By Matthew Continetti
Thursday, December 03, 2020
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On October 27, 1960, National Review celebrated its
fifth birthday with a gala dinner in the ballroom of the Plaza Hotel. William
F. Buckley Jr.’s speech that evening struck a melancholy note. He framed his
remarks around the lives of several prominent members of the audience: Herbert
Hoover, General Douglas MacArthur, and Admiral Lewis Strauss, the former
chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission whose nomination for secretary of
commerce had been rejected by the Senate.
Like these men, Buckley said, National Review did
not fit with its times. “We are all of us in one sense out of spirit with
history,” Buckley observed. “And we are not due to feel those topical
gratifications which persons less securely moored will feel as they are
carried, exhilarated, in and out with the ebb and flow of events.”
Liberalism was dominant. “What is not fashionable,”
Buckley said, “are some of those certitudes and intuitions that most of us here
in this room aim to serve.” These “certitudes and intuitions” included
religious faith, a commitment to individual freedom, and the knowledge that
“the Communist experiment, the worst abuse of freedom in history, is a violent
mutation on truth, a horrible caricature on justice.” Buckley pointed to the
careers of Hoover, MacArthur, and Strauss (and might have mentioned his own
reputation) as proof that the defense of “forgotten virtues” was unpopular
among intellectual elites.
Conservatives, Buckley went on, drew satisfaction from
resisting the pull of the crowd. “And I expect,” he concluded, “that they and
all of you, my good and generous and devoted friends, must be happy, as I am,
to know that for so long as it is mechanically possible, you have a journal, a
continuing witness to those truths which animated the birth of our country, and
continue to animate our lives.”
Six decades later, Buckley’s journal maintains its
witness. But the conservative movement that he helped to build has fractured.
It no longer coheres. Presidential politics divided its ranks. National
populism challenged its principles and institutions. And multiculturalism and
identity politics toxified the culture it inhabits. Critics from both the right
and the left say that conservatism is outmoded, a failure, a dead end. What,
they ask, has conservatism conserved?
It’s a tricky question. The answer depends on one’s
baseline for comparison. Judged by today’s circumstances, the challenges facing
the United States are profound. The Right is split and uncertain. There is much
work ahead of it.
By the standards of 1960, however, the achievements of
the conservative movement are undeniable. It changed the world to such a degree
that it is easy to forget its influence. That is because conservatives solved
many of the problems they set out to address, removing them from public
concern. These accomplishments outweigh conservatism’s blind spots, missed
opportunities, and bad calls. And they suggest the form of a conservatism
devoted to national renewal in the era of the coronavirus, China, and Black
Lives Matter.
By “conservative movement,” I mean the network of
institutions, publications, and individuals that sprang up in the middle of the
20th century to defend political and economic freedom against the challenges of
bureaucratic centralism at home and Soviet totalitarianism abroad. This
movement had five major parts. The first consisted of organizations that
promoted the conservative cause in general, beginning with the Foundation for
Economic Education (1946), the Mont Pelerin Society (1947), the Intercollegiate
Studies Institute (1953), the Young Americans for Freedom (1960), the New York
Conservative Party (1962), the Philadelphia Society (1964), and the American
Conservative Union (1964).
The second part was a communications apparatus, from Human
Events (1944), Regnery Publishing (1947), National Review (1955),
and Modern Age (1957) to talk radio and Christian broadcasting. The
third and fourth parts were charitable foundations and think tanks. Finally,
there were groups devoted to a single issue or cause, such as the National
Right to Work Committee (1955), the National Right to Life Committee (1968),
the Eagle Forum (1972), the Gun Owners of America (1976), Concerned Women for
America (1978), the Federalist Society (1982), and Americans for Tax Reform
(1985). All of them fought what Buckley liked to call “the effronteries of the
20th century.”
The movement had its first success in reclaiming a place
within the Republican Party. By 1960, the “modern Republicanism” of Dwight
Eisenhower, Richard Nixon, and New York governor Nelson Rockefeller was
ascendant. Conservative heroes were either dead (Robert Taft and Joseph
McCarthy) or defeated (California senator William F. Knowland). Only four years
later, however, a group of young activists helped win the GOP presidential
nomination for the conservative hero Barry Goldwater.
The Goldwater nomination ended in a landslide victory for
Lyndon Johnson. But it also reestablished the Republican Party’s conservative
brand. And it guaranteed conservatives a spot in the party’s organizational
structure. Not all subsequent Republican nominees belonged to the conservative
movement (far from it). But each one had to include conservatives in his
coalition. This relationship was neither inevitable nor permanent. It continues
to be resisted by many within the party.
The GOP became the instrument through which the
conservative movement reoriented the nation’s foreign, economic, social, and
judicial policies. Of these realms of activity, foreign policy was by far the
most important. The conflict between the United States and the Soviet Union
shaped practically every aspect of world politics between 1947 and 1989. Even
before the onset of the Cold War, however, opposition to the Soviet Union and
to the spread of Communism and socialism unified the American Right. Buckley
referred to anti-Communism as the “harnessing bias” of the movement.
This bias informed conservative calls for
political-ideological warfare against Moscow, for the rollback of Soviet
dominion, for a buildup of conventional and nuclear forces, for aid to anti-Communist
authoritarian regimes, for an end to détente and “coexistence,” and for a
reassertion of national pride and willpower. When Ronald Reagan became
president in 1981, he pursued a multifaceted strategy against the Soviets that
resembled what he had been reading in conservative journals for decades.
By the end of 1991, the Soviet Union was no more. Of
course, it is true that the collapse of the Soviet empire and the end of Soviet
Communism resulted from many causes. And conservatives often found themselves
disagreeing with Reagan on arms control during his second term. But it is also
the case that U.S. foreign policy would have been more accommodating to Soviet
power if not for the unwavering conservative opposition to the atheistic,
immoral, and illiberal Communist system. It was conservatism that, in the
aftermath of Vietnam, provided the intellectual and political support for a
strategy of confrontation that accelerated the Soviet Union’s demise.
The expansion of political freedom that followed the collapse
of Communism coincided with, and drew energy from, a global turn toward free
markets. Tax and poverty rates are lower, private- and public-sector unions are
weaker, consumer goods are cheaper today than in 1960, and stagflation is no
longer an issue, because of the work of conservative and libertarian economists
such as Friedrich Hayek, Milton Friedman, George Stigler, James Buchanan, P. T.
Bauer, and Robert Mundell.
No economic order is perfect. Many on the right (and
left) did not appreciate the risks inherent in global economic integration with
authoritarian regimes. As demographer Nicholas Eberstadt noted recently in a
report by the American Enterprise Institute, “America’s engines of material
advance and personal success are in serious need of repairs.”
Still, it is foolish to pretend that the economic utopias
one finds described online are achievable. And it is obvious that the world is
both far richer and far freer than it was 65 years ago. Liberals have a
seemingly irrepressible desire to increase government taxes, expenditures, and
regulations. But the conservative movement has made it more difficult for them
to realize their goals, while expanding opportunities for personal savings and
investment.
Conservative victories are easy to take for granted.
Consider the fall in violent crime. The political scientist James Q. Wilson
spent his life demonstrating the efficacy of both order-maintenance (or “broken
windows”) and community policing. He and his colleague George Kelling helped
bring about changes in the theory and practice of policing in the early 1990s
that hastened the dramatic collapse in crime rates. Only in recent months, when
widespread vandalism, arson, murder, and theft reappeared in some urban
centers, have people rediscovered their appreciation for public order and
personal safety.
In 1996, when the Republican Congress and President Bill
Clinton agreed to a welfare reform that made assistance temporary and linked
benefits to employment, most social scientists and liberal spokesmen said the
law would immiserate the poor. They said that women and children would suffer
most. But none of that happened.
Drawing from the scholarship of Wilson, Charles Murray,
Lawrence Mead, and Robert Rector, the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity
Act was the most dramatic blow against the welfare state in half a century. It
was the culmination of a long-running argument between the Right and the Left
over individual agency and the demoralization that accompanies dependency. And
today it is just another part of the political background. Hardly anyone pays
attention to it.
What cannot be ignored is the triumph of the conservative
legal movement. National Review was born during the first years of the
Warren Court. The legal academy and federal judiciary embraced the
jurisprudence of the “living Constitution.” Judges made law and created rights
out of constitutional “emanations” and “penumbras.” Beginning in the 1970s,
however, Antonin Scalia, Robert Bork, Laurence Silberman, and others argued that
the Constitution should be interpreted according to its original public
meaning.
The Reagan administration embraced their efforts to
reground constitutional and statutory interpretation in the written text. The
philosophy of originalism inspired Reagan’s Justice Department and judicial
selections. His attorney general engaged in a public argument over originalism
with Justice Brennan.
The conservative legal movement permeated the federal
judiciary and the legal academy. Originalism became such an overwhelming force
that even liberals found it necessary to call themselves originalists. The
confirmation of Justice Amy Coney Barrett means, among other things, that a
majority of Supreme Court jurists are active members of the Federalist Society.
And a sixth justice, John Roberts, has been associated with the society in the
past.
Originalism does not guarantee policy outcomes. That is
its point. But it does lead judges and lawyers to return, however reluctantly,
to the words and ideas of the Framers and the Constitution.
It is not clear why conservatives were able to change the
nation’s legal culture but unable to change the university itself. It’s not as
if they did not try. The conservative critique of the academy began in 1951
with Buckley’s God and Man at Yale, went through 1987 with Allan Bloom’s
The Closing of the American Mind, and continues in the present with the
work of the National Association of Scholars, the American Council of Trustees
and Alumni, Heterodox Academy, and the Foundation for Individual Rights in
Education. But the situation on campus has not improved.
Nor has the situation elsewhere. Various sectors of
government and culture remain no-go zones for conservatives. “At the central
point of communication and control,” wrote Frank S. Meyer in 1970, “a
liberalism of rote and habit still prevails — in the university establishment,
in the media, in the governmental bureaucracies from State to HEW, in a large
part of the corporate bureaucracies.” That sentence could be written today. The
only difference is that Meyer was dealing with a single department of health,
education, and welfare. We have two.
It is this failure to capture “the central point of
communication and control,” along with the absence of the “harnessing bias” of anti-Communism,
that is behind a lot of the current despair on the right. Many conservatives
are so anxious about permissive, transgressive, and anti-American trends in the
culture that they overlook favorable developments in politics and policy. This
concern makes a certain amount of sense. Young people in particular draw their
attitudes, habits, and ideas from books, arts, sports, entertainment, and
education. And a culture inhospitable to American institutions and traditions
would not be worthy of conservation.
The danger is that alienation from and antagonism toward
American culture and society can turn into a general opposition to the
constitutional order. This particular form of cultural despair has tempted
conservatives before. It is one of several traps that have ensnared parts of
the movement.
Another error is conspiratorial thinking. A third flaw is
the habit of allowing the perfect to be the enemy of the good. A fourth is
benign neglect toward grifters.
Perhaps the most damaging failure, however, was the
conservative movement’s opposition to the Civil Rights Act of 1964. This stand
delegitimized conservatism in the eyes of many Americans. It limited the
movement’s appeal. And it contributed to the Right’s ongoing confusions and
difficulties in addressing matters of race and identity with sensitivity and
tact.
American conservatism got several things wrong. But it
also got many of the big questions right. How to approach the Soviet Union, the
role of the private sector, the importance of public order, the benefits of
work, the relevance of the Constitution, the nature of political parties —
these were subjects that once were “up in the air.” For the most part, these
questions are now settled, and largely in the Right’s favor.
But the work is never over. “I see it as the continuing
challenge of National Review,” Buckley said in 1970, “to argue the
advantages to everyone of the rediscovery of America, the amiability of its
people, the flexibility of its institutions, of the great latitude that is still
left to the individual, the delights of spontaneity, and, above all, the need
for superordinating the private vision over the public vision.”
Where the Right has gone astray is in its failure to
apply this uniquely American vision, and the principles it entails, to the
problems of 2020. And so the conservative movement, in its disagreeable and
hesitant condition, must forge a new consensus, based on the particularly
American idea of individual liberty exercised within a constitutional order,
that addresses the challenges of our time. The Right needs to ask the
following: How can we address the problems everybody sees, while trying to keep
the concerns unique to us from overwhelming our society?
And conservatism must do all this with Buckley’s hallmark wit, gratitude, and good cheer. “Let’s face it,” Buckley wrote in NR’s first issue. “Unlike Vienna, it seems altogether possible that did National Review not exist, no one would have invented it.” Thank goodness someone did — and had the courage to be “out of spirit with history.”
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