The Conservative Pulse/Through a Glass Rightly

...Finally, what do we want to keep safe and secure about America...

...Television is the medium for the job...

...Even if one dislikes this approach, there is plentiful irony in the fact that conservatism, of all words, has proved incapable of keeping a stable, orderly definition of itself...

...Meanwhile, until the right answers come along, we shall have to make do with a congeries of episodes that may yet congeal into firm and lasting shape...

...It is a remembrance of things past, a celebration of famous victories, a last hurrah...

...that is to say, conservatism as a way of conducting the affairs of the polity in light of how history is understood, more a matter of steadily accreted wisdom, disposition, temperament, elective affinities, and, above all, moral responsibility than of rigidly programmatic initiatives carried out on the basis of abstractions...

...Perhaps "The Conservatives" is prophesying that the coming millennium has brought forth a sore-as-hell, cunning-as-a-serpentmovement of populists, reactionaries, hirelings, operatives, consultants, publicists, jack-leg economists, academic careerists, foundationists, evangelicals, supernumerary pols, and variety artists, who, taken as fast as they come, constitute the Grand Standing Army of the Great Conservative Alliance...

...A dichotomy, to be sure, and like most patently false but, nonetheless, stuffed full of distinctions worth arguing about...

...A more modest approach, maybe done up in TV-sports lingo, could have called it "Some Kind of Conservatives...

...Whether the body of thought and action extolled in "The Conservatives" will "live long and prosper," as another missionary endeavor ad astra puts it, is the question that later television documentaries will have to address...

...The clear and present menace, more than Kennedy and Johnson, was Nelson Rockefeller and the fell grip of the Eastern Establishment...

...The Conservatives," a 90-minute documentary produced by the Blackwell Corporation of Washington and shown on the Public Broadcasting Service stations, is supposed to shed light on how its subject behaved during the last four decades...

...What "The Conservatives" fails to do—if one may blame Neal B. Freeman for not doing what he didn't attempt—is to present a taxonomy of American conservatism...

...What private duties of civility, self-restraint, and moderation must we observe in our conduct...

...Buckley, Podhoretz, Rusher, White, and Ralph de Toledano, among others, manage to prove...

...As history affords one kind of illumination, so does the light of common day...

...Such a lordly disdain for the vocation of politics struck mid-western Republicans as stupid...

...Chambers combat, Sen...

...Hence, the emergence of Clifton White & Company is as important to an understanding of the contemporary GOP as was the insurgency of Russell Davenport, Oren Root, and Charles Halleck in the Willkie campaign of 1940...

...Rather, "The Conservatives" focuses on the grievances and discontents that mobilized political operatives, publicists, and activists into taking over the Republican party under the true-blue colors of "conservatism...

...What those eager to know the wayward history of American conservatism will make of it is puzzling...

...The title suggests an authoritative, even definitive account...

...It is not a "post hoc" fallacy that what Americans recognize as conservatism is largely the product of video technology, a composite of images reified on the gross national picture tube...

...That was the defect of Old Guard Republicanism, which earned one failure after another at the polls and stranded the party in glowering defeatism...

...It is conservative advice worth heeding...

...The program comes to a stirring if elegiac end as the nation's oldest President, in the midst of his final term, eulogizes the deceased Whittaker Chambers, the sempitemal Clare Boothe Luce, and the honorably retired Barry Goldwater...

...It's an open question whether the power grab was driven by ideology, or just the other way around...

...It's a shame that Peter Viereck, poet, historian, and conservative thinker par excellence, was not included, for his measured reflections are as sound as they are eloquent...

...Joe McCarthy's career, William Buckley and the National Re-View, the vicissitudes of Richard Nixon, the Goldwater campaign of '64, and, molto crescendo, Ronald Reagan and the Rightist Risorgimento...

...Older, more orthodox conservatives (the Burkean traditionalists, if you will) were elated at the victories won by this new vitality and shrewdness, but dismayed by the ideologizing of what they had upheld as a matter of personal character...

...Still the glory of the occasion ishardly a summoning of new leaders and stewards from the rising generations to the service of American Conservatism...

...What of the American experience must we promote and strengthen at whatever cost...

...Perhaps what is really happening to conservatism is that it is evolving (pace, fundamentalists of little faith) into an utterly different form of political philosophy, something at once primitively vigorous and sophisticatedly organized...

...blink) the program presents a loose-jointed chronology that tells how our patriots reacted to divers stimuli: the Hiss vs...

...One way or another, anyone who thinks himself a conservative had better keep that in mind...

...What conservatism in America, root and branch, holds as essential are representative democracy, individual liberty, private enterprise, and unyielding resistance to Soviet imperialism, international Communism, and totalitarianism...

...To confuse Richard Lugar, for instance, a classical conservative whose political practice is rightly moderate with Jesse Helms, a radical reactionary whose practice is extremist, is to make American conservatism as loose and easy as a trollop who doesn't much care whom she picks up...

...Where the serried ranks break apart is on the jagged point of humane responsibility for the public interest, the American community...

...Images can play one false, particularly if one is unsure of the source of the light by which they are seen...

...Indeed, such 36 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR APRIL 1987 conservatives tend to regard ideology as the bane of political parties and of the political process in general, believing that systematized rationalism inevitably hardens into authoritarian dogma and thus corrupts its adherents into bigots and zealots...

...Gentlemanly amateurism may be a nice ethic for club sports (as it used to be for intercollegiate athletics), but it is a hell of a way to run a railroad—as the N.Y...

...The medium is useful for instructing and informing, as Ronald Reagan has convincingly demonstrated, and the lexicon of political discourse usually needs to be set straight or brought up to date...

...What the show reveals is that a number of clever, energetic, and determined persons took over a static body of serious thought and genteel sentiment, and turned it into a brassy, truculent, and rancorous movement...

...After all, a perennial philosophy is seldom seen to best advantage off the walls...

...THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR APRIL 1987 37...

...Central, the Pennsy, and the old-line GOP never quite grasped...

...Louis Sullivan's dictum that form follows function can be applied to the transformation of the GOP, if one takes ideological conservatism as an overarching structure capacious enough for disparate energies and ambitions...

...Although TV producers and critics sniff at "talking heads," it is in such wise that conservatism best presents its affirmations and contradictions, as Messrs...

...Perhaps the dynamic usurpers from the South and West, now in command of the Republican party, have assembled a creature so all-consuming and tremendous that old-school conservatism, whether Republican or Democrat, will soon be as moribund as the Federalists and the Whigs, fit only for the maunderings of antiquarians...

...Conservatives close ranks against the arbitrary interventions of government into the private realm (except, of course, when social or religious conservatives demand them), deficit spending (except, of course, when military preparedness requires it), or the entanglements of foreign adventures (except, of course, when one presidential doctrine or another needs to be reinforced...

...If the Whites brought savvy, tenacity, and skill to the practice of Republican politics, Karl Hess, Irving Kristol, Norman Podhoretz, and a strange alliance of former social democrats, ex-lefties, and heterodox right-wingers supplied the theories that gave the movement an apparent coherence...

...While talented Democrats sought and found careers in politics, Republicans chose to make by Kent Owen their marks in business, industry, and the professions, leaving the operation of campaigns, organizations, and supporting institutions to whoever would do the work...

...The turning point, according to this account, came at the 1961 Avenue Motel gathering in Chicago when Clifton White and his fellow Young Republicans set about to capture the GOP for the greater glory of conservatism...

...he Conservatives" might have T treated questions like these in a thoughtfully discursive manner...

...These are moments of homage—the awarding of the Medals of Freedom—that befit conservatism of any description...

...What obligations must all citizens accept to conserve the common good...

...Hence, some conservatives remain of two minds about the advent of Reaganism, the New Right (particularly its raucous and intolerant populist elements), and neoconservatism, thinking themselves less a movement than a settlement that admires the examples of Robert A. Taft and Henry Jackson as interpreted by James Kilpatrick, George Will, Peter Viereck, Russell Kirk, among the more prominent...

...T n short, the program does not con-1 cern itself with the lessons of history or the roll of honor as conservatism at its purest professes to do...

...Better, at least, ignoble successes than noble failures...

...For that matter, you will look in vain for Robert 'A...

...Taft, the beau ideal of many mid-century American conservatives, or for Arthur Vandenberg, or for any Democrat, not Richard Russell, Harry Byrd, Alben Barkley, or Tom Connally...

...And the gates of hell shall not prevail against them...

...And there's no one to provide a bracing dose of antithesis, perhaps John Kenneth Galbraith, Arthur Schlesinger, Murray Kempton, Richard L. Strout, Henry Steele Commager, or that bugbear for all reasons, Gore Vidal...

...To a marked extent TV has propelled conservatism with a sounding force that has changed it from a private domain of sense and sensibility to a public ideology...

...Do those who call themselves conservatives want too much, too little, or the wrong things altogether...

...From its opening portrait gallery (among them M. Stanton Evans, James J. Kilpatrick, and Holmes Alexander, if I didn't Kent Owen is Indiana editor of The American Spectator...

...Plato cautions his readers not to mistake the flickering shadows on cave walls for the real thing...

...Before too many reflective conservatives become ill at ease in the company of Jesse Helms, Jerry Falwell, Pat Robertson, Richard Viguerie, and John Lofton (again, a batch of mixed and matched specimens), a scrupulous observer needs to make pointed distinctions about who is up to what, on what grounds, and for whose good...

...If you want to learn what patrimony Adams, Hamilton, Madison, Webster, and Lincoln left to the latterday conservatives, disappointment awaits you, although Russell Kirk's The Conservative Mind gets a passing mention (as does Hayek's The Road to Serfdom...

...Maybe something like Philip Rahv's distinction between American literature's "palefaces" and "redskins" can do the trick: the tradition-conscious, historical-minded, civility-respecting gradualists who work to preserve the balance of rights and institutions centered in the Constitution and to bring about the well-being of society through reasonable measures versus the singleissue-obsessed, ruthlessly expedient, intransigently demanding ideologues who insist on the uncompromising attainment of whatever economic, social, moral, and political imperatives define their vision of the compulsory Good Society...

...With banners waving and trumpets a-blare, there is a certain triumphalism to "The Conservatives" that ignores the whirr of time's winged chariot...

...the twenty-two confederates were determined to overthrow a leadership that had become stolid, lazy, and, horrors, susceptible to liberalism...

...TV's ineluctable swell over the last forty years has mounted while conservatism has ebbed and flowed across the land...

...Nor is Kristol, Kilpatrick, Will, or the proprietor Tyrrell here...

...More than the Democrats (who suddenly found their ranks full of Kennedys, New Frontierpersons, and Great Socialites as well as unionists and New Dealers), the Republicans entrusted party management to slogging mediocrities who kept the heat turned low and the ledgers in order...

...Was there ever such a thing as conservatism in America, and, if so, what substance did it possess to give it staying power...

...As McLuhan decreed, the printed word is the relict of outmoded consciousness, that of persons given to sorting through experience...