Conservatives Without Conscience

by John W. Dean

  The conservatism of Burnham and of an entire generation of conservative intellectuals has virtually disappeared as a functional political force, because it proved unable to stand up to the waves of demagogues, bigots, fanatics, malcontents, and assorted populists who have claimed the label for their own extremist aims. Leaders such as George Wallace, Strom Thurmond, Jesse Helms, and Pat Robertson—along with many more pedestrian politicians, political operatives, and social activists in pursuit of whatever narrow agendas—have easily overwhelmed and pushed aside the principles of conservative’s founders.[18] Had conservatism been entrenched enough to prevent expediency from overtaking critical thinking, it might not have been so easily uprooted. But conservatism was built on an unstable ground, and was not sufficiently fortified to weather such political storms.

  A Brief History of Modern Conservatism: Shallow and Twisted Roots

  Numerous recent studies have traced the evolution of the conservative movement.[19] As these works show (but certainly do not concede), conservatism has too often been perverted by small minds, which has enabled any number of extremist forces to subvert its authentic principles. Unlike classic liberalism, which evolved slowly over centuries, modern conservatism was cobbled together, if not contrived, by a relatively small group of intellectuals during a brief period in the late 1940s and early 1950s. Modern conservatism was soon brought into elective politics in the 1950s; its followers then joined forces with Southern politicians in the 1960s, and began flirting with evangelical Christians in the 1970s. Conservatism’s many factions were consolidated under Ronald Reagan’s Republican Party in the 1980s. Less than satisfied with their lot under Reagan, however, evangelical Christians increased their religiously motivated political zealotry in the late 1980s, throughout the 1990s, and into the new century.

  While modern conservatism is a post–World War II political phenomenon, its earliest adherents, sometimes labeled the “old right,” date back to those Republicans who refused to follow former president Theodore Roosevelt and his progressive Bull Moose Party during the 1912 presidential election campaign. This group nonetheless chose to remain within the Republican Party ranks and support the reelection of President William Howard Taft. This, of course, resulted in the ascendance of Woodrow Wilson, who was even more progressive than TR, but in those days, conservative purity was paramount. Between the world wars, conservative Republicans played an obstructionist role, blocking Wilson’s League of Nations, opposing American intervention in foreign affairs, resisting non-European immigration, and pushing laissez-faire economic policies. Republican Party historian Lewis L. Gold notes that when “discussing the failures of the United States to intervene in World War I, or the difficulties of the League of Nations in the 1920s, Republicans rarely point out how much their [own] party did to sustain these now discredited policies.”[20]

  Early conservatives were groping for something more than a philosophy of opposing anything that departed from the status quo and giving corporations the freedom they sought from government. They were searching for ideas and found common cause in their opposition to the New Deal. No factor did more to stimulate the growth of modern conservatism than the election of Franklin Roosevelt (with the possible exception of the spread of communism). He is the man conservatives most dislike, for he embodies the big-government ideology they most fear. Opposition to FDR’s policies and programs resulted in people like H. L. Mencken and former Republican president Herbert Hoover’s joining the conservative cause, adding stature to the nascent movement.[21] In time, conservatives found political leadership in President Taft’s son, Robert Taft, of Ohio, who became majority leader of the Senate in 1953, but seven months later died of cancer.

  Lionel Trilling, a leading voice of the left, observed in 1950 that in “the United States at this time, liberalism is not only the dominant but the sole intellectual tradition….[T]here are no conservative or reactionary ideas in general circulation.”[22] Trilling, for a while, was correct. Intellectual efforts, rather than political leadership, however, ultimately proved more significant for the initial growth of conservatism. The work of conservative scholars, which had commenced in the late forties, although inconsequential at first, did serve to create a foundation for modern conservatism, and a philosophy was developed from scratch. At first they looked to European thinking and tradition, but this seemed un-American to many of them, and they, accordingly, began developing an authentically American conservative heritage. This was not easy, given the liberal tradition of this country, and in fact, nothing in America’s founding, or the creation of the United States, was of a conservative nature.

  George H. Nash, himself a conservative, is the leading authority on this intellectual development, and his work The Conservative Intellectual Movement in America is considered a classic.[23] Nash’s study, however, reveals the dubious analysis employed by early conservatives in constructing their philosophy. Nash reports that the post–World War II resurgence of conservatism resulted in three independent schools of thought, all of which developed concurrently. First, Nash explains, “classic liberalism” morphed into “libertarianism,” which held that the expanding powers of the state threatened “liberty, private enterprise, and individualism.” Second, “traditional conservatism” developed in reaction to the secularism among the totalitarian states during the aftermath of World War II. This brand of conservatism called for “a return to traditional religious and ethical absolutes,” and rejected “relativism” as something corroding Western values. Third, Nash reports, there emerged a school of “militant, evangelistic anti-communism.”[24]

  The conspicuous weakness in Nash’s work is his failure to report any of the inevitable conflicts among these three early schools of thought. Nash also does not establish any real connection between them other than anticommunism, which they all embraced (as did most progressives and liberals). Thus, he provides little historical insight into early fissures within conservatism, although these would develop into the factions which have yet to resolve their differences.

  Early conservative scholars sought to establish the conservative tradition in America, often doing so by turning history upside down. They began with the Declaration of Independence, which involved an attempt to co-opt such profoundly liberal concepts of inalienable rights and equality. The Declaration, which formalized the end of colonial American allegiance to the monarchy of George III, has long been considered a classic statement of liberal political theory.[25] Echoing the words of the liberal philosophers like Jean-Jacques Rousseau and John Locke, Jefferson proclaimed as self-evident truths that “all men are created equal” and “are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights,” including “Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” These are concepts that are hardly articles of faith in conservative thought.

  Nash admits that the Declaration was “troublesome” for the early conservatives, and reports that one scholar suggested conservatives should claim that, in fact, the Declaration’s egalitarian ethos had not been carried over to the Constitution; rather, that the Declaration was just that, a declaration and not a governing document.[26] Nash explains that it was ultimately decided “to stress the compatibility” of both the Declaration and the Constitution with conservative views, although that compatibility was created by brazenly reinterpreting the founding events and documents.[27] Accordingly, for conservatives the clause “all men are created equal” would be construed to apply merely to equality under the law and not to “some misty ‘pursuit of happiness’ [as] the true foundation of our polity” and certainly not to the brand of egalitarianism favored by liberals. Most conservatives, in fact, oppose equality, and there is ultimately no clearer underlying distinction between conservatives and liberals than their views on this issue.[*] Nash concludes that in “a variety of ways, then, conservatives sought to drain the Declaration of its explosive [liberal] rhetorical potential.”

  Removing equality from the American tradition, however, created early divisions withi
n conservative ranks, because deliberate tampering with history simply was not acceptable to everyone. In 1965, for example, conservative political scientist Harry Jaffa, a highly respected Lincoln scholar, concluded that no principle was more fundamental than the Declaration’s assertion that “all men are created equal.” This did not apply merely to equality under law, but to political equality. According to Nash, the gist of Jaffa’s position was that “no man is by nature the ruler of another, that government derives its just powers from consent of the governed—that is from the opinion of the governed.” Thus, majority rule could not be separated from “the principle of the natural equality of political right of all men” (italics in original).[28] Jaffa had no doubt, unlike some conservative scholars, that the “Founding Fathers adhered to the principles of the Declaration of Independence” when writing the Constitution.[29]

  Another example of a conservative attempt to rewrite history is in the interpretation of the American Revolution. Because revolution is the antithesis of conservatism, Nash explained, conservatives relied “on the work of such conservative scholars as Daniel Boorstin,” later head of the Library of Congress, who argued in The Genius of American Politics (1953) that the American Revolution was, unlike the French Revolution, not a cataclysmic upheaval, but rather a “limited war for independence” fought by colonialists to obtain the traditional rights of their forefathers. Others have pushed the argument even further, insisting that the American Revolution was merely an effort to place a check on Parliament and the out-of-control king of England. These conservatives “tended to stress that the American Revolution was a moderate and prudent affair—hardly a revolution at all,” Nash reports.[30] Of course, a distinctly different reality is portrayed by almost all legitimate historical accounts of the American Revolution (whether written by conservatives or liberals), from David McCullough’s highly praised 1776 (2005) to Merrill Jensen’s The American Revolution within America (1974) and Bernard Bailyn’s The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution (1967). The war for independence was America’s longest war (lasting eight years) and its deadliest until the Civil War. Especially given its outcome, to call it a “moderate” or “limited” war borders on the absurd.[31] For example, McCullough wrote in 1776, “The war was a longer, far more arduous, and more painful struggle than later generations would understand or sufficiently appreciate.”[32]

  In their efforts to present conservatism as an American tradition, conservatives have also reinterpreted the U.S. Constitution. One of the key elements of the Constitution is the establishment of a unique republic, in that a federal system would coexist with state and local governments. Before it was ratified many opponents attacked its progressive and innovative nature, for far from representing the status quo, the Constitution was dramatically liberal. James Madison defended it in The Federalist Papers by explaining that the founders “have not suffered a blind veneration for antiquity, for custom” but rather employed “numerous innovations…in favor of private rights and public happiness.” Madison said that “precedent could not be discovered,” for there was no other government “on the face of the globe” that provided a model.[33] Madison, the father of the Constitution, clearly saw his work as the opposite of conservatism. Far from venerating the principles of the past, or feeling bound by custom, our nation’s founders relied on reason, which is anathema for many of today’s conservatives.

  By laying claim to the Constitution as part of their own antiliberal tradition, conservatives have, even Nash seems to believe, gone too far. “In sharp contrast with many (including some of the Founding Fathers) who believed that the Constitution was intended to set up a stronger national government than the one under the Articles of Confederation,” Nash wrote with a tone of apology, “many conservatives stressed the powers of individuals and states under the federal system.” Even more inexcusable is that some conservative thinkers “seemed to infuse an almost anti-Federalist understanding of the Constitution” into its interpretation.[34] Anti-Federalists, of course, opposed its ratification, so to take that line of thought its full distance would have us still operating as European colonies. Absurd? Apparently not, as one influential Southern conservative historian, Clyde Wilson, has argued that the anti-Federalists were the only true American conservatives.[35] Fortunately, such thinking did not carry the day, but it has been prevalent from the outset of the conservative movement.

  Had conservative scholars of the 1950s conceded the nation’s liberal legacy, and stated at the time that they were formulating a conservative philosophy based on a century and a half of history since the nation’s founding, a legitimate conservative foundation could have been built on the American tradition. Nash isolated the key question facing the early conservatives: “How could a nation conceived in violence and dedicated to universal rights ever be called ‘conservative’?” Political scientist Clinton Rossiter, considered one of the first neoconservatives, answered this question head-on, and unlike his peers, honestly, in his early study Conservatism in America, stating correctly that America’s political roots were “progressive” and the United States was conceived out of “a Liberal tradition.”[36]

  Goldwater Conservatism Is Dead, R.I.P.

  Barry Goldwater defined conservatism for my generation and several others. Incongruously, many former Goldwater conservatives have been instrumental in reshaping conservatism, but in doing so they have abandoned the senator’s own philosophy and the sense of conscience that anchored his thinking. The senator explained that much of his own conservative thinking had come from his mother’s “wonderful common sense” as well as his experiences as an Arizona businessman during the period that he and his brother ran their chain of successful department stores. Before Goldwater ran for Congress, Senator Everett Dirksen (R-IL) sent him speeches and background papers of his own, and had the Library of Congress gather a number of speeches by Senator Robert Taft (R-OH) for the candidate to study. Although he had never been much of a student as a young man, the senator became one, and spent the first ten years of his Senate career fascinated by books and reading, not to mention studying the workings of government. Herbert Hoover, who in 1932 was the first president for whom Goldwater had voted, became the senator’s friend and mentor after he arrived in Washington, and he collected all of Hoover’s published works to study them.

  Senator Goldwater wrote a thrice-weekly column on conservatism for the Los Angles Times for almost four years.[37] He was frequently asked to define conservatism and did so over the course of several of those columns. The Conscience of a Conservative (1960) attempted to refine that definition, but it was over the next decade that he distilled it into its final form. In The Conscience of a Majority (1970) he defined conservatism as the belief that “the solutions to the problems of today can be found in the proven values of the past.”[38] (He elaborated later, saying that “in its simplest terms, conservatism is economic, social, and political practices based on the successes of the past.”)[39] As for the conscience of the conservative, he wrote that it was “pricked by anyone who would debase the dignity of the individual human being.”[40] When I asked him years later what now “pricked” the conservative conscience, he said that he should have written that the conservative conscience is “pricked by anyone or any action” that debases human dignity. “Doesn’t poverty debase human dignity?” I asked. “Of course it does,” he replied, and went on to say that if family, friends, and private charity cannot handle the job, the government must.[*] When I pressed him on conservatives being opposed to equality, he chuckled. “Those are the intellectual conservatives’, who couldn’t get themselves elected dog-catcher.”[41] (Sadly, this once may have been true, but it is certainly not the case today.)

  “Politics is the art of achieving the maximum amount of freedom for individuals that is consistent with the maintenance of social order,” Senator Goldwater wrote, and in balancing between these forces, he argued, “the conservative’s first concern will always be: Are we maximizing freedom?�
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  I have always thought of these fundamentals—draw on the proven wisdom of the past; do not debase the dignity of others; and maximize freedom consistent with necessary safety and order—as conservatism’s “paragon of essences,” and have considered them broad enough to address a wide range of issues, from fiscal responsibility to libertarianism (toward which the senator was strongly inclined) to acknowledging the threat of communism (and today, terrorism) without getting hysterical about it. Distinctly absent from Goldwater’s conservatism was any thought of the government’s imposing its own morality, or anyone else’s, on society. In other words, the values of today’s social, or cultural, conservatism had no place in the senator’s philosophy.

  Philip Gold, who campaigned for Goldwater in 1964, argued in his meditative Take Back the Right: How the Neocons and the Religious Right Have Betrayed the Conservative Movement that conservatives should have retained a covenant with the fathers of conservatism, for “continuity across generations [is] the essence of conservatism.” What has breaking that covenant, as has clearly occurred with Goldwater, meant? It is a serious loss, believes Gold, for Goldwater “cared deeply about civilization…. He also was humane, one of his party’s few who took issues such as civil rights, women’s rights and the environment seriously.”[43]