Conservative Exceptionalism

Bruce J. Schulman and Julian E. Zelizer, a couple of history professors, are about to publish a book they edited titled "Rightward Bound: Making America Conservative in the Seventies." Here they give the gist of how they see it.

Without agreeing to everything, I find certain trends here exciting. One is the emergence of the 1970s from the enormous, bloated shadow of the 1960s:

A quarter-century after the fact, historians are starting to recognize the centrality of the 70s. New scholarship suggests that the 70s transformed American economic and cultural life as much as, if not more than, the revolutions in manners and morals of the 1920s and 1960s. The 70s reshaped the political landscape as much as did the 1930s. In race relations, religion, family life, politics, and popular culture, the 1970s were a watershed in modern U.S. history.

That was bound to happen over time, of course; history (the academic discipline, not the thing itself) is constantly reinventing itself as fresh generations of graduate students investigate what was overlooked by their elders. But, as a survivor of the Class of '78, I'm glad I lived to see it.

Here's another long-overdue development in revising the received wisdom about the 1960s in America:

Joseph H. Crespino, an assistant professor of history at Emory University, recently published In Search of Another Country: Mississippi and the Conservative Counterrevolution (Princeton University Press, 2007), an investigation of segregationist politics in Mississippi that undercuts the conventional 60s-focused portrait of white resistance to civil rights. Instead of seeing white Mississippians as "pariahs within a larger liberal nation, one that finally made good on its centuries-old commitment to equality for all its citizens," Crespino sees them as crucial actors in a broader reshaping of American politics in the closing decades of the 20th century.

If that vague statement means what I think it does (I don't have Crespino's book), it may be that something I've been preaching in the wilderness for a few years now might finally get heard. If it gets some academic legitimacy, perhaps I won't be so readily dismissed as a racist for pointing out the complexities of rural Southern white America.

Then there's conservatism itself:

The reality of "conservative" America is that the federal government remains a large presence in American life. When disasters strike, we turn to government. When we retire, we turn to government. When we face external threats, we turn to government. Republicans failed to curb the growth of federal spending between 2001 and 2007, when they controlled the White House and both houses of Congress. In fact the Republican leadership developed new forms of government, ranging from the No Child Left Behind Act in education to a sweeping domestic-surveillance program.

The professors have their own explanation for why this happens, and it's rooted in the 1970s.

But what strikes me as exceptional about American conservatism is what it isn't -- and hasn't been for a long, long time. There is no American version of the statist conservatism that has characterized right-wing politics in Europe for the past two centuries, sometimes with chilling and horrific results.

That is the unresolved tension that tore apart the GOP under Bush: The trend of events and the impulse of the leaders under Bush has been toward statist conservatism. But that is anathema to the conservative movement in America. If something like the 9/11 attacks had happened in France in 1880 or Britain in 1930, how different the result would have been! People who make their bucks writing about fascist America overlook this: This was a period when many a nation would have drifted into right-wing statism. It's not happening here, and not because of the brave resistance of MoveOn.org or the steely spines of Reid, Pelosi, et al.

What happened to statist conservatism in the U.S.? I still don't know. It was the most powerful force in the government in the decade after the Constitution. Alexander Hamilton embodied it down to his toenails. It was dynamic, hopeful, confident, and in charge. It died with the Federalist Party, but the question is why it never revived in another guise.

The answer to that is a book or 20. But I like to remember what killed it. Jefferson's victory over Adams in the 1800 election. Which was one of two presidential elections in U.S. history (1828 was the other, coincidentally deposing Adams' son) decided by the notorious "three-fifths" clause in the Constitution.

That boost to the political power of the slave states has attracted far more obloquy than it deserves, especially based on its practical impact. It gave the South more representatives in the U.S. House, but the political clout of the South lay in the Senate (the advantage there, I think, was based on the nature of the planter aristocrats who could devote themselves entirely to politics, while their Yankee counterparts had to keep going home to make money).

Yet thanks to the slave-inflated vote in 1800, America swerved away from a dangerous authoritarian statism. And 28 years later, the three-fifths clause beat down the gatekeepers and threw open America to "pure democracy" that we claim to revere today, forgetting how much the Founders loathed it.

Tweedle

[posted by Callimachus]

Much is made this week of conservatives "abandoning" Bush. Some of what is said about it makes sense. Most of it is nonsense.

I'm not a conservative, so I can't speak for them. Who I can speak for are people who are not doctrinaire and locked into eternal opposition to someone or something or some party or some nation. People, in other words, who try to navigate the real world as it happens around them, guided by principles but not ossified by them, aware of ideologies and also of their limitations. Such a person's course of actions is bound to look like a drunken stagger when you only watch the walker, not the pitching deck of the world as it goes on around him.

In some sense, everything is a necessary evil -- from abortions to zoos -- with equal emphasis on both parts of the clause. Often you accept the bad for the sake of opposing the worse. And your rough measure of "bad" and "worse" is always being re-calibrated, unless you're stupid.

Bush and many of his inner circle were a bad lot I hated to see get power in 2000. But al Qaida, and the Taliban, and Saddam, were worse. The U.S. military rushing into difficult nations to fight uncertain wars was bad. But the failure to support them as they did so was worse. The temporary crippling of ancient civil rights and national ideals in the name of a fight was a short-term evil, not new in our history, and tolerable only in the light of the two above "worses."

Always it is a two-handed act. The easy-answer people never have to do balancing acts. Both hands grip firmly the sweat-soaked handle of the sledge they use to beat on their political or class enemies. They come at you like street gangs from both sides, Tweedledum and Tweedledee.

At various points for different people, the "this is bad" of the Bush Administration rose up and the "that is worse" of the Islamist threat subsided. The "this is bad" of battering the military against a hard job changed places with the "that is worse" of not giving it moral support in its work. The "this is bad" of getting our noses bloodied in Iraq for the sake of giving people a shot at freedom got overtaken by the "that is worse" of suspecting the whole region was playing us for suckers.

Which has the accidental effect of making some thinking people seem to agree with some unthinking extremists.

Who now proudly proclaim, in their unblinking puritanism, that they will never welcome or accept converts. They have an absurd tendency to see and write in terms of high school. I've seen the edgy, literate, articulate conservative blogger Jeff Goldstein derided in an extended metaphor as "the geeky kid who wants to sit at the lunch table with the artsy kids but they reject him, too," and so on and so on. Now Peggy Noonan is, I forget, "the intellectual girl who got to date the football captain but then he dumped her and now she's discovering she's not so special" or something. As though their opponents lived in the same juvenile "my parents and teachers suck" world as the fever swamp anti-war left.

News flash: Nobody wants to sit at your table. Nobody who wants to be part of your political psychodrama isn't there already.

Sophomoric

[posted by Callimachus]

Worth it for the title alone, GOP and Man at Yale, but also worth it for the read:

The young men and women of the Right aren’t reading much Richard Weaver these days—nor much Robert Nisbet or Russell Kirk, to name two other seminal conservative thinkers critical of modern warfare. The time when Young Americans for Freedom wore badges blazoned with the slogan “Don’t Immanentize the Eschaton” has long passed. Now College Republicans parade in shirts proclaiming “George W. Bush Is My Homeboy.” The campus Right has almost always been more activist than intellectual, just as the wider movement has been more political than cultural. But where once students were at least familiar with the names Kirk and Weaver, or Mises and Nock, today they look to Sean Hannity and Ann Coulter for guidance. They’re little acquainted with the wisdom of the contemporary Right’s founding generation, and it shows.

Who You Calling Conservative?

I live not far from Dover, the little bedroom borough in York County, Pennsylvania, where the "intelligent design" controversy played out. When the ruling came down against the school district, one of the local newspapers sub-headed its reaction story "Scientists, teachers pleased; conservatives furious."

That's how far "conservative" has fallen. Somehow, the name of the philosophy of Burke has come to be the nameplate the press nails under its lurid pictures of "gang of snake-handling yahoos." The left-wing bloggers use the term "wingnuts." The media uses "conservatives." Both seem to have the same image in mind, whatever word they use.

This Wall Street Journal piece, however, is a good reminder that there is such a thing as a genuine philosophical conservative approach to American life. And that it doesn't necessarily have anything to do with the Republican Party. And it can be internally consistent and dynamic. And that, while I am not quite in line with it (I'm somewhere on the line between there and Jeffrey Hart's "soft utopianism"), it is something I can respect and admire.

Among the great banes of modern conservatism is utopianism. Among its ideal virtues are "a healthy practical skepticism and the requirement of historical knowledge as a guide to prudent policy." Hart applies that combination to the current political scene, and he discovers case after case where the conservative position diverges from the Bush Administration or its allies.

On free markets, for instance:

But the utopian temptation can turn such free-market thought into a utopianism of its own--that is, free markets to be effected even while excluding every other value and purpose.

Which is a classic Russell Kirk position. Through some writings I had done I got to know a local college professor, W. Wesley McDonald, one of the last defenders of the old conservative ideology he had learned from his mentor, Kirk. I got to read an early copy of McDonald's book, "Russell Kirk and the Age of Ideology," which uncovered the philosophical foundations of Kirk's work.

It was an eye-opener, to me. Kirk, who died in 1994, is best known as the author of "The Conservative Mind" (1953), a book which galvanized young thinkers -- McDonald was one of them -- disaffected with the prevailing political culture of America. "The Conservative Mind" appeared at a time when received wisdom about conservatives in politics hadn't evolved since 1861, when John Stuart Mill pegged them as "the stupid party." American political scholars seriously argued in print that political conservatism was not a philosophical position but a mental maladjustment.

Kirk was a "traditionalist." He believed that an objective universal moral order exists, and that it ought to be defended from ideologues of the left and right. He disliked unbridled free-market capitalism (which fuels "the dream of avarice"), and he believed the state has a constructive role to play. He believed that traditional patterns and institutions -- "the permanent things" -- preserve order, and they are the best foundation of a political system that can offer real freedom rather than mere anarchy.

Hart also echoes Kirk in his high regard for a quality most modern Americans hardly think of when the read the word "conservative" -- beauty.

Kirk looked to literature and held that "ethical and normative truths are often best conveyed through a symbolic veil, as found, for example, in the medium of great poetry, rather than by the means of discursive explication."

Kirk could call T.S. Eliot friend. His belief in the power of myth and literary tradition makes one think not of Republican politicians but rather of Harold Bloom or Joseph Campbell. Literature "is the breath of society," Kirk wrote, "transmitting to successive rising generations, century upon century, a body of ethical principles and critical standards and imaginative creations that constitutes a kind of collective intellect of humanity, the formalized wisdom of our ancestors."

Hart sees the same quality in natural beauty.

The tradition of regard for woodland and wildlife was present from the beginnings of the nation and continued through conservative exemplars such as the Republican Theodore Roosevelt, who established the National Parks. Embarrassingly for conservatives (at least one hopes it is embarrassing), stewardship of the environment is now left mostly to liberal Democrats.

Other modern Republican shibboleths turn out to be equally adrift from classical conservatism. Evangelical religion, for instance:

Religion is an integral part of the distinctive identity of Western civilization. But this recognition is only manifest in traditional forms of religion--repeat, traditional, or intellectually and institutionally developed, not dependent upon spasms of emotion. This meant religion in its magisterial forms.

Or blanket opposition to abortion:

Nevertheless, most conservatives defend the "right to life," even of a single-cell embryo, and call for a total ban on abortion. To put it flatly, this is not going to happen. Too many powerful social forces are aligned against it, and it is therefore a utopian notion.

"Conservatives assume that the Republican Party is by and large conservative," Hart writes. "But this party has stood for many and various things in its history. The most recent change occurred in 1964, when its center of gravity shifted to the South and the Sunbelt, now the solid base of 'Republicanism.' The consequences of that profound shift are evident, especially with respect to prudence, education, intellect and high culture. It is an example of Machiavelli's observation that institutions can retain the same outward name and aspect while transforming their substance entirely."

It was Kirk who sounded the warning that conservatives and libertarians were not natural allies. In fact, as he knew, liberals and libertarians have more in common than the Latin root of their names, and more in common with one another than with conservatives. He also knew the difference between a conservative and a reactionary, as his disciple, McDonald, makes clear.

"Life is always presenting us with new possibilities, and hence our applications of the good must be constantly adjusted to emerging circumstances," McDonald writes. "The ethically ordered society is realized by the creative acts of successive generations of virtuous people striving to apply universal standards of the good to concrete situations. In this process, as traditions are preserved and renewed, society maintains a healthy balance between the twin necessities of change and preservation."

That's a kind of conservative I could stand to see a lot more of in the headlines.