The Future of Conservatism: Conflict and Consensus in the Post-Reagan Era
288
The Future of Conservatism: Conflict and Consensus in the Post-Reagan Era
288eBookDigital Original (Digital Original)
Available on Compatible NOOK devices, the free NOOK App and in My Digital Library.
Related collections and offers
Overview
Edited by noted Reagan scholar Charles W. Dunn, this collection casts conservatism as a collage of complexity that defies easy characterization. Although it is commonly considered an ideology, many of conservatism’s foremost intellectuals dispute this notion. Although it is thought to embody a standard set of principles, its principles frequently conflict. Although many leading intellectuals, liberal and conservative, believe that conservatism lacks a significant tradition in America, it has contributed more to American life than the credit lines indicate. And although it is usually thought to create homogeneity among its adherents, in truth conservatism is marked by a great deal of heterogeneity in both its adherents and its ideas.
In fact, conservatism’s complexity may well be its strength—or so the essays gathered here suggest. In painting a bright picture of the prospects for conservatives, The Future of American Conservatism is a timely and thought-provoking volume.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781497620742 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Intercollegiate Studies Institute (ORD) |
| Publication date: | 04/08/2014 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 288 |
| File size: | 274 KB |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
The Future of Conservatism
Conflict and Consensus in the Post-Reagan Era
By Charles W. Dunn
ISI Books
Copyright © 2007 ISI BooksAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-4976-2074-2
CHAPTER 1
The Uneasy Future of American Conservatism
George H. Nash
In the boisterous chatter of current political debate, it is easy to forget that American conservatism has become middle-aged. In 2005 its flagship publication, National Review, celebrated its fiftieth anniversary. A couple of years before that, the Intercollegiate Studies Institute, another star in the conservative firmament, celebrated its own half-century of existence, along with the golden anniversary of Russell Kirk's tour de force, The Conservative Mind. In Washington, DC, the Heritage Foundation—the nerve center of the conservative public policy establishment—is now more than thirty years old.
The Anxieties of Maturity
What happens when a political movement reaches maturity? For those within its ranks, the impulse grows to proclaim success and salute its intrepid founders in festschrifts, biographies, and other acts of commemoration. For those outside its ranks, passion yields to envious curiosity: how, the critics wonder, did such a phenomenon come into prominence and power? With the advent of middle age, present-mindedness gives way slowly to increased self-consciousness and a quest for deeper understanding of one's roots.
In 2007 American conservatives are proudly conscious of their past. But mingling with their impulse to celebrate is a discernible note of unease. In part this is a consequence of the instability of the world as we now know it. Particularly since September 11, 2001, Americans of all political persuasions have lived with a heightened sense of the unpredictability of events. Whether the source of anxiety be terrorism abroad, hurricanes at home, the prospect of nuclear weaponry in the hands of Iran, or predictions of an imminent global pandemic of bird flu, many Americans at present are convinced that things are not quite under control. All this makes it risky for anyone in politics to rest on his laurels. Relaxation is impossible. The shape of the future cannot be taken for granted.
Other unsettling perceptions are peculiar to conservatives. Among many on the right, there is a growing realization that conservatism's political success in recent decades has not been matched by commensurate changes in the way we live. For two generations the critique of the liberal welfare state has been integral to conservative discourse, yet governmental expenditures and regulations continue to grow. Conservatives passionately decry the tide of moral relativism, yet year by year they perceive a further hollowing out of the moral foundations of our civilization. There is a sense, moreover, in parts of the conservative intellectual community, that "the old gray mare, she ain't what she used to be": that the conservative movement itself has been corrupted, even transmogrified, on its road to power.
Lurking beneath these anxieties is another, seldom expressed yet not far (one suspects) from the surface of conservative consciousness: when a political or intellectual movement becomes middle-aged, does this mean that its glory days are numbered? Must noonday sunshine fade inevitably into twilight? To put it bluntly: is the sun about to set on the conservative empire?
The Evolution of Fusion
Such questions cannot be addressed in a vacuum. Before we can profitably peer into conservatism's future, it is necessary to grasp its present configuration and understand how the present came to be. In a post-9/11 world, it would be a bold person indeed who would venture to predict the contingent factors that may affect the prospects of American conservatives. In this respect the future is unknowable. What is knowable is conservatism's past. By examining the recent evolution of the American Right, we can identify some of the internal factors that impinge upon its present, creating the frontier where the next chapter in the conservative saga will be written. In conservatism's own history, first as an intellectual and then as a political movement, may be found important clues to its problematic present and uncertain future.
Perhaps the most important fact to assimilate about modern American conservatism is that it is not, and has never been, univocal. It is a coalition with many points of origin and diverse tendencies, not always easy to reconcile: a river of thought and activism fed by many tributaries. At its best it has been driven not by petty material interests but by ideas and by a driving urge to implement them. It is a coalition, moreover, that has evolved over two generations: a datum of increasing significance.
In 1945, at the close of World War II, no articulate, coordinated conservative intellectual force existed in the United States. There were, at most, scattered voices of protest, profoundly pessimistic about the future of their country and convinced that they were an isolated Remnant, standing athwart history yelling, in the words of William F. Buckley Jr. at National Review, "Stop!" History, in fact, seemed to be what the Left was making. The Left—liberals, socialists, even communists—appeared to be in complete control of the twentieth century.
In the beginning, in the aftermath of the war, there was not one rightwing renaissance but three, each reacting in diverse ways to challenge from the Left. The first of these groupings consisted of libertarians and classical liberals, resisting the threat of the ever-expanding State to individual liberty, free-market capitalism, and individual initiative in the economic realm. Convinced in the 1940s that post–New Deal America was rapidly drifting toward central planning and socialism—toward what the economist Friedrich Hayek famously called "the road to serfdom"—these intellectuals offered a powerful defense of free-market economics that achieved some prominence and influence by the mid-1950s. From men like Hayek, Ludwig von Mises, and John Chamberlain in the 1940s and 1950s, to Milton Friedman and the Chicago School economists in the 1960s, to Arthur Laffer and the supply-side economists in the 1980s, and to such recent winners of the Nobel Prize in Economics as Gary Becker, the libertarian conservatives produced a sophisticated defense of free-market capitalism and exerted an enormous influence over the American Right. They helped to make the old verities defensible again after the long nightmare of the Great Depression. The Reagan administration's policies of tax-rate cutting, deregulation, and encouragement of private-sector economic growth in the 1980s were the direct product of this intellectual legacy. More recently, the current Bush administration's agenda for tax-cutting can be traced intellectually to the supply-side orthodoxy that captured the Republican Party in the Reagan era.
Much of this perspective was enunciated in powerful books, such as Hayek's masterly polemic The Road to Serfdom (1944), a book now recognized as one of the most influential works published in the English language in the twentieth century. Other works of note included Ludwig von Mises' Human Action (1949), Milton Friedman's bestsellingCapitalism and Freedom (1962), Thomas Sowell's Knowledge and Decisions (1980), and George Gilder's Wealth and Poverty (1981). On a more popular level, the free-market fiction of Ayn Rand shaped the minds of many, including a young man named Alan Greenspan.
Concurrently, and independently of the libertarians, a second school of nonliberal thought emerged in America in the first decade after World War II: the "new conservatism" or "traditionalism" of such men as Richard Weaver, Peter Viereck, Robert Nisbet, and Russell Kirk. Appalled by totalitarianism, total war, and the development of secular, rootless, mass society during the 1930s and 1940s, the "new conservatives" (as they were then called) urged a return to traditional religious and ethical absolutes and a rejection of the moral relativism that had allegedly corroded Western values and produced an intolerable vacuum filled by demonic ideologies. More European-oriented and historically minded, on the whole, than the classical liberals, the traditionalist conservatives extolled the wisdom of such thinkers as Edmund Burke, Alexis de Tocqueville, and the Anglo-American literary giant T. S. Eliot, and called for a revival of Christian orthodoxy, classical natural law, pre-modern political philosophy, and mediating institutions between the citizen and the state. Why? In order, they said, to reclaim and civilize the spiritual wasteland created by secular liberalism and the false gods it had permitted to enter the gates.
In provocative books like Richard Weaver's Ideas Have Consequences (1948) and Robert Nisbet's The Quest for Community (1953), the traditionalists expounded a vision of a healthy and virtuous society antithetical to the tenets of contemporary liberalism. From towering European émigré scholars like Leo Strauss and Eric Voegelin they learned new techniques for assessing the problem of secular modernity. From Russell Kirk's monumental tome The Conservative Mind (1953) the fledgling traditionalists acquired something more: an intellectual genealogy and intellectual respectability. After Kirk's book appeared, no longer could conservatism be dismissed, as John Stuart Mill had dismissed British conservatives a century before, as "the stupid party." No longer could conservatism be disparaged as the philosophy of provincials and philistines. In books like The Conservative Mind the highbrow conservative academics of the 1950s struck a blow against the liberals' superiority complex.
Third, there appeared in the 1940s and 1950s, at the onset of the Cold War, a militant, evangelistic anticommunism, shaped by a number of excommunists and ex-Trotskyists of the 1930s, including Whittaker Chambers, James Burnham, Frank Meyer, and many more. It was also reinforced by anticommunist exiled scholars from Eastern and Central Europe, including Stefan Possony and Gerhart Niemeyer. These former men and women of the Left and their European émigré allies brought to the postwar American Right a profound conviction that America and the West were engaged in a titanic struggle with an implacable adversary—communism—which sought nothing less than the conquest of the world.
Each of these emerging components of the conservative revival shared a deep antipathy to twentieth-century liberalism. To the libertarians, modern liberalism—the liberalism of Franklin Roosevelt and his successors—was the ideology of the ever aggrandizing, bureaucratic welfare state which would, if unchecked, become a centralized totalitarian state, destroying individual liberty and private property. To the traditionalists, modern liberalism was a disintegrative philosophy which, like an acid, was eating away not only at our liberties but also at the ethical and institutional foundations of traditional society, thereby creating a vast spiritual vacuum into which totalitarianism could enter. To the Cold War anticommunists, modern liberalism—rationalistic, relativistic, secular, anti-traditional, quasi-socialist—was by its very nature incapable of vigorously resisting an enemy on its Left. Liberalism to them was part of the Left and could not effectively repulse a foe with which it shared so many underlying assumptions. As James Burnham eventually and trenchantly put it, modern liberalism was essentially a means for reconciling the West to its own destruction. Liberalism was the ideology of Western suicide.
In the late 1950s and early 1960s the three independent wings of the conservative revolt against the Left began to coalesce. The movement found its first popular embodiment in the editor of National Review, William F. Buckley Jr., who, apart from his extraordinary talents, personified each impulse in the developing coalition. He was at once a traditional Roman Catholic, a defender of the free market, and a staunch anticommunist (a source of his ecumenical appeal to conservatives.
The Evolution of Division
As this consolidation began to occur, certain intellectual problems arose for those who took the name conservative. It was not enough for them to rebel against contemporary liberalism. If they were conservatives, what did they wish to conserve? What was the conservative tradition to which they professed such fealty?
It soon transpired that the conservative intellectuals (not all of whom liked the word "conservative") gave a variety of answers. Some identified conservatism with the defense of Christian orthodoxy. Some extolled what they labeled the Great Tradition of political philosophy going back to ancient Greece and Rome. Some invoked natural law in opposition to liberalism's emphasis on natural rights. Some venerated Edmund Burke as their political patron saint. Most admired America's Founding Fathers and its tradition of limited government and constitutionalism. Some, like Hayek, repudiated the conservative label entirely and styled themselves Old Whigs or classical liberals.
Complicating this quest for philosophical order was a severe challenge to the fragile conservative identity: a growing and permanent tension between the libertarians and the traditionalists. To the libertarians the highest good in society was individual liberty, the emancipation of the autonomous self from external (especially governmental) restraint. To the traditionalists (who tended to be more religiously oriented than most libertarians) the highest social good was not unqualified freedom but decent behavior, or, as they often put it, ordered freedom resting ultimately on the cultivation of virtue in the individual soul. Such cultivation, argued traditionalists, did not arise spontaneously. It needed the reinforcement and guidance of mediating institutions and even of the government itself. To put it another way, libertarians tended to believe in the beneficence of an uncoerced and spontaneous social order, both in markets and morals. The traditionalists often agreed, more or less, about the market order, but they were far less sanguine about the unregulated moral order. Spontaneity was not a term of endearment in the traditionalist lexicon.
Not surprisingly, this conflict of visions generated a tremendous polemical controversy on the American Right in the 1960s, as conservative intellectuals attempted to sort out their first principles. The argument became known as the freedom-versus-virtue debate. It fell to a former communist and chief ideologist at National Review, a man named Frank Meyer, to formulate a middle way that became known as fusionism—that is, a fusing or reconciliation of the competing paradigms of the "libs" and the "trads." As a purely theoretical construct, Meyer's fusionism was rickety, but as a formula for political action and as an insight into the actual character of American conservatism, Meyer's project was a considerable success. He taught libertarian and traditionalist purists that they needed each other and that American conservatism must not become doctrinaire. To be relevant and influential, especially politically, it must stand neither for an abstract, dogmatic antistatism nor for a regimenting authoritarianism but for a society in which people are simultaneously free to choose and desirous of choosing the path of virtue.
In arriving at this modus vivendi, the architects of fusionism were aided immensely by the third element in the developing coalition: anticommunism, an ideology that everyone could share. The presence in the world of a dangerous external enemy—the Soviet Union, the Evil Empire, the mortal foe of liberty and virtue, of freedom and faith—was a crucial cement for the nascent conservative movement. The life-and-death stakes of the Cold War helped to curb the temptation of right-wing ideologues to absolutize their competing insights and thereby commit heresy.
Politically, the postwar American Right found its first national expression in the campaign of Senator Barry Goldwater for the presidency of the United States in 1964. The 1964 election had three enduring consequences for conservatives. It created the Democratic congressional majorities which permitted enactment of President Lyndon Johnson's Great Society program, the greatest lurch to the Left in domestic policy since the New Deal. It led to conservative capture of the political machinery of the Republican Party. And it created a new national political figure in Ronald Reagan, whose eloquent television speech for Goldwater on the eve of the election led directly to Reagan's successful candidacy for governor of California two years later.
It was not long after the 1964 election that a new impulse appeared on the intellectual-political scene, one destined to become the fourth component of today's conservative coalition. The phenomenon became known as neoconservatism. Irving Kristol's definition conveyed its essence. A neoconservative, he said, was "a liberal who has been mugged by reality." According to another definition, a neoconservative was someone who uttered two cheers for capitalism instead of three. In any case, one of the salient developments of the late 1960s and 1970s was the intellectual journey of various liberals and social democrats toward conservative positions.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from The Future of Conservatism by Charles W. Dunn. Copyright © 2007 ISI Books. Excerpted by permission of ISI Books.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
Contents
Introduction Conservatism on Center Stage Charles W. Dunn,I The Uneasy Future of American Conservatism George H. Nash,
II Four Heads and One Heart: The Modern Conservative Movement James W. Ceaser,
III The Irony of Conservative Success George W. Carey,
IV A Plea for Constitutional Conservatism Harvey C. Mansfield,
V The Electoral Future of Conservatism Michael Barone,
VI Conservatism, Democracy, and Foreign Policy Daniel J. Mahoney,
VII Add, Don't Subtract: How Christian Conservatives Should Engage American Culture Marvin Olasky,
VIII From Reagan Democrats to Social Conservatives: Hard Choices Facing the Pro-Family Cause Allan C. Carlson,
IX Stuck-with-Virtue Conservatism Peter Augustine Lawler,
Epilogue The Enduring Reagan William Kristol,
Notes,
Index,