By Matthew Continetti
Saturday, October 22, 2016
A few years before he became president, Ronald Reagan
appeared on Firing Line. The topic of
the January 13, 1978, episode of William F. Buckley Jr.’s long-running debate
show was the treaties by which the United States relinquished the Panama Canal
to its host country.
Reagan had been against the treaties for years, using
them to catch up to President Ford during the 1976 GOP primary. And Buckley had
been against them, too, until a visit to Panama changed his mind. What might
first appear as a trivial issue at a time of economic stagflation and
diminishing American power was in fact incredibly meaningful to large numbers
of voters, especially conservative ones. “Certainly it was of major consequence
in my own career as a conservative,” Buckley wrote later. “I received much
disparaging mail for having deserted first principles, and the stand I took is
still here and there cited as evidence of my unreliability as a conservative.”
The debate was between two teams of four. Reagan led the
opposition. Alongside him were journalist and presidential aide Patrick J.
Buchanan, Latin America specialist Roger Fontaine, and Admiral John McCain Jr.
Buckley argued pro. His teammates were National
Review senior editor James Burnham, syndicated columnist George F. Will,
and Admiral Elmo Zumwalt. Former senator Sam Ervin was the judge.
You can watch the match here,
and read about it in On the Firing Line,
Buckley’s history of his 33-year-old program. Within seconds you will be struck
at the level of discourse between the future president and his interlocutors.
The repartee is spirited, intelligent, respectful, detailed, and humorous. It
is hard to imagine a similar intra-conservative dialogue being held today.
And yet, at some level, a replay of the controversy over
the Panama Canal Treaty is exactly what the American Right has been
experiencing over the last 16 months. The conservative movement is divided over
the question of Donald Trump, over his suitability for office, over the issues
of nationalism, illegal immigration, criminality, corruption, and elitism he
has raised in his campaign. The terms of and parties to this dispute are
remarkably similar to those in the debate at Duke University almost 40 years
ago. In some cases they are the very same people. The antagonism between the
populism of Buchanan and the conservatism of National Review is remarkably persistent.
What makes that episode of Firing Line significant in retrospect is how it threw into high
relief the differences between Buckley and the so-called New Right. Since
founding National Review in 1955,
Buckley and his colleagues had been the spokesmen of an intellectual and
philosophical critique of democratic mass society as well as the domestic and
foreign policies of American liberalism. Beginning with the Republican
nomination of Barry Goldwater (whom Buckley supported) in 1964, however, and
accelerating in the tumultuous 1970s, the National
Review crowd found itself challenged by a group of activists, journalists,
and politicians whose criticism of the elite was populist, vehement,
bipartisan, and anti-corporate. The question of how these anti-Establishment
newcomers from the South and West fit into the conservative movement and the
Republican party, the question of where to strike the balance between populism
and conservatism, has bedeviled conservative intellectuals and pro-business GOP
officials ever since.
It is noteworthy, for example, that Reagan sided with
Buchanan and the populists in the debate over the Panama Canal. If he hadn’t
done so he would have alienated an increasingly important Republican
constituency. “I think, ironically, that Reagan would not have been nominated
[in 1980] if he had favored the Panama Canal Treaty, and that he wouldn’t have
been elected if it hadn’t passed,” Buckley wrote in Overdrive. “He’d have lost the conservatives if he had backed the
treaty, and lost the election if we’d subsequently faced, in Panama,
insurrection, as in my opinion we would have.”
Republicans have walked this tightrope for decades. When
the party has integrated the issues, goals, and tactics of the New Right into
its campaigns, it has been remarkably successful. Think 1968, 1972, 1980, 1984,
1994, 2010, and 2014. But there also have been signs, on the presidential level
most clearly, that the alliance with populism is bringing diminishing returns.
The GOP is on the brink of losing the popular vote in six out of seven
presidential elections despite its current nominee running precisely the type
of campaign the New Right has wanted to see for years. And this election is
likely to return to office a Republican House majority that is more
anti-Establishment, more hostile to compromise, more suspicious of institutions
and elites than the one we have today.
This is the crisis of the conservative intellectual.
After years of aligning with, trying to explain, sympathizing with the causes
of, and occasionally ignoring the worst aspects of populism, he finds that
populism has exiled him from his political home. He finds the détente between
conservatism and populism abrogated. His models — Buckley, Burnham, Will,
Charles Murray, Yuval Levin — are forgotten, attacked, or ignored by a large
part of the conservative infrastructure they helped to build. He finds the
prospect of a reform conservatism that adds to our strengths while ameliorating
our weaknesses to be remarkably dim. Such conservatism has exactly two spokesmen
in the Senate. It has a handful of allies in the House and states.
From the Panama Canal to the Tea Party, from Phyllis
Schlafly to Sarah Palin, the conservative intellectual has viewed the New Right
as a sometimes annoying but ultimately worthy friend. New Right activists
supplied the institutions, dollars, and votes that helped the conservative
intellectual reform tax, crime, welfare, and legal policy. But that is no
longer the case. Donald Trump was the vehicle by which the New Right went from
one part of the conservative coalition to the dominant ideological tendency of
the Grand Old Party.
FOUR WAVES OF
CONSERVATISM
To best understand the history of modern American
conservatism, it helps to think of it in terms of waves. First came the Old
Right, the anti-statist opponents of Wilson and Roosevelt, of the New Freedom
and the New Deal, of the First and Second World Wars. Then came Buckley and National Review, fusing classical
liberals, traditionalists, and anti-Communists into a conservative mainstream.
Later, in the 1960s, a group of Cold War liberals moved steadily to the right,
eventually calling themselves neoconservatives.
It was also during the 1960s that William Rusher, the
publisher of National Review, became
disappointed with the conservative movement. Buckley, Burnham, Frank Meyer,
Whittaker Chambers, and Russell Kirk had books and journals and lectures, but
they lacked power. Their conservatism was elitist, pessimistic, grimly witty,
and academic. It lionized abstruse philosophers such as Eric Voegelin and Leo
Strauss and Richard Weaver. To use a phrase uttered often today, Rusher
wondered what conservatism had conserved.
The main obstacle to an effective conservatism, Rusher
believed, was a Republican party dominated by Eastern liberals. He was
instrumental in winning the 1964 GOP nomination for Senator Barry Goldwater, a
son of the West and a devoted National
Review conservative. Goldwater lost bigly, of course. But that loss also
secured conservative primacy within the Republican nominating process. No
longer could the Right be ignored.
The 1964 election also empowered President Johnson to
enact his Great Society. Legitimized and in some respects expanded by the
Supreme Court, LBJ’s program involved the federal government much more deeply in
aspects of civil society — the city, the town, the school, the family, the
church — that it had previously ignored. The results were mixed at best. Crime
surged. Inflation accelerated. Welfare rolls increased. Riots broke out. Women,
gays, and African Americans revolted against discrimination. The ability of
parents to determine where their children went to school, and what they learned
once they got there, was severely diminished.
This “great disruption” of American politics, culture,
and society provoked a reaction. Shortly after Goldwater’s defeat, Buckley
helped found the American Conservative Union to promote the cause. In 1965,
Richard A. Viguerie formed a direct-mail-solicitation firm to collect
signatures and donations and rally citizens outraged at the direction in which
America was headed. As Alan Crawford writes in Thunder on the Right, “the leaders of the New Right have mastered
the art by taking their message directly into the living rooms of their
constituents via their mailboxes. Through the accumulation of lists of
supporters, they have built a national following to which they can appeal for
money to bankroll their organizations and which they can mobilize for political
action.”
That all this was happening outside the traditional
institution of the political party was crucial. The New Right did not
necessarily see itself as Republican or Democratic. Indeed, the voters filling
Viguerie’s pockets were typically Southerners and blue-collar workers in
Northern cities who had voted for FDR, Truman, and Kennedy. “But the focus of
political debate shifted in the 1960s, when the Democrats became the party of
social engineering,” writes Robert W. Whitaker in The New Right Papers.
What is social engineering?
Social engineering is a massive
manipulation of a society’s structure and values, aimed at bringing about
desired “social change” in the direction considered best by a small elite. It
is carried out through programs to achieve racial balance, “progressive”
education, the discrediting of traditional values and parental authority, and
imposition of a new ideology and morality. The opponents of social engineering
are fittingly referred to here as social conservatives.
These social conservatives did not join the GOP right
away. In 1968, they voted in large numbers for the Alabama populist and
segregationist ex-Democrat George Wallace, who won five states and 14 percent
of the popular vote. Buckley and National
Review were antagonists of Wallace, but Buchanan and Rusher were much more
accommodating. It was Nixon aide Kevin Phillips, in his book The Emerging Republican Majority, who
urged the president to bring the social conservatives into the Republican fold.
By emphasizing the issues of crime and disorder, and by unleashing his vice
president to attack the bias and countercultural values of the media, Nixon
appropriated the Wallace vote and won reelection in a landslide.
He resigned from office less than two years later. “If
there was a single moment you can point to as the beginning of the New Right,
it came in August 1974,” Viguerie wrote. That was when the new president,
Gerald Ford, appointed as his vice president Nelson Rockefeller, “the very
symbol of old, Eastern, liberal establishment Republicanism.” What the New
Right saw as Ford’s betrayal illustrated a maxim of conservative M. Stanton
Evans: “By the time they get into a position where they can help us, they are
no longer one of us.”
The axis of Republicans, National Review conservatives, and social conservatives broke up.
The headline of a 1975 article by Phillips described an emerging power center
in the “Coors/Richard Viguerie/New Right Complex.” There were discussions of
forming a new party. “Viguerie and his allies, who now began to be called the
New Right, were broadly sympathetic to my own 1975 call for a new party to
institutionalize the majority coalition of economic and social conservatives,”
Rusher wrote, “whereas most other conservative analysts and activists preferred
to stick with the GOP.”
AMERICAN
ADVERSARIANISM
The new party would be unified by a total rejection of
the status quo. Its base of support would be the Old South and the rapidly
growing West, along with blue-collar counties in the North, a combination of
the Sun Belt and Orange County, Canarsie and Cuyahoga County. Its pop-culture
heroes would be cowboys and renegades such as John Wayne and Clint Eastwood. It
would conceive of itself as an oppositional force, antagonistic to all aspects
of the Eastern Establishment, Republican and Democrat, liberal and
conservative, cultural and economic.
The new party would devalue intellect and prioritize
activism. “Buckley has acknowledged that most of the NR circle had been brought up on James Burnham’s Suicide of the
West doctrine — a pessimistic, almost Spenglerian point of view — and that the
possibility of arresting the decline of the West was not part of their
consciousness at all,” wrote Paul Weyrich, who started the Heritage Foundation
in 1973. “In 1978, William Buckley admitted to me that where political action
was concerned, National Review had
been guilty of the theological sin of otherworldliness: the belief that as long
as one’s own life was free of sin, one needn’t worry about the affairs of the
world.”
The enemies of the New Right were compromise, gradualism,
and acquiescence in the corrupt system. Partisan identification had little to
do with their antagonisms. Nor did ideology. Buckley and Will were just as much
targets of media criticism as CBS and the New
York Times. Conservatives and Republicans with Ivy League degrees were
sellouts, weak, epiphenomena of the social disease.
“There are conservatives whose game it is to quote
English poetry and utter neo-Madisonian benedictions over the interests and
institutions of establishment liberalism,” Kevin Phillips wrote in Commentary, clearly rebuking Will. “Then
there are other conservatives — many I know — who have more in common with
Andrew Jackson than with Edmund Burke. Their hope is to build cultural
siege-cannon out of the populist steel of Idaho, Mississippi, and working-class
Milwaukee, and then blast the Eastern liberal establishment to
ideo-institutional smithereens.” In two sentences Phillips repudiated the
cornerstone of Burkeanism — the protection of established order against radical
challenges — in favor of upheaval, destruction, and power.
Today, when we think of Wallace and the fight against
crime and busing, we think of racial antagonism and bias. But there was also
something else going on. “Racism is a part of it, though somewhat muted in
recent days,” wrote Kirkpatrick Sale in his 1975 book Power Shift. “But more potent still is a broad adversarianism, a
being-against. Wallace has no real policies, plans, or platforms, and no one
expects them of him; it is sufficient that he is agin and gathers unto him
others who are agin, agin the blacks, the intellectuals, the bureaucrats, the
students, the journalists, the liberals, the outsiders, the Communists, the
changers, above all, agin the Yankee establishment.”
It took a figure of Ronald Reagan’s stature and talent to
convince adversarianists that they had a place in the Republican party. His
1976 campaign against Ford was the start. His opposition to the Panama Canal
Treaty credentialed him as a nationalist and populist. At times viewed by the
New Right with suspicion, Reagan won them over not only through policy
concessions but also through his own success. The alliance between a popular
U.S. president and a burgeoning social movement benefited both parties. Support
for Reagan legitimized the New Right inside the Republican party and among the
other factions of the movement such as the Buckleyites and neocons.
Once again, however, the goodwill was short lived. The
first President Bush was the literal offspring of the Eastern Establishment so
detested by the New Right. His embrace of a “New World Order” after the
collapse of the Soviet Union, his overseas interventions, his support for free
trade, his tax increases, and his environmental and disability regulations
alienated Viguerie, Weyrich, Phillips, Buchanan, and their associates,
followers, political-action committees, foundations, and think tanks. Buchanan
ran for the Republican nomination in 1992 and 1996. Democrats won both years.
Opposition to President Clinton and the inventive
leadership of Newt Gingrich brought the New Right back into the fold with the
Republican Revolution of 1994. Meanwhile, another group had entered the
conservative movement: the religious Right.
While the two groups overlap, it is worth distinguishing
the New Right from the religious Right. True, the Reverend Jerry Falwell was a
New Right leader. Due to its numbers, the religious Right contained populist
elements. But the religious Right was also much more friendly to establishments
than the New Right. It did not seek the overturning of the American system but
to reform it along the lines of Evangelical principle and Catholic social
thought. It was much more universal in its appeals. It defined itself less in
oppositional terms. The New Right was against busing, the religious Right was
for school choice. The exemplary New Right leader is Buchanan. The exemplary
religious-Right leader is President George W. Bush.
Some of the second President Bush’s most vituperative
critics were associated with the New Right. They opposed the second war with
Iraq, increases in federal spending, and reforms of immigration. These critics
assailed John McCain and Mitt Romney for betraying “true conservatism.” They
cheered Sarah Palin. They marched against amnesty, against tax increases,
against Obamacare. They organized Tea Parties, defeated incumbent Republican
senators who had gone native in Washington. But, more often than not, they
found themselves on the same side as the conservative intellectuals on the East
Coast. Then Donald Trump happened.
THE POPULIST
TRIUMPH
Trump’s strongest supporters are drawn from the network
of institutions, spokesmen, and causes established by the New Right some 40
years ago. The single-issue groups fighting for gun rights, the right to life,
and right to work are behind him. So is the American Conservative Union.
Opinion at the Heritage Foundation is divided, leaving the conservative
powerhouse rather muted during 2016. Other institutions have picked up the
slack. Trump is promoted by cable news, talk radio, bloggers, the Drudge Report, Breitbart, and Infowars.com.
Phyllis Schlafly was one of Trump’s most committed
supporters before her death earlier this year. Buchanan cheers on Trump at
every opportunity. Jerry Falwell Jr. gave Trump his blessing. “Donald Trump
will be helping to advance the conservative movement,” Viguerie said last
summer.
Trump deploys New Right symbols and tropes. His
antagonism toward the Eastern establishment is obvious. He made a point last
year to obtain the endorsement of John Wayne’s daughter. He earned tepid
support from Clint Eastwood in an interview with Esquire. He is strongest where Wallace was strongest, among whites
without college degrees, in the South, in ethnic blue-collar enclaves such as
Staten Island. In Orange County, California, Trump took 77 percent of the
Republican-primary vote. Just north of Orange County are the Claremont
Colleges, where the Trump-friendly Claremont Institute is based.
Immigration, which emerged as a social issue at the turn
of the 21st century, was key to Trump’s success. So was his role as outsider,
independent critic of the rigged system, scold of elites, avatar of reaction.
The apocalyptic predictions, the dichotomy between makers and takers, even the
idea of seizing Arab territory and “taking the oil” comes straight from Bill
Rusher’s 1975 Making of the New Majority
Party. The relentless hostility toward the media, both liberal and
heterodox conservative, the accusation that it, the government, and the
financial sector are engaged in a criminal conspiracy with Hillary Clinton, the
denigration of Speaker of the House Paul Ryan, the appeal to supporters of
democratic socialist Bernie Sanders, the charge that the “global power
structure” has “stripped” manufacturing towns “bare and raided the wealth for
themselves” — this is adversarianism in its purest, most conspiratorial, most totalistic
form.
The attacks on National
Review, on George Will, on conservatives with elite educations, on
conservatives granted legitimacy by mainstream institutions is a replay of the
New Right rhetoric of the 1970s. Names have been added to the list of Republicans
in Name Only, of false, cuckolded conservatives, but the battle lines are the
same. On the one hand are the effete intellectuals based on the East Coast,
shuttling up and down the Acela corridor, removed from the suffering of the
average American, ignorant of the social issues, amenable to social
engineering, fat and happy on a diet of foundation grants, magazine sinecures,
think-tank projects, speaking engagements. On the other are the blue-collar
radio and television hosts with million-dollar contracts, the speechwriter for
Wall Street banks who uses a pseudonym to cast aspersions on the feckless
conservative elite, the billionaire-supported populist website that attacks
renegade Jews, the bloggers and commenters and trolls estranged from power,
from influence, from notoriety, from relevance, fueled by resentment, lured by
the specter of conspiracy, extrapolating terrifying and chiliastic scenarios
from negative but solvable trends.
It is the same discourse, the same methods, the same
antinomianism, the same reaction to demographic change and liberal overreach
that we encountered in the 1970s. The difference is that Donald Trump is so
noxious, so unhinged, so extremist in his rejection of democratic norms and
political convention and basic manners that he has untethered the New Right
politics he embodies from the descendants of William F. Buckley Jr.
The triumph of populism has left conservatism marooned,
confused, uncertain, depressed, anxious, searching for a tradition, for a
program, for viability. We might have to return to the beginning to understand
where we have ended up. We might have to reject adversarianism, to accept the
welfare state as an objective fact, to rehabilitate Burnham’s vision of a
conservative-tinged Establishment capable of permeating the managerial society
and gradually directing it in a prudential, reflective, virtuous manner
respectful of both freedom and tradition. This is the challenge of the moment.
This is the crisis of the conservative intellectual. What makes that crisis
acute is the knowledge that he and his predecessors may have helped to bring it
on themselves.
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