The Long Goodbye
Conservatism’s perpetual decline
JONAH GOLDBERG & RAMESH PONNURU
Conservatives are famous nostalgics. Apparently we also inspire nostalgia in others: To hear some people tell it, the conservatives of yesteryear were vastly superior to today’s. Some of the people lamenting our sad decline are liberals, while some profess to be conservatives themselves. But the storyline is generally the same. The conservatives of old had a prudent concern about overweening government and a fierce attachment to individual liberty. But conservatism has now, according to the critics, degenerated into the worship of power, an authoritarian cult of personality surrounding George W. Bush, and an impulse toward theocracy.
John Dean, President Nixon’s counsel, has made a book-length version of this argument. He recently wrote: “For more than 40 years I have considered myself a ‘Goldwater conservative,’ and am thoroughly familiar with the movement’s canon. But I can find nothing conservative about the Bush/Cheney White House, which has created a Nixon ‘imperial presidency’ on steroids, while acting as if being tutored by the best and brightest of the Cosa Nostra.”
He continued:
Today’s Republican policies are antithetical to bedrock conservative fundamentals. There is nothing conservative about preemptive wars or disregarding international law by condoning torture. Abandoning fiscal responsibility is now standard operating procedure. Bible-thumping, finger-pointing, tongue-lashing attacks on homosexuals are not found in Russell Kirk’s classic conservative canons, nor in James Burnham’s guides to conservative governing. Conservatives in the tradition of former senator Barry Goldwater and President Ronald Reagan believed in “conserving” this planet, not relaxing environmental laws to make life easier for big business. And neither man would have considered employing Christian evangelical criteria in federal programs, ranging from restricting stem cell research to fighting AIDS through abstinence.
Similar broadsides can be found any day of the week at Time’s website, where the magazine’s “conservative” blogger, Andrew Sullivan, excoriates the Right for its constant failure to conform to his shifting ideals. Francis Fukuyama’s new polemic, America at the Crossroads, employs the same basic narrative arc, except that it is applied solely to neoconservatives, who have supposedly lost their way. (Which makes him a paleo-neocon?)
Dean is, however, the most perfectly representative critic of contemporary conservatism. His analysis piles clichés on top of errors as though it were an archeological site dedicated to the excavation of ancient ad hominem arguments. He even trots out the old standby that today’s conservatism, unlike the conservatism of a few minutes ago, is flirting with fascism. Like Adorno and Horkheimer, he finds the fascist roots of conservative ideology deep in the personalities of its adherents.
But please: Russell Kirk a friend of gay rights? One wonders, also, where John Dean, the defender of Reagan, was during the 1980s. Reagan’s Environmental Protection Agency repulsed environmentalists more than Bush’s has. Reagan tried to restrict research involving human embryos. Bush may be resented in some quarters for standing in the way of same-sex marriage; Reagan was vilified as a willing abettor of genocide against homosexuals. That he was responsible for huge deficits — larger as a percentage of the economy than today’s — was, meanwhile, the central policy indictment made against him during the Eighties. Anthony Lewis cited those deficits as the chief black mark on Reagan’s legacy.
Both Dean’s complaints and their absurdity fit a pattern. Conservatives are always in the dock for betraying their forebears, and they are always found guilty. The fact that those forebears were found guilty of the same offense does not get in the way of the verdict. Whether the critics are themselves liberal or conservative does not much alter the indictment. Liberals — “bookless,” as Martin Peretz has recently observed — are especially keen on pointing out perceived (and putatively hypocritical) defections from conservative dogma. Conservatives, meanwhile, take pride in the doctrinaire aspects of their cause — but they often forget that politicians will always disappoint them, and that the reality of life will always be an imperfect shadow of words on a page.
THE SONG REMAINS THE SAME
Conservatives in the Bush era have supposedly turned their back on the small-government principles of the Gingrich era. The Gingrichites, meanwhile, were assailed for abandoning Reagan’s sunny optimism. As for the Reaganites themselves . . .
Well, here’s Kevin Phillips writing in 1982: “Today’s Sun Belt represents a confluence of Social Darwinism, entrepreneurialism, high technology, nationalism, nostalgia, and fundamentalist religion, and any Sun Belt hegemony over our politics has a unique potential . . . to accommodate a drift toward apple-pie authoritarianism.” Phillips added that it would be “a big mistake” to overlook the parallels between Reagan’s America and Weimar Germany. (That a once-wholesome conservatism has soured into fascism is a constant motif of liberals.)
The Nation, the left-wing weekly, ran articles in the late 1970s about how cruel the New Right was being to such supposedly stalwart conservatives as Edward Brooke, Howard Baker, and John Anderson (who ended up running against Reagan as an independent in 1980). Across the Atlantic Ocean, Margaret Thatcher had her conservative credentials rejected, too. Tory “wets” thought she was too pro-capitalist to deserve the label.
Conservatism has died many deaths, which may explain the recurring phoenix-like rebirth of various “new” Rights and “neo” conservatisms. One of the more famous rumors of conservatism’s death was spread during the administration of Richard Nixon. Wage-price controls; the opening to China; deficit spending; Justice Blackmun; new federal bureaucracies: Nixon’s apostasies from conservatism easily exceeded the current president’s. Brent Bozell wrote that the conservative movement, by backing Nixon in 1968, had “ceased to be an important political force in America.” The judgment was sufficiently widely shared by 1971 that the New York Times invited William F. Buckley Jr. to explain that conservatives had been realists, not suckers, and that Nixon, while by no means perfect, was the best option available.
Just a few years earlier, Goldwater had been said to have betrayed the Right. Gov. Bill Scranton of Pennsylvania suggested that his followers were “extreme reactionaries” and “anything but conservatives.” He was a far cry from Robert Taft: So said Scranton, along with columnists Richard Rovere and Walter Lippmann. The liberal establishment of the era saw Goldwater not as the representative of an honorable political philosophy, but as a manifestation of mass psychosis, the “authoritarian personality” made flesh.
CBS correspondent Daniel Schorr told Americans that Goldwater was associated with German neo-Nazis. The New York Times ran an ad reporting that 1,189 psychiatrists found Goldwater not “psychologically fit.” LBJ shamelessly bludgeoned Goldwater as a champion of “hate.” The intellectuals joined the fray. An essay in Partisan Review declared Goldwater’s campaign “a recrudescence on American soil of precisely those super-nationalistic and right-wing trends that were finally defeated in Europe at the cost of a great war, untold misery, and many millions dead.” Martin Luther King Jr. was more plainspoken: “We see dangerous signs of Hitlerism in the Goldwater campaign.”
Even Goldwater, however, was a latecomer to the enterprise of corrupting conservatism. Many observers, including most self-described “movement conservatives,” have treated Buckley’s founding of this magazine as the origin of the modern Right. But NR, too, was judged to have fallen short of true conservatism. John Fischer, the editor of Harper’s, said that he was disappointed to see that it was “an organ, not of conservatism, but of radicalism.”
SEEKING A ‘USABLE CONSERVATIVE’
Which is not to say that there were no good conservatives. There was Clinton Rossiter, about whom Willmoore Kendall said that “he could make you feel ashamed of yourself if you were not both conservative and Liberal.” There was also Peter Viereck. Viereck was such a perfect conservative that he denounced Robert Taft as a Robespierre. He preferred Adlai Stevenson to Eisenhower, believing that conservatives should conserve the welfare state. Shortly before Viereck’s death earlier this year, The New Yorker hauled him out to condemn all conservatives who came after him. Viereck said that he had “opened people’s minds to the idea that to be conservative is not to be satanic.” But “once their minds were opened,” he added sadly, “Buckley came in.”
Tom Reiss’s worshipful New Yorker article portrayed Viereck as a sage in exile, a literary device useful for giving his jeremiad against contemporary conservatism the ring of authenticity. Viereck “anticipated the radicalism of the George W. Bush Presidency,” seeing conservatism as a movement “infiltrated by religious fundamentalists, paranoid patriotic groups, and big business leaders, united in their loathing for the cosmopolitan elites on the nation’s coasts.” With Reiss’s article, the conservatives-betraying-their-forefathers genre came full circle. Elsewhere we could learn that Bush had betrayed Gingrich, who betrayed Reagan, who betrayed Goldwater. Now it turned out that Bush’s “radicalism” was just a working out of Buckley’s initial betrayal. What a long, strange trap it’s been.
The history of conservatism’s alleged decline is, in other words, roughly coterminous with the history of modern conservatism. To trace back the genealogy of this criticism is to discover that conservatism never existed in its pure, natural state.
A few common themes pop up again and again at every stage of conservatism’s supposed degeneration. First, liberal amnesia. Liberals reinvent yesterday’s conservatives in order to exalt them. Would liberals really want to trade the racial attitudes of today’s conservatives for those of yesterday’s? Would they prefer the Smith Act to the Patriot Act? The House Un-American Activities Committee to John Ashcroft? In recent decades, liberals have been particularly prone to cast yesterday’s conservatives — especially Reagan and Goldwater — as more socially liberal than they were. (A few years ago, we learned in The New Yorker that Friedrich von Hayek, too, was really a social democrat.)
Second, liberal presumption. Liberals have always been far more likely to lecture conservatives about what conservatism truly means than conservatives are to return the favor. This tendency is so deep-seated as to invite the speculation that liberalism has a tropism toward intellectual imperialism: It constantly wants to create a kind of house conservatism in its own image.
Third, a double bind. Anti-statist conservatism is always condemned as radical, while a conservatism that is insufficiently anti-statist is condemned as proto-fascist. If conservatives were ever simply to declare the status quo ideal, one imagines that liberals would start reading us that bit from Burke about how a state without the means of change is without the means of its conservation.
Fourth, an opportunistic use of disaffected conservatives. Conservatives have usually been eager to debate first principles and their application. But in every generation, some conservatives will lose the intramural debates, and it will be only natural for them to feel that they have lost them unfairly. They will maintain that they alone have stayed true to the faith. Liberals will, in turn, be delighted to tout these scolds as exemplars of a good conservatism — so long, that is, as the scolds are out of power.
None of this means that conservatism never changes in response to changing circumstances, or that those changes are always for the better. But the next time you read a magazine article about the corruption and degeneracy of conservatism, you can take comfort in knowing that our decline has been going on for a long time. We are, indeed, upholding a tradition.
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