MARK FALCOFF: Upward and Onward

...Hoover, he explains, really became a spokesman for conservative ideas once he left the White House...

...But in the late 1940s and 1950s, Regnery explains, there was no such thing as a conservative intellectual movement...

...It is still a formidable bulwark but probably not sufficient to advance much beyond its provincial boundaries...

...He also glides a bit too quickly over what liberals love to call “Red Scare...

...The twelve largest “progressive” foundations have combined assets of $11 billion as against $1.7 billion for the handful of conservative foundations that fund organizations like the American Enterprise Institute or the Heritage Foundation...

...A perhaps surprising number of wealthy families have chosen to avoid conservative causes for fear of being “controversial...

...Rather, conservatives use their resources more efficiency and intelligently...

...It was not that there were no Communists in government—as recent works by historians like Ronald Radosh, Edward Herman, Allen Weinstein, Harvey Klehr and John Earl Haynes demonstrate, they were all too common and often in very high places...

...some of them, like Buckley’s journalism and Goldwater’s candidacy, were the product of conscious decisions by courageous, principled, and imaginative people...

...This explains the relentless and determined cam- Somewhere baCk in the late 1950s it was paign against Fox News, the plan to shut off talk radio with the misnamed “Fairness Doctrine,” the ideological litmus test imposed on aspiring academics at our universities (and attempts to prevent conservative speakers from appearing on campus), even the efforts of bookstore clerks to hide or (even in one widely reported case) to destroy conservative books rather than to display them for potential customers...

...Hunt had written a manuscript he wanted Regnery to accept...

...What has changed has been their own mindset...

...It is also a contribution to the political history of the United States in the 20th century...

...Neither—and this is really the point—did a lot of the venues in the United States where Democrats had been winning elections since at least 1930...

...Going into the 2008 election, one might question his optimism...

...political thinkers have historically faced an uphill Tfor most of the past century conservativ y t i c o s t g i r e t e c i e t t S d e i n t h h e e C U ent t ral th a em s e o s f a this n boo - k r is h that th e oug e , h battle to participate fully in American political discourse...

...to purge the movement of anti-Semites and loony conspiracists, most notably the crazies attracted to the John Birch Society...

...For example, despite his groundbreaking (and enduringly best-selling) The Road to Serfdom (1944), Friedrich Hayek was never granted a chair in economics at the University of Chicago (he was invited to sit on something called the Committee on Social Thought), and even then only when a wealthy benefactor agreed to pay his salary...

...Had it been contributing to the “right” (that is, left) causes I seriously doubt it would have become a target of “progressive” militants and some Democratic presidential candidates...

...I feel that Regnery does not give sufficient importance to (though he certainly mentions) the valiant, principled, and successful efforts in the In a book of this sort, which covers a vast range of One of the funniest episodes in the book deals with the visit sometime in the early 1960s of Regnery’s father to H. L. Hunt, the ultra-eccentric Texas oil billionaire who (if he had not existed) would have to have been invented by some deranged liberal...

...Rather, conservatives were “an odd group of intellect s i n u m m o f d e t r i e r t e c x n o m m c n g in ua i ls a o nd polit e icos p wh fo o w th ould ha ap r pea o r t C o have noth m - and FDR: libertarians, or as they called themselves, classical liberals, a few wealthy businessmen, some Midwestern isolationists, traditionalist Catholics, a college professor here or there...

...through the Committee on the Present Danger, and finally, the decision of evangelical Christians to actively participate in electoral politics...

...They take ideas seriously, and what perhaps gives them a crucial advantage over their adversaries, they take their opponents’ ideas seriously too...

...The result is a vast tour d’horizon that will be familiar in individual parts to many conservative voters, readers, and political activists, but manages to collapse a huge number of insights and fresh information into a single, comprehensive volume...

...Upward and Onward Upstream: The ascendance of american conservatism By Alfred S. Regnery (Threshold/simon & schusTer, 448 pages, $26) Reviewed by Mark falcoff retreated to a reduced perimeter consisting of ethnic grievance mongers (though not all minorities, nor all of every minority), public sector unions, the faculty and administration of our universities, and a declining, indeed (happily) disappearing print media...

...Except for Regnery’s father there were practically no conservative book publishers...

...Their emergence to mainstream influence took place over several dec ades, the most outstanding markers of which were the founding in 1955 of William F. Buckley Jr.’s National Review, the emergence of Barry Goldwater as a national political figure (and presidential candidate), Buckley’s own campaign for mayor of New York in 1965 (quite possibly the first time—and very probably the last—when the city’s fundamental problems were seriously discussed by at least one candidate), Ronald Reagan’s election as governor of California, the accession of former Democrats (“neo- conservatives”) The central theme of this book is that though the United States is a center-right society, for most of the past century conservative political thinkers have historically faced an uphill battle to participate fully in American political discourse...

...The very fact that the only difference between Senators Clinton and Obama is which of their governmentrun “health care” plans is better, not to mention that both have plans to appoint the same kind of liberal judges (perhaps indeed the very same people) suggests that many of the battles fought in the 1960s and 1970s will probably have to be fought again...

...To be sure, conservative intellectuals have always been with us—Albert J. Nock, Irving Babbitt, Friedrich Hayek, James Burnham, Russell Kirk, and Richard Weaver, and if one plumbs deeper into American history there is Alexander Hamilton, John C. Calhoun, Henry and Brooks Adams, even Henry James...

...After one reading the latter rejected it flat out, and also turned aside a munificent offer by Hunt to underwrite the costs of publication...

...He objects to domestic institutions like the income tax, direct election of senators, and many innovations of the Progressive movement (in which he locates the origins of vote-buying through redistributionist policies...

...The debate continues with Evans’s new book on McCarthy...

...He takes many Republican icons to task—most notably Herbert Hoover and Dwight D. Eisenhower—for veering too far from their stated philosophies...

...Rather, McCarthy’s particular style—lobbing careless and sometimes unsubstantiated accusations into our political space—allowed far too many people who were actually guilty to style themselves as innocent victims of a new “ism...

...He reminds us that the Nixon administration—whose unlovely fruits included an embrace of the Brezhnev Doctrine, wage and price controls, creation of the Environmental Protection Agency, the National Endowment for the Arts, and minority set-asides—was (not surprisingly) devoid of any movement conservatives...

...The five largest conservative foundations’ total assets are less than the money the five largest left-wing foundations gave away in one year...

...The American left (“progressive” or “liberal,” depending on how one styles it) has Now comes Alfred Regnery, publisher of this journal and scion of a distinguished conservative family, to provide the other half of the story—the rise of the right as an intellectual and political force in the United States...

...The real difference is not money—far from it...

...3 I can still recall a spirited discussion—civil but passionate— between Ronald Radosh and Stan Evans at a lunch at the Heritage Foundation some 15 years ago...

...Left-wing intellectuals and self-styled “progressives” are still not quite clear about what h appened to them...

...6 8 T H e a M e R I c a n s P e c T a T o R M a R c H 2 0 0 8 b o o K s I n R e V I e W who managed to be elected to the White House, Ronald Reagan, was (not surprisingly, in Regnery’s view) the most successful...

...phenomena, any reader is bound to have some quibbles...

...3 Regnery ends his book with a chapter entitled “We Are All Conservatives Now...

...Speaking of think tanks, Regnery points out that liberal ones spent six times what their conservative counterparts dispersed in 2002...

...in the interim they have lost the abundant self-confidence that was once their hallmark...

...And no wonder—by now most of their ideas have actually been tried and found wanting...

...Upstream is not, however, just a history of the conservative movement...

...The truth is that although some conservative donors and foundations did exist even in the darkest days of the movement, and they continue to exist today, they have never had a fraction of the resources liberals have long enjoyed...

...when Knopf (somewhat surprisingly) accepted Russell Kirk’s The Conservative Mind they insisted that the author pare it down to a quarter of its original length...

...It was not that people liked Nixon— nobody ever liked Nixon,” he writes in one of his more lapidary phrases, “but that they were appalled by McGovern...

...Misreading their victories in the elections of 1964 and 1976, liberal Democrats proceeded to generate their own antibodies through policies that drove millions of working-class and middle-class people from their coalition, most notably through their solicitude for criminals (particularly violent criminals), their addiction to racial preferences and social engineering (busing), not to mention their profligate use of other people’s money for programs whose only beneficiaries were a new class of bureaucrats, civil servants, and racial “power brokers...

...The one movement conservative b T i Moark K falcoff is resident scholar emeritus at the American Enterprise Institute in Washington...

...This is a subject on which conservatives will probably never reach full agreement...

...Now, however, when they have an abundant supply of intellectual adversaries, liberals have decided that perhaps they’d rather not talk at all...

...What else could it be...

...At the time, Regnery’s father was one of the very few publishers who brought out conservative books...

...Certainly insofar as the Republican Party is concerned, there is no new Ronald Reagan, no matter how much individual candidates claim to be carrying forward his torch...

...Half the story of how this happened has been told in a multitude of new books, most notably Mark Stricherz’s Why the Democrats Are Blue or Herman Cain’s They Think You’re Stupid: Why Democrats Lost Your Vote and What Republicans Must Do to Keep It...

...b o o K s I n R e V I e W common to hear liberals sigh that they wished— they really did—that they could find some serious conservatives to argue with...

...To put it bluntly, he does not share the view of many contemporary conservatives (or at least, neoconservatives) that Joseph McCarthy’s scatter-shot efforts to clean out the State Department were often counterproductive...

...My personal hunch is that many billionaires and mega-corporations opt to support liberal causes as a way of purchasing silence from potential critics...

...As Kevin Phillips was to put it, “the world of Manhattan, Harvard and Beverly Hills was being exported to Calhoun County, Alabama, and Calhoun County did not like it...

...The difference between then and now—it is a point Regnery drives home at the end of his book—is that from the point of view of institutions and outlets, the right is far better positioned to enter the lists...

...Lacking a transmission belt to the wider political community, conservative ideas languished (and also to some extent flourished) in isolated archipelagos scattered across the society...

...Although I find myself in accord with most of Regnery’s interpretations, some of them would be regarded as idiosyncratic even by people who consider themselves conservative...

...indeed, many of the latter didn’t even want their president reelected in 1972...

...Even worse, they have lost the intellectual initiative and much of the popular support upon which they thought they could count...

...7 0 T H e a M e R I c a n s P e c T a T o R M a R c H 2 0 0 8...

...This last point is important...

...hence the title...

...Wal-Mart is a case in point...

...But conservatives were also fortunate in their adversaries...

...Given the current prospects, it had better be...

...Moreover, old divisions between libertarians and movement conservatives have (for the moment at least) apparently created an opening through which two rather improbable Democratic candidates seemed poised to walk...

...2 Regnery has his facts and figures at hand...

...It must be due, they thought (and many still think), to money from obscure (and obscurantist) sources like the proverbial Texas oil tycoon.1 It must be the money, they thought...

...Though the academy was not then the hothouse of ideological correctness that it is today, it was not particularly a welcoming place...

...There were few conservative journals and no conservative think tanks...

...late 1950s by people like William F. Buckley Jr...

...The liberal agenda reached something of an apogee (or nadir, depending on one’s point of view) in the Carter years, when Americans were instructed to overcome their “inordinate fear of Communism” and to apologize for their own history at home and abroad...

...For example, while the late Owen Lattimore was most assuredly a Communist or a fellow-traveler, he was not—as McCarthy at first claimed—an agent of Soviet espionage, as the senator himself was later forced to admit...

...How could these people (Dwight Macdonald called them “scrambled eggheads” writing for the “intellectually underprivileged”) possibly M a R c H 2 0 0 8 T H e a M e R I c a n s P e c T a T o R 6 9 1 2 b o o K s I n R e V I e W be serious competitors in the battle of ideas, much less elect politicians who subscribed to them...

...Whatever we may think of this tactic on the part of the American wealthy, it is at least a rational explanation for what would otherwise seem irrational behavior...

...Let no one fool themselves: 50 years ago liberals were not a great deal more tolerant of debate than they are today...

...He frankly regrets American entry into the First World War, which he sees as having established the circumstances that led to the Bolshevik Revolution and the rise of Adolf Hitler...

...To be sure, these things did not just happen...