Just as with stupidity and daintiness, “conservative is as conservative does.”
Title: The Death of Conservatism, by Sam Tanenhaus
Motivation: Widely noted book by a well-known political commentator.
Completed: June 2, 2012 (#37)
Recommendation: Would have been more compelling prior to the 2010 mid-term elections…
While his conclusions are no doubt uncongenial to contemporary conservatives, Mr. Tanenhaus has produced a noteworthy critique of the Grand Old Party and, more broadly, the “Conservative Movement.”
Mr. Tanenhaus’s point of departure, as with any thoughtful discussion of conservatism, is Edmund Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France:
In his most celebrated work, Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790), a series of bulletins on the insurrectionists and their English supporters, Burke made no sustained effort to justify the ancien régime and its many “abuses.” Nor did he propose a counter-ideology. Instead, he warned against the destabilizing perils of extremist politics of any kind. The Jacobins—in particular Robespierre, who proclaimed a “despotism of liberty”—and more moderate figures, too, were inflamed with the Enlightenment vision of the ideal civilization and sacrificed to its abstractions the established traditions and institutions of what Burke called “civil society.” With “the delusive plausibilities of moral politicians,” they placed an idea of the perfect society over and above the need to improve society as it really existed. They deemed France “incapable or undeserving of reform, so that it was of absolute necessity the whole fabric should be at once pulled down, and the area cleared for the erection of a theoretic experimental edifice in its place.”
By contrast, Mr. Tanenhaus argues, the Republican Party of the 1990s and today bears greater resemblance to the Jacobins, espousing a revanchist ideology that shares little with Burkean temperance and prudence:
The movement conservatives of our time seem the heirs of the French rather than of the American Revolution. They routinely demonize government institutions, which they depict as the enemy of the people’s best interests. But to classical conservatives the two entities, government and society, are mutually dependent. Burke drew no meaningful distinction between the state and society—that is, between the formally established institutions of government and those institutions rooted in patrimony, custom, and habit. The two were coterminous, at times almost interchangeable. “Government is a contrivance of human wisdom to provide for human wants,” he wrote, adding a few sentences later, as if following a single arc of thought, “Society requires not only that the passions of individuals should be subjected, but that even in the mass and body as well as in the individuals, the inclinations of men should frequently be thwarted, their will controlled, and their passions brought into subjection. This can only be done by a power out of themselves … [T]he restraints on men, as well as their liberties, are to be reckoned among their rights. But as the liberties and the restrictions vary with times and circumstances, and admit of infinite modifications, they cannot be settled upon any abstract rule.”
There is an unsettling kernel of truth to much of Mr. Tanenhaus’s critique, and conservatives would be well advised to take up this short book to wrestle with his arguments. That said, there is a great deal of weirdness in the author’s view of the Conservative Movement and its post-war history. A case in point:
And yet it was in this period that conservatism entered its greatest phase, a decade-long period, from 1965 to 1975, during which the familiar dynamic between orthodoxy and consensus underwent a remarkable reversal. The liberal sun, even as it steadily enlarged, swerved off its consensus course and strayed into the astral wastes of orthodoxy. And the conservative movement, building a coalition of disenchanted and alienated elements of the old Democratic coalition—blue-collar urban ethnics, Jewish and Catholic intellectuals repelled by the countercultural enthusiasms of the New Left—shaped a new consensus.
Beautifully written, but come again? Bracketing this supposed Golden Age—and clearly excluded from it on Mr. Tanenhaus’s reading—are the candidacies of Sen. Goldwater in 1964 and President Reagan in 1976 and 1980. From 1965 through 1975, the Republican Party was dominated by a disgraced moderate who imposed wage and price controls and his ineffectual and unelected one-term successor. Sen. Goldwater—for all his bombast—placed conservatism on the political map and ignited a revolution that led, eventually, to the apotheosis of the Conservative Movement in the Reagan era. Surely the Nixon/Ford years were the darkest years in GOP history, albeit brightened by some foreign policy coups?
Mr. Tanenhaus recognizes this reality, as later he writes as follows:
Despite his reputation for being a hard-liner, Safire adds, Nixon was “a progressive politician, willing and even eager to surprise with liberal ideas, [and he was] delighted with the comparison” to Disraeli, a conservative who had governed innovatively, outflanking liberals.
William Safire’s description of President Nixon is fair. Love him or hate him, President Nixon was cut from a different sort of cloth—a more progressive, liberal cloth—than the likes of Presidents Reagan or Bush the Younger. Does it follow, therefore, that the “greatest age” of conservatism coincided with the most liberal Republican president since the Second World War?
Mr. Tanenhaus unfortunately confuses descriptive and normative evaluations of the Conservative Movement. It is perfectly legitimate for a political opponent of President Reagan to recognize that he represents the apex of a certain mode of conservative thought. President Obama has regularly done so, including, famously, in his 2008 campaign. Descriptively, the years 1932 through 1945 were surely the Golden Age of national socialism, just as the years 1661 through 1715 were the Golden Age of monarchical absolutism, but to recognize these facts does not imply that one must subscribe to the Nazi or ancien régime program as a normative matter.
Mr. Tanenhaus appears to have a substantive preference for so-called “RINOs” (“Republicans in name only”), which is a perfectly reasonable position for a man of the Left to adopt. Conservatives tend to prefer Daniel Patrick Moynihan and Joseph Lieberman to the alternatives, too. However, just as it would be odd to claim that Sen. Lieberman’s appearance at the 2008 Republican National Convention on Sen. McCain’s behalf is the high-water mark of American progressivism, it is simply weird to claim that the presidents most abjured by conservatives are in fact the greatest exemplars of conservative philosophy.
There’s no real question that modern American “conservatism” is actually “radical,” an effort to completely restructure current society into an idealized world, and so the primary thesis of his book holds.
The question of Nixon’s conservatism is in my mind analogous, even related, to the question of LBJ’s liberalism. Today he’s remembered for Civil Rights and The Great Society, but recall that in 1960 LBJ was supposed to be the conservative counterbalance to JFK’s liberalism and that he successfully carried the South on the ticket, and that LBJ had the affection and support of all the most powerful and vehement conservatives of the south, like Richard Russell, who treated him like a son.
The big question, one at the heart of Robert Caro’s latest, is if, as Caro argues, “power reveals,” and LBJ’s ascent to the Presidency “revealed” his deeper liberalism. There’s an argument to be made for that, but a strong counterargument is the recognition that LBJ himself was driven first and foremost by a fear of humiliation and an ambition for power. The primary way he could show and express his power (to himself and to the world) was to surpass even Kennedy in his liberal achievements, which he did. There’s thus the question of if LBJ used his political prowess to achieve a great goal or if the political prowess was the end in and of itself, and that LBJ set up The Great Society for the same reason George Mallory climbed Everest: because it was there, because he could.
I see Nixon in the same light. Nixon, like LBJ (and unlike, say, Kennedy or FDR or Reagan) was a man driven by demons. His “conservative” policies were not in the mold that most liberals or conservatives would view them, and neither his successes nor his failures have any clear partisanship to them.
All that said, I still think the author is correct that the pinnacle of modern American conservatism as an ideology is somewhere between 1960 and 1976. Neither Reagan nor any of his Republican successors can be deemed “conservative,” given how all fought hard to dramatically increase the size of the state and, appallingly, the size of the budget deficit and national debt.
We could just write that off as politicians being politicians, except that an entire generation of “conservatives” have defined themselves by justifying this conduct, and the George W. Bush years were proof-positive that “conservative” today means “thinks homos and abortions are gross,” because the entire conservative movement cheered deficits, expansion of federal power, increasing international interventions, and radical reconstruction of the constitutional norms of the past. Consider what the Supreme Court did last month: used a radical reinterpretation of the First Amendment, one with no support anywhere in American history, to blissfully strike down a Montana anti-corruption law that had served that state well for over one hundred years. By what right could that be considered “conservative?” Yet, the response was nothing but overwhelming support from the “conservative” movement.