Bill Moyers Journal

by Bill Moyers

  What we sometimes forget is that in the last five presidential elections Democats won pluralities in four of them. The only time the Republicans have won, in recent memory, was when George Bush was reelected by the narrowest margin in modern history for a sitting president. So what this means is that, yes, what I think of as a radical form of conservatism is highly organized. We’re seeing it now—they are ideologically in lockstep. They agree about almost everything, and they have an orthodoxy that governs their worldview and their view of politics. They are able to make incursions. And when liberals, Democrats, and moderate Republicans are uncertain where to go, this group will be out in front, very organized, and will dominate our conversation.

  What gives them such certainty? Your conservative hero of the eighteenth century, Edmund Burke, warned against extremism and dogmatic orthodoxy.

  It’s a very deep strain in our politics. Some of our great historians like Richard Hofstadter and Garry Wills have written about this. If you go back to the foundations of our republic, we have two documents, “creedal documents” they’re sometimes called, more or less at war with one another. The Declaration of Independence says one thing and the Constitution says another.

  The Declaration says—

  That we will be an egalitarian society in which all rights will be available to one and all, and the Constitution creates a complex political system that stops that change from happening. So there’s a clash right at the beginning. Now, what we’ve seen is that certain groups among us—and sometimes it’s been the left—have been able to dominate the conversation and transform politics into a kind of theater. And that’s what we’re seeing now.

  In your book, you call them insurrectionists. And you write that they’re not simply in retreat, they’re outmoded. They don’t act like they think of themselves as outmoded.

  They do and they don’t. When I wrote that, I also say that the voices are louder than ever. Already we were hearing the furies on the right. Remember, there was a movement within the Republican Party, finally scotched, to actually rename the Democrats the “Democrat Socialist Party.” So the noise is there. William Buckley had a wonderful expression. He said the pyrotechnicians and noisemakers have always been there on the right. I think we’re hearing more of that than we are serious ideological, philosophical discussion about conservatism.

  The news agenda today is driven by Fox News, talk radio, and the blogosphere. They are propagandists for the right. Why are they so powerful?

  There’s been a transformation of the conservative establishment. And this has been going on for some time. The foundations of modern conservatism, the great thinkers, were actually ex-Communists, many of them. Whittaker Chambers, the subject of my biography. The brilliant thinker James Burnham. A less-known but equally brilliant Willmoore Kendall, who was a mentor, oddly enough, to both William Buckley and Garry Wills. These were the original thinkers, and they were essentially philosophical in their outlook. Now, there are conservative intellectuals who we don’t think of as conservative anymore—Fareed Zakaria, Francis Fukuyama, Andrew Sullivan, Michael Lind, the great Columbia professor Mark Lilla. They’ve all left the movement. So it’s become dominated instead by very monotonic, theatrically impressive voices and faces.

  What does it say that a tradition that begins with Edmund Burke, the great political thinker of his time, moves on over the decades to William Buckley and now embraces Rush Limbaugh as its icon?

  Well, in my interpretation it means that the tradition is ideologically depleted. What we’re seeing now and hearing are the noisemakers, in Buckley’s phrase. There’s a very important incident that occurred in 1965, when the John Birch Society, an organization these new groups resemble—the ones who are marching in Washington and holding tea parties, the very extremist revanchist groups that view politics in a conspiratorial way—decided during the peak of the Cold War struggle that Dwight Eisenhower was a Communist agent, and that 80 percent of the government was dominated by Communists, that Communists were in charge of American education, American health care, were fluoridating the water to weaken our brains. All of this happened, and at first Buckley and his fellow intellectuals at National Review indulged this. They said, “You know what? Their arguments are absurd, but they believe in the right things. They’re anti-Communists. And they’re helping our movement.”

  Actually, many of them helped Barry Goldwater get nominated in 1964. Then in 1965, Buckley said, “Enough.” Buckley himself had matured politically. He’d run for mayor of New York. He’d seen how politics really worked. And he said, “We can’t allow ourselves to be discredited by our own fringe.” So in his own magazine he made a denunciation of the John Birch Society. More important, the columns he wrote denouncing what he called its “drivel” were circulated in advance to three of the leading conservative Republicans of the day—Ronald Reagan, Barry Goldwater, and Senator John Tower of Texas. Tower read them on the floor of Congress into the Congressional Record. In other words, the intellectual and political leaders of the right drew a line. And that’s what we may not see if we don’t have that kind of leadership on the right now.

  To what extent is race an irritant here? During the 1960s, when we were trying to enact the crucial civil rights bills, we were troubled by William Buckley’s seeming embrace of white supremacy. It seems to me to have left something in the DNA of the modern conservative movement that is still there.

  It is. And one of the few regrets Bill Buckley ever expressed was that his magazine had not supported the Civil Rights Act, although you may remember that in the late ’70s, he did support a national holiday for Martin Luther King’s birthday, when someone like John McCain did not. In the late ’90s, I heard Buckley give a brilliant lecture in New York City in which he talked about the importance of religion in American civil life. And it was Martin Luther King who was the subject.

  What changed him? Because he was writing favorably in the National Review about the importance of preserving the white class structure.

  He actually did that a little bit earlier, in the ’50s. Remember, in the early ’60s, even a great thinker like Garry Wills, who was still a part of the National Review, supported the civil rights movement, but thought it might weaken the institutional structures of society if it became too fervent a protest. Now, what the Republican Party did was to make a very shrewd political calculation, a kind of Faustian bargain with the South. As you know, Lyndon Johnson thought, when he signed those bills into law, that Democrats might lose the “Solid South,” as it had been called, for a generation or more.

  And yes, the Republicans moved right in, and they did it on the basis of the states’ rights argument. Now, however convincing or unconvincing that was, it’s important to acknowledge that conservatives within the Republican Party thought that a hierarchical society and a kind of racial difference, established institutionally, was not so bad a thing. They were wrong. They were dead wrong. But that sense of animus is absolutely strong today. Look who some of the great protestors are against Barack Obama. Three of them come from South Carolina, the state that led the secession—Representative Joe Wilson, Senator Jim DeMint, and Governor Mark Sanford. And there’s no question that that side of the insurrectionist South remains in our politics.

  When you heard Joe Wilson shout, “You lie,” during President Obama’s State of the Union address, did you think you were hearing the voice of conservatism today?

  No. I thought, “This man needs to read his Edmund Burke.” Edmund Burke gave us the phrase “civil society.” Now, people can be confused about that. It doesn’t mean we have to be nice to each other all the time. Bill Buckley was not nice to his political opponents. What it means is one has to recognize that we’re all part of what should be a harmonious culture, and that we respect the political institutions that bind it together. Edmund Burke, in a very interesting passage in his great book Reflections on the Revolution in France, uses the words government and society almost interchangeably. He sees each reinforcing th
e other. It’s our institutional patrimony.

  When someone on the floor of Congress dishonors and disrespects the Office of the President, he’s actually striking, however briefly, however slightingly, a blow against the institutions that our society is founded on. And I think Edmund Burke might have some trouble with that.

  There’s long been a fundamental contradiction at the heart of this coalition that we call “conservative.” There is the Burkean conservatism that yearns for a sacred, ordered society, bound by tradition, that protects both rich and poor, and there is what has been called the “libertarian, robber baron, capitalist, cowboy America.” That marriage was doomed to fail, right?

  It was. First of all, this is absolutely right, in the terms of a classical conservatism. The figure I emphasize in my book is Benjamin Disraeli. The French Revolution concerned Edmund Burke, but half a century later what concerned Disraeli and other conservatives was the Industrial Revolution. That’s what Dickens wrote his novels about—children, the very poor becoming virtual slaves in workhouses as the search for money, for capital, for capital accumulation, seemed to drown out all other values. Modern conservatism is partly anchored in that.

  Yes, and you have to wonder, why isn’t conservatism standing up against turbocapitalism?

  One reason is that very early on in its history America reached a kind of pact, in the Jacksonian era, between the government on the one hand and private capital on the other. The notion that the government would actually subsidize capitalism in America, that’s what the right doesn’t often acknowledge. A lot of what we think of as the unleashed, unfettered market is, in fact, a government-supported market. Remember the famous debate between Dick Cheney and Joe Lieberman? Cheney said that his company, Halliburton, had made millions of dollars without any help from the government. Bill, it all came from the government! They were defense contracts. What’s happened is the American ethos—the rugged individualism, the cowboy, the frontiersman, the robber baron, the great explorer, the conqueror of the continent—has been driven by the engine of the market. What brought them together, what we’ve seen on the right, is what I call a politics of organized cultural enmity.

  Accusatory protest, you call it.

  Accusatory protest, with liberals as the enemy. So if you are a free marketeer, or you’re an evangelical, or a social conservative, or even an authoritarian conservative, you can all agree about one thing: you hate the liberals who are out to destroy us. That’s a very useful form of political organization. I’m not sure it contributes much to our government and society, but it’s politically useful to them, and we’re seeing it again today.

  It wasn’t long ago that Karl Rove was saying this coalition was going to deliver a new Republican majority. It came apart in 2006–2008. Why?

  I believe it had come apart earlier than that. I really think Bill Clinton’s victory in 1992 sealed the end of serious conservative counterrevolution. We forget that election. It seems like an anomaly, but consider, Bill Clinton won more electoral votes than Barack Obama, despite the presence of one of the most successful third-party candidates, H. Ross Perot. But that’s not the most important fact. The most important fact is that George H.W. Bush got a lower percentage of the popular vote in 1992 than Herbert Hoover got in 1932. That was really the end. But the right had been so institutionally successful that it controlled many of the levers, as you say. Then what happened in the year 2000? Well, the conservatives on the Supreme Court stopped the democratic process, put their guy into office. Then came September 11, and the right got its first full blank slate. They could do really whatever they wanted. Those were the eight years of the Bush administration, which, I think, was the end of ideological conservatism as a vital formative and contributive aspect of our politics.

  Why?

  Because it failed so badly. It wasn’t conservative, it was radical. It’s interesting. Many on the right say, “George Bush betrayed us.” They weren’t saying that in 2002 and 2003. Conservatives saw him as someone who would complete the Reagan revolution. I think a lot of it was Iraq. Now, I quote in the book a remarkably prescient thing from the thirty-one-year-old Benjamin Disraeli, who wrote in 1835 that you cannot export democracy, even then, to lands ruled by despotic priests. And he happened to mean Catholic, not Islamic, priests. But he said you actually have to have a civil society established in advance. He said that’s why the United States had become a great republic so shortly after the Revolution. We had the law of English custom here. You see? So we were prepared to become a democracy.

  There were conservatives who tried to make that argument before the war in Iraq—Francis Fukuyama, Fareed Zakaria. There were people in the Bush administration who tried to argue this, and they were marginalized or stripped of power. With the invasion of Iraq, what America saw was an ideological revanchism with all the knobs turned to the highest volume. The imperial presidency of Dick Cheney and all the rest. And we saw where it got us.

  You say in The Death of Conservatism that, even as the collapse of the financial system has driven us to the brink, “conservatives remain strangely apart, trapped in the irrelevant causes of another day, deaf to the actual conversation unfolding across the land.” Yet it seems to me that they are driving the conversation today.

  Well, they have many mouths, Bill, but they don’t have many ears. The great political philosopher Hannah Arendt once said, in one of her essays on Socrates, that the sign of a true statesman is the capacity to listen. And that doesn’t simply mean to politely grow mute while your adversary talks. It means, in fact, to try to inhabit the thoughts and ideas of the other side. Barack Obama is perhaps a genius at this. For anyone who has not heard the audio version of Dreams from My Father, it’s a revelation. He does all the voices. He does the white Kansas voices; he does the Kenyan voices. He has an extraordinary ear. There’s an auditory side to politics. And that capacity to listen is what enables you to absorb the arguments made by the other side and to have a kind of debate with yourself. That’s the way our deliberative process is supposed to work.

  Right now, at this time of confusion and uncertainty, the ideological right is very good at shouting at us and rallying their troops. You know, one of the real contributions conservatism made in its peak years—as an intellectual movement in the 1950s and ’60s—is that it repudiated the politics of public demonstration. It was the left that was marching in the streets, carrying guns, threatening to take the society down, or calling President Johnson a murderer. It was the conservatives who used political institutions and political campaigns, who rallied behind traditional candidates produced by the party apparatus. They revitalized the traditions and the instruments and vehicles of our democracy.

  But now we’ve reached a point, quite like one Richard Hofstadter described some forty years ago, where ideologues don’t trust politicians anymore. Remember during the big Tea Party march in Washington, many of the protestors or demonstrators insisted they were not demonstrating just against Barack Obama, but against all the politicians—that’s why some Republicans wouldn’t support it. This revanchist crowd believes in a cultural revolution. They think the system has been, some would say, hijacked. Of course, they wouldn’t use that word. They would say it’s been maneuvered, controlled, and that they can get their hands back on the levers. One important thing about the right in America is that it always considers itself a minority movement in an embattled position, no matter how many branches of government they dominate. What they believe in is what their early philosopher Willmoore Kendall called a politics of battle lines—of war.

  What do you see as the paradox of conservatism today?

  The paradox of conservatism is that it gives the signs, the overt signs, of energy and vitality, but as a philosophy, as a system of government, as a means of evaluating ourselves, our social responsibilities, our personal obligations and responsibilities, it has right now nothing to offer.

  They disagree with you, obviously. They think you have issued a call for unilateral
disarmament on their part—that brass knuckles and sharp elbows are essential to fighting for what one believes in, and therefore, you, Sam Tanenhaus, are calling for a unilateral disarmament.

  Well, that’s what Richard Hofstadter called the paranoid style, when it’s living on the verge of apocalypse, when defeat is staring you in the face, and the only victories are total victories. Because even the slightest victory, if it’s not complete, means the other side may come back and get you again. This is not serious, responsible argument. Much of my book is actually about the failures of liberalism in that noontime period of the 1960s. And many of the conservatives simply ignore that part of the argument.

  What explains your long fascination with conservative ideas and the conservative movement?

  Well, I think it has been the dominant political philosophy in our culture for some half a century. What particularly drew me first to Whittaker Chambers and then William Buckley is the idea that these were serious intellectuals who were also men of action. In their best periods, in the days when National Review and Commentary and The Public Interest were tremendously vital publications, conservatives were self-examining, developing new vocabularies and idioms, teaching us all how to think about politics and culture in a different way, with a different set of tools. They contributed enormously to who we were as Americans. Many liberals were not paying attention. Many liberals today don’t know that a splendid thinker like Garry Wills was a product of the conservative movement. It’s astonishing to them to learn it. They just assume, because they agree with him now, he was always a liberal. In fact, he remains a kind of conservative. This is the richness in the conservative philosophy that attracted me, and that I wanted to learn more about, to educate myself.