I knew where Newt was coming from, having
encountered him as a graduate student who considered himself endowed with such
a magnificent destiny that the normal rules of academic procedure didn’t apply
to him. Not all the candidates were suffering from megalomaniacal
grandiosity; the rest seemed to be arguing from principles with which
a significant number of Americans agreed.
Since the “anyone but Romney” candidates
insisted that they were more conservative than he, while he insisted he was
every bit as conservative as they, I decided that I needed a refresher course
in conservatism. My friends were
appalled. Why waste time examining irrational
delusions entertained by proto-fascists? The academics were especially dismissive. When
I asked them where they thought Santorum, or Paul, or Romney was coming from they
didn’t think at all—they just threw their heads back and shouted “Rick Paul!”
or “Santorum!” or “Romney!” with expletive force accompanied by spatters of contemptuous spit.
This did not seem a particularly rational
response. How can we argue from our own
principles without a firm grasp of the opposition’s? True, when I was young and callow I didn’t study
the first principles of Barry Goldwater and John Birch. When the sneering mien
of William F. Buckley Jr., that pioneer of nasty-mouthed right-wingery, appeared
on my television set I changed channels with self-righteous contempt. But now that I am (so very much) older and
wiser, isn’t it useful to go widdershins for a spell, starting with my old
sworn enemy?
Conservatism, I learned, derives from the
philosophy of the 18th century thinker Edmund Burke, who fostered
· honor for traditions of
culture and nation
· accumulated wisdom and
experience of our ancestors
· reform of old
institutions while relying on the wisdom embedded in institutions and law,
understood as valued history and tradition to be passed on in an
intergenerational covenant.
This feeling for community values is different
from libertarianism, which, taking individual freedom as the primary good,
opposes any tradition or institution that interferes with individual liberty. Albert Jay Nock, an early libertarian
influence on Buckley when he was still in school, argued in Memoirs of a Superfluous Man, “against statism and collectivism in all
forms” insisting that “governmental power will inevitably be turned against the
individual” (68). Buckley was also taken with F.A. Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom (1944), which opposes
all forms of economic planning which “would require an economic dictator to
make fundamental choices for the society.” 135
Do you recognize Ron Paul here? These are the basic tenets he enunciated with
admirable consistency to large audience of cheering twenty-somethings during
the primary, hailing Hayek as one of his
most important sources.
Traditional conservatism is not so dismissive of
the community and economic regulation. Even Adam Smith wrote that the free
market was not free to damage civil society, and should be regulated
accordingly. In the early years of
editing the National Review Buckley encouraged a broad spectrum of
conservatives like Russell Kirk and Gary Wills, both of whom were eventually
alienated by his libertarianism.
Kirk called himself a “New conservative,” fostering
authority and order, including that of states and governments. The conservative, “ he insisted in In The
Conservative Mind , always stood for true community, the union of men,
through love and common interest, for the common welfare…Individualism is
social atomism, conservatism is community of spirit” (111). In Confessions of a Conservative Gary Wills wrote that “no society can ever be
formed on the basis of individualism …conservatives
value continuity and tradition.” Wills was
troubled by the way Buckley “placed the
free market at the center of its philosophy. Since “capitalism was all about risk taking
and seeking new markets… it is ”therefore not a force for continuity and
stability.” He was dismayed that business
had become the principal source of power in modern America. “We rather
simple-mindedly kept the nexus power=conservative,
even when the power involved was a revolutionary and unstable one” (332).
Wills distrusted market fundamentalism, which
Buckley took as a given. Carl Bogus, by no means a conservative himself,
provides an interesting analysis of where Buckley’s emotion-laden belief system
came from. “William F. Buckley Jr.’s ideology
was not the product of study and reflection,” he asserts, but mirrored the
libertarianism, neo-conservatism, and religiosity of his domineering,
homeschooling father, who instilled his moods as well as his values in his ten children.
William F. Buckley Sr.’s tenets derived from keeping his oil business
profitable during the Mexican revolution, which left him a life-long proponent
of stability, government by an educated class, and protection of private
property, including that belonging to the church and to foreign nationals like
himself.” The intensity he brought to
his conservatism, and his diatribes against liberalism, came from closer to home
in Connecticut , where the family was never accepted by the liberal protestant
elite.
In his writings and television punditry Buckley
Jr. took his father’s beliefs and distastes as givens. Profoundly racist, Buckley
Sr. felt that American Negroes were intrinsically inferior. In the National Review, Buckley Jr. responded to the Civil Rights
Movement by insisting that the white community in the south is “the advanced
race” with a claim to civilization, even to the extent that “the
great majority of the Negores in the south who do not vote do not care to vote,
and would not know for what to vote if they could” (157-158).
Anyone who ever watched Buckley’s television program witnessed his self-righteous
fury against his enemies, chief among whom were the “liberal elite.” This enmity, channeled from his father,
became gallingly personal during his senior year at Yale. He had been invited
to give a graduation speech to the alumni but, having read it, the university
retracted the invitation. Enraged, he
published the speech as God and Man at Yale, where he argued that the
university had failed in its duty to “Christianize Yale” because of its
erroneous belief in “academic freedom” which he sees as a “myth.” Yale should have indoctrinated students in
religion, free enterprise, and limited government.
Does anyone recognize Rick Santorum here, drifting
into use of the “N” word, warning against government moving into every corner
of American lives, exhibiting contempt for “the east coast liberal elite” and
its mouthpiece, “the liberal media, and vomiting about the separation of church and state?
“This is not your father’s Republican Party,”
remarked Joe Biden the other day, and it is far from the moderately
conservative Republicanism of Governor
Bill Millken of Michigan, Senator Nelson Rockefeller, George Bush Sr. or even Governor Mitt Romney of Massachusetts. What we witnessed in the primaries was closer
to the Republicanism of Ronald Reagan, who was converted to William Buckley’s neo-conservatism
when he read the National Review during his travels as a salesman for
General Electric or to George Bush Jr. channeling
the neo-conservatism of Cheney and
Rumsfeld.
As spring arrived and the Republican field narrowed,
I realized that I was as appalled by the emotionalism of neo-conservatism as by
its principles. Giving one’s intellect over to anger, always disturbing in an individual,
becomes terrifying when taken up by the mob. Several years ago, a friend and I
waded into a crowd of 70,000 Tea Party marchers on the Washington Mall because
we wanted to reason with them about the
Affordable Health Care act. Their pickets with “Don’t Kill my Grandmother” and “Bury ObamaCare with Edward Kennedy ” that they were waving were less frightening than
the expressions on their faces.
“But we are
grandmothers,” we reasoned, “and we love what
the Act is going to do for us.” Their eyes glazed over; they didn’t hear a word
we said, the reasoning function of their
brains having been entirely overwhelmed by their emotions.
It seems to me that the response to rampant
conservative emotionalism on the part of liberal intellectuals shouldn’t be rampant
liberal emotionalism. Wouldn’t it be
wonderful to sit down with a conservative and have a good long conversation about
traditions and values, starting with what we have in common, then reasoning
together about the practical application of our different positions? If the Republican Party had continued in the
conservative tradition of Kirk and Wills, we might be able to look at President Obama's list of values:
- Hard work
- Lookin out for one another
- the idea that we're all in this together, and that I am my brother's and my sister's keeper
So let’s keep our minds open, but use them. Let’s see, what shall I read next? How about the two volumes that a brilliant intellectual who was a
member of the Bush Jr. Administration, has written
~ Condoleeza Rice!
