The Chimera of Conservatism

...laissez-faire economics as well as corporate syndicalism...

...praises Rossiter's book in extravagent terms or when, in turn, Russell Kirk magnanimously asserts that Schlesinger is really a conservative at heart...

...and by virtue of providing organization for the impulse it helps strengthen and dignify it...

...The real function of conservative rhetoric is to legitimate existing institutions, to make persons feel comfortable in the political world (that is, to make them want to do what they have to do) and symbolically to cover naked oligarchy with the vestments of aristocracy...

...3) To procure strong emotional support for the social structure through the engineering of sentiments by the rhetoric of assent...

...By suggesting a conspiratorial view of social change, conservatism obj.^ctifies social anxiety, and the conservative fear of the innovator performs a social function similar to the fear of the devil in earlier periods...

...Has it protected the freedom of institutions or liberty of the Spanish people...

...italics mine—EVW...

...Man's higher nature, he asserts, must control his primitive nature to make possible a civilized society...

...Yet I would submit, by contrast, that it is not a movement to be taken lightly...

...Man is a social animal whose best interests are served by cooperating with other men...

...Between statism and individualism lies the middle way of ordered liberty...

...The more complex this militarycorporatebureaucratic apparatus becomes, the more vulnerable to shifts in sentiment it is...

...In many respects it is not possible to distinguish Rossiter's conservatism from what usually goes by the name of liberalism unless one examines its social function—what it is designed to do...

...What was formerly a chaos of trends (High and low Whiggery...

...The rare whispers of conservative rebellion are lost amid the conservative cries of assent...

...When polity and policy are fixed, when there seems no alternative to the welfare-corporate-garrison state except economic collapse or destruction by war, then conservative rhetoric becomes "the public philosophy...

...Each is pleased with the other, and no one's feelings are hurt when Arthur Schlesinger Jr...

...III The welfare-corporate-garrison state tends to build a system of highly organized and irrational institutions...

...Meanwhile the apologists for the system will continue to react not to reality but to pictures in the head...

...Indeed, he has no real meaning except as contributing member of one or more intrinsic groups...

...Lippmann's argument is equivocal in any case...

...And as the private personality becomes increasingly politicized, it is necessary to explain away the shrinkage of private living-space with arguments about "qualitative freedom" and the casuistry of "freedom for what...

...Lippmann's argument includes an appeal to natural law: society must be based on the "public philosophy," which he equates with the classical theory of politics, identified with natural law...

...He is convinced that classical natural law is the premise of civic institutions, but his defense of natural law will do that philosophy little good...

...Yet Bromfield is quick to be thankful for the putative wisdom of the present administration, and Kirk bows his head in piety before the awesome mysteries of Society...

...The American liberals are, by and large, very cordial in their relations with the new conservatives...

...Their plight is not new...

...principles...

...The rise of conservatism among American intellectuals has provoked ironic comment here and there but few attempts to explore its sources in the condition of society or to articulate its living function or to surmise its fate...

...He seems to be entirely unaware of the criticism the natural law position has received from the historical school, the utilitarians, David Hume, the pragmatists and a host of others...

...The Bohemian man of letters has practically disappeared, at least among those who engage public interest...

...It creates and justifies the idea of the state or of economic institutions as inhuman super-entities with a life of their own that transcends individual human lives...

...the authentic Conservative (who is) moved almost to tears by noblesse oblige...

...It offers little solace to an anxiety-ridden public whirled along by dizzy technological change and trapped in the garrison economy...

...While the liberals still tend to talk about policy, the conservatives are closer to the realization that within the framework of the welfare-corporate-garrison state, there is no alternative policy, and they are less concerned with policy than with attitudes: policy is immutable but sentiments may be changed...

...Whatever the truth of this remark for England, in America the intensity of debate comes mainly from the tiny remnant of radicals...

...Thus Rossiter writes: Conservatism is something more than a bundle of political and social principles...

...Impelled by the continuing revolution in technology, internal conceatration and centralization, and the pressures of an external Enemy, American society moves willy-nilly toward a balance between pluralistic collectivism (the union of corporate concentrates bound together by military production) on the one hand and politico-military centralization on the other...

...The unity in this farrago of notions and sentiments is simply a unity of function...

...Lippmann's public philosophy is based on a kind of negative pragmatism: accept it because bad things will happen to you if you do not...

...Opposed to this classical view of politics he sets up what he calls the Jacobin gospel, which "instead of ruling the elemental impulses . . . stimulated and armed them...

...Sentiment dominates even Rossiter's writing, which is otherwise comparatively even-tempered—in contrast to the promiscuous romanticism of Kirk and the superficial preciosity of Peter Viereck...

...Graham Hough, writing in the London Twentieth Century, recently suggested that "the old, sleepy conservative-liberal debate .. . has in our day assumed a new sharpness, almost a theological inten sity...

...It is not an agglomeration of lonely individuals, but a grand, complex union of functional groups...

...The liberals openly admire the conserva tives for their temper and restraint (qualities, as one discovers upon looking into their books, more imaginary than real) , while the con servatives patronize the liberals for their eagerness to learn decorum and their alacrity to blush over the Jacobin pranks of their youth...

...Furthermore, discipline and self-mastery are the qualifications for rulership in the civic state...

...is not only in the service of a bourgeoisie which is in a state of anxiety, but...

...Sentiment is still more unpredictable than the engineers of acquiescence would like-1984 more a counsel of perfection than an immediate reality—and it is not possible to conceal all the social costs and the life denying energy of the social structure...

...Those who do not know the past, Santayana said, are condemned to repeat it...

...Spain...

...But conservatism works well as an ideological sedative...

...Perhaps the central point to be made is that as the liberal garrison economy exerts pressures in behalf of acquiescence, it also creates uneasiness and tension which can momentarily be relaxed by veiling the acquiescence it demands in terms that imply and even permit a conservative criticism of its structure...

...Thus Burke and other Romantics have been used to make respectable the theory that the foundations of institutions are necessarily irrational...

...It thus has three main tasks: 1) To weld citizens (no longer cemented by primitive or natural bonds) to the unwieldy social apparatus by strong ideological ties...

...Today, both liberals and conservatives are theoretical Whigs...

...Consequently, he has more and more come to possess the bourgeois form of soul, of which one of the most conspicuous characteristics is an affectation of the political feelings of the aristocracy—an attachment to systems of arbitrary authority, to military and priestly institutions, a scorn for societies founded upon justice, upon civic equality, a cult for the past, etc...

...11 The social function of the conservative movement, quite apart from the various subjective intentions of its intellectual defenders, is to lubricate the machinery of acquiescence...

...Thus he constructs his conservative position—as "liberals" like Drucker, Galbraith and Berle construct theirs—upon the skeleton of the Whig theory of politics...

...all sorts of aristocratic, oligarchic, anti-democratic, xenophobic and quasi-fascist impulses) now becomes an orderly array under the arranging hand of conservatism...

...2) To divert attention from the irrationalities and the life-denying energy of the social structure...

...One might question Mills' judgment that "the attempt to create a conservative ideology in the United States (is) a little playful luxury a few writers will toy with for a while, rather than a serious effort to work out a coherent view of the world they live in and the demands they would make of it as political men...

...What is "new" and unique about the movement is not at any rate doctrinal, for the doctrines have been around for a long time, but the way a multitude of diverse elements are so easily assembled and identified as "conservative...

...For years he had criticized the masses because they responded not to political reality but to pictures in their heads...

...Since, ironically, the libertarian tradition of American political thought has traditionally resisted organicism, the function of neo-conservatism must now be to destroy this resistance...

...The elasticity of Whiggery partly accounts for the fact that there has been so much accommodation to conservative ideology and so little resistance...

...Perhaps when these irrationalities become intense enough, the entire edifice may collapse from a sudden reversal of mood...

...On the contrary, one might interpret neo-conservatism as a serious and desperate movement in the old struggle of the American mind to conceive a political self—a struggle that is now taking place in a political milieu where traditional American political theories are no longer adequate to explain political reality...

...The more complex the garrison economy becomes, the more organicist will be the ideologies that justify it...

...The world has changed in the last three decades but Lippmann has not: he still holds high his demophobia and aristocratic faith.* What is alarming today, however, is the striking similarity between his mood and that of the intellectuals of the Weimar Republic: the myths about mass behavior, despair at democracy's direction, attacks on parliamentary institutions, the call for strong and insulated executive leadership...

...The language of organicism uses biological analogies to describe social interdependence...

...It is faith, mood, sentiment, bias...

...Hieratic, it is the keeper of what Walter Lippmann calls "the signs and seals of legitimacy," and, as maker of liturgical myths, it is the consecrated defender of the "imponderable powers" of the state...

...Despite the recent attempts of Russell Kirk, Clinton Rossiter and others to suggest some canons, neo-conservatism behaves like the Cheshire cat when one examines it for a common body of doctrines and assumptions...

...To this purpose his argument is addressed...

...himself has become more and more of a bourgeois, endowed with all the social position and respect which belong to that caste...

...In contrast to conservatism, liberalism is generally associated with a philosophy of process and a concern for policies and techniques, often arguing from some form of relativism...

...Even as a metaphor, the idea of the organism "is a dangerous instrument of political thought...

...In his perceptive essay in the first issue of DISSENT, C. Wright Mills remarks upon the social irrelevancy of neo-conservatism and suggests that the position is merely tolerated by contemporary institutions...

...Others have been misled by the faddish characteristics of the movement and the comic agility with which some frivolous minds have leaped into it...

...served as a common program for revolutionists: it stimulated the revo lutions in England and France in the seventeenth and eighteenth cen turies, and resurged explosively in Continental thought just before the Bolshevik and Fascist revolutions...

...The political system is a balance of supremely coordinated power nuclei and controls administered by a coalition of managerial, bureaucratic and military elites...

...There are periods when natural law has been not at all conservative but, on the contrary, a powerful revolutionary force...

...Society rests on an eternal rock, guarded by providential forces— but watch out for Jacobins, Bolsheviks, leftists, pinkos or even liberals...

...The conservatives' talk about "reality" suggests an aphorism of Kierkegaard: What they say is as disappointing as a sign you see in a shop window that reads "Pressing Done Here...

...If you bring your things to be pressed, you will be fooled, for the sign is only for sale...

...Today, as the corporate personality becomes a dominant nucleus of political power, its defenders feel the necessity to ascribe to it a soul and a conscience...

...Now, for the intellectuals, Lippmann has new pictures...

...Mythical tendencies dominate political thought especially in times when it is not possible to do much about political reality...

...It is the Conservative who weeps at Gettysburg or Dunkirk, the Conservative who gets goose flesh when the band plays the national anthem...

...The social function of conservative ideology is to justify these institutions, though from a distance, and to participate in the higher levels of the public relations program—the engineering of acquiescence...

...The role of sentiment and the attack upon the independent mind is less apparent in the writing of a conservative like Walter Lippmann...

...A healthy society, he says, "will display a balanced combination of institutions," and he outlines a theory of countervailing powers, political and economic...

...It is the Conservative "keeps tight reign on his emotions," then heaven help us if he ever let himself go...

...Political theories which can make sense of the situation and still justify it can only be organic views of society...

...To make the irrationalities acceptable, the conservatives promote a distrust of rational criticism...

...Yet the fate of the conservative-liberal coalition is dependent on the fate of the present social structure...

...A garrison or command economy dominated by corporate concentrates and a military-bureaucratic apparatus is indeed a super-entity and must be justified by the defenders of the system...

...Reasoning from effects, Lippmann suggests that natural law philosophy (and he seems to mean the Thomist system of transcendental values) is the bulwark of free institutions...

...No longer does it make sense to discuss the place of the corporation in society...

...Russell Kirk grumbles over the ravages of industrial capitalism...

...there must be what Lippmann would call "the adherence of the whole body of people to the public philosophy...

...The conservatives (excluding the business-oriented conservatives) tend to couch their analogies in neo-feudal terms, borrowing from the history of medieval guilds and from Catholic social thought...

...add little to liberalism except a rhetoric and a temper, and the American liberals are gradually becoming more conservative...

...It provides a rhetoric of assent and an organized center from which to attack radical and, when necessary, liberal independence...

...One can only wonder if Mr...

...It is the organiza tion of that impulse to political acquiescence which has been steadily rising in this country these past two decades...

...The marriage is not premature...

...Their images, drawn from a system of social interdependence based on kinship, personal fealty and emotional bonds represents a kind of solidarity that has little relevance for the present system of highly rationalized institutions based on an advanced technology and impersonal, mechanical bonds...

...Lippmann is aware that the country in which Thomist natural law has been taught par excellence on all levels of the educational system is...

...From some conservative quarters one hears occasional mutterings of disaffection with the welfare-corporategarrison state: Louis Bromfield lashes out at foreign policy, immigration practices, and the growing domination of political life by the military...

...A system of objective, transcendental values may exist, but it is not "proven" by establishing the fact that it is needed...

...Hence he ignores its battle-scarred history and presents an archaic version of the philosophy...

...As it happens, however, this kind of faith is always poisoned in the Nessus shirt of skepticism...

...Even principles are less important than feelings...

...he warns that "the Conservative is careful not to ride the cellular analogy too hard, for he is aware that it can lead to a social theory in which man loses all dignity and personality...

...These institutions," he claims, "are inseparable from the public philosophy . . . in our time the institutions built upon the foundations of the public philosophy still stand...

...For it is true: the American conservatives can * Clinton Rossiter, Conservatism in America...

...In the pages that follow I propose to discuss the New Conservatism not so much in terms of its ideas—that, by now, has been done in DISSENT and elsewhere—but in terms of its significance in the American intellectual world...

...Rossiter's way out is a philosophy of organic pluralism...

...The doctrine has not changed much—original sin is an involution of the Whig theory of progress—but its function has...

...now the question is the place of the individual in corporate society...

...It may easily be used in a normative rather than in a descriptive sense—that is to justify the enforcement of certain kinds of solidarity rather than merely describe conditions of symbiotic interdependence...

...How fresh and relevant are the words of Julien Benda, written about the situation in France thirty years ago: The modern writer...

...On the one hand he claims: Society is cellular...

...Lippmann recognizes that the skeptic cannot be made to conform but must be made to want to conform...

...Clinton Rossiter exhibits the predicament of the conservative poised ambivalently between his libertarian heritage and his need to express an organicist view...

...Traditional libertarian political thought must therefore be replaced by organic theories...

...Natural law philosophy has often • Walter Lippmann, Essays in the Public Philosophy...

...Neo-conservatism is a transitional phenomenon, modulating to rapidly changing social and political forces...

...However, where old Whiggery was generally libertarian and individualist in outlook, the new Whiggery is Burkean and Tory-tinged—conservative and more organicist...

...Yet it does so by providing a set of political catch-words and symbols—those which direct attention backward to an hypothetical pre-industrial conservative order—which are basically irrelevant to our liberal version of the garrison economy...

...As A. A. Berle has shown recently, giant economic organizations are quasi-political units...

...The Whiggish dilemma and its role in the development of American political thought receives perceptive analysis by Louis Hartz in his recent book, The Liberal Tradition in America...

...It is faith, mood, sentiment, bias...

...To preserve the institutions, he asserts, the public philosophy must be taught...

...Critics have been misled by the content of conservative dogmatics...

...Natural law for Lippmann is a political myth, grounded in the conviction that wishing will make it so...

...They must adhere at all costs...

...The conservatives offer assurance that the foundations are absolute, that the roots of society are sound, or, by another analogy, that the house is secure, despite the nibbling of Jacobin rats...

...it seems a waste of time to enter its soggy domain and struggle with ideas that ooze away from the bright light of criticism...

...Like all ideologies, its social function is not to be determined merely from a study or criticism of its explicit claims and formal ideas...

...So that if the intellectuals are at present not ready for the absolute organicism of Maistre and Maurras, they are being gradually prepared...

...Critical analysis of it is important because it reveals the direction of its movement and the forces that sustain it, but it will have little effect on the movement itself, the conservative mind being largely impervious to criticism...

...But Rossiter cannot go all the way...

...Rossiter's position clearly illustrates that the old Whiggery of nineteenthcentury liberalism has metamorphosed into the new Whiggery of twentieth-century conservatism...

...One might argue that the present conservative-liberal coalition is a stage in the history of American Whiggery, which is a story in itself...

...Far from being an intellectual sport or luxury, as Mills suggests, it is a serious effort by writers who are impelled to collaborate with power in order to work out a coherent view of the new world they live in and the demands it makes of them as political men...

...Yet, even though conservative ideas have little relevance to contem porary reality, they do correspond in function to a grave social need...

...As Ernest Barker warns, organismic language conjures with metaphor, and the change from a metaphor to a myth to an idol is all too easy...