Grumbles Left and Right: Two Books on the Past and Future of Conservatism
By: Barton Swaim (WSJ)
S E E D E D C O N T E N T
The American right finds itself once again in the position of trying to remember what it wants. We have seen versions of this situation before: One sort of conservative blames another sort for what appears to be the unchecked advance of the left. Things are far more confusing this time. The present discord didn't arise from a punishing electoral loss, as in 1964 or 2008, but from the Republican victory of 2016. Nor have today's quarreling conservatives fallen out mainly over a discrete set of policy differences. Conservatives in the 2020s disagree about what it is they're trying to conserve.
One prevalent line of thought runs something like this. The post-World War II conservative coalition's stress on the free market and individual liberty made sense during the Cold War, when Soviet totalitarianism threatened the West and tempted its intellectuals to embrace Marxian centralization, but what's needed now is cultural and economic solidarity. This critique, popular among some self-described "national conservatives," overestimates the good and underestimates the harm government planning can bring about. Still, it isn't an unreasonable argument. R.R. Reno's "Return of the Strong Gods" (2019) is an eloquent expression of it.
But a number of vocal “nat cons,” as they’re called, takes the complaint further. Not only is the Cold War-era conservative’s defense of markets and individualism no longer needed, they contend; 20th-century conservatives who promoted economic and personal liberty weren’t conservatives at all but “right-wing liberals.” Deliberately or not, these “conservatives”—nat cons are liberal users of ironic quotation marks—did their part to foster the moral anarchy of present-day America and over time divested conservatism of whatever authority it might have used to stop the bedlam.
This is more or less Patrick Deneen’s allegation in “Why Liberalism Failed” (2018). It is the animating complaint behind Josh Hawley’s “common-good conservatism” and J.D. Vance’s welfare-state populism. These figures reject the distinction many conservatives are wont to draw between classical liberalism, which originated in the 17th century, and modern liberalism, born in the 20th. Yoram Hazony offers a version of the same criticism—i.e., that Cold War conservatives accepted the major premises of liberalism and so ceded the field—in “Conservatism: A Rediscovery.”
Mr. Hazony, an Israeli-born, U.S.-raised political writer and president of the Herzl Institute, posits an “Anglo-American tradition” of conservatism. That tradition understands Christianity as the necessary religious infrastructure to Western republican government. (Mr. Hazony mocks the term “liberal democracy.”) Its chief proponents are statesmen who forced their nations to move backward in order to remedy the disastrous effects of specific courses of action. So, for instance, Mr. Hazony lauds the 17th-century English jurist Matthew Hale for his part in restoring Charles II to the English throne, thus ending (I assume this is the thinking) the radical Protectorate in which religious liberty was given an early try.
Other true conservatives in Mr. Hazony’s pantheon include George Washington and John Adams, who restored traditional English rights to the colonists, but not Thomas Jefferson, a proponent of “Enlightenment rationalism.” Adam Smith is in, not because he championed free trade but because he was an “empiricist” and not, like Jefferson, a rationalist. The original liberal, John Locke, who asserted liberty of conscience against absolute monarchy, is definitely out. Some readers will appreciate Mr. Hazony’s adventure in political philosophy. To me it all feels like a game of intellectual shuffleboard.
“Conservatism” is a capacious book, with long theoretical discussions of conservative theory, foreign and domestic policymaking, and religious and family life. What mars the book irreparably is Mr. Hazony’s false rendering of modern conservatism’s history. “For decades now,” Mr. Hazony writes, “many prominent ‘conservatives’ have had little interest in political ideas other than those that can be used to justify free trade and lower taxes, and, more generally, to advance the supposition that what is always needed and helpful is a greater measure of personal liberty.” His refusal to name these faux-conservatives, together with this statement’s maladroit wording—“many” have had “little interest” in ideas “other than” those that “can be used to justify” free trade and low taxes—suggests to me that Mr. Hazony, an otherwise capable writer, knows this statement isn’t true.
The book’s attempt to portray the postwar conservative movement as little more than a capitulation to Enlightenment liberalism is so qualified and tendentious as virtually to prove the opposite. Mr. Hazony acknowledges that Russell Kirk, whose book “The Conservative Mind” (1953) did much to define postwar conservatism, did draw on the Anglo-American tradition. The philosophers Leo Strauss and Friedrich Hayek, we’re informed, committed a grave error by accepting on faith “the supremacy of the principle of individual liberty”; but neither man considered himself a conservative. William F. Buckley Jr. and National Review magazine, Mr. Hazony generously allows, operated “within the Anglo-American conservative tradition.” Ronald Reagan himself “was able to govern within the Anglo-American conservative tradition.”
So—what is the criticism, exactly? Mr. Hazony’s lack of evidence for his own allegation puts me in mind of E.H. Carr’s gibe about Herbert Butterfield’s “The Whig Interpretation of History”: The book, wrote Carr, didn’t name “a single Whig except Fox, who was no historian, or a single historian save Acton, who was no Whig.”
Mr. Hazony does eventually find one full-on individualist: Frank Meyer, an early National Review editor and former communist. Meyer placed individual liberty at the center of his philosophy. “Man,” he wrote in a typical passage from “In Defense of Freedom” (1962), “is of such a nature that innate freedom is the essence of his being.” Aha! Of course, Meyer wasn’t asserting the individual’s freedom from any obligation to family, church or nation; he was describing the importance of the freedom principle in formulating governmental arrangements . In the end, whatever we may say about Meyer, Mr. Hazony finds himself in the preposterous position of arguing that postwar American conservatism wasn’t actually conservative because a magazine editor in the 1960s was a libertarian.
Matthew Continetti’s “The Right: The Hundred Year War for American Conservatism” paints a messier, and for that reason far more accurate, portrait of 20th- and 21st-century American conservatism. The conservative movement was always a motley assemblage of free-marketeers, neoconservative reformists, apocalyptic paleoconservatives, populist reactionaries, Catholic intellectuals, Evangelical campaigners, and a variety of weirdos and visionaries (Ayn Rand, Robert Welch Jr., L. Brent Bozell Jr.) who eventually found themselves alienated or expelled from the movement. Mr. Continetti puts it this way: “There is not one American Right; there are several.”
His chronicle follows both the intellectuals and party elites, on the one hand, and ordinary conservative voters and activists, on the other. “A successful political movement must incorporate both elites and the people,” he writes. “Only intermittently, however, has the American right been able to achieve such a synthesis. That is why its victories have been so tenuous—and why its coalition has been so fragile.”
American conservatism exists, if I could put it in my own words, to clean up the messes created by the country’s dominant class of liberal elites. The Reagan Revolution wasn’t a proper “revolution” at all but a series of conservative repairs, chief among them reforming a crippling tax code and revivifying the American economy. The great triumph of neoconservatism in the 1970s and ’80s was not the formulation of some original philosophy but the demonstration that liberal policies had ruined our cities. Richard Nixon won the presidency in 1968 and again in 1972 not by vowing to remake the world but by vowing to clean up the havoc created by Lyndon Johnson when he tried to remake Southeast Asia. George W. Bush would draw on a form of liberal idealism when he incorporated the democracy agenda into an otherwise defensible foreign policy—a rare instance of conservatives experimenting with big ideas, and look where it got them.
Just as often, the right has overreacted and gotten blamed for the whole mess. In the decade after World War II, virtually the entire liberal establishment, operating with its habitual naivete about human nature, took an indifferent attitude to the very real threat of communist espionage and infiltration. The right’s answer? Joe McCarthy. Six decades later, the aggressions of Obama-era progressivism led the GOP’s rank and file to conclude they had no choice but to nominate an unscrupulous agitator who delighted in giving offense.
The American right, Mr. Continetti’s account makes clear, has always had its cranks and dreamers. The aforementioned L. Brent Bozell Jr., to take a memorable example, was the co-author, with Buckley, of “McCarthy and His Enemies” (1954) and an editor at National Review until 1963. Over time he lost patience with American society’s irreligion and libertinism. In 1965 he decamped to Franco’s Spain and founded a Catholic magazine called Triumph. Eventually he repudiated the American republic altogether. His hypertraditionalist outlook convinced Bozell, writes Mr. Continetti, “that liberalism . . . was a Gnostic heresy.” The theocratic vision “also made him alert to the heretical impulses of those branches of the Right that stretched back to classical liberalism.” The more things change . . .
—Mr. Swaim is an editorial-page writer for the Journal.
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