To Preserve What We Have American Conservatism
By WILLIAM F. BUCKLEY JR.
When in 1955 I set out to publish a journal devoted to the interests of U.S. conservatism, I stressed in a preliminary circular pretty much what one would have expected on the subject. It was necessary then, and would be necessary for most of the balance of the millennium, to confront directly the challenge of Soviet-based communism; to explain, and to plead, that whatever the pains and dangers of resisting it, these were worth undergoing. In retrospect, it appears obvious that the effort was worthwhile, but it was less than obvious at crisis points, among them Hungary, Berlin, Cuba and Vietnam. History will document that the high cost of nuclear-stakes resistance dismayed more merely than U.S. Catholic bishops. Resistance a outrance engendered flesh and blood perspectives. It came down to: Is it really worth it? What do we end up having in hand, by developing and redeveloping and updating a nuclear inventory and the hardware to deliver nuclear strikes, whether pre-emptively or punitively?
American conservatism needed to say and to think through the philosophical vocabulary for saying: It is worth any cost to preserve what we have.
And what was it that we did have?
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Conservatives could list, bit by bit, those things that distinguished American life from life in the Soviet Union. A large inventory springs readily to mind. There were the different levels of self-sovereignty. The individual -- conservatives argued -- has certain rights over his own direction in life. These rights are subject to biological constraints: You can't, without consequence, ignore diet and exercise. And there are social restraints: You can't defy American orthodoxy without bumping into civil blockades. You can't marry three people simultaneously or refuse to send your child to school.
Then there was sovereignty at the next level, the freedom to choose, politically and economically. There the American, unlike the Soviet citizen, was substantially freer, though here there was a domestic struggle, still going on after 50 years. Acquisitive members of society are always seeking to enhance their jurisdiction. What we had in America, and continue to have, is an inchoate sense of proportion in the matter. The conservative instinctively rejects collectivization. Fifty years ago (and contention goes on today) it was thought by many an improvement in social management to pool those concerns that aren't irrevocably personal (whom shall I marry?), by letting collective authority decide how much steel should be produced or property permitted to an individual or his heir. Grander perspectives were thought to be served by socializing education and health care. In 1954, the U.S. hovered between the New Deal and the Great Society. Conservatives fought on, winning some, losing some. With the increase in regulations and extension of custody, the public throne sprouted more and more emeralds and baubles. The sovereignty of the public sector reached to over 40% of the gross national income. AMERICAN CONSERVATISM
This is the second in an occasional series.
* A Question of Temperament 12/03/02
Even so, the Utopians were slowed down, and that was mostly the doing of American conservatives. To hinder, let alone to check rampant collectivization, conservatives needed to do two things. The first was to take empirical note of the failures of those societies that sought collective answers to every problem. Such failures needed to be publicized, and the correlative consequences of yielding authority to the state thought through. The challenge has been to decoct from empirical history relevant lessons. John Adams taught that the state tends to turn every contingency into an excuse for enhancing itself. That is 200-year-old wisdom, but in 1955, and today, it had become a faintly remembered, quaint aphorism of a founding father learned, but grouchy. The lesson required reiteration in modern times, in hardboiled, contemporaneous philosophical jousting.
American conservatives, in order to enliven the principles they stood by, needed to observe life under communism in the Soviet Union and China, to learn from their failures but simultaneously to reinforce philosophical prejudices, liberal in origin. If human freedom is the fountainhead of American conservative thought, then its preservation becomes its principal concern. That means that the knights-errant of conservatism have to find fresh and communicable ways of burnishing the goals of individual authority and of free choice. Everybody is prepared to stipulate that all men should be free to choose between Coca-Cola and Pepsi-Cola. It is something else to document the advantages, real and ideal, of private health care over public health care.
Conservatives do not vest in the free market ontological authority. But we believe that the marketplace is the operative mechanism by which individual choice is transcribed. It is true that the free market produces wealth beyond the resources of socialism, but what conservatives are engaged in defending isn't the proposition that Coca-Cola is better than Pepsi. On such matters conservatives are nescient, never knowing which of the two is "better," capable only of knowing which is in greater demand -- while discerning, in the course of submitting to the free market, that what is important isn't the relative merit of the goods, but the inherent meaning of the individual's expression of choice. That freedom magnifies to the high level espied by G.K. Chesterton when he said simply that we should be free to be our own potty littlselves
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Conservatives (unlike anarchists, or Objectivists) know that sacrifices are necessary, even as diet is necessary for organic health. Exactly what it is necessary to forgo is always debatable. Some good men thought it wrong to go to war to end slavery, or to go to Congress to end Jim Crow. Conservatives correctly assumed, in 1955, that to resist the Soviet aggression meant such things as taxes and even a draft. Today the enemy has another face, and we need to remind ourselves that designs on our freedoms don't disappear; they express themselves variously, in entirely different ballistic design. Al Qaeda is messianic, not Utopian, but the ugly genius of science creates weapons of mass destruction, and the market facilitates their assembly and distribution. Put your mind to it, compel the state's treasury to cooperate, and you have an atom bomb. Can we imagine what is needed to thwart explosions in Bali nightclubs? Conservatives know only that whatever is needed, we must come up with it.
Above all, conservatives tend to intuit that materialist terminology is insufficient to express the depth of American attachments to their ideals. It remains, for some reason, arresting that one speaks of the "sanctity" of life, of our "devotion" to our ideals, of the "holy" causes in which we engage. American conservatives never exclude those who discountenance transcendent perspectives, but we tend to live by them.
Mr. Buckley is editor-at-large of National Review and author, most recently, of "Nuremberg: The Reckoning" (Harcourt, 2002).