The Conservative Intellectual Movement in America since 1945
O'Lessker, Karl
Book Review/Karl O'Lessker Postwar American Conservatism • • It is a measure of Mr. George Nash's great good sense that in a book on American conservatism he begins by disclaiming any intention...
...the latter, the dominant conservative counterpoint to that policy...
...Nor, let me quickly add, does a nontheological evaluation of Communism mean a value-free evaluation...
...It seems obvious to me that what is at issue here is a matter not of intellect but of personality, for it requires a certain personality type to perceive political conflict in theological terms...
...Opposition to Communism on economic and political grounds will lead to containment abroad, wary watching at home...
...One can perfectly well condemn Stalinism or Brezhnevism (or Maoism or Titoism or any other form of authoritarian collectivism) without invoking eschatology, Gnosticism, or the War between Heaven-and Hell...
...Nor, as I argued earlier, is there much prospect they will be so long as conservatism i§ debarred from espousing welfare-state economics...
...It says all too much, I'm afraid, about that totalitarian streak in postwar conservatism that Hayek (among others) found so dismaying...
...Nash remarks the enormous popularity of Barry Goldwater's Conscience of a Conservative (ghost-written for him by L. Brent Bozell...
...Their own most eagerly desired goals are to crush the Eastern elites, to elevate to unchallengeable orthodoxy the folkviews of "the virtuous people," to restore a nearly vanished order to this monstrously permissive society...
...To an older generation, however, it still comes as something of a shock to hear conservatives described as complaisant toward the exercise of established authority...
...The two chapters in which Nash describes this species of conservatism are entitled, appropriately, "The Revolt against the Masses" and "The Recovery of Tradition and Values...
...rises at the antipodes from individualism...
...opposition to Communism, socialism, and utopian schemes of all kinds...
...Nothing I shall say in the following paragraphs is intended to question Solzhenitsyn's moral and literary greatness or his right to condemn Communism in apocalyptic terms...
...The point here is that one large group of conservative thinkers isn't all that addicted to freedom...
...It is another of the great virtues of George Nash's account of postwar conservatism that he makes no attempt to paper over the cracks in the movement's walls...
...conservatism is community of spirit...
...Whatever else this species of neopopulist conservatism might be, it is a very long way from the more familiar and coherent verities of a Hayek or a Kirk...
...Republican partisans may complain that this was a result of Eastern liberal media misrepresentation of Goldwater's positions...
...For another, the men whose work he treats were largely a colorful crowd whose zest for combat was exceeded only by their sense of Mission—and they saw nothing in their Mission to discourage them from havingat one another (not to mention at liberals) with murderous enthusiasm...
...Republican, William Buckley is Mr...
...But the policy consequences of these differing modes of perception are enormous...
...One hears its characteristic accents more and more frequently in the writings of such stalwarts as Jeffrey Hart and William Rusher...
...acceptance of traditional morality and the need for an inelastic moral code...
...This was not crankiness on Hayek's part...
...Conservatives can hardly make the same complaint, because for the most part those "misrepresentations" were statements of perfectly familiar conservative positions drawn straight from the pages of the Senator's best-seller...
...And "He explicitly dissociated himself from the 'Tenth Amendmentite anxieties' that James J. Kilpatrick and Russell Kirk express...
...Kendall himself had, in his own words, "sworn no vow of absolute fidelity...
...Nash goes on to argue that "Meyer and other conservatives never tired of stressing that conservatism was not an ideology, complete with sacred texts or a Fourteen Points...
...As to the native American breed of anti-Communist, it is not very difficult to understand why persons of a conservative bent would find Communism repellent both as to philosophy and operations...
...belief in Christianity or Judaism (or at least the utility of such belief...
...I]t did not try to encapsulate all its beliefs in a handbook of doctrines...
...But other conservatives may well stop to ask themselves whether electing a congenial President is worth the sacrifice of fundamental conservative principles...
...Pray don't fall laughing to the floor just yet...
...I shall resist doing so, except to make certain observations relevant to conservatism's present-day political situation...
...That, I think, will provide a truer measure of the immensity of the task...
...Kevin Phillips...
...Hence, too, perhaps, William Buckley's bittersweet description of himself as "a conservative grown up in the knowledge that victories are not for us...
...I may be excused for preferring a different explanation...
...And for anyone who claims to value freedom as he values the air he breathes, it will hardly do to find virtue in one brand of tyranny on the grounds that it is ideologically opposed to a different brand...
...Hence Kevin Phillips' impassioned emphasis on social rather than economic issues...
...The essential challenge, as Nash so well puts it in a paraphrase of a Whittaker Chambers remark, is "to defend enduring truths in a language appealing to America in the 1970s...
...I quote from memory and must therefore report it only as a paraphrase: What this country needs, said Kendall, is a new orthodoxy to which all must conform...
...Those who entered the movement via Traditionalism and anti-Communism see freedom as at best an instrumental value, useful only insofar as it conduces to the pursuit or maintenance of other, more fundamental values—order, for example, or piety, or privilege...
...Anti-Communism continues to be the most conspicuous strain in conservative music...
...But it is also true that even so fierce an opponent as L. Brent Bozell, in a 1972 interview, conceded that fusionism had become the de facto consensus, and the more judicious William F. Buckley spoke of a conservative "symbiosis...
...William F. Buckley, Jr., John Chamberlain, William Rusher, and Ralph de Toledano were among those most deeply affected by Chambers' themes...
...What is difficult to account for is the tendency to see it as metaphysically evil...
...It was a decade later, during the sixties, when that sort of thing began to annoy me on behalf of such friends as Ben Rogge, who had at least as good a claim to conservative credentials as did all those hot-eyed young Torquemadas who were insisting that people like Rogge were heretics because they hadn't much stomach for holy wars and even less for ramming orthodoxies down anyone's throat...
...This dawning awareness then began to have broader ramifications...
...The most familiar names here are James Burnham and Whittaker Chambers, though it is worth noting that a great deal of the polemical firepower came from such Central European Emigres as Gerhart Niemeyer, Stefan Possony, and Robert Strausz-Hupe...
...a `gut affirmation' of the goodness of America and the West...
...Every hundred pages or so he feels compelled to reiterate the common grounds upon which conservatives could stand...
...At least one major component of the conservative movement, the Old Whigs and libertarians, would find this the worst of all possible worlds...
...Nash doesn't need me to tell him that more than a few "right-wing intellectuals" will not be very eager to clamber aboard that particular platform...
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...Not myself being a conservative when I first started regularly reading their writings, I was not especially offended at the spectacle of one set of ideologues telling another that they were unfit to wear the colors...
...But I am not self-deluded or self-indulgent enough to try to erect a matter of personal preference into a high political principle...
...Those who had succeeded to the largest part of the conservative mantle were of a strikingly different breed...
...But by 1960, the year of Hayek's essay, with Taft dead the bet-ter part of a decade, that was no longer the case...
...Let me call this latter group, for want of a better term, the neopopulists...
...26 The Alternative: An American Spectator May 1976 they saw around them but that, more often than not, governmental initiatives only made things worse...
...The thoughtful reader would be repaid by letting his mind dwell for a few moments on the second part of the prescription, with its lip-licking advocacy of punishment and expulsion for nonconformists...
...To us, a conservative was primarily an unyielding anti-New Dealer, a bitter opponent of any accretions to government power...
...to free enterprise .h la von Mises...
...Put another way, ordinary Americans have never been able to work themselves up to the theological fever-pitch of anti-Communism that has characterized so much of postwar conservative thought, which in turn has tended to repel rather than attract voter support...
...Pragmatism characterizes also the transformation of Old Liberals to neo-conservatives on the question of government control of society...
...For while many still cling passionately to that vanishing ideal of a less statist society, other members of the Great Fusion find it decreasingly enchanting...
...For it is notoriously true that, for many of the most ardent anti-Communists, the late Generalissimo Francisco Franco was something of a cult hero and his Falangist dictatorship the model of a well-ordered state...
...Conservative...
...This hope consists in the emergence of what the Wall Street Journal has called a "neo-conservative movement," staffed to a considerable extent by people who less than a decade ago were card-carrying New Deal/Fair Deal liberals...
...He died trying...
...But on almost all other large policy issues, bread-and-butter liberals have had much the best of the argument...
...The flow began with the anti-New Deal free marketeers and libertarians like Albert Jay Nock, Friedrich Hayek, and Ludwig von Mises, who regarded individual freedom as the supreme human value, a free market economy as an indispensable requisite to its attainment, and the state as its inevitable enemy...
...The next identifiable group of conservative thinkers gathered under a banner which bore but a single device, Anti-Communism...
...Far more important is it, he rightly says, "to get on with the task of explaining what conscious conservatism in the United States has been since World War II...
...If, for Burnham and Chambers, the late Dean Acheson was a cowardly appeaser, for Kristol and Podhoretz he was a hard-nosed, tough-minded statesman who played an anti-Communist hand with skill and courage...
...Younger readers will find nothing surprising in Hayek's observation...
...Meanwhile, Hayek and the libertarians denied they themselves even were conservatives...
...The former characterizes official U.S...
...Its central impulse is pragmatic rather than metaphysical...
...Surely you know several people who would enjoy The Alternative's blend of serious analysis and factual information, and its stained glass window on the world of the absurd...
...Here indeed the chasm dividing groups of self-identified conservatives yawns wider and wider in our own day...
...To be sure, most Americans have been resolutely anti-Communist—though it is unlikely they ever preferred Burnhamite liberation to the containment policies of official Washington...
...If the imagined spectacle of Bible-belt bookburners, Texas oil millionaires, New York construction workers, and California financiers marching together behind a common banner seems irresistibly funny, control your mirth long enough to recollect the component parts of the New Deal: as heterogeneous and improbable as anything Kevin Phillips is proposing, it ruled us for twenty years, sanctified by five successive Presidential elections...
...Vide anything Willmoore Kendall ever wrote on the subject of individual rights versus society's will...
...Notwithstanding its several oddities, it is a not altogether inexplicable development...
...In much the same way that Robert Taft was Mr...
...the Alternative: An American Spectator May 1976 25 even the "strong national defense" proposition if accepting it entails a Goldwaterish open-handedness toward the Pentagon...
...For he is not only a great writer and bona fide refugee from Soviet tyranny but an organ-thunderous exponent of the demonological view of Communism—and he has earned the right to it...
...Chambers' influence was immense: "it is doubtful," says Nash, "that the experience of Communism would have seared the conservative consciousness as irrevocably as it did were it not for...
...And conservative policies have not, since 1930, had much sales appeal...
...While they have picked up on many of the themes of common garden-variety conservatism, two seem to stand out: anti-Communism and anti-Big Governmentism...
...But none of this was very doctrinaire, very "principled" in classic conservative terms...
...Yet there is in all of this gloom a ray, and perhaps more than a ray, a beam, of hope for the kind of conservative whose concern is much more for limiting the power of government than for elevating the folk wisdom of the masses to official Orthodoxy...
...But what electoral consequences does it portend...
...hostility to positivism and relativism...
...Individualism is social atomism...
...What will appear especially intriguing for readers of George Nash's book—a history of the conservative intellectual movement—are the intellectual difficulties that lie in the way of bringing conservatives together on a political platform fashioned, in effect, by Willmoore Kendall...
...their intellectual and spiritual progenitor was Willmore Kendall...
...But George Nash, happily, whatever his own convictions on these matters, sees it as no part of his assignment-to declare judgments in favor of any of the litigants...
...It is important to be right about this because Buckley has for so long been so exemplary as well as influential...
...Not only the most inflexible libertarians, say, and Randians, who don't regard themselves as right-wingers anyway, but many in the Chicago School would doubtless have trouble accepting the moralistic and religionizing planks and perhaps Kendall's lip-licking advocacy of punishment and expulsion for nonconformists says all too much about that totalitarian streak in conservatism that Hayek (among others) found so dismaying...
...Paul, a system which in practical effect would be the fruit of a marriage between rednecks and hard-hats...
...For these men the evil and menace of ComThe Conservative Intellectual Movement in America since 1945 by George H. Nash Basic Books $20.00 munism approached apocalyptic dimen sions...
...Certainly it does not involve differences of interpretation of a complex set of empirical data...
...Most notable is the absence of any reference to a limited government of separated powers...
...After the word "language" add the phrase "and policies...
...Tyranny is tyranny...
...And what about a conservative like William F. Buckley, Jr., surely the most influential figure in the entire movement...
...There is a "so'syour-old-man" quality about much of this, but I can't help reflecting that while conservatives have been largely justified in assailing anti-Fascist liberals for their willingness to forgive, forget, or ignore Communist enormities, that same brush dipped into a different barrel of tar will deface conservative pretensions as well...
...Such exemplary diffidence comes as a mighty relief after so many years of enduring the windy dicta of all those self-appointed guardians of conservative purity who never tired of proclaiming what the true conservative position had to be on everything and everyone from Abel to Zoroaster...
...Reflecting on this, Nash comments that "He had even attacked the widespread conservative belief that political freedom and free enterprise were inseparable...
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...Perhaps my own inability to see it so bespeaks a fundamentally trivial cast of mind...
...This is something of what Friedrich Hayek talked about in his famous essay, "Why I Am Not a Conservative...
...So it all makes for good lively reading, and for the reviewer the great temptation is to join in the melee at this safe distance of time...
...For the hard fact is that Wallaceite construction and assembly line workers and inflation-ridden retirees are not going to give their votes to a candidate who preaches free enterprise—not when the opposition can so easily translate abstract doctrine into specifics about the elimination of social security, medicare, unemployment compensation, and so on...
...Chambers more than anyone else gave this strain of conservative thought its characteristic tone...
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...please print) My Name Address City State Zip 1. Subscription for Address City State Zip 2. Subscription for Address City State Zip 3. Subscription for Address City State Zip The Alternative: An American Spectator May 1976 27...
...The anti-Communism so forcefully espoused by neo-conservatives resembles that of earlier conservatives in being inalterably suspicious of (primarily) Soviet intentions, and therefore favorable to a strengthened national defense and disinclined toward detente...
...They came to see that massive government intervention in the market served far more often to dampen productivity and inflate the currency than to cure economic ills...
...So they changed...
...Old Conservatives joined them on foreign policy...
...Some of the most prominent names here are Edward Banfield, Nathan Glazer, Irving Kristol, Daniel Moynihan, and Norman Podhoretz...
...This may sound boring but isn't...
...If it is correct to assume that he would be unwilling to lend his immense prestige to a vote-gathering enterprise as intellectually shoddy as neopopulist conservatism, its chances for electoral success may not be worth the time even to think about...
...The neo-conservatives held certain values in common with most thoughtful Americans and they discovered that these values were threatened by current trends and policies which they themselves had been espousing...
...Whether minimum-wage increases, federal aid to education, medicare, supplemental unemployment benefits, or any of the rest, RICHARD STRAUSS whenever economic security (real or imagined) confronted conservative principles, the latter never stood a chance...
...This is not at all to say that they are unprincipled...
...Moreover, the definition is defective at least as much for what it leaves out as for the too much it includes...
...Vide the Buckley/Bozell defense of McCarthyism, and especially their rationalizations for suppressing dissent...
...After the first fine flush of joy over having dished the New York Review crowd, Buckley would not, I think, be ecstatic...
...as it] more and more came to resemble the old liberal policy of containment...
...Flogged to attention by Kevin Phillips, a growing number of conservatives now see the way to a true conservative hegemony in this country: a coalition of forces as broad and powerful as the hated Roosevelt Coalition—Reaganites and Wallaceites, together at last, one and indissoluble...
...George Nash's great good sense that in a book on American conservatism he begins by disclaiming any intention or need to define "conservatism...
...It is worth quoting his final effort: "There was a fascinating heterogeneity in conservative thought, yet most right-wing intellectuals readily agreed on certain fundamental 'prejudices' which they articulated and refined in many different ways: a presumption (of varying intensity) in favor of private property and a free enterprise economy...
...Nash cites his "three essential themes—the sense of titanic struggle, the interpretation of that struggle as God versus Man, and the belief in the fundamental continuity of liberalism and Communism...
...Nor is it easy to imagine joy filling the hearts of the Traditionalists, whose world-weary elitism would find scant comfort in a socioeconomic order based on the raw will of the masses...
...To be sure, also, public opinion surveys during the last two decades have shown broad public hostility to federal court initiatives in the areas of criminal justice and school busing, on both of which liberals have tended to side with the courts...
...Instead, in the coolest, most thoughtful way, he goes about charting all the streams and rivulets of self-identified conservative thought that flowed together after 1945 to make a goodly river, if not exactly a raging torrent...
...Just get three of them to sign up for a year, send us their checks and the form below (or a reasonable facsimile), and we'll extend your current subscription for one year...
...But Goldwater was buried under one of the great electoral landslides of American history...
...They help to explain, too, why conservatism has been such a bust at One can perfectly well condemn Stalinism or Brezhnevism (or any form of authoritarian collectivism) without invoking eschatology, Gnosticism, or the War between Heaven and Hell...
...policy since World War II...
...Quite a number of conservatives, Kirk and Kendall among them, continued to try to tell other conservatives what they had to believe in order to be conservatives...
...Chambers is dead but Alexander Solzhenitsyn is a more than adequate replacement for him...
...support of strong national defense...
...They are concerned far more with policies than with philosophical principles...
...For one thing, Nash writes well and manages never to be tedious in his exposition...
...The graven image of a conservative was Senator Robert A. Taft...
...The neo-conservatives developed a new understanding of, and respect for, the institutions of capitalism...
...All that is lacking at the moment is a great popular issue and a great popular leader, neither of which is yet in sight...
...The reason heretofore why conservatism hasn't been more successful at the polls is that most Americans tend not to be very ideological in their thinking...
...In it he spoke of "the characteristic complacency of the conservative toward the action of established authority and his prime concern that this authority be not weakened rather than that its power be kept within bounds...
...Appalled," in Nash's phrase, "by the erosion of values and the emergence of a secular, rootless, mass society"—and fervently anti-Communist to the core of their being—they began to speak as if individual freedom were at best too expensive a luxury for Western Civilization threatened by, indeed staggering under, the implacable onslaughts of secularism and Communism...
...Vide Russell Kirk: "True conservatism...
...Nash puts the matter well when he discusses the "subtle change in the conservative foreign policy of the early 1970s...
...Distrusted, indeed detested as hewas by Kendall, how pleased would he be with a system to which Kendall would be Publius, if not St...
...But Phillips is surely right in wanting to prepare the ground...
...A most extraordinary realignment (to use Nash's apt word) is taking place...
...Their most articulate spokesman is Mr...
...It is no great problem for Phillips precisely because political power, not intellectual consistency, is the object...
...As we have already seen, he at least understood the word "conservative" to have a certain quite definite content, and he felt altogether justified in denying that it was applicable to himself...
...Most of the rest of the book consists of a comprehensive account of the swirls and eddies of conservative thought during the fifties and sixties...
...Awakened from their dogmatic slumbers by a succession of Great Society policy failures and by the wise and eloquent account of them by Daniel Moynihan, many of them began to realize not only that Big Government was incapable of solving the social problems In order for conservatism to be electorally successful it will have to transform itself into a kind of welfare-state conservatism socially conservative but economically liberal...
...Far from being embarrassed by the charge that they are statist and illiberal, many present-day conservatives hasten to submit supporting evidence...
...And above all they came to understand that the Behemoth our well-intentioned liberalism had created was almost, if not already, out of control, growing into a welfare state so vast, so stifling, so overpowering in its control of so much that had once been private, that it seemed hardly worth the effort to try to inhibit its carcinomic growth...
...And there will be no conservative victories, certainly not at the national level, without the votes of these people...
...On the contrary, he describes with lucidity and care the efforts of "fusionists" like the late Frank Meyer to map the common ground on which all, or most, conservatives might comfortably stand...
...24 The Alternative: An American Spectator May 1976 the polls: for all their undoubted dislike and distrust of Communists and Communism, the American people have had no inclination for wars of liberation in Eastern Europe, let alone Vietnam, and were more scared than amused by Senator Goldwater's 1964 remark about "lobbing an H-bomb into the men's room at the Kremlin...
...My own favorite, not cited by Nash, is from a mid-fifties symposium in which Kendall participated...
...The votes just weren't there...
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...Opposition to it on theological grounds will lead to calls for Holy War abroad, state-imposed orthodoxy at home...
...Well, yes and no...
...These were but a few constituent elements of the working conservative consensus...
...But I am (unhappily) inclined to think it is the wave of the future for politically active conservatism...
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...Soon they were joined, if only nominally, by that very different group of thinkers such as Richard Weaver and Russell Kirk who conceived the Good Society as necessarily hierarchical, traditionalist, and profoundly inimical to mass culture...
...Nash thinks he came closer to success than I do, but each reader will be able to form his own judgment thanks to the author's full disclosure of the record...
...For my part, being upper-middleclass in income and tastes and a bit soft on Roman Catholicism into the bargain, I should much rather be dictated to by Spanish Fascists than by Russian Communists...
...For all their outcries against bureaucrats, they are not opposed in principle to government efforts to promote security, whether national or economic, not caring that it takes large numbers of bureaucrats to accomplish such efforts...
...So, despite his initial good resolution not to get hung up on the question, Nash, like the proverbial poor sufferer poking at an aching tooth, keeps returning to the problem of conservative unity, or lack thereof...
...their most influential organs of opinion are Commentary and The Public Interest...
...and those who do not conform must first be punished, then expelled...
...What has transformed Kendall's quirkiness and idiosyncrasies into the intellectual driving force behind a political movement is the sweet smell of electoral success...
...Dumbfounded, rendered almost mute a few years ago by a conservative President's opening to Peking and pursuit of detente with the Soviet Union, ardent anti-Communists have now found their voices again...
...A related point has to do with conservative indulgence for anti-Communist but decidedly undemocratic governments elsewhere in the world...
...Chambers and the trial of Alger Hiss...
...What this means, then, as Kevin Phillips recognizes, is that in order for conservatism to be electorally successful it will have to transform itself into a kind of welfare-state conservatism—which is to say socially conservative but economically liberal...
...They joined the Old Conservatives on domestic policy...
...It differs, however, very significantly in having none of that crusading zeal, that liberationist, Armageddon-now quality that so characterized—and stigmatized—the earlier variety...
...It is certainly true that an all-star cast of conservative luminaries told Meyer in effect to go peddle his fusionist papers elsewhere (Russell Kirk, for example, accused him of being "filled with detestation of all champions of au-thority...
Vol. 9 • May 1976 • No. 8
