AGAINST THE NEOCONSERVATIVES THE DEBRIS OF IDEAS
Hux, Samuel
American conservatism has not been, by and large, intellectually very precise. Lionel Trilling's judgment in 1950—which every conservative writer or anthologist seems dutybound at some time to...
...Kristol's now famous sentiment from Two Cheers for Capitalism is instructive: A nation whose politics revolves around such issues as day-care centers or school lunches or the "proper" cost of false teeth is a nation whose politics is squalid, mean-spirited, debasing...
...I think it would be a good idea if we could manage to reduce our profit margins by knocking prices down considerably...
...A worthy intention, that...
...He may be an ex-liberal "newly" conservative, like Nathan Glazer or Irving Kristol, or he may never have been, so far as I know, anything but conservative, like Robert Nisbet or Peter Berger—names I select to make things manageable...
...Since we do not live in a world that's small and beautiful and stable, laissez-faire economics makes sense theoretically as a system of justice only if one imagines capitalists saying to themselves, "You know, things are pretty rough on the people...
...His intellectual credentials aside, what distinguishes the neoconservative from the ordinary conservative, according to a conservative friend, is that he's "not so sure about capitalism" (two cheers instead of three...
...I'm reminded of a remark by the traditionalist conservative George Will that the prototypical American conservative has examined his conscience, prayed long for guidance, "and come to the conclusion that it is high time the government cut his neighbor's benefits...
...knows what conservatism really means in this nation...
...I think the first direction signifies a quarrel with democratic socialists over means, the second over ends...
...2) those Americans who seem not to be so motivated are suffering from temporary "psychological deprivation" as a result of poverty, bad housing, bad health, and so on...
...By this token, the second direction, Kristol's, a defensive conservatism of possession, seems to me rather Whiggish: a society is great only to the degree that its financial and industrial barons are respected...
...In what way is a nation whose politics revolves around such issues as cost-efficiency, or GNP, or "proper" profits, a nation whose politics are grand, fair-spirited, elevating...
...2) Welfare presupposes no such assumptions as Kristol would stick it with...
...I don't think that neoconservatism is a monolithic movement...
...it would seem he'd wish that adequate health and welfare measures be established once and for all so that politics can be released to its "proper" or "higher" energies...
...Some of his characteristics are in fact virtues, like enterprise, pride, ambition, which have become crippled...
...then he denies to the capitalism he would defend its traditional motor...
...The point is that whether Kristol is dispensing advice to corporations or arguing details with Friedrich von Hayek or Milton Friedman, his energies are directed to justifications of what we still insist on calling the market...
...The thesis consists of the following propositions: (1) all Americans are highly motivated to work as a means of improving their material condition...
...And if someone is really offended that politics "revolves around such issues" (oh that it did...
...that this is the moral issue for him...
...It means that Welfare, whether in its present sorry state or in a more just and efficient arrangement of payments or as negative income tax or whathaveyou, is not cost-efficient, and I don't have any obligations toward my unfortunate fellow citizens anyway, although charity toward a private individual of course is a holy thing (even the thought of it, that more likely than the act) and good at least for my sense of self (and may be morally instructive for the recipient: he sees me being kind and feels a little ashamed of himself, as he damned well ought to), and since we're not going to get rid of Welfare, as frankly I can't see us doing, I don't see why it shouldn't be made at least a little more punitive...
...I'm not caricaturing an evil fellow, just an ill one...
...Lionel Trilling's judgment in 1950—which every conservative writer or anthologist seems dutybound at some time to mention in rebuttal— remains apt: "with some isolated and ecclesiastical exceptions" conservative impulses in America express themselves not in ideas but "in action or in irritable mental gestures which seek to resemble ideas...
...When a conservative whose conservatism amounts to, or even contains, capitalist apologetics so tsches, it's a sign either that thinking has ceased or that thoughts must be disguised...
...Now, Kristol's tsching is a little more sophisticated than the ordinary conservative writer's—only occasionally does he moan that we are but the descendents of Adam, alas that it were not so...
...There's a hard winter coming, and the people need a break, you know...
...True, Adam Smith could imagine a world in which the unrestrained free competition of fallen men concerned only with self-interest gave birth paradoxically to a common good...
...It means, rather, that free enterprise should suffer no controls (grants and tax loopholes, that's another matter), either because I am a free enterpriser or because I may someday be, and if someone argues the heresy that American capitalism is no longer free enterprise he's trying to confuse us, and if some industry practices sharp tricks that might seem to justify controls that's a matter of one rotten apple, not the barrel, and anyway cleverness is one way of getting ahead and not altogether unadmirable...
...This neoconservatism is no more than the old: a capitalist apologetics that sometimes speaks the elegant language of aesthetic disdain...
...Might one say, socialized medicine is based on a flattering assumption about human nature—that all people want to be healthy, that those who do not are suffering from anomie and such, and that if you make health care a social right they will exercise their "normal" impulse to live...
...We wouldn't have to lay off people to compensate for the loss...
...Nor does it mean Glazer's concern with legitimate "limits of social policy" in such a way that Welfare as a mechanism for alleviating social distress does not weaken "traditional mechanisms" from family to landsmanschaft...
...Who—no one excluded—would believe it...
...And I think that fact is the most significant of all: the ordinary elector of congressmen and voter on referendums (I thought conservatives were supposed to abhor the plebiscite as a violation of the genius of indirect government...
...and that he thinks that's clearly a more elevated consideration than questions of who baby-sits for the working mother's kids or how much dentures cost, or even the question of whether such matters aren't of consequence to a traditional institution like the family...
...But since the stakes are large—a humane vision of distributive justice—there's no reason to expect that acrimony will not pierce that universe...
...The other "neo-" conservatism, represented by Kristol, is talking about something else altogether...
...I see two principal directions...
...Who, a demented right-wing ideologue excluded, would argue such...
...On the other hand, the traditionalist rhetoric, which is nonetheless retained, often reveals ironically the conservative's true assumptions and makes him look rather foolish—as when he contructs a conservative rationale out of prescriptive rights (instead of an abstractly reasoned rights-of-man), out of respect for ancient values (instead of lately attained prejudices), out of duty and responsibility (instead of self-interest), out of the virtue of old-fashioned property with which one has mixed his labor (instead of mere stock-holding or managerial interest), and so on, and then argues the consequent justice of something as relatively abstract, newfangled, acquisitive, and alienating as laissez-faire capitalism, to say nothing of neocapitalism...
...Long before Kristol raised his two cheers (two not out of skepticism about capitalism, 166 as he admits, but because nothing deserves three), back when it was still barely possible to consider him a kind of cautious, unromantic, no-nonsense liberal, iconoclastic, realistic, crusty, and all such good things, he was writing in On The Democratic Idea in America: Welfare policy in the United States is based on a very simple—and enormously flattering—thesis about American human nature...
...It is beside the point that I don't think capitalism ever had any moral moorings or any virtue lovelier than skindeep...
...The "neoconservatism" of today is not a reeling away from a misspent totalitarian youth, and, in fact, it brings with it a reputation for circumspection, intellectual moderation, fierce honesty, and a kind of respectability almost philosophical that the older "new conservatism" never really had...
...But why, if a nation's politics revolves around dental costs and such, must it revolve around them alone...
...But, first, he was writing about a model economy of small manufacturers and entrepreneurs, none of whom where capable of cornering a market or were interested in forming conglomerates or agreeing cleverly among themselves on prices...
...He told us also where we might hear living Irishmen proud that "they have succeeded in increasing sevenfold the pensions of widows, a mere earnest of their intent...
...Much of Kristol's last book (usually the parts that first appeared in the Wall Street Journal) amounts to no more than advice to executives on how to improve the corporate image and how to put the "New Class" of conspiratorial anticapitalist intellectuals of the media, universities, and foundations in their place...
...It makes sense, that is, only if one subscribes to a happy view of human nature as essentially altruistic, which conservatives usually dismiss because they think leftists hold it...
...And since I think the differences are more profound than the single term neoconservative suggests, I'd like to use some qualitative and historical terms to give both directions their due and suggest that conservatism remains as fractured as it's always been...
...I cannot, however, be so "understanding" toward his mentors who tell him his virtues are in a good state of social health...
...It doesn't, of course...
...but that's a clever rhetorical move, and also a way of ignoring what one should be able justly to expect a government minimalist to realize (if conservatives really are concerned with minimalism): that if government has any justification for its existence at all, it is precisely to see to the health and welfare of its citizens...
...As far, perhaps, as to that other, overdue, considera167 tion of Welfare, national health insurance...
...It is absurd to propose both that human nature is dark and that capitalism is a just ordering of the economy...
...Displeased with a politics that "revolves around such issues," as Kristol would put it, he quoted Burke: "What shadows we are, and what shadows we pursue...
...Kristol would like them established, as a matter of fact, but his definition of adequacy is stingy: no more than the bare minimum, which will leave a capitalist polity safe from social complaints...
...4) That old American conservative attitude toward Welfare suited up anew by Kristol, since it attacks the assumptions it thinks lie beneath Welfare, is ultimately not a quarrel with specific abuses but with Welfare itself...
...On this matter, conservatism tends to have its cake and eat it too: first, the charge isn't true but, second, if it is it's because conservatism begins with lived experience, rooted traditions, and those rights assumed to be ancient, obvious, and unarguable, which Edmund Burke called "prescriptive," instead of with a priorism and rationalistic engineering...
...It does not propose that all want to work if they but could, although it assumes that most do...
...He told us where we might find the noble facades of monuments and the statues of Burke and other great figures from the heroic past...
...But on the other hand, if he does not think the "impulse to selfbetterment" is "'normal...
...it is just as philosophically glib, a mere ideological justification of crippled virtues, a manner of dismissing certain social necessities as "beneath" us...
...I don't think the first neoconservative type will be listened to very closely by the nonreflective, ordinary American of the right, but the second will be welcomed as mentor...
...and as the one with which "he completely disagrees," "the primacy of the community...
...That, in the 1950s, was one "new" conservatism, and somehow one knew what to expect of it...
...anything else is extra...
...among those with which "he substantially disagrees," "order, unity, equity, stability, continuity, security, harmony, and the confinement of change as marks of the good society...
...The question is begged, when it's convenient to beg it, whether rationalistic and intellectual are interchangeable terms...
...Another question begged is whether mainstream American conservatism has anything to do with Burke, or with the lyricist of tradition Coleridge, or even with John Adams...
...Clinton Rossiter, certainly a friendly student, in Conservatism in America listed among those principles of traditional conservatism about which the American conservative "is serenely unconcerned," "the mystery, grandeur, and tragedy of history...
...It does not mean "to empower people"— to use the title of a pamphlet by Berger and the liberal journalist and theologian Richard John Neuhaus—through strengthening those "mediating structures" like neighborhood, family, church, and voluntary association as a counter to the "megastructures" of public and corporate life...
...What's revealed is "essentially . an Adam Smith got up in Edmund Burke's prose," as Joseph Epstein once characterized William Buckley in these pages...
...And I do not think the second direction of the "new" conservatism is signficantly different from the old...
...and, second, he assumed a model world that knew nothing of geometrical population growth, potential scarcity of food and material, or other factors that would upset the delicate balance theoretically achieved by my greed being limited by yours and yours by mine...
...It proposes that whether in the individual case it's a matter of structural unemployment or base human sloth, a national polity has no ethical right to consciously allow a human being to sink to greater degradation or to starve, and that if Welfare is merely "the dole" and degrading, degradation is not so final as starvation...
...3) One wonders how far the conservative "realistic" attitude might be extended...
...The first I'd characterize as essentially either temperamentally and philosophically conservative, as Nisbet and Berger seem to me to be, or pragmatically conservative, as Glazer strikes me with his sociological nuts and bolts...
...Nor does it mean Nisbet's fear that power grows "invisible" in modern society...
...Rather, the "twiceborn ideologue"—as John P. Diggins called the type—trading one fierce political extreme for another, tended to revel in his cowboy virtues...
...I hesitate to help bloat the political vocabulary, but privately I think of the three as "neo-Tories" when I consider that oldfashioned Toryism, while adamant that change must come within the framework of a traditional order, often turned its energies to the questions of social justice that the Whigs tended to assume needed no direct and "meddlesome" attention...
...But at least there was no quoting of Coleridge or paeons to Disraeli, no tragic posturings about "fallen human nature...
...If he benefits (the story went) that's a mere accident of liberty-for-all, if he benefits just a little more that's the price all must pay for liberty, essentially his benefit is no greater than the ghetto-dweller's or unskilled laborer's...
...Not duty, but freedom to be dutiful or not...
...But much of it (usually those parts collected from the Public Interest) is an energetic analysis of what happens "When Virtue Loses All Her Loveliness"— what happened to capitalism when "the will to success and privilege was severed from its moral moorings...
...168...
...I'm sure Kristol would protest that's not exactly what he means, although readers of the Wall Street Journal, in which his words first appeared, might be excused for assuming it is...
...The neoconservatives concerned with "traditional structures," like Berger, Nisbet, and Glazer, yet share a common universe of discourse with democratic socialists— although it seems to me that socialists are more appreciative than neoconservatives of the fact that traditional structures for coping with distress began breaking down long before anything approaching social democratic measures were taken, and that a responsive measure is not a cause...
...Either thinking has ceased, or Kristol's reflections on human nature are but a debator's thrust...
...but as often is the case, crippled virtue means a mean spirit...
...Of course, there was no frank admission that the principal beneficiary of conservatism is the capitalist...
...A FEW REMARKS: (1) As long as intellectual historians can remember, conservatives have been tschtsching about "human nature" when it's convenient to do so: we know that man is fallen and imperfect, while you liberals and socialists think him perfectible...
...It proposes that even if a particular adult would not work, no matter how many and good the chances, the sin of the father should not be suffered by the dependent—even if intervention on behalf of the dependent were considered meddlesome and an insufficient respect shown the traditional institution of the family...
...What of the newest...
...3) improve their material environment and the "normal" impulse to self-betterment will automatically assert itself...
...Absolute laissez-faire in the market...
...When, as used to happen with great regularity, one of those ex-Comrades not to the conservative manor born would come along to articulate the real impulses of 164 American conservatism—the late Frank Meyer, for instance—he generally dispensed with the Tory rhetoric and admitted that Burke is an intellectual foreigner to the American right...
...Society not a community (not a collectivity, he'd have interpreted that), but an atomistic series of individuals...
...we could just take some of it out of R&D and set a limit on executive wages...
...Russell Kirk began The Conservative Mind, back in 1953, by reflecting on Burke in Dublin, with an affectation of tragic nostalgia...
...On the other hand, the rhetoric often marvelously obscures the assumptions and makes them seem mere afterthoughts just casually above the inconsequential—as when Russell Kirk assures us that "A conservative order is not the creation of the free entrepreneur: rather, the modern man of business exists only because a conservative order recognizes the importance of his function...
...Not to Kirk...
...As worthy as these considerations are, they're not what conservatism means to the 165 affirmative voter on Proposition 13 or to the voter helping push Congress surely to the right, any more than it means the patent absurdity I'm sure these thinkers would reject, that the American people or enough of them are tired of the plebeian vulgarities of the tasteless modern world, concerned with the threats to the moral backbones of their neighbors, and, in general, are jealously guarding the ancient polities they love because they inherited them from their fathers and their fathers' fathers, knowing the value of Chesterton's "democracy of the dead," knowing with Burke that society is "a partnership not only between those who are living, but between those who are living, those who are dead, and those who are to be born...
...Kristol's voice and tone, like the substance of his concerns, sound too familiar to me...
Vol. 26 • April 1979 • No. 2
