Grant Havers
Since the Cold War era, some prominent voices of the American conservative movement have portrayed their cause as a noble continuation of the traditional English conservatism that Edmund Burke or Benjamin Disraeli defended in an earlier era. In this chapter, I show that these claims are not tenable. My discussion of the Canadian Tory philosopher George Grant demonstrates that there is a wide gap between the post–World War II conservative valorization of capitalist democracy and the inveterate conservative suspicion of this late modern system. I also contend that, unlike traditional Tories, the advocates of “democratic capitalism” as the best system for every society stand for liberal globalization rather than a conservative defense of particularity and organic social relations. Most tellingly, post–World War II conservatives have often ignored how state capitalism, the alliance of big government and big business, has historically undermined the cause of conservatism.
When George Grant wrote his most famous book, Lament for a Nation: The Defeat of Canadian Nationalism, the future of conservatism was in doubt on both sides of the North American border. In the United States, the Republican Party was still reeling from its colossal defeat at the hands of Lyndon B. Johnson’s Democrats in the 1964 election. In Canada, the Conservative government led by Prime Minister John Diefenbaker had narrowly lost its grip on power in 1963 to the Liberal Party, which had received the support of the Kennedy administration. Lament was published in 1965, at a time when the liberal consensus in America was very solid. With a Democratic majority in Congress, LBJ was starting to push through comprehensive legislation in support of his Great Society social programs as well as plans to escalate America’s involvement in the Vietnam conflict. Popular opposition to this twofold social engineering at home and abroad had not yet materialized. Most Republicans offered only tepid opposition to LBJ’s social programs while they enthusiastically supported the bombing of North Vietnam. It seemed that liberalism had triumphed over conservatism in America.
Grant emphasized the meaning of this triumph closer to home. The weakness of conservatism and what it meant for the survival of his country was the central theme of Lament. As a Canadian with deep ancestral roots in the Loyalist opposition to the American Revolution, Grant eloquently articulated the precarious nature of conservatism in the modern age. “The impossibility of conservatism in our era is the impossibility of Canada. As Canadians we attempted a ridiculous task in trying to build a conservative nation in the age of progress, on a continent we share with the most dynamic nation on earth. The current of modern history was against us.”1 According to Grant, true conservatism had to oppose “progress.” More specifically, conservatives were supposed to resist liberalism, the political philosophy most devoted to progressivist political aims. The mind-set of Grant, which had deep roots in the High Tory tradition of Richard Hooker, Jonathan Swift, and Samuel Coleridge, stressed the preservation of tradition, organic social relations, and historical particularity,2 or what Grant liked to call “love of one’s own.”3 In contrast, liberal progressivism demanded the universal dissemination of “freedom” and “equality” at the cost of traditional attachments to one’s hearth and home. In practice, capitalism was the means for accomplishing this ambitious goal, which, as Karl Marx argued, demolishes all traditions that interfere with the relentless expansion of the market economy. As Grant noted throughout Lament, once Canada’s corporate elites had embraced the new American empire of the twentieth century, after severing their ties to the obsolete English imperium, the fate of the country’s traditions and autonomy was effectively sealed.
For all these reasons, Grant doubted that American conservatism was a bulwark against the antitraditional forces of progress. The defeat of Barry Goldwater’s Republicans in the 1964 election had demonstrated to Grant that the conservatism south of the Canadian border was too modernist in origins and assumptions to mount an effective resistance against liberalism. In fact, American conservatism, unlike Anglo-Canadian Toryism, was simply the older version of liberalism.
The Americans who call themselves “Conservatives” have the right to the title only in a particular sense. They stand for the freedom of the individual to use his property as he wishes, and for a limited government which must keep out of the marketplace. Their concentration on freedom from governmental interference has more to do with nineteenth-century liberalism than with traditional conservatism, which asserts the right of the community to restrain freedom in the name of the common good.… The founders of the United States took their thoughts from the eighteenth-century Enlightenment. Their rallying cry was “freedom.” There was no place in their cry for the organic conservatism that predated the age of progress. Indeed, the United States is the only society on earth that has no traditions from before the age of progress. Their “right-wing” and “left-wing” are just different species of liberalism. “Freedom” was the slogan of both Goldwater and President Johnson.4
The fact that the Republicans under Richard Nixon returned to power in the 1968 election due to widespread discontent over Johnson’s mismanagement of the Vietnam War, race relations, and the Great Society programs did not convince Grant that conservatism was making a comeback in America. In a new preface to Lament, which he wrote in 1970, Grant observed that no true ideological shift had taken place among the elites who controlled the centers of power in America. Rather, the “dominant classes” had to “content themselves with the clearer, if grimmer, technocratic skill of Mr. Nixon, and even with the direct bourgeois self-defence of Mr. Agnew and Mr. Mitchell.”5 Meanwhile, in Canada, people were still “quite proud of our ‘show-biz’ technocrat, Pierre Trudeau, in Ottawa, when the U. S. can no longer afford that luxury.”6 Even so, liberal progressivism on both sides of the border was facing little threat from the conservative side of the spectrum.
Grant’s surgical distinction between Anglo-Canadian Toryism and American conservatism has encouraged a great deal of debate. Some admiring readers have argued that Grant’s political philosophy is evidence for what Louis Hartz called the “Tory touch.” Hartz argued that the Loyalists’ breakaway from America constituted a “fragment” of traditional conservatism that repudiated America’s rugged individualism.7 Gad Horowitz elaborated on Hartz’s thesis by arguing that Grant’s political philosophy was an articulate defense of this tradition.8 However, Grant has also had his critics, some of whom contend that he failed to provide an accurate picture of conservatism on both sides of the border. In particular, Grant’s claim that America lacks a true conservative tradition has provoked considerable disagreement. Barry Cooper contends that Grant did not sufficiently recognize the liberal or Whiggish roots of Canadian conservatism that it shares with its American cousin.9 In fairness, Grant often acknowledged in Lament that Canada eventually embraced a Whiggish tradition that transformed conservatism at the expense of its Tory roots. This version of English liberalism had already triumphed in Britain by the time that the older conservatism “was inherited by Canadians.”10 Yet this admission has not satisfied critics who insist that the conservative tradition in Canada has never been independent of classical liberalism.11
These criticisms of Grant’s conservatism have merit. There has always been considerable debate over the extent to which the Loyalists who were forced to flee revolutionary America still adhered to Whiggish views on politics. Many of these refugees retained liberal views of self-government, albeit ones that were often tinged with the resentment of defeat and expulsion at the hands of the Yankee revolutionaries.12 These Loyalists also used John Locke’s liberalism to their own advantage. Thomas Hutchinson, the Loyalist governor of Massachusetts, noted in his famous “Dialogue between an American and a European Englishman” (1768) that both sides to the growing conflict in the American colonies cited Locke in defense of their opposing positions.13 As Bernard Bailyn observed, “Both speakers cite Locke (accurately) to defend their positions.”14 The American’s position on the right to disobey unjust laws and the European Englishman’s position on the need to obey laws in order to preserve order were equally Lockean. In other words, precious little distinguished Canadian conservatism from its American cousin precisely because they both heralded from the same English tradition of liberalism.15 Moreover, Canada’s political system, despite its Anglo-French roots, was not intended to conserve this dual heritage. Rather, the intent of the Fathers of Confederation was to build a liberal regime that welcomed all peoples, regardless of tradition, identity, or heritage.16 In short, Grant, according to Cooper, was not “engaging in political analysis.” Rather, he was “evoking a political idea or myth” of a Loyalist Canada that never existed.17
In fairness to Grant, he never denied that there were some liberal elements within the Loyalist tradition. He even remarked, in Technology and Empire, that the most educated Loyalists were “straight Locke with a dash of Anglicanism.”18 Still, he quickly added that these men also had the “desire to build a political society with a clearer and firmer doctrine of the common good than that at the heart of the liberal democracy to the south.”19 In Lament, Grant admitted that these gentlemen lacked a concrete political philosophy. The “British conservatism,” which was their source of inspiration, “is difficult to describe because it is less a clear view of existence than an appeal to an ill-defined past. The writings of Edmund Burke are evidence of this.”20 Nevertheless, he insisted that many Loyalists truly possessed “an inchoate desire to build, in these cold and forbidding regions, a society with a greater sense of order and restraint than freedom-loving republicanism would allow.”21 Grant posed the provocative question: “If Lockian liberalism is the conservatism of the English-speaking peoples, what was there in British conservatism that was not present in the bourgeois thought of Hamilton and Madison? If there was nothing, then the acts of the Loyalists are deprived of all moral significance.”22 More pointedly, he asked: “If there was nothing valuable in the founders of English-speaking Canada, what makes it valuable for Canadians to continue as a nation today?”23
It is unduly harsh to dismiss these sentiments as merely expressions of a mythical consciousness or the historical resentment of the defeated. As the American historian Claude H. Van Tyne ably documented in his study The Loyalists in the American Revolution (1902), many Tories or Loyalists were “honestly aghast” at the fact that their fellow Americans could embrace the abstract or self-evident truths of the Declaration of Independence over and against the weight of historical experience as well as the benefits of British rule.24
What, however, is this “doctrine of the common good” that, Grant insisted, lies at the heart of the Tory mind? For the remainder of this chapter, I argue that what truly distinguishes Grant’s Toryism from the current understanding of conservatism in America today is his critique of democratic capitalism. This system, which has enjoyed broad support within the American conservative movement since the Cold War, never truly inspired the traditional conservative mind, as Grant understood it. Edmund Burke, in Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790), famously took aim at the “sophisters, oeconomists, and calculators” who replaced the “age of chivalry” with the age of self-interest and economic man.25 Furthermore, he repudiated the bourgeois view of the state that reduced it to “nothing better than a partnership agreement in a trade of pepper and coffee, calico or tobacco, or some other such low concern, to be taken up for a little temporary interest, and to be dissolved by the fancy of the parties.”26
These sentiments were not entirely mythical or romantic in substance. The class conflict between the landed aristocrats and the nascent bourgeoisie in nineteenth-century England sheds some light on the history of Anglo-Canadian conservative misgivings over capitalism. Even though the Tory landowners did not see the agricultural proletariat as their equals within the class hierarchy, they both made common cause against the bourgeoisie’s campaign for free trade and the repeal of the Corn Laws that had benefited both the aristocracy and farm labor (although these laws also kept the price of food artificially high). One should be cautious about understating the self-interest that motivated this alliance. Still, Oswald Spengler was unduly dismissive of the differences between English conservatives and liberals when he regarded business “in the piratical sense” as “the sum and substance of this politics, no matter whether Tories or Whigs are the bosses at any given moment.”27 Russell Kirk in a similar vein erroneously claimed that “the domestic quarrel between Old Tory and Old Whig shrank into insignificance” with the end of the French Revolution and the Jacobite rebellion.28 Neither Spengler nor Kirk devoted sufficient attention to historical evidence that pointed to the English Tory suspicion of the ascendant bourgeoisie. The Marxist historian E. P. Thompson argued, in his classic study The Making of the English Working Class (1963), that the English proletarian and petit-bourgeois belief in a Tory elite that would protect their interests from the rising moneyed classes was very real in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Although Thompson admitted that the “paternalist” legislation that flowed out of this elite group was often “restrictive” and “punitive” in its effect on the working classes,
there was within it the shadowy image of a benevolent corporate state, in which there were legislative as well as moral sanctions against the unscrupulous manufacturer or the unjust employer, and in which the journeymen were a recognized ‘estate’, however low, in the realm.… The function of industry was to provide a livelihood for those employed in it; and practices or inventions evidently destructive of the good of the ‘Trade’ were reprehensible. The journeyman took pride in his craft, not merely because it increased his value in the labour market, but because he was a craftsman. These ideals may never have been much more than ideals; by the end of the eighteenth century they may have been threadbare. But they had a powerful reality, none the less, in the notion of what ought to be, to which artisans, journeymen, and many small masters appealed.29
Even if protectionist measures (e.g., a minimum wage law, passed in 1773) were eventually swept away by the tide of industrialization in the early nineteenth century,30 there was a lingering sense of noblesse oblige among some English Tories that the state should benevolently care for the laboring classes.31
It may seem odd to quote a Marxist historian in a chapter devoted to an exegesis of the Tory mind. However, it is noteworthy that Grant admired certain features of the Marxist approach to history and politics that provided insight into the hegemonic power of the capitalist system.32 Grant and other Tories have drawn on a rich body of historical evidence that supports their vision of a “common good” conservatism. Most famously, Benjamin Disraeli’s call for “One Nation Conservatism” and Randolph Churchill’s dream of “Tory Democracy” built on the assumption that the English aristocracy and working class were natural allies, even if they were not natural equals. Grant particularly admired Disraeli, who belonged to a conservative tradition “that has decayed in Canada before the ravages of capitalist liberalism.”33 In the words of Ron Dart, the “literary and political conservatism of Disraeli, as Grant was obviously aware, was about a concern for the poor and marginalized, and the use of the state and society to minimize glaring social injustices.”34 To this day, “Red” Tories who are suspicious of capitalism dream of restoring Disraeli’s alliance between their party and the English working class.35
As a twentieth-century Anglican Christian, Grant was far more egalitarian than these Tory luminaries from the previous century. It is hard to imagine even Disraeli uttering these words: “Equality should be the central principle of society since all persons, whatever their condition, must freely choose to live by what is right or wrong.”36 Perhaps for this reason, Grant never forcefully defended the notion of a class hierarchy per se, even if he sometimes admired how the English aristocracy had produced men of quality such as William Gladstone and Disraeli, whose “level of education and character” had no equivalent amid the “undiluted triumph of capitalist democracy” in the modern age.37 In short, Grant retained a Tory skepticism toward the ascendant capitalist class. Once again, a society based on “order and restraint” rather than “freedom-loving republicanism” was the Loyalist dream.38 Yet it is hard for this conservative vision to survive in the age of capitalist modernity. From Grant’s jaded perspective, liberalism and capitalism fit like hand and glove in their shared hostility to tradition and national identity. “Liberalism is the fitting ideology for a society directed toward these ends. It denies unequivocally that there are any given restraints that might hinder pursuit of dynamic dominance.”39 Moreover, the corporate elites of Canada “lost nothing essential to the principle of their lives in losing their country. It is this very fact that has made capitalism the great solvent of all tradition in the modern era. When everything is made relative to profit-making, all traditions of virtue are dissolved, including that aspect of virtue known as love of country. That is why liberalism is the perfect ideology for capitalism.”40
The 1964 presidential election in the United States had demonstrated to Grant that the liberal establishment and corporate power were joined at the hip. At least since the New Deal era, big business in America had accepted and even welcomed the new managerial state. This fact was lost on the Goldwater Republicans:
The clobbering of Goldwater at the polls in November of 1964 shows how little the American people cared about the early liberalism of their Founders. Johnson’s “Great Society” expressed the new American “freedom” far better than Goldwater’s talk of limited government and free enterprise. The majority tradition in the United States backs Roosevelt, Kennedy, Johnson, whose liberalism is the most modern. The older liberalism of the Constitution had its swan song in the election of 1964. The classes that had once opposed Roosevelt were spent forces by 1964. The leaders of the new capitalism supported Johnson. Goldwater’s cry for limited government seemed as antediluvian to the leaders of the corporations as Diefenbaker’s nationalism seemed to the same elements in Canada.… The Goldwater camp was outraged by the sustained attack of the television networks and newspaper chains. Were they not aware who had become the American establishment since 1932? Corporation capitalism and liberalism go together by the nature of things. The establishment knew how to defend itself when threatened by the outrageous challenge of outsiders from Arizona. The American election of 1964 is sufficient evidence that the United States is not a conservative society. It is a dynamic empire spearheading the age of progress.41
Although Grant thought that his observations on the 1964 election were “platitudinous,”42 it is hard to find any equivalent ideas within the modern American conservative movement. While there have always been a few American conservatives who have had similar misgivings about capitalism, critiques of its “inner workings” from the American Right have yielded to critiques of big government from the New Deal era onward.43 As I will show, the post–World War II conservative movement has generally embraced capitalism without any serious ideological difficulty. This adherence to capitalism goes hand in hand with the confident view that the “democratic” version of capitalism that America embodies is a necessary bulwark against the intrusions of the state. What is absent in this movement is adequate recognition of the fact that capitalism and the managerial state have become intertwined since the 1930s. Grant often employed the term “state capitalism” to press the point that big business since the Great Depression has desired and needed the support of the state. Under this system, the state itself is not “capitalist”: it does not take on the role of controlling the means of production for profit.44 Rather, the state leaves the private ownership of capital untouched for the most part while providing crucial support for the moneyed interests. This support includes the maintenance of social order in times of economic distress, subsidies for major industries, and the dissemination of propaganda that legitimizes the system.45
While Grant supported the old Tory idea of a benevolent state that protects the poor, he was dubious about the overall merits of state capitalism, whose defenders also profess compassion for the underprivileged. The progressivist rhetoric that they employed also aroused his suspicions. For all of these reasons, Grant wrote: “State capitalism and liberalism are much more advanced manifestations of the age of progress than the Russian system with its official Marxism.”46 In contrast, the preeminent defenders of American capitalism often make the same mistake as the Goldwater Republicans in assuming that capitalism is still independent of, and opposed to, big government.
To demonstrate the vast divide between Grant’s Toryism and postwar American conservatism, I compare and contrast his ideas with those of five famous defenders of the American social order who have had extensive influence on intellectual conservatism in the United States since World War II: Russell Kirk, Frank Meyer, Irving Kristol, Michael Novak, and Allan Bloom.
Philosophical defenses of democratic capitalism in America emerged long before the advent of the Reagan era in the 1980s. The antecedents for this worldview are apparent as early as the 1950s. In 1953, Russell Kirk published his classic best seller The Conservative Mind: From Burke to Eliot, a work that William F. Buckley praised as “an act of conscious apostleship to a social and historical and philosophical order which is best described as ‘conservative.’ ”47 In this book, Kirk synthesized the ideas of British and American political philosophers, whose common opposition to modern revolution after 1790 demonstrated, at least to Kirk, a common conservatism. “Only Britain and America, among the great nations, have escaped revolution since 1790, which seems attestation that their conservatism is a steady growth and that investigation of it may be rewarding.”48 Unsurprisingly, then, Kirk devoted extensive attention to the Anglo-Irish parliamentarian and philosopher Edmund Burke, whose sympathy with the American Revolutionaries was the lynchpin of Kirk’s thesis that conservatism as a whole is intelligible and desirable to peoples beyond the Anglo-American orbit. “A universal constitution of civilized peoples” was implicit in Burke’s thought, after all.49
How traditional was this conservatism? Kirk was too careful a reader of Burke to argue, as many neoconservatives later did, that conservatism must embrace ahistorical claims about the desire or ability of all human beings to contrive stable and decent constitutional regimes. He assiduously followed Burke’s opposition to “abstraction,” or “rather vainglorious generalization without respect for human frailty and the particular circumstance of an age and a nation.”50 For this reason, Kirk devoted several pages of The Conservative Mind to debunking the “natural rights” philosophy of Thomas Paine and others, a doctrine that falsely and dangerously downplayed the power of historical circumstances. He writes: “What may be a right on one occasion and for one man, may be unjust folly for another man at a different time.”51 No people had a “natural right” to bring a regime into place by force or violence if they were unready for government, as in the case of the French Jacobins. Even though Kirk’s reference to an “eternal natural order which holds all things in their places”52 conveyed the impression that his conservatism was universally applicable to all human beings, regardless of time or place, he never strayed far from his Burkean conviction that the preconditions for liberty, including religion, moderation, and experience, were far more important than the mere desire for liberty.
As Paul Gottfried has argued in Conservatism in America: Making Sense of the American Right (2007), Kirk’s discussion of what he takes to be the common core of Anglo-American conservatism is oddly silent on the presence of a liberal tradition in the history of America, before and after the Revolution. Kirk never challenged Louis Hartz’s famous thesis that America’s primary political tradition was liberal, given the absence of a feudal heritage that characterized English and European climes.53 I mention this fact because Grant in Lament endorsed Hartz’s thesis (without actually citing Hartz) that American conservatism was just old-fashioned American liberalism, as we have seen. None of this implies that Grant would have disagreed with Kirk’s thesis that the founding of America owes a great debt to English traditions. However, these traditions were liberal or Whiggish, hostile to the premodern traditionalism that, Grant believed, once defined true conservatism. Unlike Kirk, Grant did not attribute to Burke an elaborate political philosophy that clearly outlined what conservatism was. Nor did he conflate English liberalism with true “British conservatism,” which was “already a spent force at the beginning of the nineteenth century when English-speaking Canadians were making a nation.”54 The conservatism that Kirk sought to defend was more liberal, in Grant’s view, than what most American conservatives (Kirk included) recognized.
In his critique of Kirk, Gottfried exposes a more serious defect of his philosophy that also widens the divide between post–World War II American conservatism and Grant’s Toryism. What Nietzsche called a “historical sense,” or the need to understand the sheer temporal distance between one’s own time and the past, is absent in Kirk’s presentation of conservatism. The emphasis on “eternal” truths, a precursor to the universalistic rhetoric of neoconservatism, ignored the fact that the conservatism of the eighteenth century bore little resemblance to the post–World War II republic in which Kirk lived and wrote. The old conservative love of hierarchy, an established church, and ordered liberty seemed to have little place in the America of the 1950s. Gottfried writes: “What brought tears of pride to late eighteenth-century English eyes would not likely do the same for contemporary young urban professionals—or even for their parents who sold insurance, ran laundromats, or repaired TV’s.”55 Although Kirk’s star gradually waned on the right as the neoconservatives gained greater influence,56 his optimistic attempt to bridge the historical gap between the colonial era and the America of the 1950s sounds uncannily similar to some neoconservative views that the oldest traditions of America were still viable in the twentieth-century republic. Gertrude Himmelfarb, spouse of the famous neoconservative journalist Irving Kristol, could write in the early years of the third millennium that the liberal Enlightenment is alive and well, even a “source of inspiration today,” in an America dominated by mass corporations and the Leviathan state.57
This lack of a historical sense explains the considerable difference between Kirk’s and Grant’s views on capitalism. This difference should not suggest that Kirk was always an unabashed defender of capitalism, in sharp contrast to Grant’s withering critique. In The Conservative Mind, Kirk quotes Burke’s famous attack on “sophisters, oeconomists, and calculators” who have succeeded the “age of chivalry,”58 indicating his dislike for a cold-blooded capitalist mentality. He explicitly warned throughout the 1950s that conservatism and capitalism are not the same thing. In his words, “A conservative order is not the creation of the free entrepreneur.”59 Kirk also decried the corporate despoliation of the environment that his fellow conservatives often casually defended as the price of doing business.60 These comments have led some interpreters to argue that Kirk was at times a serious opponent of capitalism, even though he did not harbor any practical desire to transform the system.61 The famous left-wing activist Ralph Nader has praised Kirk as a stalwart defender of the environment against the depredations of capitalism.62
Nevertheless, these environmentalist concerns are absent in Kirk’s later defense of capitalism in the early 1980s. In a published exchange with the American socialist author Michael Harrington in 1982, Kirk lined up with Irving Kristol to give “two cheers for capitalism.”63 Even though capitalism cannot guarantee “human happiness,” which would have earned it a third cheer, Kirk emphasized that its twofold achievement of material prosperity for millions of Americans along with the freedom to enjoy unprecedented leisure time abundantly demonstrated that it was far superior to any socialist alternative.64 Moreover, Kirk was utterly untroubled by the fact that it is up to capitalists to “control the use of capital, whether or not they personally own the capital.”65 This separation of ownership from control, which spelled the end of the bourgeois era, was of little importance. As the writings of James Burnham and Samuel T. Francis have made clear, however, this phenomenon explains why the managers of big firms have shown little opposition to the expansion of the managerial state since the New Deal era. If managers do not own their companies’ assets, they have no vested interest in protecting them from statist intervention.66 In short, “state capitalism” becomes an attractive option to big business in this climate.
Kirk, however, refused to believe that there was such a thing as state capitalism in modern America. In his exchange with Harrington, Kirk associated this sort of collusion with the kind of “state socialism” practiced in Sweden.67 Unlike Grant, Kirk doubted that there was this sort of “unholy alliance of state capitalism and big business” in America.68 There are two other significant differences between Grant and Kirk in their treatment of state capitalism. In “An Ethic of Community” (1961), Grant describes state capitalism as “more than a practical system for producing and distributing goods; it is also a system of ideas and ideals which determine the character of leadership and inculcates a dominating ethic in our democracy.”69 In contrast, Kirk denied that capitalism in general, whether free market or statist, is a “moral philosophy, or a body of moral habits.”70 Additionally, Grant worried far more than Kirk about the power that big business wielded over the political system and society as a whole. While Grant thought that “passive mediocrity” was a more likely outcome than a “just and creative society” under state capitalism,71 Kirk was confident that the “free economy” of capitalism would continue to liberate “energies” and “enterprising talents.”72
It would be unfair to accuse Kirk of completely ignoring just how much capitalism had changed in the twentieth century. He was just as aware as Grant that the “United States is no longer a society of small property owners, but of massive private and public corporations.”73 Kirk worried about the “strong tendency toward consolidation” that threatens “small firms, partnerships, and family enterprises.”74 Yet he refused to attribute this defect to the inner workings of capitalism itself. What he called “this very diminishing of competition” was due to ill-conceived public policies like inheritance taxes and government subsidies that harm small firms while enriching large ones. The reader is left with the impression that big business, in Kirk’s view, is a mere bystander, not an agent, of this tendency toward greater statist intervention in the economy.75
While Kirk was arguably naive about the reality of state capitalism, he never abandoned his misgivings about the historical transformations that characterized American democracy in the Cold War era. Toward the end of his life, he penned a scorching essay on the likelihood that “Caesarism” would emerge out of American democracy. In particular, Kirk lambasted the dangerous tendency since LBJ toward an imperial presidency that centralizes power in the hands of the executive.76 In this essay, he exhibited an admirable historical sense about the decay and decline of liberalism in American politics. According to Kirk, even an admirable politician such as Gene McCarthy used the term “liberal” only with the meaning that it had enjoyed since the time of FDR, not its classical version. On this point, Grant and Kirk agreed. In Lament, Grant sharply noted that liberalism, once the “voice of the outsider,” is “now the voice of the establishment.” Moreover, “Harvard liberalism was surely nobler when William James opposed the Spanish American war than when Arthur Schlesinger Jr., advised Kennedy on Cuban policy.”77 Kirk was also far from oblivious to the power of the Kennedys and the Rockefellers in the new liberal America.78
What I believe is consistently absent in Kirk’s thought, however, is a “root and branch” critique of how political power and corporate power envelop each other in a state capitalist system.79 As I have noted, Grant doubted that corporations have any reason to oppose the liberalism of the managerial state. Moreover, conservatives who fail to take this fact into account are doomed to irrelevance, in Grant’s view. Although Kirk incisively exposed LBJ’s Caesarist tendencies, he was silent on how many elements of the corporate establishment prefer a Caesar over a republican.80 It is unsurprising, then, that Kirk offered no practical ways of reinventing capitalism. All that he could contemplate is the desirability of a “petit-bourgeois” economy that once characterized nineteenth-century America, without citing any measures that could effect this restoration.81 Unlike Grant, Kirk seemed indifferent to the fact that this vision had no place in the age of state capitalism.82
The post–World War II conservative synthesis of capitalism and traditionalism perhaps received its most ambitious defense in Frank Meyer’s concept of “fusionism.” According to Meyer, there is no fundamental conflict between freedom and tradition as long as the state does not impose a program of “virtue” or morality on its citizens. This limited form of government allows and protects the freedom of citizens to engage in virtuous activities such as the raising of a family. Any form of government that goes beyond the maintenance of law and order as well as the preservation of liberty and the administration of justice is not only ill suited to preserve virtue but will endanger it.83 “Freedom, then, is a necessary political condition of a virtuous society, not only because the high likelihood is that the standards imposed by men with the power of the state would not in fact be virtuous standards, but also because, even if they were virtuous, to impose them upon individual persons would immensely reduce their ability to act virtuously at all and absolutely destroy their potentiality for active, creative, positive virtue.”84
The night-watchman state that Meyer defended is the only hope for the preservation of that most conservative goal, a virtuous society. The “fusion” of freedom and tradition can succeed as long as the state sticks to its legitimate domain of protecting citizens from violence at home and abroad while citizens freely preserve the mores inherited from Christian civilization, including respect for the dignity of the person.85 Meyer’s belief that Americans are still interested in preserving traditional Christian morality would have struck Grant as naive. One of the recurrent themes in his writings is the importance of recognizing how Protestants in the twentieth century “accepted the liberalism of autonomous will” while failing to “provide their societies with the public sustenance of uncalculated justice which the contractual account of justice could not provide from itself.”86 In Grant’s view, the transition from bourgeois Calvinism to democratic liberalism (and hedonism) was a seamless one.87
There are important differences between Meyer’s idea of fusionism and other versions of American conservatism in the Cold War era. Not all voices on the American Right have been enamored with Meyer’s libertarian view of the state, which is prohibited from regulating sexual and social vices. Whatever the differences between Meyer and his critics (including Russell Kirk88), however, the lack of an adequate historical sense is just as apparent in the writings of Meyer as it is in those of Kirk. Meyer defended fusionism at a time when mass institutions, both public and private, were already employing their awesome powers of influence and surveillance to shape the consciousness of a democratic citizenry. It is hard to imagine why big business would even welcome this “fusionism” that severely imposed limits on the power of the state.
In fairness, it would be inaccurate to claim that Meyer was totally oblivious to the revolutionary changes that transformed American capitalism since the New Deal. He genuinely lamented the fact that “organization men,” the bureaucratic class that had taken over the management of the corporation, had succeeded the old bourgeois elite. “They have no significant personal ownership of the industrial power they control, simply administering vast masses of capital in the name of stockholders, as government bureaucrats administer the state in the name of the ‘people.’ ”89 This new managerial elite was the product of the separation of management from control that had so fatefully redefined the large capitalist enterprise, as Burnham and Francis have argued. This class of corporate bureaucrats was interchangeable with the bureaucrats of big government who direct a “pliable mass public” to support whatever aims these managers saw as furthering their own interests.90 Meyer also seemed to share Grant’s pessimism when he admitted that a viable middle class that exhibited economic or intellectual independence was practically inconceivable in an age of mass private and public corporations that strove to “engineer the consent” of a “manipulable mass.”91
Meyer never doubted, however, that his philosophy of fusionism could still push back against these collectivizing tendencies. For this reason, he trained his critical guns on the power of the state, not big business. Although Meyer was second to none in warning against the powers of the Leviathan state, he did not exhibit similar worries over the hegemony of big business, perhaps because he thought, as many postwar conservatives did (e.g., Kirk), that big business owed its hegemony to the expansion of the state since the New Deal era. Big government, in Meyer’s view, was at fault for advancing the powers of corporations and trade unions. The “salaried manageriat” that characterized both business and labor was “almost entirely a creation of the years since 1932.”92 It did not occur to Meyer that large elements of the business class welcomed the New Deal or at least preferred it to a return to laissez-faire.
These developments on both sides of the border in North America preoccupied Grant. As he often noted in Lament, the last thing that the Canadian business elite wanted was limited government and free market economics. Since the end of World War II, the managerial liberalism of the New Deal, which Prime Minister Mackenzie King had adopted from his friend Franklin D. Roosevelt, was the favored ideology of Canadian big business. Corporations accepted the legitimate role of the state in “postwar reconstruction” as long as the government “never questioned the ultimate authority of business interests to run the economy.”93 The “confusion of populism, free enterprise, and nationalism” that Prime Minister Diefenbaker had offered was utterly unappealing to Canada’s business elites.94 It is hard not to arrive at a similar judgment of Meyer. Why would American big business in the 1960s, which stood to profit from the mass marketing of sexual libertinism in that decade, desire a fusionist society that blended traditionalism with libertarianism? Furthermore, why would corporations want the federal government to stay out of their business if this intervention was profitable to them?95 As Grant argued, the technological state that capitalists favored encourages a version of freedom that has little time for traditional virtues. The only “pluralism” that liberals favored is the diversity of choices that express the freedom to be a thoughtless consumer of food, sex, and faith. The one proviso is that everyone could express these tastes as long as nobody seriously questions the system that provided this freedom.
Tastes are different, and we should have a society that caters to the plurality of tastes. How much fairer this would be than the old societies in which standards of virtue were imposed on the masses by pertinacious priests and arrogant philosophers. But this is not what is happening in our state capitalism. In the private sphere, all kinds of tastes are allowed. Nobody minds very much if we prefer women or dogs or boys, as long as we cause no public inconvenience. But in the public sphere, such pluralism of taste is not permitted. The conquest of human and non-human nature becomes the only public value.… The vaunted freedom of the individual to choose becomes either the necessity of finding one’s role in the public engineering or the necessity of retreating into the privacy of pleasure.96
Meyer’s desire for a fusion of traditional virtues and capitalism would have likely struck Grant as antediluvian. By the early 1960s, when Meyer was defending this synthesis, big business and many consumers had already left this bourgeois ethos behind.97
The term “state capitalism” does not appear often in the modern American conservative lexicon, except as a phenomenon that is distinctly opposed to “democratic capitalism.” As we shall see, defenders of democratic capitalism such as Irving Kristol and Michael Novak conceive of the modern corporation as an entity that is both distinct and separate from that of the state in American democracy. Yet the neoconservatives who support democratic capitalism are also opposed to Meyer’s version of libertarian capitalism. As Novak argues in his Spirit of Democratic Capitalism, neoconservatives distinguish free market capitalism from democratic capitalism, since the latter is quite compatible with a “vision of social welfare” that requires a more interventionist state than the night-watchman state favored by laissez-faire capitalists.98 Nevertheless, the state largely leaves the running of the economy to the private sector. Grant, however, believed that this conventional conservative understanding of the separation of big business and big government was as historically obsolete as laissez-faire. In his view, at least since World War II, it has become more difficult to separate the functions of business from the powers of the state, given the increasingly close relation or alliance between these two centers of power.
In his essay “An Ethic of Community,” Grant noted how “the most dangerous result of state capitalism is that our society recruits its chief leadership from the executives who have been most successful in living out the capitalist ideal.” Grant went on to observe that “the leaders of the great corporations are an overwhelming majority of the members of the governing boards of our universities.” This domination of the university was, of course, an expression of great corporate power that had emerged since World War II.99 “In 1945 the business elite in North America had in their hands the unquestioned leadership of the world.” Yet Grant warned that this leadership is now passing “more and more into the hands of a tough communist elite.” Part of the problem was the “restricted vision” of business leaders that “could only put up against it [Communism] the motives of corporate and personal greed and the impulses for personal publicity and prestige hunting.” Grant concludes on a dark note: “It is, of course, not only the business community in North America which will pay for this failure of leadership, but all free men who care about the traditions of the West.”100
At first glance, Grant’s message looks identical to the neoconservatives’ worry that businesspeople lack the imagination or verve to defend their system on the basis of high moral principle. Irving Kristol, in Two Cheers for Capitalism (1978), similarly argued that capitalists rely so heavily on the “acquisitive impulse,” which has contributed to the prosperity of millions of people, that it is left “practically defenseless” against anticapitalists from the Left who dismiss this impulse as empty in the first place.101 Unlike Grant, however, Kristol believed that big business is fighting, and losing, the ideological war against its very existence because of its fundamental weakness in the mass society that it created. According to Kristol, the “large corporation” is under great pressure to enter the political sphere against its will. He worries that it “is not going to be able to withstand those forces pulling and pushing it into the political sector unless it confronts the reality of its predicament and adapts itself to this reality in a self-preserving way.”102
Kristol admits that the result of this process that undermines the “private character” of the big firm may well be “state capitalism,” but not because corporations actively seek this integration with the state. Like Meyer, Kristol ultimately blames the state or forces external to the corporation. The corporations of the Cold War era faced an unprecedented level of hostility because of historical transformations affecting ownership and control as well as the direction of mass culture. Before the rise of corporate capitalism, the individual entrepreneur who had worked hard to create his wealth commanded the respect of most Americans.
So long as business was an activity carried on by real individuals who “owned” the property they managed, the politicians, the courts and public opinion were all reasonably respectful of the capitalist proprieties. Not only was the businessman no threat to liberal democracy; he was, on the contrary, the very epitome of the bourgeois liberal-democratic ethos—the man who succeeded by diligence, enterprise, sobriety, and all those other virtues that Benjamin Franklin catalogued for us, and which we loosely call “the Protestant ethic.”103
Yet the impersonal mass corporation of today exhibits none of these traditional bourgeois Protestant virtues. “Not only don’t we know who the Chairman of General Motors is; we know so little about the kind of person who holds such a position that we haven’t the faintest idea as to whether or not we want our children to grow up like him.”104 Both Grant and Kristol agree that the modern corporation has little interest or incentive in reviving the old Protestant ethic. Both men clearly doubted that the fusionist synthesis of traditionalism and capitalism, which Meyer most famously advanced, had much of a chance in the hedonist America of the post–World War II era. According to Kristol, the virtues famously embodied by the Horatio Alger myth had little place in modern America. “From having been a capitalist, republican community, with shared values and a quite unambiguous claim to the title of a just order, the United States became a free, democratic society where the will to success and privilege was severed from its moral moorings.”105 The upshot of this revolution is that “capitalism outgrew its bourgeois origins and became a system for the impersonal liberation and satisfaction of appetites—an engine for the creation of affluence.”106 In a similar vein, Grant remarked: “In the age of high technology, the new capitalism can allow all passions to flourish along with greed. Playboy illustrates the fact that the young executive is not expected to be Horatio Alger.”107 In short, the moral status of the modern corporation is precarious, given its inability to stake out an ethical vision that goes beyond mere calculation.
Because the corporation fails to provide an ethical vision of its purpose, it is unwittingly dragged into the political system. As Kristol argues, the immense political pressure to please different stakeholders and activists leads to an outcome whereby “the large corporation has ceased being a species of private property, and is now a ‘quasi-public’ institution.”108 This neoconservative critique of the modern firm should not suggest that firms actively desire state capitalism per se, a system that “does constitute a huge potential threat to the individual liberties Americans have traditionally enjoyed.” If state capitalism came into being, it would be due to the failure of the large corporation to “withstand those (political) forces pulling and pushing it into the political sector.”109 In fact, Kristol and other neoconservatives doubt that there is a special relation between business and the state, as Grant argued. Kristol even dismissed the idea that businesspeople have the power to influence the state. According to Kirk, “Most Americans are now quick to believe that ‘big business’ conspires secretly but most effectively to manipulate the economic and political system—an enterprise which, in prosaic fact, corporate executives are too distracted and too unimaginative even to contemplate.”110 Corporations, after all, have more interest in making money than bending society or the state to their will. Meanwhile, none of this stops the business executive from being portrayed as “the natural and predestined villain” in the media and culture at large.111
Kristol and other neoconservatives reject the label of “state capitalism,” or the unholy collusion of business and the state, for another reason. In their view, the corporation, despised as it is, still constitutes an important check or restraint against the power of the state. The “concentration of power” that corporations enjoy should not blind us to the fact that “they contribute to a general diffusion of power, a diffusion which creates the ‘space’ in which individual liberty can survive and prosper.” Moreover, the “general principle of checks and balances, and of decentralized authority too, is as crucial to the social and economic structures of a liberal democracy as to its political structure.”112 Novak offers a similar argument. “Without the large private corporation, there would be one fewer among the large private forces strong enough to check the growing ambitions of the administrative state. Were the state to acquire control over the large corporations, the political system would thoroughly dominate the economic system.”113 In his critique of Charles Lindblom’s portrait of corporate power, Novak elaborates on the “checks and balances” theme to which Kristol alluded: “The contest between the leaders of the political system and the leaders of the economic system does not seem to be as one-sided as he (Lindblom) claims. Each side makes life more difficult for the other. The division between economic power and political power is deliberate, and so are the headaches involved. This separation can never be perfect, is always fluid, and is properly hotly contested.”114
It is striking that neither Kristol nor Novak advocates a return to an older conservatism that manifests what Kristol calls “an acute yearning for order and stability,” a vision that appears in the writings of Coleridge, Thomas Carlyle, John Henry Newman, and Michael Oakeshott. This conservatism, which was skeptical toward capitalism, had no place in America.115 Rather, what corporations need to do, according to Kristol, is to “think politically,” namely, to undertake a better presentation of their legitimacy through marketing and advertising that would stress their good citizenship over and above their mere focus on acquisition and profitability.116 Otherwise, they will succumb to the pressures of their enemies who want to subordinate firms to the power of the mass state.
In contrast to Grant’s analysis, then, neoconservatives argue that state capitalism is not something that corporations ordinarily seek. Instead, they prefer to protect their autonomy from the state. If they work with the state at all, it is due in part to pressure from a “New Class” of left-leaning bureaucrats and intellectuals who seek to drag the firm into the public sphere and render it powerless against political interventions.117 “State capitalism,” then, is a reality that these radical forces seek, not big business. Kristol writes: “There can be little doubt that if these new imperialistic impulses on the part of the ‘public sector’ (i.e., the political sector) are unrestrained, we shall move toward some version of state capitalism in which the citizen’s individual liberty would be rendered ever more insecure. But it is important not to have any illusions about how much can be done to cope with this situation. The ‘new class’ is here, it is firmly established in its own societal sectors, and it is not going to go away.”118
What is astounding about the neoconservative analysis of the history of capitalism here is the lack of attention to the vast body of evidence that big business has always desired a closer relationship with the state in order to secure and cultivate its power and influence.119 Instead, Kristol’s version of history suggests that big business has tried to maximize profit while avoiding as much as possible any steady connection to the political sphere, despite the revolutionary transformations that have taken place within the capitalist system. The “anonymous oligarchy” that runs the modern firm has little in common with the entrepreneurial business of the nineteenth century, in which an individual or family controlled and managed its capital.120 This entrepreneur was a real person, not a “legal fiction.”121 By the late nineteenth century, large pools of capital as well as a “variety of technical expertise” were needed to “exploit the emerging technologies and create economies of scale.”122 Amid this revolutionary process, corporations have at times tried to evade the competitive laws of the free market, although not always with success.123
Although Kristol makes some valid points in his historical overview of American capitalism, Grant would likely consider this version of history incomplete. As we have seen, Grant argued that business exerts leadership in institutions (such as universities) that further the domination of corporate capitalism in our mass society. With a nod to leftist critiques of capitalism, Grant thought that the new corporate oligarchy had created “intractable inequalities” that arise from its distribution of wealth.124 Moreover, “the powerful instruments of opinion have tried to identify in the minds of the general public the capitalist model of incentive with all possible systems of incentive.”125 Contra Kristol and Novak, big business has a vested interest in working with the state and other mass institutions to expand its ideological hegemony. It is an agent actively asserting its influence, not a passive bystander besieged by hostile forces.
What is also missing in the neoconservative version of history is the recognition that big business today has little interest in resisting the Left. Although Kristol portrays the modern firm as a victim of pressure tactics from an anticapitalist Left bent on destroying the corporation by subordinating it to statism and public opinion,126 this interpretation ignores how the Left and big business often share common goals and work together in attaining those goals even though they often differ over the means. Grant doubted that the nineteenth-century distinction between “left” and “right” had much meaning today, because major political parties or ideologies “all live within a common horizon” that upholds technological progress under state capitalism.127 As Grant put it, “The directors of General Motors and the followers of Professor Marcuse sail down the same river in different boats.”128
For this reason, Grant took aim at the New Left in the 1960s for misunderstanding that the corporate and political elites share the goal of destroying historical particularity for the sake of achieving mass political equality. In his essay “A Critique of the New Left” (1966), Grant wrote:
One immediate reason why I think the New Left is deluded about what is happening in North America is because it has misinterpreted the events which took place in the southern United States. It says today: look at our triumphs in the South; we will now carry these triumphs of citizen action into new fields of social revolution. What has been forgotten is that the powerful among the people and the institutions of North America were more than willing that the society of the white South should be broken. The civil rights movement had behind it all the powerful forces of the American empire. It marched protected by federal troops, it had the blessing of the leading government figures. It was encouraged night after night by NBC and CBS. There was violence from the white South, but the white South is not an important part of the American power elite. It will be a different matter when the protests are against some position which is dear and close to the American establishment.129
As Grant had argued in Lament, the establishment’s attack on the Goldwater Republicans in the 1964 election was motivated in part by a sense that his movement, largely supported in the South, was “the last-ditch stand of a dying culture.”130 Moreover, Grant would not have shared Kristol’s fears about the power of the “New Class,” since the powers that be are so effective in bureaucratizing or co-opting dissent. Dissent and protest “are taken into the system and trivialized. They are made to serve the interest of the system they are supposed to be attacking, by showing that free speech is allowed.”131
Ultimately, Grant’s Tory critique of capitalism has more in common with paleoconservatism than neoconservatism.132 Both Grant and Samuel T. Francis, for example, fundamentally agree that the modern corporation’s alliance with the state is not a relation that was undertaken with serious reluctance. As Francis argues in Leviathan and Its Enemies (2016), corporations need the mass state and media to disseminate advertising that controls demand for its products.133 I have already noted that the gradual separation of management from ownership in the large corporation, a phenomenon that rendered the individual entrepreneurial owner obsolete, made it easier for corporations to work with the state. Whereas the old bourgeois elite, which owned its firms, had a vested interest in resisting the state, the new managerial elite, which often owns very little stock in the firms that it runs, has little incentive to protect the autonomy of the corporation. This “dematerialization of property” is the foundation of state capitalism in America.134 Big business and the Left have also worked together in undermining the old bourgeois morality that put the brakes on instant gratification and sexual libertinism. While big business supported the sexual revolution for the sake of profits, the New Left celebrated it in order to advance a hedonism that would ostensibly lead to a healthier and freer society.135 There was no tension between a libertine society and an imperialist determination to spread these values. As Grant wryly observed, the motto of North America may as well be “the orgasm at home and napalm abroad.”136
This symbiotic relation between the Left and corporations should not suggest that they have identical aims at all times. As Gottfried observes, “Big business puts up with other members of its coalition (with leftist activists) just as store owners used to pay the mob to ‘protect’ them against disaster.”137 However, this alliance also reveals the willingness of the Left to give up the aim of abolishing capitalism while accepting its role as a representative of bureaucratized dissent that shares in the overall goal of destroying the remnants of bourgeois society.138 Corporations that have enthusiastically supported affirmative action and transgenderism in recent years are advancing, however unwittingly, social engineering that destroys old traditions. In Marxian terms, the state performs the crucial task of “legitimization” by supporting measures, even those that are leftist in tone and content, that present capitalism as a system of freedom and equality. As Grant argued, there is no contradiction whatsoever between a state that intervenes in the economy and society, on the one hand, and a state that permits almost unlimited sexual freedom, on the other.
This last comment may seem unrelated to neoconservatives such as Kristol, Novak, and many other prominent voices on the American Right who have celebrated bourgeois values of self-restraint while they mourn their passing. Kristol never denies that the “cultural nihilism” of modern capitalism dissolves tradition, including the old bourgeois attachments to religion, individual responsibility, marriage, and family.139 He would likely agree with Grant that the old Protestant or bourgeois version of capitalist individualism has morphed into the “demanded right to one’s idiosyncratic wants taken as outside any obligation to the community which provides them.”140 Kristol even seemed to share at times Grant’s doubts that capitalism would change for the better, although some neoconservatives have hoped that tax cuts for the rich may stimulate the old bourgeois ethic of hard work.141 Despite these points of convergence, I suspect that Grant and Francis would also agree that the neoconservatives’ acceptance of a limited welfare state and other inheritances from the New Deal belies any lip service to bourgeois ideals.142 Oddly enough, this acceptance of statism does not translate into support for state capitalism, which, in Kristol’s view, has been unfairly forced on big business. If Kristol is right, capitalism as a system does not merit the sort of root-and-branch critique that Grant offered, namely one that focuses on the sheer power that corporations enjoy within a state capitalist order. The much-victimized modern corporation still deserved two cheers for providing freedom and prosperity for millions of people. Absent in this neoconservative vision is the recognition that the corporation, for true conservatives, is part of the problem, not the solution.
From the quasi-Marxian perspective to which Grant loosely adheres, every system needs to legitimize its existence through propaganda, rather than simply relying on brute force. The defenders of the state capitalist system, particularly its American manifestation, present it as an order that is wedded to the universalization of liberty and equality. Francis writes: “Managerial capitalism must therefore articulate and sponsor an ideology of cosmopolitanism that asserts universal identities, values, and loyalties, challenges the differentiations of the bourgeois order, and rationalizes the process of homogenization.”143 Although the first generation of neoconservatives, Irving Kristol included, did not exhibit a strong desire to conflate America’s values with the values of humanity, the second generation of this movement has dreamed of a Pax Americana that supports the spread of democracy around the globe.144 Since the end of the Cold War, the new neoconservatives have insisted that it has always been the mission of America to disseminate its values, by force if necessary. This interpretation of America’s history requires a radical reinterpretation of what counts as conservatism in the American tradition. James W. Ceaser insists that the spirit of liberal “internationalism” goes back to the Founders, who forged ideals for all peoples, not just Americans.145 If Ceaser is correct, America is the only nation that can accomplish this imperial mission, given that it was founded on the basis of “nature,” not myth or tradition. The American regime is based on the credo that the nature of humanity is to seek and enjoy the right of freedom, an ideal that calls for revolutionary action. “Americans were the first to bring nature down from the realm of philosophy and introduce it into the political world as a foundation of a full nation.”146 Since this foundation is based on nature, it must be accessible to all of humanity.
This enthusiasm for the promotion of democracy on a global scale was lost on Grant, who worried about the fragile survival of his own nation-state amid the conflict between America and Russia during the Cold War. He was not convinced that liberal democracy would be any more favorably disposed to national identities than Soviet Communism was. In Lament, Grant darkly warned that nationalism in an age of multinational capitalism would go the way of the dodo bird. “By its very nature the capitalist system makes of national boundaries only matters of political formality.”147 Moreover, “liberal nationalism” was an oxymoron. “The belief in Canada’s continued existence has always appealed against universalism. It appealed to particularity against the wider loyalty to the continent. If universalism is the most ‘valid modern trend,’ then is it not right for Canadians to welcome our integration into the empire? Canadian nationalism is a more universal faith than French-Canadian nationalism. But if one is a universalist, why should one stop at that point of particularity?”148
Nothing sheds more light on the divide between Toryism and what passes for modern conservatism today than the disagreement between Grant and modern-day American conservatives on the “universalization” of values. This mission of spreading democratic values is often associated with the political philosophy of Leo Strauss and his numerous followers (including Ceaser). What complicates this comparison, however, is the fact that there is considerable debate on where Strauss himself stood on the desirability of this mission. Despite his famous portrayal of America as a regime based on the universal principles of natural right,149 Strauss would have likely been more cautious or hesitant than many of his supporters in placing love of country above love of the good (or the divine). As he once soberly wrote, “No one claims that the faith in America and the hope for America is based on explicit divine premises.”150
An additional complexity in this context is that Grant never tied Strauss to any imperial tradition of global democracy-promotion. In his view, Strauss was “a better philosopher than any practicing Christian I know on this continent.”151 The fact that Strauss was more sympathetic to the liberalism of the Cold War era than Grant was did not stop this Canadian Tory from portraying Strauss, however erroneously, as a conservative traditionalist.152
The differences between Grant and Straussians on what counts as universal and particular in politics should not obscure the fact that they have sometimes attacked the same target on the liberal left. In his English-Speaking Justice,153 Grant presents certain criticisms of the famous liberal philosopher John Rawls that are identical to ones offered by the famous Straussian scholar Allan Bloom. Both men fault Rawls for presenting in his Theory of Justice an account of justice that is at once unoriginal and abstract. In Grant’s view, Rawls’s defense of liberty, equality, and statist protections for the disadvantaged adds nothing substantive to the policies of the Democratic Party since the New Deal era. “In practical terms, what he (Rawls) is saying is that the works of F. D. Roosevelt must be carried to their completion, probably by the Democratic party.”154 Moreover, his political philosophy “is so typical of current liberalism in both the intellectual and practical English-speaking worlds.”155 Yet Rawls’s liberalism is oddly detached from the actual politics of this world. The abstract content of A Theory of Justice is “even more surprising when one remembers that the Vietnam War was justified in terms of liberal ideology, was largely planned by men from the liberal universities, the most influential of whom were from Rawls’s own university.”156 Perhaps most tellingly, “Rawls’ theory of justice is enormously weakened by his failure to relate it to the facts of imperialism or of domestic corporate power.”157
In his review of A Theory of Justice, Bloom similarly points out the parochial and abstract flavor of Rawls’s consciousness, “which is American, or at most, Anglo-Saxon.”158 Readers “will be given a platform that would appeal to the typical liberal in Anglo-Saxon countries: democracy plus the welfare state—leaving open whether capitalism or socialism is the most efficient economic form (so that one need not be a cold warrior).”159 Bloom also joins Grant in attacking Rawls for ignoring the historicism of Marx, who (along with Nietzsche) posed the most serious challenges to liberal democracy and “made it questionable whether an undertaking such as Rawls’s is possible at all.”160 Both Bloom and Grant sound as if they are singing from the same philosophical hymnbook when they decry Rawls’s reliance on self-interest as the basis for justice in a liberal democracy, a foundation that is alarmingly oblivious to the classical preoccupation with understanding justice in terms of living a virtuous life that transcends mere calculations of pleasure and pain.161 Rawls’s “original position,” in which individuals who are ignorant of their future social status (the “veil of ignorance”) ultimately opt for a society of “fairness” (namely, a Rawlsian one) that will protect the disadvantaged, has nothing to do with the Hobbesian-Lockean state of nature that its participants leave for a social contract that guarantees self-preservation.162 All of these convergence points probably convinced Grant that he and Bloom were offering similar critiques of Rawls, since he praised Bloom’s review as “a brilliant and extended account of the difference between the state of nature and the original position.”163
Despite these family resemblances, Grant and Bloom fundamentally differed on two major areas of discourse: the historical (or religious) origin of the belief in equality, and the universal nature of the American mission in the world of the late twentieth century. These differences shed light on the overall disagreement between Grant’s conservatism and Bloom’s liberalism, even if Grant was unaware of the magnitude of these differences. Grant notes with some displeasure Rawls’s conventionally liberal view that justice requires no grounding in religion. “The human species (according to Rawls) depends for its progress not on God or nature but on its own freedom, and the direction of that progress is determined by the fact that we can rationally give ourselves our own moral laws.”164 As a result, it is legitimate to treat religion as a “matter of private pursuit” that has no role in politics.165 Yet Grant suspects that Rawls has “inherited the noble belief in political equality, and the belief that the ‘free and rational person’ is ‘valuable’ in a way quite different from members of other species” from a tradition that he does not acknowledge.166
Is this tradition a religious one? Although Grant does not specifically accuse Rawls of ignoring the biblical origins of these liberal credos,167 he is clear in other writings on the necessary connection between the Bible and the belief in human equality and intrinsic value. In his “Ethic of Community,” Grant warns leftists and liberals that it is naive to think that the belief in equality could survive without its biblical basis because secular philosophy or liberalism has so far failed to provide an answer as to why all human beings should be treated as valuable in a noninstrumental sense.
It must be insisted, however, that the idea of equality arose in the West within a particular set of religious and philosophical ideas. I cannot see why men should go on believing in the principle without some sharing in those ideas. The religious tradition was the biblical, in which each individual was counted as of absolute significance before God.… To state this historical fact is not to deny that many men have believed in equality outside this religious tradition. The question is rather whether they have been thinking clearly when they have so believed. This religious basis for equality seems to me the only adequate one, because I cannot see why one should embark on the immensely difficult social practice of treating each person as important unless there is something intrinsically valuable about personality.168
Although Grant had serious misgivings about the complicity of Protestantism (especially American Calvinism) with modern liberalism and capitalism,169 and even struggled with the conflict between Christian universalism and “love of one’s own,”170 he never denied the overall importance of the Bible in shaping the moral consciousness of the Western soul.
While Bloom is not oblivious to these defects and omissions in Rawlsian liberalism, he does not draw the same theological conclusion as Grant does. To be sure, he takes aim at Rawls for assuming “that we are all egalitarians,” perhaps because this is a sentiment that “we happen to like today” in our liberal age.171 He also chides Rawls for ignoring “the challenge to his teaching posed by the claims of (biblical) religion.”172 In accord with his teacher Strauss, Bloom recognizes the complexity of the historical relationship between the Bible (Jerusalem) and philosophy (Athens).173 Yet Bloom does not believe, as Grant does, that secular liberalism requires a traditional religious basis. In fact, Bloom never claims to be a conservative at all. Although he admires conservatives for their “firmness of character” amid a hostile academic milieu, he himself does not “happen to be that animal.” Rather, the “preservation of liberal society is of central concern” to Bloom.174 In his best-selling work, The Closing of the American Mind (1987), Bloom almost sounds conventionally liberal or secular when he dismisses Christianity as mere dogma that has had its day: “The domesticated churches in America preserved the superstition of Christianity, overcoming of which was perhaps the key to liberating man.”175 Bloom follows Strauss’s line on the necessity of separating revelation from politics and political philosophy, an attitude that Grant, who admired Strauss, would have rejected as imprudent.176 Yet Bloom must insist, like most Straussians, on the secular character of America so that the appeal of its values to non-Christian peoples is successful. If America’s values are tied to a particular religious tradition, this connection may undermine the legitimacy of America’s mission to export its values to the world.177
The universality of America’s values, as Rawls presents them, also inspires utterly different responses from Grant and Bloom, which further highlight the gap between their political philosophies. This difference is not surprising in light of the fact that Grant was a critic of American imperialism while Bloom was a booster of an expansionist foreign policy. In The Closing of the American Mind, Bloom praises the global influence of America in the twentieth century as the necessary means to spread its democratic values that belong to all of humanity. This “democratic universalism” has been beneficial, since it “has had liberalizing effects on many enslaved nations.”178 Bloom adds: “And when we Americans speak seriously about politics, we mean that our principles of freedom and equality and the rights based on them are rational and everywhere applicable. World War II was really an educational project undertaken to force those who did not accept these principles to do so.”179 Bloom, however, notes that this “educational project” is far from complete. He chides the Far Left and Right for importing into America antidemocratic (especially German) ideas that undermine faith in democracy. He also blames historicists from the Far Left and Right for denying the universal applicability of American democracy.180
Yet these radicals are not the only ones who, Bloom believes, undermine American democracy and its mission. In his critique of Rawls, Bloom suggests that the liberal philosopher does a poor job of defending American democracy as the universal regime. Instead, Rawls commits the historicist sin of assuming that an advanced degree of economic development is necessary for the successful development of democracy. Bloom faults Rawls for adding the “codicil that liberty may be abrogated in those places where the economic conditions do not permit of liberal democracy (thus saving the Third World nations from being called unjust).”181 What strikes some defenders of Rawls as admirable realism on his part182 offends Bloom on the grounds that Rawls fails to demonstrate the suitability of American democracy for all human beings around the world.
Readers who are familiar with Grant’s writings already know that he was a vehement opponent of the Vietnam War, one of the most famous attempts to impose American will onto a nation with little positive experience of Western traditions. Grant saw this intervention as an example of an empire that “uses increasingly ferocious means to maintain its hegemony.”183 Moreover, it was not a fascist dictatorship that was devastating Vietnam. “What is being done in Vietnam is being done by the English-speaking empire and in the name of liberal democracy.”184 The liberal ideology of the Johnson administration provided the rationale for this war. “Above all, we cannot dissociate what is happening in Vietnam from the principles of the Great Society. That ferocious exercise in imperial violence must surely be part of our pointing. Mastery extends to every part of the globe.”185
What is glaringly obvious in Grant’s writings (and absent in Bloom’s works) is the drawing of a clear connection between imperialism and liberalism’s universal ideals. While Grant’s pacifism may have played a role in shaping his opposition to American foreign policy from World War II on,186 I suspect that his conservative notion of “loving one’s own” is a more prevalent motivation here. Grant’s opposition to American imperialism directly parallels his opposition to the English imperialism of his Whiggish ancestors who justified this expansionist policy in the name of progress.187 The conservation of tradition could not long survive in this context. “As Plato saw with unflinching clarity, an imperialist power cannot have a conservative society as its home base.”188 In general, loyalty to one’s own traditions, people, and culture was preferable, in Grant’s view, to the universal global empires that were competing with each other during the Cold War. Indeed, these loyalties “rather than principles are the mark of the conservative.”189
Grant also doubted that liberal imperialism would succeed in its objectives to disseminate its ideals around the world, in part because the universalism of these ideals turned out to be hollow rhetoric in practice. The debacle in Vietnam would only be the first in a long sequence of failures to transplant liberal democracy in illiberal climes.
Abroad, the tides of American corporate technology have not washed up liberal regimes on the shores of their empire. Indeed, to put it mildly, the ferocious determination of the Americans to keep Indo-China within the orbit of their empire made it clear that the rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness might be politically important for members of the domestic heartland, but were not intended to be applicable to the tense outreaches of that empire. In the light of these facts, the argument is still presented by liberals that unfree regimes arise in colonial areas when they are first being modernized, but that in the long run they will develop into liberal democracies. By this argument the identity of technological advance and liberalism is preserved in thought. The strength of the argument is necessarily weakened, however, as fewer and fewer colonial regimes remain colonial democracies. The question is then whether the argument is an appeal to progressivist hope, or to facts; or whether progressivist faith is indeed fact.190
These doubts about the success of transplanting liberal values abroad may have led Grant to oppose the parallel policy of multiculturalism in Canada, a policy that also assumes that all peoples desire freedom and equality.191 Despite the divisive nature of these policies,192 he doubted that the “progressivist faith” that fueled them would dissipate anytime soon. Once again, Grant was well aware that a liberal state capitalist order, like any regime that seeks legitimization, has a vested interest in inculcating its values within the minds of the citizenry, especially the young. There was little doubt in Grant’s mind that this state was teaching a new public religion that would replace the old Christian one. Although he admitted that this civic lesson in democracy “should be carried on” because it is always valuable to teach the young about their “heritage of legal government,”193 he also recognized the ideological purpose behind this pedagogy: the replacement of Christianity with a religion of the state. “The fact that those liberals who most object to any teaching about the deity are generally most insistent that the virtues of democracy be taught, should make us aware that what is at issue is not religion in general, but the content of the religion to be taught.”194 For this reason, Grant vowed, as a parent and a Christian, to “keep careful watch on the inculcation of this democratic faith among my children in case they should confuse their loyalty to a particular ordering of this passing world with the absolute loyalty which they owe to that which is beyond the world.”195 Grant never abandoned his doubts about the outcome of this process. “When the state has become secularized, it will quickly free itself of its use of the church. The religion of humanity and progress will reign monolithically in the schools.”196 Unlike many of his contemporaries, Grant also entertained few hopes that the citizenry of a democracy would reject these measures. This was the same citizenry, as Grant often bitterly remarked in Lament, that no longer had the opportunity to “learn independent views” amid the hegemony of corporate media.197
In accord with Bloom’s “democratic universalism,” the logic of liberal democracy is to implement an “educational project” that presents these values as ones that owe nothing to a religious heritage so that they seem universal to all human beings. It would not surprise Grant that both sides of the political spectrum today present the same message. On the right, Bloom’s fellow Straussian Walter Berns, in Making Patriots (2001), contends that America’s leaders must present “Nature’s God” as a deity that has no connection to the God of the Bible, whom the vast majority of Americans (mostly Protestants) worshipped during the Revolutionary Era.198 In order to “make patriots,” loyalty to this secular Supreme Being must be encouraged. On the left, Michael Ignatieff, who is Grant’s nephew, assures his fellow liberals that the biblical “concept of the sacred” is no longer needed to buttress belief in human rights, even though secular education that promotes these values is as essential as ever.199 Although it is a safe bet that Grant would have doubted the validity of these sentiments, it would not surprise him that prominent scholars in a liberal democratic order that coexists with state capitalism insist, in propagandistic ways, that this message of universal or human rights be publicly disseminated on a regular basis. This regime cannot leave to the church or any other private institution the primary role of teaching alternate values to the impressionable masses.200
Despite his distinction between loyalty and principle, Grant never truly separated the two in a surgical way. In his words, “love of one’s own must ultimately be a means to love of the good.”201 Yet the “good” should not be identified with the epiphenomenal principles of liberal state capitalism, which discourages the preservation of tradition even as its defenders present it as the best regime for all of humanity. The love of one’s own tradition also required an honest and thoughtful appraisal of how the modern corporation has weakened tradition. Grant was convinced that state capitalism, whatever its material benefits or democratic features, undermined loyalty to traditions and mores that constituted civilization as a whole. His tough-minded critique of this alliance between business and the state never led to any material reward for himself, while many post–World War II conservatives have benefited handsomely from their support of the moneyed interests aligned with the Leviathan state. True conservatives understand that principle and loyalty must inform each other, particularly if the love of one’s tradition is a principled protest against the temptations of power and empire. To the end of his life, Grant fought the good fight for a conservatism that repudiated the dominant politics and economics of his time.