Paul Gottfried
The critical studies in this volume examine how the conservative movement presents its own history and how its interpretations depart from factual reality. Much of this self-interpretation has gone unchallenged because it satisfies conservatism’s critics almost as much as its defenders. According to this received account, the conservative movement grew out of a once-isolated sect of anti-Communist activists; and as it moved beyond its parochial starting point, it gained in both sophistication and moderation. Established conservatism supposedly overcame its sectarian beginnings as it evolved into a vital part of the political conversation. Today at its best, it supposedly advocates for civility in American politics and for the application of “values” to our common life. Because conservatives oppose “extremism” while remaining dedicated to whatever they claim to believe, they insist that they are open to dialogue with others who share their reasoning.
Although the conservative movement, which has expanded as a media presence, admits to having changed over the years, it still offers a problematic self-portrait. Our investigations will address this self-representation by posing two questions. One, does the movement’s present identity reveal ideological and programmatic continuity with what it was fifty or sixty years ago? Two, does the movement encourage an open, honest discussion of political differences, including with those who may be thought to be on its right? The following chapters demonstrate that the conservative movement has reconfigured itself with remarkable regularity and readily kicked out journalists and intellectuals who have balked at changing party lines.
Two developments are critical for understanding the direction in which the conservative movement has gone, particularly since the 1980s. One is the rise of the neoconservatives as the dominant force within the movement, a process that several of the contributors address in their chapters. A group of influential journalists and fund-raisers who combined strong anti-Soviet feelings with fervent Zionist sympathies, the neoconservatives have enjoyed commanding positions in conservative publications and foundations since the 1980s. One of their first acts in assuming leadership positions in the movement was removing uncooperative employees and activists who resisted their new party line. This consisted of a strongly pro-Israeli form of liberal internationalism in foreign policy with a willingness to move generally toward the left on most domestic issues. The neoconservative model of conservatism became permanent as their ideological and financial influence over the movement proved to be irreversible.
The other development that would shape the movement, and one related to the neoconservative ascendancy, has been a growing flexibility on social questions. There are few, if any, social positions taken by the Left, whether on immigration or LGBT (lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender) rights, that the conservative movement has not eventually incorporated. Conservative publicists have made these adjustments while promoting an activist foreign policy against countries depicted as human rights violators. A regular line of attack against Putin’s Russia and Muslim opponents of Israel is their failure to recognize gay rights, or in the case of Russia, to permit gay pride parades. The Muslim mayor of London was designated in the neoconservative New York Post as a “conservative” hero because he has striven mightily to accommodate both Zionists and LGBT activists.1 The fact that major conservative backers have been socially liberal Zionists may throw light on the positions taken by those whom they fund.
Over the years one encounters different forms of “American conservatism,” some of which have vanished over time and others of which, particularly as we approach the present, have been stifled or weakened by better-funded groups claiming the conservative label. This volume deals principally with the second situation, in which those who previously represented conservative positions succumbed to successful rivals. Here we are not dealing with historically driven displacements—for example, when the exponents and defenders of archaic visions of order cease to have their ideas prevail under the force of social change or because cataclysms, like the American Civil War or World War I, resulted in social change. Rather, we are focusing on the systematic discrediting of certain ideas and sentiments associated with the Right that were thought to clash with the interests of an expanding business operation.
It is undoubtedly true that at least some of what the present conservative movement rejects is malicious and bigoted. There are indeed white nationalists and defenders of the Third Reich whom one can locate somewhere on the right, if we extend that side of the political spectrum far enough. But setting that group aside, the conservative establishment has unfairly degraded the rest of those on its right. We might note some of the offenses for which an older Right was read out of the movement by the 1990s. Such presumed enormities included opposing the First Gulf War, supporting Patrick Buchanan’s presidential bid in 1992, and complaining about the influence of the American Israeli lobby.
Some of the same people had also been critical of the cultural effects of Third World immigration, the extensions of the Voting Rights Act that would increase the electoral strength of the Left and bring the electoral process almost totally under federal administrative control, and the elevation of Martin Luther King—a controversial figure of the Left in his own time—to iconic status with a national holiday. Although arguably this opposition may have been doomed from the outset, one could not fail but notice the disappearance from respected conservative publications of certain commentators who failed to make the desired turn The tolerance of dissent was in short supply here, as it was in other matters that those who were in commanding positions in the conservative movement decided for the rank and file. Moreover, the effects of landmark congressional legislation of the 1960s have been for the most part what its critics on the right predicted. These measures have contributed toward moving the country politically and in other ways toward the left. With regard to King, the Left has been perfectly justified in mocking the yearly ritual by Heritage, American Enterprise Institute, and various Republican websites and publications to claim the avowedly leftist civil rights hero as a “conservative.” This transmogrification may exemplify the view of history as the tricks that the living play on the dead.
Throughout the 1980s, as Gary Dorrien documents in The Neoconservative Mind: Politics, Culture and the War of Ideology, Norman Podhoretz and other neoconservatives steadily denounced homosexuality and any public tolerance granted to this lifestyle.2 This did not prevent the same activists from turning around and railing against the former presidential candidate Pat Buchanan for using the term “San Francisco Democrats” in an address before the GOP presidential convention in 1992. Buchanan was accused of having made a veiled attack on homosexual American citizens, although from the neoconservative perspective his real sin was to have mocked, rightly or wrongly, the “Israeli lobby in the US,” before and while running for president. What Buchanan said at the Republican convention, however, never approached in intensity the antigay invective that had come from his neoconservative opponents.3 Dorrien gives one obvious reason why even some on the left have been pleased with the direction of American conservatism: “Neoconservatives did not convert existing conservatism but rather created an alternative to it.”4
The chapters that follow demonstrate how far and in what ways the conservative movement has misrepresented both its past and present character. A media phenomenon driven by ratings and its relation to its donor base, it demonstrably falls far short of the ideals that it purports to be promoting. National Review senior editor Rich Lowry called for the removal of Robert E. Lee statues throughout the country in 2017,5 at a time when Lowry had become a frequent guest on mainstream news programs. Leaders from Dwight Eisenhower to Winston Churchill to Bill Clinton, while still governor of Arkansas, lavishly extolled Lee’s character and his dignity in defeat as a Confederate commander. And one of Lowry’s colleagues at National Review, Kyle Smith, was allowed to ask the obvious question about the policy endorsed by his editor in chief: “Destroying symbols: where does it end?”6
This anthology examines the authorized conservative movement in a strikingly original way. All of the chapters present arguments that the reader will not likely find in the New York Times or in conservative house organs like National Review and the former Weekly Standard. According to the contributors, the conservative movement has insulated itself so well against examination by an independent Right that it no longer has to worry about inventing its past. It has become, with the docile compliance of the Center Left, the ultimate creator of its own account of how it got to where it is. What is suggested is that the voices of an older American Right operate on the media fringe and should be viewed as marginal to the conservative establishment. Most of the contributors to this collective work have some identification with the Right, but not with the lucrative business operation that goes by that name.
John Kerwick, a professor of philosophy who specializes in semantics, examines what he calls the “Big Con.” He argues by means of copious examples that “conservative” media, including such mainstream conservative fixtures as Fox News and National Review, are neither consistently conservative nor a true alternative to the dominant or “mainstream” left-leaning media. Rather, the authorized conservative media are largely a system of Republican Party propaganda that has succeeded in making “conservatism” synonymous with the steady and changing interests of the GOP. Despite its occasionally misleading rhetoric, moreover, the GOP is almost as committed as its Democratic counterpart to expanding the size and scope of the central government. The GOP and its “conservative” front organizations are, moreover, no less committed than the Democratic Party to “political correctness,” that is, to furthering a program of indoctrination and surveillance that has strengthened public administration at all levels. In fact, the conservative media, working in tandem with the GOP, have helped make big government and political correctness less and less objectionable to self-identified conservatives.
Keith Preston, author of, among many books, The Tyranny of the Politically Correct and editor of the website Attack the System, examines a major turning point in the expulsion of Southern traditionalists from the conservative movement. Preston looks at the precipitous downfall of Southern literary scholar M. E. Bradford, who in an explosive rebuke was refused the post of director of the National Endowment for the Humanities in 1981. Bradford’s fall from grace in the Reagan administration was engineered by neoconservative journalists and foundation heads; and the attacks leveled against him in the press as a “Lincoln hater” and Southern reactionary continued long after he was kept from government service. Preston explores the likely reasons for these broadsides and how they targeted not only Bradford but, at least indirectly, other Southern regionalists, whom the neoconservatives in their ascent to power were interested in marginalizing. Contrary to a widespread misconception, the “Bradford affair” was more than a minor incident in the history of the conservative movement. It was fraught with significance in both demonstrating and consolidating neoconservative control of American conservatism.
Grant Havers, who chairs the philosophy department at Trinity Western University, elaborates on the distinctions between the Tory tradition and what now passes for American conservatism. In the post–World War II era, many prominent voices of the American conservative movement portrayed their cause as a noble continuation of the traditional English conservatism that such worthies as Edmund Burke and Benjamin Disraeli defended in an earlier era. Havers maintains that these claims are unfounded. By focusing on self-described Tory traditionalist writers such as George Grant, one can locate a wide gap between the neoconservative valorization of capitalist democracy and the inveterate conservative suspicion of what contemporary American conservatives are taught to venerate. Unlike traditional Tories, the advocates of “democratic capitalism,” wherever they are present, represent globalization, not a conservative defense of particularity and organic social relations.
Joseph Cotto of the San Francisco Review of Books looks at one possibly overriding reason that conservative foundations have adopted certain favored positions. Cotto examines the funding sources of conservative policy organizations and the close connection between their policies and those who pay their tabs. Given the mass of material that exists on this subject, the author limits himself to only one aspect of the correlation between funding and advocacy. He examines the assistance that Republican think tanks in the Washington area receive from defense industries and from those who are pushing for a more activist foreign policy. Cotto’s investigation leads to findings that conservative activists might find surprising, and among the more naive or idealistic, even disheartening.
Marjorie L. Jeffrey of Clemson University deals with the persistence of a neoconservative foreign policy in the conservative movement and why it has not been discarded despite its obvious limitations. Following the collapse of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War, the American Right faced an existential question: Would it support the continuation of a semi-imperial foreign policy, or would it seek to redirect political energies toward domestic policy? The 1992 Republican primary and the victory of the incumbent president, George H. W. Bush, against his challenger, Pat Buchanan, answered that question; and until the election of 2016, both major parties were in agreement on matters of foreign policy, except for working out the details. Jeffrey examines the philosophic claims of the interventionist, or “neoconservative,” wing of the American conservative movement, against the foreign policy prescriptions of the American Founders, as well as those of such truly conservative modern critics as George Kennan and Buchanan.
Jesse Russell of Georgia Southwestern University discusses the rise and fall of perhaps the most unusual bloc within the neoconservative movement: the Catholic neocons. He traces how Michael Novak’s best seller The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism caused Catholic neoconservatives to shift American Catholic discussion of economics to a defense of “democratic capitalism” as the purest distillation of Catholic social teaching. This argument was reinforced when another Catholic neoconservative, George Weigel, seized the public image of John Paul II for political purposes with the publication of Weigel’s biography Witness to Hope. Once the neoconservatives were able to speak for conservative Catholicism in America, they rallied American Catholic celebrities to their positions on foreign interventionism, support for multinational corporations, and Jewish ultranationalism. Integral to this campaign was the success of Catholic neoconservatives in fashioning an American Catholic understanding of political philosophy, starting with the social teachings of St. Thomas Aquinas. In The Hemisphere of Liberty, Novak dwells on a statement made by the English Catholic classical liberal Lord Acton in order to present St. Thomas as the “First Whig.” This was part of an arduous effort to reconcile medieval political philosophy with the neoconservative understanding of Anglo-American liberalism.
Nicholas W. Drummond, who teaches political theory at Black Hills State University, evaluates the neoconservative anti-Trumpers who view the Trump presidency as a betrayal of America’s founding principles. These detractors have been especially critical of nationalist populism and its rejection of “globalist” policies like free trade, foreign interventionism, and immigration. According to Drummond, neoconservatives misunderstand our principles as a nation because they have relied heavily on certain sources, starting with the view of the American founding taught by the followers of Leo Strauss. This view overemphasizes Lockean natural rights and the merits of commercial acquisitiveness. Absent from this neoconservative analysis is an appreciation of three tenets of James Madison’s political thinking, each of which accords with nationalist populism: civic republicanism, intergenerational duty to ancestors and posterity, and a warning that too much diversity will lead to a plutocratic oppression of society through a politics of divide and conquer. Although neoconservatives may have personal reasons to criticize the presidency of Donald Trump, their argument from the American founding is, according to Drummond, not particularly convincing.
Richard T. Marcy of the University of Victoria investigates the Alt Right and how it has developed as a response to the perceived inadequacies of the authorized conservative movement. Although Marcy does not ignore the Alt Right’s antics and grandstanding, he focuses primarily on its psychological and cultural aspects. He cites examples of its tactics—for example, provocations leading to moral outrage from the Left and Republican establishment—and situates these acts within a broader cultural war. He stresses the efforts of a marginalized group to attract attention through outrageous gestures while at the same time aiming to join the political conversation. Marcy’s chapter draws on relevant psychological and sociological literature and integrates historical scholarship dealing with earlier artistic-political avant-garde movements and their revolts against mainstream culture.
Boyd D. Cathey, a widely published authority on the political theory of Spanish counterrevolutionaries and the antebellum South, writes on the fate of Southern regionalists within a now-transformed American conservative movement. Cathey deals with the deliberate removal of the Southern traditionalists from this establishment, a process that was greatly accelerated once the neoconservatives became a force to be reckoned with. This displacement represented a major reorientation of the conservative movement, given that Southern Agrarians and, more generally, Southern traditionalists had been significant cultural and social critics in the post–World War II Right. The loss of a Southern conservative presence was so total that any memory of this influence has been shoved down a memory hole and/or bleached out of authorized histories of the conservative movement.
George Hawley, professor of political science at the University of Alabama, discusses what political science literature indicates about the degree of ideological consistency in the American electorate. Hawley explores the degree to which Republican voters meet the basic definition of what is popularly considered conservative. It is shown that those who fit the popular definition are not particularly numerous, even within GOP ranks. Complicating the matter, Republican voters may not be as desirous of maintaining conservative purity as many observers assume. Although most of these voters use the term “conservative” to describe themselves, it is often not clear what they mean by this designation. Quite possibly the conservative media are bestowing on their viewers and readers an inapplicable characterization.
My own contribution to this anthology, on conservative purges, deals with a topic that I have engaged before; and what is presented here is intended primarily for the benefit of those who are not acquainted with my earlier examinations of the postwar conservative movement. The purges herein treated have not received adequate attention, because the conservative movement and its apparent opponents have agreed on certain seemingly innocent misrepresentations, which need to be corrected. Purges have not been limited to removing undesirables from the masthead of conservative magazines nor to breaking social and professional relations. More typically, this shunning has been accompanied by campaigns of character assassination that have sometimes lasted years. What happened to Bradford was all too typical of this process of defamation. Conservative movement leaders have behaved in a way that one might have expected in an earlier age from the Communist Party USA. In all likelihood, however, American Communists would have been generally better read and more cerebral than those who draw their picture of reality from conservative media stars.
In organizing this anthology, I consciously gave preference to young scholars in their twenties and thirties. This seemed a better approach for this revisionist work than asking senior citizens to write about old grievances. The other reason for this decision is that most of the older scholars whom I approached were fearful of losing their standing within a movement that they still depend on financially. Understandably they turned me down when I asked them to contribute to this anthology. It is also fitting that a younger generation should be asked to expose what my generation failed to explain effectively. But it may not suffice for this endeavor that interpreters seek to reveal long-standing distortions and a continuing obscuring of facts. It is equally important that they examine the conditions that engendered this situation.