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The Death of Conservatism
By Sam Tanenhaus
Gloating is inevitable. Sometimes, depending on the object of our studied contempt, it is even meritorious. The great danger with gloating is to start too soon, before it is altogether certain that your side has won. That seems to be the misfortune that befell Sam Tanenhaus, editor of The New York Times Book Review and the NYT “Week in Review” section, in this short book. The Death of Conservatism is not simply a partisan hatchet job. The author has written a well-received biography of Whittaker Chambers, whom he clearly admires. One of the author's themes is that we are actually entering an era of conservatism properly understood, if not so called. Nonetheless, this not-very-extended essay was clearly written in a blaze of enthusiasm soon after the presidential election of 2008, to celebrate the death of Movement Conservatism and the beginning of the Obaman Age. This review is written not quite a year after that beginning of the novus ordo seclorum, but already events cast new light on passages in the book like this one:
This moment's emerging revitalized liberalism has illuminated a truth that should have been apparent a decade ago: movement conservatism is not simply in retreat; it is outmoded…The more telling evidence is in the realm of ideas and argument. It is there that conservatism is most glaringly disconnected from the realities now besetting America. Even as the collapse of the nation's financial system has driven a nation of 300 million to the brink of the deepest economic crisis since the Great Depression, conservatives remain strangely apart, trapped in the irrelevant causes of another day, deaf to the actual conversation unfolding across the land, in its cities and towns, in red and blue states, in the sanctuaries of the privileged and tented “Bushvilles.” This conversation has yielded a new vocabulary—rather, instilled fresh meaning in a familiar vocabulary. It includes phrases like “sensible limits,” “sound choices,” “shared sacrifice,” and “common ideals” and stresses the delicate balance between “mutual obligation” and “individual responsibility.” Bushvilles? In any case, the author's remarks about Movement Conservatism are not without merit; the embarrassment is the panegyrics to “revitalized liberalism,” a movement that now seems less likely to result in vitality than in indictments. But of that more in a moment. Like anyone else who has ever tried to write about “conservatism” in America, the author recognizes that, for most of American history, there was no such animal. Certainly some Americans have described themselves as “conservatives” from time to time, but they formed no coherent tradition. Certainly there is no American analogue to the throne-and-altar conservatism that figures in the histories of many European countries. The author traces the beginning of Movement Conservatism to the opposition to the New Deal, especially as represented by James Burnham's book published in 1941, The Managerial Revolution. Burnham had apostatized from Trotskyism, but nonetheless recast modern history as a class struggle. In this case, the aggressive universal class consisted of managers and technocrats; Bolshevism, Nazism, Fascism and the New Deal were simply local variants of the managerial regime. “Conservatism” came to be defined as beating back the power of the technocrats, especially as manifest in central economic planning and publicly provided welfare measures. At least in Sam Tanenhaus's telling, Movement Conservatism was always tainted by the revolutionary historicism to which it was the intended remedy. It was conceived by people with a keen sense of history-in-motion, of societies as malleable objects. In its decadent phase starting in the 1990s, it was quite willing to reengineer or demolish public institutions that were long established parts of people's lives. This predilection was aided by a characteristic of Movement Conservatism that the author says first became manifest during the McCarthy episode: the practice of working within the government to subvert its operations. Conservatism would never have gotten anywhere had it been wholly in the hands of vandalizing cranks from the start, of course. Starting in the 1950s, a form of classical, Burkean conservatism began to recommend itself to certain Americans. By this the author means a conservatism incredulous of economic doctrine, whether socialist or laissez faire, but willing to use public authority to maintain social peace in the interests of personal liberty, which was by no means seen as the inverse of government action. The author's prime example of this kind of conservatism is Chambers himself, who is quoted as saying:
“One of the beneficent side-effects of the crisis of the twentieth century as a whole…is a dawning realization, not so much that the mass of mankind is poor, as that there will be no peace for the islands of relative plenty until the continents of proliferating poverty have been lifted to something like the general material level of the islands.” One may note that this advice has since been taken to heart with good effect in many places in the world, always with the introduction of market mechanisms, though never with government indifference to their operation or result. At various points the author notes the parallel evolution of Movement Conservatism and what we may call the Consciousness Movement through the 1960s and later. They each had a founding charter for political participation of the Youth of that era. The Left famously had the Port Huron Statement of 1962, from which sprang Students for a Democratic Society and its sometimes explosive progeny; the Right had the Sharon Statement of 1960 (“Sharon” is the name of William F. Buckley's estate, where it was signed), which gave us the Young Americans for Freedom, the Goldwater Girls, and so on and on. And on. The Sharon Statement was relatively short and clear; it was also boilerplate Movement Conservative in a way consistent with what such people had been saying for a generation. The Port Huron Statement, perhaps written with less opulent adult supervision, was long and rambling and whingey. It was the beginning of what the author acknowledges was two decades of unsoundness of mind on the Left, which soon turned its attention to ideological purity and impractical revolutionary projects. The Goldwater candidacy for president in 1964 was, in a way, an expression of a comparable political unworldliness, but the Right made the decision to work from within the system of electoral politics. Perhaps the most interesting aspect of The Death of Conservatism is the author's assessment that the signers at both Port Huron and Sharon were opposing a mutation of the American political system that richly deserved opposition. Earlier in the 20th century, the Roosevelt presidents' “Fair Deal” and “New Deal” were attempts to tinker with the economy to preserve democracy; in the author's parlance, both were “conservative” in a way that Disraeli would have understood. John Kennedy's “New Frontier” and Lyndon Johnson's “Great Society,” in contrast, were not remedial but aspirational. They really were projects of elites, of a national mandarinate based in the great universities and foundations. The author does not make this point, but one might say that the ideal of the “post-partisan enlightenment” that reigned around 1960 was like that which attended the foundation of the European Union: government should be structured in such a way that the outcome of elections does not matter. A point the author does make is that the whole thing was crooked. The mandarins did not seek constituencies, but they did seek clients who would support the mandarins' projects in return for public subsidies; the mandarins in turn sought patronage from deeper within the permanent government. The best and the brightest of the Kennedy era merited their comeuppance, and indeed they got it. The author does manage to make himself say that they got it from Richard Nixon. Nixon, we are given to understand, could have been the American Disraeli, had he not indulged the “revanchist” impulses that arose from the notorious fact he was the spawn of Satan. He was at his best when he listened to Daniel Patrick Moynihan, a sociologist of New Deal sympathies and later senator from New York, who counseled Nixon on the need for government policy to favor traditional family formation among the poor. Moynihan is often identified as the ur-neoconservative. Be that as it may, his views were not atypical at a time when a conservative was not someone who asked, “how can we destroy the welfare state?” but “what would a conservative welfare state look like?” We may speculate on what would have happened had American conservatism continued to follow this trajectory. The result might have been a Republican Party that really did resemble the British Tory Party, for good and ill. As it happened, however, Nixon was blasted from office by the hand of a justly furious Providence. Though a happy event in itself, that defenestration was marred by the fact it left the Republican Party at the mercy of Movement Conservatism. The author does not dwell on the 1980s. He notes that President Reagan, and indeed Governor Reagan of California, was actually much more of a Burkean than the transcripts of his old radio show would suggest. He also notes that the country really was moving in a conservative direction. People felt their livelihoods and their culture were under assault, and they configured their voting habits into a posture of defense. The problem is that this conservatism had almost nothing to do with Movement Conservatism, which increasingly regarded itself as a revolutionary doctrine hostile to any public enterprise except the military. Meanwhile, the Democrats were doing much what the neoconservatives had done. They listened to their opponents and, in organizations like the Democratic Leadership Counsel, worked out a set of policies with which they could actually govern. Bill Clinton was their Nixon; and unlike his predecessor, Clinton was not driven from office or repudiated. Even for so short a work, The Death of Conservatism leaves many loose ends. One point that the author picks up briefly is that it is inconsistent for a conservative party to be the populist party in the political system. The whole matter of “culture wars,” we are told in an aside, is an expression of intellectual incoherence on the part of the faction that regards itself as the party of principle. Conservatives, it seems, are supposed to respond to popular enthusiasms by taking a pinch of snuff and following the sneeze with a cutting epigram from Gibbon. Well, okay, but then who is supposed to be the populist party? And what would the agenda of such a party be? We are given to understand that it could not be the Democrats, who have other fish to fry. One can argue with some force that the adoption of culture-wars issues by the Right, notably opposition to abortion, the protection of the traditional definition of marriage, and the movement to end high immigration, is a cynical strategy devised by a faction that wants to remain in office to maintain their tax preferences and make sure that no pesky government agents inspect their workplaces or examine their books. Nonetheless, when we talk about “conservatism” in the Burkean sense, those sorts of things are very much what we mean. One might argue, in fact, that the great dereliction of Movement Conservatism has been the failure to articulate why those sorts of things are systemically necessary, rather than merely electorally useful. Conservatism is a “culture first” proposition. In that sense, it still has no political advocates in America. It is possible to argue that some aspects of President Obama's agenda are conservative in the way that the successful New Deal measures were. The major proposals for a national healthcare system really would be conservative in the sense of causing less disruption to the economy and society than would the continuation of the current system. It is not possible to make the argument for conservatism for what the president appears to intend regarding equal pay/comparable worth and general amnesty for illegal immigrants in a continued high-immigration environment. Though the president has resisted embracing gay marriage, we should note that that project is not an example of Burkean reform, though the author would have it otherwise. One of the most important features of Democratic economic thinking since Bill Clinton assumed office has been the contraction of “economics” to finance, and particularly to the wellbeing of a small class of financial institutions. The Republicans' smash-and-grab fiscal policy had its downside, to put it mildly, but it did at least have the vitality of larceny. In contrast, the policy of the Obama Administration is morbidly unimaginative, like a facile cocaine addict who can still speak engagingly but whose only interest is ever larger ingestions of his chemical. Liberalism today, at least as represented by the Democratic Party, has continued the worst aspects of the client-patron relationships that disfigured the New Frontier. The antics of ACORN are an extreme example, but the fact is that anti-discrimination preference schemes of all kinds have pretty much demanded that the administration of public and private institutions take that form. There is also this: Kennedy's and Johnson's mandarins were not as omniscient as they supposed, but they were usually either genuine experts or gifted administrators. Today's mandarins do not command anything like the respect their predecessors received, nor do they deserve it. One way to look at the period covered by this book is to see it as a time when both Port Huron and Sharon have been trying to undo the outcome of the generation of world wars. Port Huron wants to end the period of American hegemony and erase the phenomenon of mass bourgeois society. Sharon wants to end the publicly mediated social peace of the New Deal and embark on an age of Pure Economy, the analogue to Clausewitz's Pure War. Neither enterprise was ever likely to succeed, and the author may be right when he says that Sharon has already failed. Now comes the fall of Port Huron.
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