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A HISTORY OF BRILLIANT CONSERVATISM
“I coulda had class. I coulda been a contender.”
—Marlon Brando, On the Waterfront
Conservatism’s roster of historical leaders should be—and is—a genuine pantheon of intellectual rigor and moral fiber, not the clown car it is too often portrayed as today. That this book must begin by (re)establishing this very premise is quite telling. But a casual observer of modern politics would be forgiven for not realizing how deep the intellectual roots of conservatism go. As such, any argument for a return to those roots must first establish that those roots, indeed, exist. And the only way I know how to do this is to begin at the beginning.
While patriotic conservatives rightly revere the Constitution and the Founding Fathers, conservatism is not merely an American invention. It is a fundamental political philosophy that can be traced back to antiquity. And while some conservatives prefer to talk about the conservative sensibility, worldview, disposition, temperament, or even persuasion, I don’t shy from using the word “philosophy,” which can be defined as the seeking of wisdom. And that exercise is a very conservative pursuit. Along those lines, conservatives can take great pride in knowing that the father of political conservatism is none other than Aristotle—and that its modern champion was the great eighteenth-century politician and thinker Edmund Burke.
384 BC: Ancient Greece
A star is born: Aristotle, destined to become one of the most important philosophers in history. At eighteen, he moves to Athens to attend Plato’s Academy, where he matriculates for nearly two decades. (Imagine his student loans!) His brilliance is so undeniable that King Phillip II of Macedon invites Aristotle to tutor his son, whom we know today as Alexander the Great. Returning to Athens, Aristotle inaugurates his own school, the Lyceum, where he continues to study, teach, and contribute major advances to the worlds of science, education, ethics, philosophy, and politics—essentially every field of human intellectual pursuit.
He wasn’t always right or virtuous (he endorsed slavery, for example) but the depths of Aristotle’s accomplishments are undeniable. As such, it should come as a relief to many conservatives—those who might lament the old trope about being “the stupid party” (which also says that the Democrats are the “evil party”)—that Aristotle is also considered by many to be “the father of political conservatism.”
Aristotle’s political philosophy was rooted in fundamental principles that all real conservatives—whether they realize it or not—inherently believe. He rejected the moral relativism of his day, insisting instead upon a priori moral truths. He held that families and communities were not abstract constructs, but rather, natural and intrinsic. As he asserted in The Politics, “The city belongs among the things that exist by nature.” This flies in the face of the utopian notion that civilization developed arbitrarily, and could thus be cavalierly uprooted.
If the notion that our social order wasn’t merely a human invention seems obvious to you, it wasn’t for a lot of philosophers and world leaders throughout the ages. In some ways, the story of the twentieth century amounts to a huge argument over something Aristotle figured out thousands of years ago. He believed that the way civilization developed was not random, but rather, natural. Man, it follows, is not malleable. As such, change (the logic continues) must be slow, organic, and cautious. (As we shall see, many of these assumptions fell out of favor with the arrival of the Enlightenment and modernity.)
You might be thinking, “What does this have to do with the real world, and what does this even have to do with conservatism?” To us moderns, living in twenty-first-century America, Aristotelian philosophy may seem an esoteric idea—and it is. It’s easy for us to think of conservatism as merely a doctrine that is pro-national defense, anti-tax, and pro-life—or even a philosophy of self-reliance or rugged individualism. But these downstream ideas derive from deeper, more existential concepts. Aristotle’s foundational conservative truths speak to the very ideas on which humanity rests—and on which nations rise and fall. If you absorb his worldview, you will usually arrive at conservative policies. But get his fundamental ideas wrong, and the consequences can be dire.
The Great Debate
In the centuries after Aristotle’s death, others (most notably Thomas Aquinas, a thirteenth-century Catholic priest and saint who wrote several important commentaries on Aristotle) would help keep his ideas alive. But Aristotle’s modern political scion is the Anglo-Irish Edmund Burke. Burke’s philosophy was very much in keeping with Aristotle’s, inasmuch as it argued that Western civilization was not the result of luck or happenstance, but rather, the result of human nature evolving by virtue of trial and error.
Born in Dublin in 1729 and educated at that city’s Trinity College, Burke was the son of a Protestant father and a Catholic mother (in his day, these details mattered greatly). Moving to London, Burke emerged as a philosopher, lobbyist, author, reformer, statesman, and Whig politician who served in the British House of Commons for three decades. There, he famously advocated for better treatment of the American colonies, arguing to respect America’s unique traditions of freedom and independence—and that Great Britain should accommodate her rebellious cousins across the pond. But Burke’s most important contributions to history and conservatism derive from his opposition to the French Revolution. To some, this opposition came as a surprise. His pro-American stance incorrectly led Thomas Paine, a patriot and a radical, to believe that Burke would likewise support revolutionary attempts to quash royal oppression elsewhere. Instead, as Yuval Levin writes in his book about Burke and Paine, The Great Debate, the French Revolution exposed a yawning chasm of worldviews—arguments that would define the modern Right and Left for centuries to come, with Burke representing the former.
Paine’s ideology serves as a perfect foil to illuminate Burke’s conservative worldview. Paine’s more radical writings include themes of primitivism (a notion that civilization enslaves us) and utopianism (the quixotic idea that this enslavement might be remedied on earth). Such views overlapped with the intellectual father of the disastrous French Revolution, the Geneva-born Enlightenment philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau.11 (Anyone who doubts the ubiquity of Parisian primitivism can ask themselves why a wise and cosmopolitan man such as Benjamin Franklin would, when wooing the French to the American cause, don a coonskin cap. Boston-born Benjamin Franklin was many things, but he was neither Davy Crockett—nor Mike Huckabee.)
Without any basis in history, Rousseau invented a creation myth out of whole cloth. In his pre-social original state, man—a “noble savage”—was content and peaceful. He went where he wanted and had sex when he wanted. (It has been said that all heresies originate below the waist.) It was, Rousseau contended, only after the invention of the concept of private property and the rise of civilization that greed and jealousy and war crept into his secular Eden. As such, Rousseau viewed institutional intrusions between the government and the individual—for example, the family and the church—as artificial ingredients that had essentially paved paradise and put up a parking lot.
Again, you might be thinking, “What does this have to do with modern conservatism?” but stick with me. Primitivism might sound quaint, if naive, but followed to its logical conclusions (as in the French Revolution and elsewhere), this belief led to the guillotine and the gulag. Returning to man’s natural state requires toppling—by force—organic institutions that took centuries to develop. To accomplish this, the ends justify the means, and patience is not a virtue. As with Rousseau, Paine’s focus on noble-sounding principles such as liberty and equality came at the expense of tradition, institutions, and faith, which were deemed not only superfluous but also counterproductive.
Against this backdrop, a clash of philosophies emerged. “We have it in our power to begin the world over again,” Paine famously averred.12
Burke saw things differently. His worldview, more traditionally Christian, assumed a fallen world could not be perfected or begun over again. It could only (if we were lucky) be managed. He thought us fortunate to inherit a Western civilization that functioned to the degree it did. Bad things would always happen, of course, and Burke spent much of his career advocating for wise reforms to redress chronic problems; however, he also believed we had been well served by respecting the accumulated wisdom and institutions that had slowly developed over years. To put it in modern parlance, he believed we had “crowdsourced” wisdom from our ancestors. From the signing of Magna Carta in 1215, through the Glorious Revolution of 1688, until Burke’s present day, Britain’s tale had been one of gradual change, where history’s arc slowly bent toward justice. Burke believed we must work hard to preserve these freedoms gradually won over time, so that we might continue this positive evolution of civilization into the future.
Burke’s advocacy for reform and preference for “ordered liberty” attempted to balance competing, but not mutually exclusive, values. He wasn’t opposed to change, yet his philosophy stood in sharp contrast to radical attempts of the Jacobins to cast off the yoke of history. Burke was not a “reactionary” or even a conservative who solely wanted to preserve the past; he believed it was our responsibility to use our accumulated wisdom to wisely and prudently continue moving forward. (Modern conservatives who admire Burke should not hearken for the supposed “good old days” of the 1950s but instead go “back to the future,” as it were.)
Aside from Aristotle and Christian tradition, we can only conjecture about Burke’s motivation and influences. It would be convenient if we had a “Rosebud” sled moment to shed some light on this and possibly turn his story into a neat narrative. While there are no obvious answers, theories exist, says Burke scholar Yuval Levin. “I think that Burke’s upbringing in Ireland—his witnessing of how love can overcome deep differences of dogma (in his parents’ mixed marriage, say) and how neighborly trust and affection can allow people to live together in seemingly impossible circumstances left him thinking that life was just much more complicated in practice than it could ever be in theory, and that this was a good thing.”13
Burke’s prescient concerns about the French Revolution were quickly confirmed when talk of the “Rights of Man” led to a Reign of Terror in 1793, as cries of “Liberty, Equality, Fraternity” gave way to cries from the guillotine. Eventually, the Revolution turned on itself. Paine, who had done much to boost the revolutionary fervor (first from America and later from France), ended up imprisoned in Paris. Even revolutionary leaders Danton, Saint-Just, and Robespierre went to the scaffold. The Revolution not only devoured its enemies; it ate its own. A dictator named Napoleon arose. The revolution’s denouement played out much the way Burke expected (and Aristotle might have predicted).
Burke in the Twentieth Century
Burke’s sounding of the alarm about the French Revolution became even more prescient to twentieth-century Americans—many of whom were introduced to him in the early 1950s, when Russell Kirk published his seminal book The Conservative Mind. The geopolitical and economic context was as pertinent then as it had been during Burke’s own life, and Burke’s warnings about uprooting long-held tradition and institutions were arguably even more relevant. Burke, in retrospect, looked even more like a Cassandra—someone who was prescient and ahead of his time. The French Revolution, it turned out, wasn’t an anomaly, but presaged a bloody trend. After all, what was the Soviet Union if not the bastard child of the French Revolution?
In between Rousseau and Lenin was Karl Marx,14 another intellectual who had invented an abstract dogma divorced from human experience—an alternative, historical narrative that led to significant bloodshed. The notion that Communism would be the final and inevitable stage of history was, like Rousseau’s creation story, conceived ex nihilo. As a bonus, achieving this mythic resolution would require completely toppling nearly every traditional institution of civilization. Just as King Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette had met the guillotine, Russia’s Tsar Nicholas II would be forced to abdicate and then, along with his wife and children, summarily stood up against a basement wall and executed in 1918. The state would have an ideological objective of eliminating religion and confiscating the property of the Russian Orthodox Church. In one fell swoop, the Bolsheviks would upend centuries of tradition and institutions that had been deeply ingrained into Russian lives. While most conservatives are inherently skeptical of top-down planning (because life is too complex for a handful of elites to game out), Communism espoused the efficiency of a centrally planned economy. Burke’s warnings about the French Revolution not only proved prophetic for the time; they also anticipated the rise of the Soviet Union. If conservatives needed an intellectual hero to help guide them forward in the 1950s, who better than Burke?
Burkean Conservatism versus American Individualism
It’s worth noting that American conservatives have never fully embraced the notion that conserving good things from our past defines conservatism. This is, no doubt, due in part to the fact that America began with a revolution. More than their European brethren, American conservatives tend to focus more on individual rights and liberty than on tradition or order or virtue. These values are not mutually exclusive, but their relative weight creates tension. While the Traditionalist wing of the conservative movement hews closely to a Burkean philosophy, the more libertarian wings of the movement do not. Craig Shirley and Don Devine argue that “modern American conservatism has roots in the ideas of philosopher John Locke, the founding fathers, and the notion that humans’ natural state is freedom.”15 Burke, they argue, was wedded to a British system where power flowed downward rather than an American system where power flows upward. As Shirley also told me, “Reagan often quoted Paine. He rarely quoted Burke.”
To illustrate how complicated and nuanced this debate can become, consider this question: Was Thomas Jefferson a conservative? Burkeans would say that Jefferson, a Deist and a Francophile, most surely was not. But Jefferson’s emphasis on small government and agrarianism would probably fit in with today’s conservative movement quite nicely. Indeed, if one takes a close look at the Tea Party movement, it’s probably fair to say that today’s American conservatives are perhaps closer to Jefferson and Paine than they are to Burke. I would argue that this dual alignment is indicative of the problem that this book aims to address. Others would see it as a prime example of American exceptionalism where even our version of what constitutes a conservative is uniquely individualistic.
There are other reasons why it’s hard to define conservatism, and why the notion of preserving the good things of Western civilization lacks appeal for many. Some argue that a fetish for conserving the past is a rather nihilistic view that fails to take value judgments into account (just because something happened in the past certainly does not make it good). And even those who tout the importance of conserving the good things from the past may argue about which things are worth preserving (though the intent of the Founding Fathers, the Declaration of Independence, and the Constitution seem to be areas of obvious agreement). The absence of an agreed-upon definition of conservatism has negative consequences. If someone believes that the blessings of Western civilization were the product of ideas, he or she will come to different policy conclusions than someone who (I would argue, incorrectly) thinks a white racial majority is the key—or that the real battle is to preserve Jeffersonian agrarianism and that the yeoman farmer was the key to virtue and independence. Or, perhaps a conservative is someone who wants to conserve changes that just a generation ago were seen as radical. Perhaps a modern conservative is someone who wants to return us to the liberal consensus that dominated American thinking in the 1950s and early 60s. This brings to mind the G. K. Chesterton quote: “The whole modern world has divided itself into Conservatives and Progressives. The business of Progressives is to go on making mistakes. The business of Conservatives is to prevent mistakes from being corrected.” This lack of a foundational philosophical agreement has led to the confusion and contradictions that now confront conservatives.
Writing about Burke presents another dilemma; radicals such as Paine and Rousseau present a more gripping biography. Just as their philosophy was romantic, their eccentric lives consisted of drama and turmoil. Conservatism, like Burke’s life, is comparably boring and complex. To fully appreciate it requires going back to assumptions regarding human nature and the rise of civilization, not to mention comprehending the long-term implications that come from the chipping away of traditional institutions. But in a short-attention-span world where action is admired and simple solutions are required, the fact that one cannot easily sum up Burke’s philosophy and slap it on a bumper sticker (“Stability We Can Believe In!” somehow doesn’t cut it) poses a challenge for us. Then again, maybe his slogan could simply be summed up with the words I told you so.
The Rise of the American Conservative Movement
For most of American history, we have been a culturally conservative people, with strong religious traditions and deep resistance to decadence. Customs, mores, and values were decidedly conservative. In terms of economic liberty, no permanent or constitutional national income tax existed until 1913. There was also a prevailing sense that America’s two great oceans could insulate us from the ideologies and entanglements of the world.
Events such as World War I, the 1925 Scopes Monkey Trial, and the Great Depression would shake our traditional collective perceptions about existence and our place in the world. America didn’t become more liberal overnight. There were fits and starts. In the early twentieth century, progressive presidents such as Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson began changing the size and scope and raison d’être of the federal government. Though this resulted in a brief conservative backlash (“normalcy”), most personified by Presidents Warren G. Harding and Calvin Coolidge, it was Franklin Roosevelt who landed the decisive knockout punch. With the Great Depression giving him wide leeway, FDR dramatically transformed Washington, creating a previously unthinkable welfare state. In a few short years, he increased the number of Americans dependent on the federal government while simultaneously redistributing income, encroaching on civil liberties, and implementing new ideas such as income tax withholding. While Roosevelt repeatedly won reelection, not everyone was happy—his margin of victory in later terms became much thinner. By the late 1930s, the New Deal had stalled. It was in this context that a nascent conservative movement began making inroads.
Because America remained culturally conservative until at least the 1960s, and because the Democrats were seen as more bellicose on foreign policy (remember, Democratic presidents presided over World War I, World War II, and Korea and, prior to the bombing of Pearl Harbor, the “Old Right” strain in the Republican Party was decidedly isolationist), modern conservatism’s first breakthrough was fiscal. It rejected the New Deal welfare state16—instead advocating a return to the free markets that had transformed nineteenth-century America into an industrial powerhouse. Austrian immigrant Friedrich Hayek arguably provided this movement with its most significant voice. His 1944 masterpiece, The Road to Serfdom, emerged as a classic in the conservative canon. Arguing that central planning inexorably leads to authoritarianism, while competition and free markets spur economic growth, the book gained immense prominence after Reader’s Digest published a condensed version.
Unlike most of today’s contributions to conservative literature—which often seem to consist primarily of semi-comedic, off-color shtick from pundits, tomes ghostwritten for candidates, or demagogic polemics by talk radio hosts—The Road to Serfdom was a complex book about economics written by a foreigner, and the public gobbled it up. (In 2014, the Left turned obscure French economist Thomas Piketty’s book Capital in the Twenty-First Century into a surprise best seller. But the current lack of anything from the Right that resembles Hayek’s or Piketty’s success suggests a problem.)
Though there was a hunger for free market ideas in 1944, Hayek and other likeminded twentieth-century economists17 were really just updating a principle first preached by Adam Smith in his 1776 work The Wealth of Nations. By now, the heavy hand of government had replaced Smith’s “invisible hand,” a metaphor that suggested that competition and the pursuit of self-interest organically leads to salutary social benefits. Smith’s ideas (sometimes called by the confusing name “classical liberalism”) might have been utterly consistent with America’s founding principles, but they were a radical departure in the mid-twentieth century, where the liberal intelligentsia had replaced Smith with economists such as John Maynard Keynes, who espoused liberal economic principles.
It’s worth noting that Hayek did not label himself as a conservative, and his economic philosophy has only shaped one leg of the “three-legged stool” of modern conservatism. The two other coalition blocs were the anti-Communists (thought of today as national security or defense hawks) and the Traditionalists (sometimes used interchangeably with “social conservative,” though there are nuanced distinctions). Each of these disparate wings began as intellectual movements. Although social conservatives sometimes get a bad rap, they make a very serious argument that goes back to antiquity: a good civilization must contain virtue, charity, community, ethics, honor, and a moral order. America’s Founders believed that only a people who exhibit these traits could preserve our form of government.
Foreign Policy Becomes the “Glue”
Prior to World War II, the GOP and the “Old Right” were essentially isolationist entities that worried about balanced budgets and supported protective tariffs at home. But Pearl Harbor, the struggle against Nazi fascism in the 1940s, and the subsequent rise of the Soviet Union’s Iron Curtain, rendered the isolationist worldview untenable, and the subsequent rise of America as a global economic power proved protectionism obsolete. With the rise of the Soviet Union after World War II, foreign policy positions were increasingly scrambled. Democrats were split into three factions: doves who wanted détente with the Communists, anti-Communist moderates who pursued a mix of diplomacy and military responses designed to “contain” the spread of the Soviet empire, and a diminishing band of Scoop Jackson Democrats (hawks named after the New Dealer who gamely ran for the Democratic presidential nomination in the 1970s despite his stubborn support for the Vietnam War).
Meanwhile—whether out of necessity or because the new political realities had opened their eyes to the fact that America could not retreat from the world—conservative Republicans evolved into fervent hawks, a development today’s anti-interventionist, libertarian-leaning conservatives lament. Electorally, this evolution turned out to be incredibly fortuitous. For decades the struggle against Communism served as the glue binding the disparate elements of the conservative movement (which helps explain the problems conservatives have faced since the fall of the Berlin Wall, and why there was some belief that the war on terror might replace it). Each wing of the conservative movement had valid reasons for putting aside their petty differences and uniting to confront this existential threat. Fiscal conservatives railed against the Soviet’s anticapitalist system of central planning. Christians despised the Godless atheistic empire and its gulags.18 And for national security conservatives, there was obvious reason to fear the “Red Menace”—especially once they started pointing nukes at us.
Intellectual conservatives, too, argued that the Soviet Union posed an existential threat, and that the rise of the Iron Curtain necessitated an aggressive foreign policy to stop and roll back, not merely contain, the spread of Communism. They, of course, would not only win this argument, but also, eventually, the Cold War. For the purpose of concise retelling, I want to focus on perhaps the most prominent and important: Whittaker Chambers, whose tortured soul revealed more than the stakes involved in the anti-Communist fight.
Leaving “the Winning Side”
Now, you might think that an intellectual editor and writer for Time magazine—who had also served as a Communist spy and acknowledged he had numerous homosexual experiences—might make for an odd hero for the foreign policy wing of the conservative movement. In fact, you might think that, if this were fiction, this plot point would be thrown out on the grounds that nobody would believe it. But that’s where this story begins.
Born Jay Vivian Chambers (Whittaker was his mother’s maiden name) in 1901, Chambers emerged from a dysfunctional Brooklyn family. Defining biographical details include his grandmother’s insanity and his brother’s suicide—chaotic turns that seem to have made him susceptible to the authoritarian nature of Communism. But Chambers’s brush with history began in August of 1948, when the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) summoned Chambers, then a senior editor at Time, to verify the testimony of Soviet spy Elizabeth Bentley. With painful personal reluctance, Chambers testified that he knew Alger Hiss, who had served in the State Department under FDR, when the two were fellow Communists a decade earlier. Hiss was no low-level functionary. He accompanied Roosevelt to the infamous Yalta conference, where some critics felt a dying president gave away Eastern Europe to Stalin. He was also the secretary-general of the 1945 San Francisco Conference that created the United Nations.
Hiss was eventually convicted of perjury, and while debate persists over whether or not he was a Soviet spy, the preponderance of evidence suggests Chambers was correct. The Hiss trial, coupled with the Rosenberg atomic spy case that followed in the early 1950s, made it increasingly difficult for anyone to argue that Communist infiltration wasn’t at least a potentially serious problem. Aside from the obvious national security implications, the Hiss affair also suggested that liberal intellectuals were being manipulated and turned into unwitting dupes or “useful idiots.” As Chambers wrote in his book, Witness, “While Communists make full use of liberals and their solicitudes, and sometimes flatter them to their faces, in private they treat them with that sneering contempt that the strong and predatory almost invariably feel for victims who volunteer to help in their own victimization.”
To most Americans, the Soviets had become an existential threat. Supporting their ideology was tantamount to treason, and whichever political party could be the most anti-Communist would stand a better chance of winning future elections, and, presumably, the future. The fight against Communism turned out to be a winner for conservatives—despite Senator Joseph McCarthy’s infamous and sometimes demagogic Red-baiting, which ultimately led to his downfall—and a loser for liberal intellectuals. Ultimately, America would win the Cold War—a result Chambers did not envision, as he told the House in 1948 that he feared he was “leaving the winning side for the losing side.”19
But Chambers’s contribution didn’t end there. The Hiss ordeal also turned him into an influential public intellectual, whose writing shaped the foreign policy thinking of conservatism. Witness, published in 1952, remains an important contribution to the conservative canon. But he also became suspicious of what he called the “crackpotism”20 of the Right. In 1957, Chambers’s harsh review of Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged in National Review essentially wrote her out of the conservative movement (Rand would never forgive NR founder Bill Buckley). “Out of a lifetime of reading,” Chambers declared of Rand’s classic, “I can recall no other book in which a tone of overriding arrogance was so implacably sustained. Its shrillness is without reprieve. Its dogmatism is without appeal.” (If only he were still around to review Ann Coulter’s latest book.) Conservative publisher Alfred S. Regnery enshrined Chambers’s place in the conservative movement in his book, Upstream, noting, “Chambers planted the intellectual moorings for American conservatives that would last into the twenty-first century.”
“More than the intrigue, more than the spy case, more than the vivid confrontation between the traitor and the patriot, the philosophical difference between East and West, between freedom and Communism, between God and godlessness, inspired the conservative movement,” Regnery wrote. Chambers ultimately came to view the Cold War as a clash of two faiths—Godless Communism versus Christendom, which might also qualify him as a member of the third wing of the conservative movement: the traditionalists.
Thanks in part to Chambers, the conservative coalition was well equipped to criticize nearly every aspect of Communism. But if conservatism was to mean anything, it must also have a positive message. Fortunately, that was in the works.
The Rise of the Traditionalists
Today, it is fashionable for “thoughtful” conservatives to hearken back to Edmund Burke, even if they don’t spend much time dwelling on why he’s so important. In fact, it is somewhat of a cliché to suggest it’s been all downhill since Burke. As policy analyst and First Things blogger Helen Rittelmeyer wrote in a 2013 American Spectator column, “The chart of that supposed decline, if you were to draw it Ascent of Man style, would start with Edmund Burke looking intelligent and walking upright, followed by William F. Buckley as Australopithecus, slouching. The present age would be represented by some knuckle-dragging, prognathous creature like Rush Limbaugh or Sean Hannity.” That’s not exactly fair to modern conservatives, but if Burke has become the hero of conservatism, it’s at least partly because he had a great twentieth-century Boswell.
It was a young Michigan State professor named Russell Kirk who made the greatest contribution to presenting this positive definition of conservatism, helping give the cause its name, defining its positive attributes, and destigmatizing the term conservative. Published in 1953, Kirk’s The Conservative Mind would become one of the most important works of the conservative canon, tracing the conservative tradition from Edmund Burke through to Kirk’s time (including chapters on such diverse figures as John Adams and poet T. S. Eliot, who advocated reverence for what he called “the permanent things”). Had it done nothing else, Kirk’s “fat book,” as he called it, greatly contributed to reintroducing America to Burke, often thought of as the father of modern conservatism. (There’s a fine line between brilliance and insanity, and Kirk was clearly an eccentric. He refused to drive, wore a cape, and apparently carried a sword cane. It’s nice to know liberals aren’t the only ones who know how to party.)
Traditionalism is in the spirit of Aristotle and Burke, in that it values an adherence to tradition and a sense that there is a transcendent moral order that must be preserved. For most of America’s history, these were commonly held ideas. But in the post-World War II era—and especially with the rise of the hippie counterculture in the 1960s—these ideas would come under assault and eventually lose their standing as the default consensus opinions of Americans. In this environment, other conservative leaders arose who would sound the alarm21—but Kirk’s contribution was unrivaled.
William F. Buckley
With Burke firmly ensconced as the historical model for conservatism, William F. Buckley Jr.—an upper-crust Catholic conservative with an Ivy League pedigree, a huge vocabulary, and a patrician accent—probably did more than anyone to fuse the various strands of conservative intellectual thought into a politically potent, and mostly coherent, force. The son of the former Aloïse Steiner of New Orleans and William F. Buckley Sr.—a self-made oil man who learned his lesson about governmental overreach when he was expelled from Mexico for opposing restrictions on American ownership of oil rights—the younger Buckley was adventurous and eccentric his entire life. In his younger years, Buckley did a two-year stint with the CIA in Mexico. In later years, legend has it that he sailed his yacht outside US territorial limits so he could smoke pot without breaking the law. He also ran for mayor of New York City in 1965, helping spread the conservative gospel in a decidedly urban environment. When asked what he would do should he actually win, Buckley famously quipped, “Demand a recount.”
Buckley first bounded onto the scene while a student at Yale, when he published God and Man at Yale in 1951, alerting the school’s alumni that their alma mater had degenerated into a breeding ground for anti-Christian, anticapitalism professors. To prove it, he named names. Reviews were mixed, and in some cases, brutal. Writing at the Atlantic, a Yale graduate named McGeorge Bundy (later national security adviser to Presidents Kennedy and Johnson) derided it as “a savage attack on that institution as a hotbed of ‘atheism’ and ‘collectivism,’” dismissing it as “dishonest” and “false in its theory, and a discredit to its author.” Others seemed to resent Buckley’s aristocratic, charmed life. Writing at the New York Times, Peter Viereck observed, “Great conservatives—immortals like Burke, Alexander Hamilton, Disraeli, Churchill, Pope, and Swift—earned the right to be sunnily conservative by their long dark nights.…You do not earn a heartfelt and conviction carrying conservatism by the shortcut of a popular campus clubman without the inspiring agony of lonely, unrespectable soul-searching.”
Buckley proved a hardscrabble biography was not necessary to transform a movement. The creation of National Review in 1955—a magazine whose goal was to stand “athwart history, yelling Stop”—was among his greatest contributions. Prior to that, the Left had many notable periodicals, but the Right (save for a few outlets like the weekly newspaper Human Events and the fallen angel, the American Mercury) was essentially unarmed. So Buckley’s magazine provided a source for like-minded conservatives around the nation seeking intellectual stimulation and ideas. It also provided—and this is not to be underestimated—a place for conservative opinion leaders to earn a living. Thanks to Buckley’s bold vision, sharp pen, and impeccable intellectual credentials, the magazine forced the ideas espoused by conservatives like Whittaker Chambers, Richard Weaver, James Burnham, and Russell Kirk into the discourse of the intelligentsia.
Additionally, National Review provided a platform for uniting the disparate, and in the minds of some, mutually exclusive, elements of conservatism—an idea known as “fusionism,” hatched and promoted by Buckley confidante Frank Meyer. In this important cause—a prerequisite to Reagan’s election—Buckley and Meyer would mostly succeed in declaring a truce and a temporary alliance on the Right. What is more, in assuming the role as head of the de facto conservative “establishment,” Buckley unilaterally assumed the moral authority to bestow a sort of seal of approval on those who qualified as mainstream conservatives and to revoke such status from fringe elements. Today, the world has changed, and leadership is more diffuse. In an increasingly democratized world where anyone can pontificate from a laptop at Starbucks, nobody needs the imprimatur of establishment-approved gatekeepers. And that means that nobody can uphold standards. In today’s conservative movement, one would be hard-pressed to find any universally respected figure with the moral authority to write someone out of the movement.22 Buckley, and by extension, NR, did exactly that to Ayn Rand and the conspiracy theory–laden John Birch Society,23 the latter of which famously accused Republican president Dwight D. Eisenhower of Communist sympathies. (“Ike’s not a communist, he’s a golfer,” quipped Russell Kirk—a quote Buckley widely disseminated.) Though Buckley did much to excommunicate the Right of its unseemly elements, he was not without blemish. It’s fair to say that Buckley’s early opposition to the civil rights movement stands as a mark of shame on an otherwise sterling legacy.
Aside from purging the movement of its cranks, Buckley was also instrumental in helping boost young conservative activists into the fold. (After all, politics is a game of addition, not subtraction.) The founding statement of principles of the group Young Americans for Freedom (YAF), called the “Sharon Statement,” was written at Buckley’s Sharon, Connecticut, family compound.24 It was another confidante, National Review publisher Bill Rusher, who deserves some credit for focusing Buckley on activism, political dynamics, and movement building. “Without William A. Rusher,” conservative leader Morton Blackwell told me,25 “William F. Buckley would have thought and acted as if being right [by this, he means being philosophically correct] is sufficient to win.”
And if policing the conservative movement and helping a new generation of conservatives—or creating a magazine for intellectually minded conservatives—wasn’t enough, Buckley also hosted a highbrow PBS TV show called Firing Line for thirty-three years. It would be nearly impossible for a young person (accustomed to YouTube clips or today’s cable news “shout fest” format) to conceive of a show where an aristocratic conservative interviewed such diverse luminaries as economist Friedrich Hayek, liberal author Norman Mailer, beat writer Jack Kerouac, Ronald Reagan, Hugh Hefner, or Mother Teresa (all of whom appeared on his program). Buckley’s show was renowned enough to warrant parody by Robin Williams on Saturday Night Live. Whether it was his unlikely friendship with Mailer or his famous feuds with Gore Vidal, Buckley proved that conservatives were intellectually equipped to go toe-to-toe against any liberal intellectual of the twentieth century.
Buckley was so significant that during a 2005 interview with conservative columnist George Will (marking the fiftieth anniversary of NR’s founding),26 the latter told the former, “Let me invite you to take credit for winning the Cold War. The argument goes like this: Without Bill Buckley, no National Review. Without the National Review, no Goldwater nomination. Without the Goldwater nomination, no conservative takeover of the Republican Party. Without that, no Reagan. Without Reagan, no victory in the Cold War. Therefore, Bill Buckley won the Cold War.”
Barry Goldwater’s 1964 Campaign
If Buckley embodied twentieth-century conservative intellectualism, Barry Goldwater ignited today’s debilitating conservative anti-intellectualism. Not that Goldwater wanted it that way. Had President John F. Kennedy not been gunned down that fateful November day in 1963, it is very possible the 1964 presidential campaign would have been a much different affair. As good friends, Kennedy and Goldwater had even discussed campaigning jointly—imagine an alternative history where the two opponents had conducted a series of “Lincoln-Douglas”-style debates. The whole race might have been high-minded and philosophical. But Kennedy’s assassination changed everything. President Lyndon Johnson and his team would essentially invent the negative TV commercial—one of which, the infamous “Daisy” ad, suggested that a Goldwater presidency would trigger nuclear annihilation. It was the most cynical sort of politics. And sadly, it worked.
Before he was caricatured by the Johnson campaign, Goldwater rocketed to the Republican nomination, in part because of his 1960 best seller, The Conscience of a Conservative (ghostwritten by William F. Buckley’s brother-in-law L. Brent Bozell). When one thinks of the poll-tested, talking point–laden pre-campaign books by recent presidential hopefuls like Mitt Romney or Scott Walker, it’s hard to even conceive of a nascent presidential candidate releasing a philosophical treatise like Goldwater’s.
But Goldwater had a fatal flaw: an inability to balance his intelligence and philosophical commitments with wisdom and prudence. His famous line, delivered during his 1964 Republican National Convention acceptance speech, is a prime example. “I would remind you,” he roared, “that extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice. And let me remind you also that moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue.”27 This was an utterly coherent and defensible statement. It was also politically stupid, inasmuch as it reinforced Johnson’s narrative that Goldwater was a crazy fringe candidate.28 And it wasn’t the only time Goldwater played to type. Regarding nukes, Goldwater gibed, “Let’s lob one into the men’s room at the Kremlin.” Even without Goldwater’s help, Johnson’s team found ways to reinforce their narrative. The Johnson team parodied Goldwater’s slogan, “In your heart you know he’s right,” as “In your guts you know he’s nuts.”
Goldwater got crushed, winning only six states, and garnering just 38 percent of the vote. But, as previously discussed, his candidacy also launched Ronald Reagan’s long march to the presidency, and Goldwater’s breakthrough in the previously Democratic South also helped shape future Republican electoral strategy. (In a later chapter, we will discuss how this influence was a double-edged sword.) And something else happened: many of Goldwater’s young supporters and activists began studying how to win. In doing so, they coupled political philosophy with campaign know-how and political technology, based on the assumption that (as conservative leader Morton Blackwell29 teaches) “you owe it to your philosophy to study how to win.” The next phase of the conservative movement was upon us.
Another tragic and significant effect of the Kennedy assassination was the radicalization of the Left. JFK was a tax-cutting anti-Communist. Within a few years of his death, the Left would radicalize, and JFK’s hawkish brand of politics would become a rarity in the Democratic Party.
The Real Nature of Politics and Elections
From Goldwater’s drubbing at the hands of Johnson’s scurrilous campaign, conservatives learned to fight fire with fire—politics wasn’t merely about a battle of ideas; it turned out to be also about a contest of technology and fund-raising and organizing and campaigning and, yes, going negative.
In 1964, liberalism was considered the de facto philosophy of America. Literary critic Lionel Trilling had already written that “in the United States at this time liberalism is not only the dominant but even the sole intellectual tradition.”30 That would quickly change, and not entirely by accident. While some Goldwater supporters grew disenchanted with politics, others decided to document the lessons learned and apply them to future races. The youngest elected Goldwater delegate was Morton Blackwell, who went on to found the Leadership Institute.31 In a lecture called “The Real Nature of Politics,” Blackwell draws on the lessons of Goldwater’s loss and juxtaposes them with Reagan’s landslide victory just sixteen years later. Although conceding numerous variables, Blackwell argues that “the difference was that we Goldwater supporters tended to believe that being right, in the sense of being correct, was sufficient to win.…That’s not the real nature of politics.” He then reminds students of Goldwater’s slogan, “In your heart, you know he’s right.” “Unfortunately the real world doesn’t work that way,” he adds, “as we who supported Goldwater found out when Lyndon Johnson trounced us.”
Johnson’s strategic decision to “nuke” Goldwater lifted the scales from quixotic conservative eyes. No longer believing you could win simply with your ideas, conservatives came to accept the reality that you must study how to win because of your ideas. To some, such as Blackwell, this simply meant learning how to more effectively participate in democracy. To others, it meant that the ends justified the means—that politics was a form of war.
Though many of these ex-Goldwater activists were intellectuals in their own right—a stark contrast to some of today’s activists—movement leaders like Paul Weyrich, Morton Blackwell, Richard Viguerie, and Phyllis Schlafly would devote much of their lives to mastering the machinery of politics, such as how to win elections, build coalitions, and create an infrastructure of think tanks and nonprofits. The primary beneficiary of this devotion would be Ronald Reagan. In this light, Goldwater’s candidacy proved a sort of trial run, and Goldwater would be a forerunner—a John the Baptist who came out of the Sonoran Desert, eating locusts and wild honey, basically doing campaign advance work for the future conservative savior, Ronald Reagan. (Ironically, this John the Baptist would later turn Judas, supporting Richard Nixon over Reagan in 1968, Nixon over John Ashbrook in 1972, and Gerald Ford over Reagan in 1976—but that’s another story.)
Conservatism Was Smart
In the beginning, conservatism was smart. It can be again. Part of the problem is that conservatism today is too often defined by what it is not. It’s anti-tax, anti-big government, or anti-abortion. This framing, unfortunately, fails to capture the positive attributes of conservatism or its fundamental worldview. You might not agree with conservative philosophy, but it’s undeniable that the story of the rise of the conservative movement—from Burke to Buckley—is one of big, thoughtful ideas that address serious existential questions about human nature and the rise of civilization. Conservatism is about conserving the good things about Western civilization. It’s about a rejection of utopian schemes and moral relativism—a humble acceptance that life is too complex for elites to plan. It’s the belief that Western civilization didn’t merely happen, but was instead the result of the accumulated wisdom of our ancestors. It’s about a realization that Western civilization and its institutions evolved naturally, and that long-standing traditions must be preserved.