kendall does not move on from ideology and institution to the practical questions of policy, which are what politics ultimately is about...

...And in contrast to the conservatives who complain of the Hobson's choice of presidential candidates and of the inexorability of "creeping socialism,' Kendall contends that the conservative or Congressional majority has in fact been winning...

...How identify it...