This is the first of a series of posts on the subject. The title of the post consciously parrots that of an important book in the Conservative cannon. The Conscience of a Conservative was published in 1960. Authorial credit was given to Barry Goldwater but the book was actually written by Brent Bozell. He was (he died in 1997) a close associate of William F. Buckley.
Why my newfound interest in the subject? Because many people traditionally associated with the Conservative movement have claimed for some time now that President Trump is not a Conservative, although he frequently claims to be. My tendency is to agree with them. But I don't know enough about what Conservatives believe to have an informed opinion. I decided to remedy that.
My entre into the subject was via a book that was recently published called It Was All a Lie. The book was written by Stuart Stevens, one of the many people who have long been associated with the Conservative movement in general, and Republican politics in particular. He argues that the post-Trump Republican party can no longer be described as a Conservative party. If you want to understand how and why he has come to believe that, then read his book. It's a quick, easy read.
It would probably have been helpful to the construction of this series to have read the Buckley book but I never have. Instead, I am working through a book Stevens recommended called The Conservative Intellectual Movement in America Since 1945 by George H. Nash. It was originally published in 1976. I am reading the third edition, which came out in 2006. Since the book begins its coverage in 1945, let me first cover the period before that.
It took a while for U.S. political parties to develop into a form that we would now recognize. Political parties in this country began as a group of like minded people who supported Alexander Hamilton, and and an equally like minded group who opposed him.
By the early 1800s Hamilton was long gone. But that just meant that these groups found different things to disagree over. But, by then things had progressed to the point where the groups were called political parties. They also now had formally agreed upon names, the Democrats and the Whigs.
By the middle third of that century slavery had come to dominate political discourse. The Democratic Party (how things have changed) decided to go all-in on the "pro" side of the issue. Whigs couldn't decide whether or not to go all-in on the "anti" side. That ended up tearing them apart.
The largest Whig faction coalesced around the "anti" side of the slavery argument and named themselves the Republican Party. The other factions that had constituted the Whig party either withered away or joined one of the two parties that survived. And so, by a few years before the start of the Civil War, the two parties we now have, the Democrats, and the Republicans, were in place.
For a modern parallel to the dilemma that did in the Whig party, look to Brexit in the U.K. The Conservative Party became closely associated with the "pro" side of Brexit. Labor, the second largest Political Party, couldn't figure out what they stood for. Like the Whigs, they lost power and influence as a result.
Here, the parallel breaks down. The Labor Party is still a going concern. The British have a multi-party system, so the other parties could have gained as Labor shrank. But they have not done particularly well either.
Like the Republicans of the Civil War era, the Conservative Party of the current era benefitted by picking a side and sticking with it. It helped that both the modern Conservatives (pro-Brexit) and the historical Republicans (anti-slavery) picked the side that turned out to be the more popular one. Being anti-slave has turned out to gain in popularity as the years passed. It remains to be seen if being pro-Brexit will also gain in popularity as time goes by.
After the Civil War the Republican Party was able to broaden its appeal. It evolved from a one-issue party to become more middle-of-the-road and more mainstream. They were successful enough at this that Democrats had trouble finding an identity and tended to wander a bit philosophically. Slavery had gone out of fashion, so they abandoned their pro-slavery position.
Well, what happened is more accurately described as morphing than abandoning. The party's position morphed from pro-slavery to a generic pro-South position. On the other side, the one non-mainstream position postwar Republicans embraced was "Radical Reconstruction". It was effectively an anti-South position.
Lincoln had called for moderation and forgive-and-forget, when it came to dealing with the postwar South. But he was assassinated and the people who replaced him decided that: (a) the South could not be trusted, and (b) it represented a cash cow to be exploited by the less scrupulous. With his death, the moderate reconstruction that Lincoln envisioned quickly evolved into Radical Reconstruction.
Eventually the South found a way to end reconstruction in all of its forms. The method that eventually came to hand was a deal engineered between unscrupulous Democrats and unscrupulous Republicans. The deal left Democrats tightly wedded to the South and Republicans with control of the White House and with a sordid reputation. Both parties survived. But Republicans did more than that. They thrived. They did so by making a bargain, not with a region, but with business.
They became strongly pro business. "The business of the United States is business", and "what's good for General Motors is good for the U.S.A.", that sort of thing. They made no secret of the deal they had made. Why should they? For a long time the deal was very popular with voters. The country was booming, so why not. But success leads to excess. And that excess got labeled the "Gilded Age".
Republicans demonstrated a surprising amount of flexibility under the leadership of Teddy Roosevelt. He believed in trust busting and regulation. The large faction of the Republican party that Roosevelt embodied allowed Republicans to claim that they were the champion of the common man. But, after TR split with the party, it became obvious that it was TR, and not the party, that was the friend of the common man.
As a result, the public flirted with the Democrats for a while. But they soon returned to the Republican fold. The boom that followed the end of World War I resulted in the "Roaring Twenties". Republicans managed to take credit for it.
It was a time to "party till you drop" because the good times would go on forever. Except they didn't. The economy got overheated and the Stock Market Crashed. Republican President Hoover zagged when he should have zigged. As a result, things got worse instead of getting better.
As I have noted elsewhere, Hoover was a good, decent, and competent man. But he was held prisoner by his belief in an economic philosophy that was flat wrong in many ways. He made the moves that his philosophy said would improve things. Instead, they made things worse.
He confidently predicted that FDR would drive the whole country off a cliff. Why? Because that's what his economic beliefs predicted would be the result of Roosevelt's policies. Instead, Roosevelt slowly dug the country out of the Great Depression.
That made him, and the Democrats, very popular. Then he had the temerity to win World War II. That made Democrats even more popular. It also made Republicans desperate for a way to turn things around. And that brings us to 1945, the official start of our story.
Republicans needed a story to tell potential voters. They knew that they didn't like the governing economic philosophy that Roosevelt and the Democrats has used to get the country out of the Great Depression. They also knew that the old economic philosophy that Hoover had believed in was wrong, or at least wildly unpopular.
What they needed was a governing philosophy that was neither Hooverian nor Rooseveltian. It was in this environment that the modern Conservative movement was born. And the history I outlined above explains why 1945 was a good starting point for a history of the movement. That was when the development of such a philosophy began in earnest.
And the people trying to develop that philosophy started with nothing. The author observes that "[i]n 1945 no articulate, coordinated, self-consciously conservative intellectual force existed in the United States". So, they were, in a practical sense, starting with a blank sheet of paper.
They knew something about what the philosophy should exclude but almost nothing about what it should include. In spite of this, our author observes that order emerged out of chaos pretty quickly. In his telling there were soon three threads that showed promise.
Thread one is the "classical liberal " or "libertarian" thread. They focused almost entirely on the subject of "threats to liberty" and what that entailed. They saw themselves as standing in opposition to socialism, which they considered an unalloyed evil. Libertarianism, at least in its earliest form, had emerged by the mid '50s.
The second thread he identifies as "new conservatism" or "traditionalism". (This may be what we now call "neoconservatism". I haven't gotten far enough to know one way or another.) These people saw themselves as standing in opposition to totalitarianism. Their solution consisted of a "return to traditional religions and ethical absolutes and a rejection of the 'relativism' which had allegedly corroded Western values and produced an intolerable vacuum that was filled by demonic ideologies".
And by "traditional religions" I presume they meant the mainstream Protestantism that most politicians of the time paid lip service to. For a long time Catholicism was suspect. Mormonism was doubly suspect. Judaism was a non-starter. And everything else, Islam, Asian religions, or any other religion, philosophy, or culture, was beneath contempt.
Interestingly, Richard Nixon, a Republican politician who began his rise as this time, was a Quaker. At the time, the Quaker religion was considered a fringe sect and, therefore, disqualifying. But Nixon convinced everyone that he was "Quaker in name only" and was really a Chamber of Commerce Protestant at heart. Like many politicians, then and now, he was actually indifferent to religion.
The third strain the author identifies is what looks like a catch-all to me. He strings "militant", "evangelistic", and "anti-communism" together as if all are necessary. And as if one component can't be antagonistic to one or more of the other components.
He associates this strain with "former men of the Left" who have publicly abandoned the "left" or "liberal" end of the political spectrum, and embraced the Conservative end. They apparently believed that the only contest of importance was the battle between the West and Communism. Everything else must stand in abeyance until this contest is won decisively and permanently.
That these threads might not align perfectly, the author freely admits. But, "the need for consolidation of the conservative camp was urgent by the mid-1950s". He opines that this task was gradually accomplished. And he pegs the "momentous transformation of the Right . . . from a minority to a potential majority" as having occurred "in the late 1960s and early 1970s".
This gets us out of the Introduction and into chapter 1, The Revolt of the Libertarians. He then goes into a long jeremiad, which can be boiled down to a single idea. "Planning leads to dictatorship", he quotes the economist Hayek as saying. Expanded slightly, he has Hayek arguing that government direction of economic activity inevitably necessitates the suppression of freedom.
But apparently there is "good" planning and "bad" planning. Some unspecified "kind of preparation by individuals or governments for the future" is good planning. But "central direction of all economic activity according to a single plan" or "planning against competition" is bad planning. The central planning used by the old Soviet Union is the "poster boy" example of bad planning resulting in bad things happening.
But the devil is in the details. And here the devil is encompassed by the word "all". A completely planned economy is a recipe for disaster. The Soviet "Five Year Plan" top-down approach, where everything is planned by the government, was a spectacular failure. For instance, the "collectivization" of Soviet agriculture resulted in production crashing. That, in turn, led to widespread famines.
But a completely unplanned economy is just a different but equally effective recipe for disaster. We have many examples of this too. It is how all banana republics operate. Measured by per-capita GDP, these economies consistently deliver poor results. They also do a poor job of delivering superior results to the upper class.
People at the very top in banana republics tend to be very rich. But they are not as rich as the richest people in successful economies. And the banana republic rich have expenses those other rich people don't.
They have to spend a lot of money on security. For instance, they have to build and maintain a big compound that is surrounded by high walls. They have to supplement this fortress with a large, permanent staff or guards. They will often need to use a convoy that includes several vehicles full of guards just to get around. All this is necessary for them to be able to live in safety. That's an expensive and not very fun way to live.
They also have to spend a lot of money on basic services. Since the banana republic governments turn out to be incapable of building and maintaining decent roads, providing reliable utilities like sewer, water, electricity, internet, etc., rich people living in banana republics have to spend a lot of money providing for themselves. The list of missing amenities is very long.
Neither a completely managed economy nor a completely unmanaged economy is the economic sweet spot. The sweet spot is found in a mixed economy. Market based mechanisms do a lot of things well. But they also do a lot of things, like security and the amenities listed above, badly.
Frankly, a socialistic approach works better for both rich and the poor when it comes to reliably and economically providing these benefits. But the book contains no discussion of these shortcomings. And that means that there is no discussion of how to get the balance right.
What's going on here is the idea that laissez-faire (unconstrained and unregulated) capitalism is absolutely necessary ("can only be achieved") for any amount of democracy, personal freedom, religious tolerance, peace among the nations, etc., to be possible. And the alternative is "chaos". (This is a condensation of an argument he attributes to Mises, whom he quotes extensively.)
I find this argument ridiculous on its face. But, if you accept it, then everything else follows. And "everything else" includes any imaginable (and some unimaginable) excess perpetrated by the rich and powerful. Whatever it is that they are doing is good because it furthers capitalism. And the furtherance of capitalism is all the justification necessary to make these actions not only acceptable but a necessity.
You might think I am exaggerating. So, let me quote at length.
Indeed, Mises was convinced that "private property is inextricably linked to civilization" and that lasting peace could arise only "under perfect capitalism, hitherto never and nowhere completely tried or achieved."
If you exchange the word "capitalism" for the word "communism" that sounds like something Karl Marx would say. And these people characterize Marx as an extremist. So let's talk about Marx and his philosophy for a moment. And I am going to begin this discussion with the French Revolution. It began in 1789 and started as an effort to duplicate the American Revolution.
But it quickly went off the rails. It moved through several evolutions I am going to skip over. (The primary literature on the French Revolution would easily fill the main branch of the New York Public Library.) The era ended about twenty-five years later with the final defeat of Napoleon. It's impact on the French psyche was similar to the impact of the Civil War on the U.S. psyche.
This effect on the French psyche was still strong when the Paris Commune briefly set up for business in 1871. The Commune, and to a lesser extent, the reverberations from the Revolutionary period that preceded it by fifty or so years, had a profound effect on the thinking of Marx, Engels, and the other leading lights of what ended up being called Communism. And a foundational concept of Communism is the "class struggle". (Both the revolution and the Commune were violent manifestations of this struggle.)
Societies containing a thousand or more people have at least two classes, a small ruling class, and a large class of people who work for a living. (In both cases the class definition is extended to cover the entire family of the principle member of the class.) And I use the word "ruling" because typically this class controls most of the power and wealth.
Communists and Conservatives both agree on the existence of these two classes. They also agree that there is a built in struggle for power between the two classes. Where they disagree is in which class should win the struggle. Communists strive to have the working class win and Conservatives strive to have the ruling class win.
Interestingly enough, there is another area of agreement between the two. Both have a jaundiced view of government. Communists believe that government can be rendered superfluous and will eventually wither away until it ceases to exist. Conservatives don't go quite that far. They believe in "small government", one that is only capable of performing only a very limited set of functions. So both sides are on the "less" side of the argument.
Where they completely disagree is on the subject of private property. As should be obvious from previous parts of this post, Conservatives are aggressive in their support of private property. The more the merrier. Communists fall into the opposite camp. Resources like property should be held in common for the common good.
Before continuing with the material in the book let me review how Marxists saw things playing out. The ruling class would not cede poser willingly so a revolution was necessary. And some intermediate steps were necessary before it would be possible to move on to the ultimate "worker's paradise" stage of political evolution.
Under normal circumstances many workers support the ruling class. This was because, the story went, the ruling class had been engaged in a propaganda campaign of long standing. The campaign had successfully duped workers into supporting the ruling class, even though that was detrimental to their own interests.
As a result, a period of indoctrination would necessary to undo the damage caused by the propaganda campaign. It would also be necessary to educate workers so that they would be capable of right thinking. Finally, private property would have to be transferred to state control. There it could be managed much more efficiently for the good of all.
And, of course, a government would be necessary during this transition period. But once the economy had been transformed. And once the worker reeducation campaign was complete. Then government would be allowed to wither away to nothing and Utopia would be at hand. That, in short, was the Communist plan.
It is also interesting that both Conservatives and Communists agreed that gaining and maintaining control of the educational system was a critical step in achieving their objectives. Both agreed that the old bad regime had propagandized workers into believing wrong things. Both agreed that control of the educational system was critical to the implementation of the indoctrination program necessary to repair the damage.
They completely disagreed about what constituted the "wrong" thinking consisted of and what "right" thinking needed to be substituted. So they completely agreed on tactics. It was only the end objective on which they disagreed. With that, let me return to the contents of the book.
One thing I find fascinating in the next section of the book is the repeated use of the word "aristocrat". It is repeatedly used as the author discusses a book called The Superfluous Man. Nook, the author of that tome, is described as possessing "charm" and "an aristocratic aloofness from vulgarity".
None of this sounds particularly valuable or useful to me. Nor does it sound like the basis for a belief that he has anything useful to say. But it is all we learn about him, so apparently whatever else there is to know about him is unimportant.
People who work for a living can't afford to be superfluous. Doing so would cause them and their families to starve to death. The class that can afford to behave superfluously are the independently wealthy. So, this is an implicit endorsement of an upper class.
And no criteria are listed for who should properly populate this class. Membership, no matter how it is managed, is all the justification necessary. No wonder Conservatism holds such appeal for rich white men.
The author then moves on to a long recapitulation of small circulation newsletters, and the authors that wrote for them. Several books that he saw as significant achieved substantial sales, but most didn't.
In addition to books, there were conferences and societies that appeared to have little influence at the time, but loom large when viewed through the lens of a historian of Conservatism. But most of this strikes me as analogous to John the Baptist wandering in the desert before Jesus appears on the scene. I will spare you.
Except, I want to quote a couple of sentences because of the sentiment it compactly expresses.
What are the proper functions of government? Government [should be] strictly limited to the prevention of "aggressive force"[,] was the FFEs' answer.
BTW, the FFE was one of those "societies of little influence" I referred to above. The sentiment, however, was not confined to a small corner of the Conservative world. It was a sentiment embraced by mainstream back then. It is a sentiment the mainstream of Conservative thinking embraces right through to the present. The modern version of the same sentiment is, "government should be shrunk in size until it is small enough that it can be drowned in an ordinary bathtub".
I am going to skip over large chunks of this until I get to a milestone that resonates today. Again quoting,
In 1951 a young Yale graduate, William F. Buckley Jr. published a book that produced a sensation, dwarfing even the reception of The Road to Serfdom a few years before. Widely, often angrily reviewed, God and Man at Yale has probably been the most controversial book in the history of conservatism since 1945, and its importance for this movement is manifold.
This book put Buckley on the map. He stayed there until his death in 2008. His influence, not only in conservative circles, but also in wider society, is impossible to overstate.
In the book he set out to prove that at Yale "the net influence of Yale economics to be thoroughly collectivistic". And that, of course was a very bad thing, in the eyes of Buckley in particular, and more generally in the eyes of all Conservatives in good standing.
Four years later National Review, a magazine closely associated with Buckley for the remainder of his life, was founded. Until a few years ago it was hugely influential in conservative and Republican politics. But the Trump-ization of both the Republican party and the Conservative Movement resulted in its influence waning.
In 2016 it devoted an entire issue to essay after essay by noted Conservative thinker after noted Conservative thinker. The point of every single essay was that Trump should be rejected because he wasn't a true Conservative. The issue changed few, if any, minds or votes.
And that's where I am going to end this installment. My Kindle informs me that I am at the 5% point in the book. I hope to cover more ground per installment in the future. That hope is based on the expectation that I will have to provide less explanation and supplemental materials as I proceed. Time, and future installments, will tell.
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