Let’s Grow Up, Conservatives

By Neal B. Freeman

Wednesday, May 23, 2018

Fifty-eight years ago this summer, delegates to the Republican National Convention were jolted to their feet not by their ideologically hermaphroditic nominee, Richard M. Nixon, but by a handsome, jut-jawed senator from Arizona named Barry M. Goldwater. His words rang through the hall and across the country and then down through the years: “Let’s grow up, conservatives,” he growled.

The campaign that began that night and culminated four years later with the capture of one of the world’s great political parties was, from the beginning to almost the end, a National Review production. Brent Bozell, my predecessor as NR’s Washington correspondent, ghostwrote Goldwater’s book, The Conscience of a Conservative. It became the best-selling campaign book of all time and gave Goldwater a national persona. Our publisher, William Rusher, became the indomitable force behind the Draft Goldwater Committee. (For more than six months, every time I ran into Goldwater he would bark at me, “Freeman, tell Rusher to knock it off.” Bill Rusher, even his warmest friends would agree, was not a man to knock things off: Indeed, one of the most-quoted of Rusher’s Rules for Living decreed: “When you find a good thing, run it into the ground.”) William Buckley, known around the office with only a dash of irony as Fearless Leader, became the most compelling public advocate for our occasionally inarticulate and more than occasionally gaffe-prone candidate.

That 1964 campaign, described inaccurately but perhaps inevitably as the “Goldwater debacle,” was of course a bonanza for both the magazine and the cause it served. Talk about a subscription drive! We couldn’t print enough copies. Literally. Readership, ads, reprints, speaking gigs, media hits — everything went up, up, and then up some more. During the course of that “debacle,” NR demonstrated to even the most astigmatic of political observers that conservatism had become a national force and, within the Republican context, quite possibly the national force. When it came to presidential nominations, nobody pushed us around for the next 52 years. Even McCain and Romney felt obliged to kiss the ring.

That 1964 campaign was nothing but fun, the popping of a celebratory cork, the payoff for years of hard work at both levels of political transformation, the doctrinal and the practical. The former — the fashioning of a coherent philosophy that might one day command a majority of the electorate — proved to be heavy lifting. The daunting task was left to the NR editors of extraordinary intellectual range: to Willmoore Kendall, to Brent Bozell, and to Frank Meyer. It was they who banged out the fusionist conservatism that many longtime NR readers came to embrace as their own personal brand of politics. (By “banged out,” I mean that consensus was arrived at percussively, with hammer slamming repeatedly against anvil. Kendall famously once said that an emergency phone call between Bozell and Meyer was one that interrupted the regular phone call between Bozell and Meyer. What the jape left unsaid was that the emergencies were almost always created by Kendall’s own intemperate interventions.)

Buckley gave NR’s men of genius a surprisingly wide berth, joking that he and I were not bright enough for doctrinal exegesis. (In my own case, he was almost certainly correct.) Buckley, rather, expended his considerable energies on practical applications of the emerging new conservatism. There was always a magazine to be published, a debate to be staged, a television show to be produced, a political initiative to be launched, and even in the middle of a long and hectic day, a soul to be saved. (In building the ground-floor movement, Buckley and the rest of us all made pastoral visits to the ideologically impaired.) Buckley understood and could explicate the doctrinal niceties as well as anybody, but his focus was fixed on the practical and, more specifically, on the practice of what he called the politics of reality.

The political cycle that began in 1960 and featured conservatives in salient roles over the next few decades has now ended. (In my own view, it ended with George W. Bush’s dismantling of the conservative coalition, after which Donald J. Trump simply revealed that it had been dismantled. But that argument is perhaps best left to another day.) What the political realist knows is that conservatives are now at the dawn of a new cycle and must take up once again the hard work of transformation.

At the doctrinal level, we have the same definitional challenge, the very same question in fact, that we faced a half-century ago: What is a conservative? Are we free traders or fair traders? Do we want open borders or high barriers? Can we save public education or should we euthanize it? And so on, as we move down the tired agenda, making our way carefully across weathered planks of a creaking platform. One hopes that the citadels of conservative wisdom, very much including NR, will not simply record the demise of our movement but will bestir themselves to the task of rejuvenation. (Or, if only a Buckleyism can turn over your engine on a chilly morning, call it the task of repristination.)

For the realist, even more important than the reformulation of old policies is the recognition of new priorities. Indeed, one telling characteristic of the end of a political cycle is that the largest and most urgent issues are left unaddressed by any of the entrenched interests. Incumbent politicians deal with old issues. Movements ride new issues.

As just one example of a pressing issue left unaddressed, consider a public threat of cataclysmic potential. We got a taste of what bursting bubbles can do to a national economy when the tech bubble burst in 2000, and then again when the housing bubble burst in 2008. On both occasions we paid a heavy toll in lost wealth, lost jobs, lost confidence. The nation was shaken and then staggered, and climbed back only slowly into a weak recovery. Those two events were molehills. The mountain of all bubbles is now directly in front of us and nobody is remarking it, much less addressing it: Government debt. It’s a bigger, badder bubble than we’ve ever seen before. Do the math: If interest rates experience even a mini-spike, the U.S. government will be unable to pay its bills.

We know how this happened, of course. George W. Bush broke the fiscal discipline of the Clinton years and launched a spending spree that Barack Obama and Donald Trump were only too happy to continue. For two decades past, the binge has been bipartisanship at its ugly worst. (The Tea Party, it must be said, was dead-right about this issue in 2010 and is owed an apology by the establishmentarians of all parties.) But what can we do about it now? To begin, we must confront and dismiss the rejoinder from the Left that the debt makes no real difference, that we can always borrow more funds or raise more taxes. The realist must respond: Really? Just who is it who will lend us money after it becomes clear that we can’t pay them back? And tax increases? Really? Now that more than half of the middle class pays no income taxes whatsoever, and now that we are sending virtually all of our public bills to the “rich,” who among those prosperous few will not defend themselves against what amounts to a bill of attainder? (I remind my political friends with annoying repetition that capital, unlike pigs, can fly.)

Let’s grow up, conservatives. Let’s set ourselves to the hard doctrinal work, as also to the recruitment of new adherents to a reinvigorated conservative philosophy. We have before us an opportunity given to few generations of Americans — the opportunity to build a new, dynamic, and broadly beneficent political era.

I conclude with a few obligatory words in the matter of Trump. Political realism begins with the concession that Donald J. Trump is in fact president of the United States. In the current circumstance, manifestly, the political realist must contend simultaneously with a second reality, which is that concession to the first reality remains less than universal. Fact-based conservatives thus have no choice but to hold two thoughts in equipoise. The first is that Donald Trump’s personal behavior is not exemplary. We should instruct our children and grandchildren not to emulate him. The second thought is that President Trump is capable of doing good things and is much more likely to do them if we prepare him for important issues and then press him to make sound decisions.

I thus say to our friends still camping out in NeverTrump land — we know you can do it! It’s not that hard to hold two thoughts simultaneously. Aquinas held seven. Pascal nine. Einstein twelve. Buckley 18. And yes, I’m speaking seriously but not literally.