One Saturday afternoon last autumn, I was cooking lunch and listening to the radio when the station switched to the Dartmouth-Harvard game. The game had not begun, and the announcer was rambling on about the nip in the air, the autumn colors, past games, this year’s players, their names and hometowns, a semi-nostalgic discourse, which, despite an aversion for football talk, I found unexpectedly moving. Autumn, a new crop of players, New England: the world was on a steady keel after all. I could not remember having felt that quiet sense of cycle, of ongoing life, and the past floating so serenely to the surface, in a long time.
During that period, public apathy was the despair of liberal columnists. It’s hard to recall the mood, because since then, even Nixon’s majority has been stirred up by the Watergate scandals, and the vocabulary of outrage is back in the saddle. But at the time, there was a strong, almost anti-political mood which was associated with the support for Nixon, but which extended to the left (perhaps in the form of despair), and for which, as it happens, an absorption in football was the most commonly used symbol. Though it was not as a fan of the game that I was drawn to the broadcast that morning, I associated my reaction with the voices decrying apathy and decided to be very wary about joining them. Whatever the Dartmouth broadcast was unexpectedly giving me, it was not an opiate, but something to be built on.
My thought that afternoon was of the price which the continual agitation and crisis of the last years has exacted. A sense of peace generated from the outside, from the community at large, is now a rarity, at least in the urban-suburban world of the East Coast. In order to flourish, or to create an environment in which our children can flourish, people have to buttress themselves from the outside and rely on their personal resources, which, in general, they have done. Good nerves, a sense of humor, a healthy perspective on life, moral constancy, self-esteem, and a sense of purpose are qualities for which one has to fight in a personally constructed greenhouse rather than cultivating them freely in the open climate.
That morning, anyway, I felt like a conservative.
I am not a conservative. I think government not only should try to, but can, improve life for its citizens, but for the first time I’ve begun to understand the value of tradition, both for the counterpoint it can provide to the left and for the different perspective it offers on the drift rightward of the electorate. That trend has been perceived from an isolated liberal viewpoint as unquestionably regressive and described in such purely negative terms as apathy, materialism, selfishness, and complacency.
Where to look for the exponents of the conservative tradition, however, is a problem. There are the pure, aesthetically palatable conservatives like Clinton Rossiter and Peter Viereck, who are, however, quite hermit-like and disconnected from actual political life. There are the professional conservative politicians—James Buckley and Barry Goldwater—who, by and large, have little relation to classical conservatism but who still are not entirely the philosophical equivalent of their Republican colleagues. Then there are the people in between, mostly political writers, who try to relate to political actualities without utterly abandoning the principles of their professed creed. Finally, there are the ex-liberal conservatives, intellectuals like Irving Kristol, Daniel Bell, and Patrick Moynihan, about whom it is often hard to tell whether they are liberals disguised as conservatives or vice versa. It would be a mammoth task to sort out all these levels and come up with a coherent analysis of the conservative movement today. It perhaps makes more sense to first state what I think is best in the tradition, quite separate from the form it takes today.
Two elementary attitudes underlie the tradition. The first is a passionate sense of the need to conserve—the land, the culture, the institutions, codes of behavior; to revere and protect those elements that constitute civilization. Temperamentally a pessimist, the conservative shrinks from disrupting any of the elements of civilization in the name of bettering it, for fear it will be lost altogether. (He therefore dislikes big government, which exists primarily to tamper with and change the status quo.) He looks to the enduring values of the past—to holding on to what we’ve got—in forming his political positions, rather than to alluring, idealistic visions of what the future could be.
The second attitude is a cautious view of raw democracy, or direct representational government. The conservative believes firmly in the rights of minorities and those institutions that protect minorities from the whims of the majority, such as the Supreme Court—an elite, appointed body—and the Constitution, particularly the First Amendment. The concern behind this attitude is less for racial, ethnic, or religious groups than for intellectual minorities—the educated elite—to which conservatives have always belonged. (This is inextricably tied to the preservation of a wealthy, educated elite, who have a stake in conserving the status quo, and are ever endangered by the less-educated masses, who are careless about destroying the civilization. This ingredient of material—as opposed to intellectual—self-interest has always jeopardized the credibility of conservative ideas.) These institutions, which restrain the mass will are precious in the conservative view not just because they protect the few from being trampled by the many, but because they also protect the majority from its own mistakes. This awareness that the majority can often be wrong (so easily forgotten by social crusaders) produces a mental habit. Conservatives tend to be automatically uncomfortable with any idea or trend that smacks of mob psychology—anything that gains a swift and wide popularity—to the point of appearing to enjoy embracing unpopular positions and dropping wet blankets on the emotional political moods to which this country is prone.
An outgrowth of these attitudes—and one with particular value—is the humor which the skeptical turn of the conservative mind can bring to bear on the confused, disaster-prone but unreservedly grand schemes for the betterment of mankind, which the quixotic and too-often humorless liberal is forever earnestly pressing to perpetrate. The serious point behind the teasing reminder of human fallibility is that a civil, sane environment, though invaluable, is frail, and the price of disrupting it is heavy; that the actual daily life of individuals in that environment and the values on which it is based are the important, primary, realities, not the world of political theorizing and abstract social goals. The conservative reminds the liberal that all the equality, education, opportunity, and financial security will be poor comfort if the culture is destroyed, just as the scattered people from the West End of Boston have discovered that their new housing in “better” neighborhoods is little consolation for the lost community life taken for granted in the now-demolished slum. And just as I might wonder what it has all been for, if, as a result, the mild pleasure I took in a college football game has become something to remark on.
“Conservatives tend to be uncomfortable with any idea which smacks of mob psychology to the point of appearing to enjoy embracing unpopular positions.”
One could not possibly claim that these attitudes are representative of the average American mood, though they are not all unrepresentative. The following three examples of conservative thought do not tick off this checklist either, but they flesh it out by expressing in different ways the conservative reaction to the excesses of liberalism. This reaction, I think, is the point at which the genuine conservative impulse and the less articulate mood of the public are most closely in tune. Two of the examples are taken from the middle group of conservative political thinkers, Henry Fairlie and Richard Whalen, and the third comes from Randall Jarrell, who isn’t trying to make a conservative point at all but was simply observing accurately.
In his recent book, The Politics of Expectation, Henry Fairlie, the British conservative, has written about the intense heroic idealism, the hypnotizing images of unattainable promise, and the larger-than-life style of leadership that was epitomized by the Kennedys. His thesis is that the atmosphere of ever-frustrated expectation whipped the country up to an hysterical pitch, with nowhere to go from there. He sees the anarchic events of the late sixties—the assassinations and riots—as inevitable in this revved-up, unhealthy atmosphere, and therefore treats the kind of political leadership which cultivated that atmosphere as more or less criminally dangerous. After presenting his theory, which he does convincingly, there is nothing more for him to do except to back it up with examples, mostly dissections of Kennedy rhetoric, which is also convincingly, if somewhat redundantly, accomplished. But even the redundancy perhaps has value, for it rams his point again and again at that temperamental resistance of the left against seeing promise, hope, and grand social mission as anything but the finest element of political life. Henry Fairlie’s book gives a one-sided, narrow view of the Kennedys—as history, it is almost worthless. But it has changed the way I perceive practitioners of the politics of expectation.
In a recent, but pre-Watergate, issue of Harper’s, Richard Whalen, a conservative Republican, offered advice to liberals which nicely complements Fairlie’s point. He counseled liberals to stop being panicked by Nixon’s thrusts at the media, the poverty establishment, and the Constitution and to discover “the malicious satisfactions” of being on the outside.
From this perspective you gradually become aware of the arrant fraudulence of much that goes on in Washington. . . .We are being promised—or threatened with, as you prefer—a great deal less in government and spending than we will actually suffer in the next four years. We are being treated to the spectacle of presidential bluster. . . .If we take the Nixon performance at face value, we are being conned as surely as we were conned when Kennedy postured on the battlements of the free world and Lyndon Johnson commanded an end to poverty in the land.
After indulging in some fun with Nixon and his now-ousted staff, he concluded:
The beginning of realism, in this conservative’s opinion, follows from a profound skepticism about the importance of government and politics in our daily lives. If the President disappeared and the Congress went on vacation, in all probability the sun would rise, the milk would be on the doorstep, and we could skip Wicker and Lewis and begin our day with the crossword puzzle. Come to think of it, how would we tell that something was missing?
This is, of course, a comfortably middle-class view. Government does make a difference in people’s lives, though most dramatically in the lives of the less fortunate, either for better or worse—Indochinese peasants who stray in the way of B-52s, for example, or an impoverished mother of five who does, or does not, get a government check in the mail. (At this point, the Lockheeds and the Standard Oils would also notice if the government disappeared, though their “conservative” defenders usually have little sympathy for their companions in government dependency, the poor, but more of this later.) But Whalen is promoting a perspective—an attitude—not an unqualified doctrine. He has, after all, dedicated his life as a writer to politics, which he would not do if he thought it was all irrevocably fraudulent. This particular point, like Fairlie’s, is a simplified insight, affirming the value and substance of daily life and putting government in its place. It is an insight to which the liberal frame of mind is likely to be blind because of an unhealthy proclivity to shuttle uncontrollably between images of either utopia or apocalypse.
In Pictures from an Institution, Jarrell pokes fun at the fictitious Benton College, an expensive but enlightened institution for women, and at the dichotomy between the students’ actual futures and the cult of liberal guilt.
They were successful in teaching most of their students to say in contrition about anything whatsoever: It was I, Lord, it was I; but they were not so successful in teaching them to consider this consciousness of guilt a summum bonum, one’s final claim upon existence. Many a Benton girl went back to her nice home, married her rich husband—and carried a fox in her bosom for the rest of her life—and short of becoming a social worker, founding a Neo-Socialist party, and then killing herself and leaving her insurance to the United Nations, I do not know how she could have got rid of it.
And of Flo, the professor’s wife, he writes (echoing Whalen here):
Almost everything that happens to Flo and her family and her friends was, after all, only private, and to her real life was public, what you voted at, or gave for or read about in the Nation. Life seemed to Flo so petty compared to real life.
Jarrell was observing the extravagances to which the liberal mind is prone. His portrait is farcical, and one can laugh easily because his subjects are safely isolated on the Benton College reservation. The farce becomes more ominous, however, when those extravagances are transported to policy-making institutions. The dissociated, fantasy-prone characteristics of the liberal imagination are not reason to stop being liberal but they are dangers too easily forgotten by a mind gripped with the possibilities of improving things. Progressively minded people are inclined to believe they should constantly search their souls for guilt and their actions to see if they are “doing enough.” They should also look around for the skeptics who are laughing at them and learn to laugh at themselves. These are not enemies to aspiration but valuable friends.
These three conservative writers could not be called spokesmen for the majority or typical examples of the popular mind. But the conservative instinct behind what they say and some of the substance does coincide with the mood of what has come to be known as “Middle America.” The common ground is the desire for the peace, sanity, and civility, which grows out of a normal day-to-day life in one’s community and the desire to build on that without interference by emotional appeal or literal intrusion from a high-pitched social crusading (and engineering), utopia-apocalypse prone government. The points on which the current mood and the conservative tradition most notably diverge are those hate-spurred, violent elements, suggestive of radical rightism, such as Agnew’s more notorious anti-intellectual rhetoric, the hard-hat escapades, and some of the anti-busing activity.
“The institutions which restrain the mass will are precious to the conservatives not just because they prevent the few from being trampled but because they also protect the majority from its own mistakes.”
Yet looking back, even some of those specific gestures which seemed frighteningly reactionary at the time were, I think, misperceived. Take, for example, the liberal interpretation of the flag-waving fad. Expression of contempt for the country was one of the points on which Middle America most definitively rejected the left. More and more overcome with frustration and horror at the war, the left began to blur the distinction between country and policy and to use rhetoric that expressed loathing for both. The flag waving with which many people responded to literal and figurative flag burning was then logically seen as a statement of blind, jingoistic support for the U.S. policy, so much so that at a certain point a liberal dove wouldn’t have been caught dead with an American flag.
It now seems doubtful that the flags expressed widespread enthusiasm for the war itself, particularly that late in our involvement; it is far more likely that a great many of those decals on car windows were simply a rejection of the generic self-hatred which, for a while, the talk of the left expressed. There is a distinction between the country and the people in power. If the country couldn’t feel a patriotic affection for itself in bad times, then it could never overcome its policies and could be run into the ground by any administration. Self-esteem, affirmation of the things in life you know and have valued, are essentials of sanity, growth, peace, and recovery from tragedy as well. And a gesture of self-esteem is not an illogical response to elements that not only threaten disruption but preach generic self-loathing.
There have been other areas in which liberal preconceptions have been off base. For example, the majority of Americans were assumed to be quite un-conservative in accepting persecution of unpopular minorities through the courts, a preconception which was at least called into question when staunchly middle-American juries acquitted Angela Davis and the Berrigan group (to the surprise of both the prosecution and the defense), and, it now turns out, would have acquitted Ellsberg as well.
“Progressively minded people are inclined to search their souls for guilt, and their actions to see if they are ‘doing enough’ they should also look around for the skeptics who are laughing at them and learn to laugh at themselves.”
Whether or not these “hunches” are right—that a Fairlie-Whalen mood of recoil from high drama in favor of the values and primal reality of daily life describes the drift to the right—it remains that the worst elements in the mood were appealed to by the Administration. Agnew’s inflammatory personalismo style, fanning fear and hatred of the disruptive elements in society, was the most flagrantly un-conservative demonstration. Nixon has been publicly more subdued, but though he likes to think of himself as a conservative, his performance in office has been an almost perfect demonstration of a tradition turned inside out.
Nixon’s policies have been dramatically aggressive, and he has shown little love for the Constitution. In nominating Carswell to the Supreme Court (“mediocre” people should be represented on the Court, as Senator Roman Hruska said), he demonstrated his contempt for that body, too. His belief in the First Amendment and in protecting the unpopular minority has been expressed in such absurd ventures as the Berrigan trial and the ludicrous effort to crucify Daniel Ellsberg. Indeed, far from being skeptical of majority opinion and believing in moral absolutes, Richard Nixon embraces the “participatory democracy” method of decision-making: he decides according to what is marketable. (Nixon made no statement on the erupting cities in 1968 because—according to Richard Whalen, who was a White House advisor at the time—there was “no consensus” on the subject.) And the personal integrity which ought to be the hallmark of a conservative, no matter how else he might wander, is apparently a concept which holds no sway in the White House. In general, the allegiance which seems most clearly to direct Nixon’s domestic actions is to “the Big Business, Big Government, and National Security state.”
The alliance between government and business is not even inspired by aggressive capitalistic motives or by dreams of a super-productive industrial state that is the best and most efficient as well as the biggest in the world, generating a national prosperity built on real wealth. We hear about such dreams—mostly as though they have already been achieved—in Nixon’s speeches, but the reality is something quite different. Instead, the alliance is one of dependency of business on government—complicity between the two is a by-product—in which government props up overgrown, flaccid, incompetent mega-institutions which cannot make it on their own. And while dealing out tax breaks, subsidies, and special favors in billions of dollars to “shelter” these giants, to protect them from the consequences of their own failures, to keep them afloat despite their own unwillingness to shape up and pull for themselves, the Nixon mentality scowls disapprovingly at the unfortunate welfare recipient, who probably never got his head above water in the first place, suspects him of laziness, and wants to force him to endure some hardship before he gets his meager handout, lest his “dependency” corrupt the work ethic, and with it the moral fiber of the nation.
This is a perfect hypocrisy, accomplished with the handy prop of a conservative, anti-socialist, pro-capitalist mask. The lie automatically generates the third creature of this mentality, the National Security state.
As becomes more apparent every day, national security, as Nixon has developed the concept, has very little to do with hostile foreign countries discovering information that gives them an advantage over the United States. Far more passionate has been the endeavor to keep the truth about the government—or big business, the ITT episode, for example—from “leaking” out to the citizenry, leaks which in most cases could not possibly be construed as endangering the safety of the country. More than any other quality, a blanket hatred of truth-tellers has been the hallmark of the Nixon group. When this “conservatively” inclined government came in, what better opportunity greeted it for showing up the vices of the outgoing party and the virtues of an administration committed to making capitalism work than to make the defense contractors shape up? Instead, they fired Ernest Fitzgerald, the one person who, with the know-how learned in a fast little engineering consulting company of his own making, had exposed and endeavored to correct the waste and featherbedding which has by now become legendary in that industry.
The crusade against Ellsberg is another example of an irrationally violent reaction against a truth-teller, when all he was leaking was past history, which, significantly, exposed more about the overblown importance of “security regulations”—a method of institutional self-perpetuation—and about the clumsy inefficiency of the Pentagon, than it revealed about state secrets. And the original reason for hiring the ill-fated “plumbers” was, by Nixon’s own admission, to plug a “serious security leak” to the press. This fear of the truth’s “getting out” is not focused on particular pieces of information; it is a general state of mind, so general that one often gets the impression these characters have no idea which pieces of information will reflect badly on them, and therefore, for safekeeping, they must hide everything. The incredibly clumsy, transparent cover-up of Watergate, like the “shred-everything, deny-everything” reaction to scandal at ITT, betrays this mentality. There is no cunning elimination of selected documents, no carefully edited version of the truth in an explanation, the way a crook, aware of a specific wrongdoing, might carefully cover his tracks. Everything is so permeated with hypocrisy that it is no longer possible to distinguish between damaging and harmless information. At the sign of any “leak” of the truth whatsoever, you must deny all, concoct a completely phony cover story, dump all your files into the shredder, shut everybody up (whether by gagging them with dollars or threatening them, it doesn’t matter), and mercilessly pursue the leakers—blackball the Fitzgeralds, throw the Ellsburgs in jail, discredit the Jack Anderson, thus intimidating all future truth-tellers.
“A blanket hatred of truthtellers
has been the hallmark
of the Nixon group.”
No one has proclaimed Nixon as a great conservative except perhaps Nixon himself, pathetically seeing Disraeli in the mirror, or Horatio Alger, or the embodiment of old-fashioned American values, images which are so patently unconvincing that no one has bothered to challenge them. (Even Kissinger has been seduced into thinking of himself as quintessentially “American,” ludicrously describing his appeal to the public as that of a cowboy riding into a hostile town—Red China—alone. Frontier words like “bold,” “self-sufficient,” and “tough” are constantly surfacing as part of Nixon’s self-image.) The politicians who formally call themselves conservative have supported Nixon, but only in a restrained way; they saw fit to run one of their numbers against him as a token protest (although the protest seemed to be inspired mostly by the China visit). So the only people who call Nixon conservative with any conviction are those for whom the word has become blurred to mean “bad,” “reactionary,” or even “stupid.” (“We could call it ‘The Worst and the Dumbest,’” joked a New York editor when I was toying with the idea of doing a book on conservatism.) What point is there, then, in “exposing” Nixon as a phony conservative when few have claimed he was a genuine one, except to use him as a handy example of what a conservative is not?
The point is that in looking around at the politicians who do claim to be conservative—Barry Goldwater, James Buckley, John Ashbrook—one finds very little that distinguishes them from Nixon. The most noticeable difference is in standards of integrity. This is somewhat marred by the belief that men in positions of power can do no wrong, and hence, the response to evidence of corruption or lying is slow. But there is none of that smarmy ease with crime which Nixon communicates: the reputations for personal integrity which these men enjoy are probably deserved. Among the pro-Nixon ranks, for example, conservatives took the first and most unequivocal stands against the efforts of the Administration to cover up Watergate, though characteristically, only when it became unavoidably clear that a cover-up was in operation.
Before that, Bill Buckley was making a classically conservative point by inquiring of Howard Hunt on Firing Line whether his peculiar brand of patriotism, combined with moral blindness to the seriousness of breaking domestic law, was not the result of working for the CIA in foreign countries where local law was readily broken, without guilt. Hunt could not comprehend the point Buckley was trying to make and was bewildered, apparently thinking that right-winger Buckley was saying that Watergate was wrong for the same reasons it was wrong for the CIA to try to stop Castro. The failure of communication dramatically contrasted the two attitudes: genuine reverence for the law, a traditional conservative quality, does live on in today’s conservatives.
Aside from the standards of personal integrity and a true respect for the law, however, there is very little to distinguish our conservative politicians from Nixon, except perhaps the fact that they are comparatively passive. Like Nixon, they adopt the conservative position against big government only when the target is government agencies that serve the poor or strong government regulation of big business. Beyond that, they just don’t seem to have any opinion that is noteworthy, unless unusual unassertiveness constitutes an opinion. James Buckley has cut an extraordinarily low profile, both in the Senate and in his home state of New York (he actually lives in Connecticut), and Goldwater has one of the worst attendance records in the Senate. John Ashbrook, the conservative candidate who pulled the booby prize in New Hampshire, is a more gregarious, open sort, but he certainly doesn’t seem to have much to communicate besides a Boy Scout belief in the integrity of all authority and a view of the most complex situations in clear terms of “we vs. they.’’
“Expression of contempt for the country was one of the points on which Middle America most definitely rejected the left.”
Thus, Senator Buckley has voted straight down the line for business interests over everything, even the environment, although he made a sustained effort in his campaign to link a commitment to conservation with his political philosophy. (He specifically promised to vote against the SST and then voted for it.) Goldwater, who also affects a special concern for the environment, has done the same. The Ashbrook cast of mind has apparently prevented conservatives from distinguishing themselves from the Nixon philosophy by fighting the dangerous, flagrantly illegitimate national security bluff. Rather than take a firm stand on this issue—which they might have done far more effectively and credibly than the liberals—they have strained beyond the bounds of all reason to believe that the bluff is legitimate.
This attitude has, of course, become more and more strained as the Administration’s excuses have become thinner. One of the curious aspects of Bill Buckley’s interview with Hunt was that Buckley’s usually energetic, almost salacious appetite for debate was replaced by a rather downcast, uncomfortable demeanor. The Hunt attitude toward the law, and the more complex forms it takes higher up, is something Buckley must have felt in his bones for some time but doggedly overlooked. In Hunt, he was unavoidably confronted with it and thus was forced to ask the kind of questions he should have been asking of the Administration all along. Intellectual negligence, or semi-intentional misperception, more accurately describes conservative acquiescence to Nixon’s flagrantly un-conservative policies than willful dishonesty. One could say the same of many Republicans, of course, but one might have expected something a little more independent of the conservatives. One thing conservatives apparently cannot bear is to find themselves aligned on an issue with the left, but unfortunately, this suspicious distaste for joining the crowd does not apply to Republicans in power.
The same feeling of half-intentional blindness to dishonesty is true with regard to conservative support of the business-government alliance as well, although it is a position of far longer duration than the acquiescence to inflated claims of national security. The coddling of inefficient phlegmatic giants is surely a most unorthodox policy for a conservative to support, and yet most of them have. In fact, so unshakable is that support that they seem willing to throw out ideals central to their tradition without a shudder when they get in the way of protecting these dubious institutions. This aberration is at the heart of the conservative failure, in my opinion. Why did they—why did the country—get trapped into this false position?
The answer is, no doubt, worth volumes, but there are some clues to why the conservatives got themselves twisted in this way. In American Conservatism in the Age of Enterprise, Robert McCloskey puts forth an interesting theory which draws together some of the strands of this development in an historical context. McCloskey believes that both Jeffersonian liberalism and the American conservative tradition got thrown off their moral foundations by the gospel of wealth and the belief in industrial progress. “The true and central concern of American democracy is the morally free individual; the right of this individual to maintain his dignity and develop his moral capacities is at the apex of the democratic value hierarchy.” There are certain “sub-values,” he goes on to state, such as freedom of speech and religion, which are indispensable to the realization of this primary value. And then there are “instrumental values,” such as economic freedom, which are sometimes important, but contingent on shifting circumstances. Economic freedom, he states, is by no means irrelevant to the democratic tradition, but it is not basic or self-justifying. It “stands in relation to the democratic primary values as a means to an end.”
In the 19th century, with the onslaught of industrialism, standards and ideals deteriorated, and the hierarchy of values was turned upside down. Economic freedom became identified as an end in itself, the essence of dignity: to be rich was to be worthy, and every man must, of course, be free to strive for dignity.
If the entrepreneurial drive can ever be directly associated with the primary value of individual dignity, then surely it is on the lowest levels of economic venture. A system in which it is possible to start a small business on one’s own could be said to preserve with this opportunity a variation on that primary value. The following remark of John D. Rockefeller, Jr., reveals how distant this notion was to the new ethics of laissez-faire conservatives. To a Sunday school class, he said, “The growth of large business is merely a survival of the fittest. . . . The American Beauty rose can be produced in the splendor and fragrance which bring cheer to its beholder only by sacrificing the early buds which grow up around it. This is not an evil tendency in business. It is merely the working out of a law of nature and a law of God.”
What happened, then, according to McCloskey’s theory, is that under the banner of the highest ideals of Jefferson, as well as their own predecessors, the conservatives catapulted to power advocating very un-conservative ideas: rugged individualism—at the expense of the community; unbridled industrial progress—the most disrupting, dislocating force that the Western world has seen since the barbarians invaded Europe; and the gospel of wealth, which equated man’s dignity before God with the right to make unlimited amounts of money, surely at best a degrading interpretation of the Christian-Western tradition conservatives claim they seek at all costs to preserve. Material values, in other words, not only overtook ethical values, but were identified as ethical values.
The peculiar twist of values in laissez-faire conservatism is still evident in the modern conservatives. The need to conserve, to change slowly and organically, and to protect the community, which was thrown out to make way for the robber barons’ greed and industrial progress, has not been reinstated, and conservatives have carried on the banner of protecting the “liberty” of (industrial) giants at all costs.
In 1955, Peter Viereck (one of those pure, out-of-the-mainstream conservatives) chided the left for its half-baked, inconsistent approach to big business, giving what he then thought were legitimate grounds for criticizing the business community. “A few years ago liberal intellectuals were reproaching me for refusing to bait big business—and today (in several cases) for refusing to equate it with Santa Claus,” he wrote. “Why do either? Business-baiting was and is a cheap bohemian flourish, a wearing of one’s soulfulness on one’s sleeve, and no substitute for seriously analyzing the real problem, namely the compulsion of modern techniques (whether under capitalist bigness or socialist bigness) to put know-how before know-why.”
Today, Viereck’s statement would have to be altered, which brings me to the precise reason why the position taken by conservatives is disappointing in their own terms. It would be hard to assert now that American business relies too heavily on “know-how.” (“Know-why” is so far out of the picture that it is ridiculous to even bring it up.) The can-do boys of the fifties have, as Russell Baker has put it, been replaced by the can’t-do boys. All we hear from our business brethren is that they can’t do and don’t know how—can’t make the plane for the estimated price, don’t know how to make an economical pollution-free car—and with these protestations, they enter pleas for sympathy and complaints about the “unfair” demands which are being put upon them.
The most grotesque example of “can’t do” is, of course, the defense industry. But if there has been any doubt that the other industries so affectionately regarded by the Administration are brothers under the skin (though perhaps not quite so far advanced in deterioration) to the defense industry, that doubt is rapidly dissipating. The fear our business community is feeling about its ability to compete in world markets is perhaps the most telltale sign. Band-aids like devaluation of the dollar are not likely to long conceal the fact that the products are shoddy and grossly overpriced. “Made in Japan” used to be a condescending joke. Now it is a threat and a reproach.
Conservatives are certainly not responsible for this situation; the tradition has never been very strong in the country except in a distorted form, anyway. The purpose here is to use the tradition—both what is genuine in it (expressed mostly by the substratum of political writers) and what has gone wrong in it—for the perspective it can give on recent politics. The picture which shows up from this unfamiliar angle is quite different from the liberal view of a prodigal nation which has abdicated its noble ideals to opt for apathy, materialism, and social egocentricity.
As I said at the beginning, I think there is a genuinely conservative impulse in the country to which Nixon was able to appeal, however fraudulently, with the enormous help of the contrast provided by McGovern’s super-liberal, progressive image. In its best form, that impulse was a recoil from the traumas of utopia- apocalypse politics, the wanton intrusion of government into private lives, and national self-flagellation. On the positive side of the coin was a desire to reaffirm the values of normal private life and for the stability and continuity of a sane environment in which to build those values.
I don’t think a noble conservative could have transformed this impulse and ridden it to victory. Conservatism is at best a strain, not a movement, in the country. But a strong, independent conservative leadership might have articulated the impulse in the terms it deserves, elevating it above Agnewism. At the same time, it could have emphasized the concepts which distinguish conservative ideas from a reactionary mood. These include the need to protect minorities, an awareness of the difference between ignoring a problem and making a realistic appraisal of solutions to it, between affection for country and blinding oneself to the truth, between respect for authority and ignoring abuse of authority, and between building a sane environment in which change can take place without tearing at the cultural roots, and privatist, inward-turning apathy.
There is a catch, however, to the theory that a large number of people might respond to a genuinely conservative appeal. The catch is related to the points on which I feel conservatives have most grievously betrayed their tradition: the uncritical allegiance to unhealthy mega-businesses in the name of free enterprise.
In one way or another, most middle-class Americans are hooked into the big-business bonanza. They are not amassing great wealth from their connection; they are simply using it to maintain their moderately prosperous lives—the two cars, the electrical gadgets, the educational expenses, and the daily meat bills. They may know full well that their job is mere padding and completely dispensable, but it hardly means that they are going to respond warmly to any leader who points this out. No politician could do that and survive. In this sense, Nixon has a majority of the electorate not just solidly behind him, but around the collar. Most of the middle class is committed to perpetuating the puffball, the flaccid giants, and the almost-infinite rings of services that live off the magical prosperity they generate.
I still think that many people who have been taken for political cop-outs because they voted for Nixon yearn deeply to build their lives around conservative values. The last 10 or 12 years have left nerves frazzled and emotions exhausted and an utter disillusionment with the politics of promise.
Short of revolution, I don’t see how any nation can solve its social problems if it does not have a stable cultural base and a reasonably contented, self-assured population. The momentum of political idealism can, as we have seen, carry people through a lot of chaos, but in the end, the shambles press in on everyone’s consciousness and begin to dominate. Nothing would be better for everyone, the poor included, if the country found a genuinely conservative instinct and built on it.
“A civil, sane environment is frail, and the price of disrupting it is heavy.”
The big obstacle is not conscience’s dictate that we must forge ahead with progressive programs for the unfortunate, but the entrapment of so much of the prosperous population in the tenuous puffball of overpaid, underproductive, pointless work. The conservative tradition teaches of the beauty of the enterprising mind and appreciation for what it can do, of the evils of cradle-to-grave dependency (which is what happens to someone caught in a valueless job with high pay, fringe benefits, including a pension, and nowhere else to go), of the virtues of self-sufficiency, and most of all, of the importance of building individual and communal life around the enduring values of the civilization. How can such ideals be followed by a people whose personal prosperity is founded on inherently valueless work, and whose individual lives are constructed out of puffball money? How can one build stability, personally or as a nation, out of such an inherently unstable situation?
If any leader had the courage to truly advocate a conservative platform, that person would have to be willing to face this truth, and all the fear of facing it, which has built up in the country. Such a person would also have to come up with a lot of answers, such as where the sound, worthwhile jobs might be, and towards what ends work energy of every kind should be directed. That, of course, would be a very un-conservative thing to do because it would deeply disturb the foundations, or non-foundations, on which latter-day American society is constructed. Nevertheless, it would take a conservatively oriented mind to do this, just as an appeal to the genuinely conservative yearnings in the electorate would be the only way to enlist its support for such a painful reevaluation. Only when the middle class summons the courage, the faith in itself, and the desire to truthfully pursue such a reevaluation will the country get on the road to satisfy those yearnings. Then we could begin to find all those lovely sounding things—peace, continuity, a sane, civil environment, a sense of cycle, the past and ongoing life—which rose so unexpectedly to the surface and with such nostalgic force that afternoon I happened to tune into a college football game on the radio and suddenly felt like a conservative.
