The Conservative Imagination
THE MAKING OF THE AMERICAN CONSERVATIVE MIND National Review and Its Times. By Jeffrey Hart. Illustrated. 394 pp. ISI Books. $28.
IMPOSTOR How George W. Bush Bankrupted America and Betrayed the Reagan Legacy. By Bruce Bartlett. 310 pp. Doubleday. $26.
Review by GEORGE F. WILL
IN 1950, in "The Liberal Imagination," Lionel Trilling noted "the plain fact" that there were then no conservative ideas "in general circulation." And, indeed, in 1955, when William F. Buckley started National Review, conservatism was a small church militant in an unconverted world. Conservatives were marginal and embattled, but happy. Since then, they have made their long march through the institutions - executive, legislative, judicial, even journalistic. (Only academic institutions have largely repelled conservatism.) Yet today conservatives are far from serene, for two reasons.
One is success: the conservative persuasion now has numerous adherents - arguably a majority of Americans. Hence there are many conservative sects and factions - and fractiousness. Second, during conservatism's years as merely an opposition movement, it lacked the power to please interest groups by delivering government benefits. Hence it was interested in ideas to a degree unusual among American political movements. Having honed strong, clear convictions about government before experiencing the inevitable compromises involved in actually governing, many conservatives have found governance discomfiting.
Jeffrey Hart's "Making of the American Conservative Mind" is a relaxed amble along conservatism's path to the present. Bruce Bartlett's "Impostor" is symptomatic of the way many conservatives developed a thirst for fights over ideological purity during the wilderness years, and today slake that thirst by fighting one another. They do so partly because liberalism, in its current flaccidness, offers less satisfying intellectual combat than conservatives can have intramurally. Bartlett is angry as a hornet but, like a hornet, he stings indiscriminately.
For more than three decades, Hart, an emeritus professor of English at Dartmouth, has been a senior editor of National Review. There he has seen, and helped to referee, conservatism's struggles of self-definition. His book is a gossipy memoir leavened by a quick skimming of 50 years of political history. "I confess," he says, "to a fondness for gossip, which, indeed, is a conservative genre. Gossips do not want to change the world; they want to enjoy it." National Review, however, wanted to change the world. This project got off to a rocky start because the magazine went slumming with Senator Joseph McCarthy in the mid-50's, reflecting in part its populist antipathy for the national elites.
A benign example of what Hart calls Buckley's "intermittent" populism was his famous, and sincere, avowal that he would rather be governed by the first 2,000 names in the Boston telephone directory than by the Harvard faculty. But Buckley's upbringing and temperament made him a singularly unsuitable vessel for populism. His aim has been to nurture a conservative intelligentsia.
To that end, the magazine's Manhattan office became a nest of intellectuals. Buckley, a cosmopolitan from Yale, and his sister Priscilla, his managing editor from Smith College, built the early National Review around James Burnham (Princeton and Balliol College, Oxford), Frank Meyer (Princeton, Balliol) and Russell Kirk, the author of "The Conservative Mind" (1953).
Conservatism in the 1950's and 60's was energized by the intellectual tension between Kirk, with his stained-glass mind, and Meyer, an ex-Communist who recoiled from the Kremlin to Monticello. "Kirk's Man," Hart writes, "is the Man of the Church, the university, the library, the community, Aristotle's Man of the Polis. Meyer's Man is Man against the Sky, creating himself in perpetual acts of choosing."
Meyer, Hart says, "attacked Kirk as setting forth no discernible political principle." Kirk, with his Wordsworthian worry that getting and spending we lay waste our powers, represented an impulse that sometimes threatens to turn conservatism into an aesthetic pose. This impulse made National Review vulnerable to what can be called the Southern temptation, the idealization of an imagined cavalier culture immune to secularism and materialism. Hart, to his great credit, does not flinch from recalling a repellent sample of what the magazine said in 1960, before, in Hart's words, it "let the magnolias go":
"In the Deep South the Negroes are, by comparison with the whites, retarded. . . . Leadership in the South, then, quite properly, rests in white hands. Upon the white population this fact imposes moral obligations of paternalism, patience, protection, devotion, sacrifice."
The tension between Kirk and Meyer prefigured today's tensions between "social conservatives," who take their bearings from European and religious thinkers, and minimal government conservatives, whose formative influences were Friedrich Hayek's and Milton Friedman's writings on political economy and Barry Goldwater's sunny Southwestern libertarianism.
The social conservatives might wonder whether someone can be conservative without being religious. That question, although a hardy perennial on the right, is silly: George Santayana and David Hume were the former but not the latter. By contrast, Hart the provocateur declares that "populism is never conservative, except by accident." He thinks the evangelicalism that propelled the ascent of George W. Bush is populism sublimated in religion, and he says Bush's election was "the political high-water mark of America's third Great Awakening." A Roman Catholic convert, Hart tartly wonders, "What exactly was conservative about this form of religious expression, with its roots in the camp revivals?"
What, Bruce Bartlett asks, with his answer indicated by his indignation, is conservative about George W. Bush? Noting that Bush has said, "We have a responsibility that when somebody hurts, government has got to move," Bartlett exclaims: "A more succinct description of liberalism would be hard to find."
Well. Defining liberalism - or conservatism, for that matter - is not Bartlett's strength. His preoccupation is economic policy. He does, however, understand the problematic nature of "compassionate" conservatism. If compassion is always government's business, government's business is unlimited. He is also robust in voicing familiar conservative complaints about the Bush administration - its incontinent spending, its traducing the principles of federalism with the No Child Left Behind Act's intervention in education from grades K through 12, and so forth.
Sometimes Bartlett is a tad too robust. His chapter "Why the Bush Tax Cuts Didn't Deliver" might be more convincing were the economy not in the fifth year of a humming expansion. And when he says the law establishing the Medicare prescription drug entitlement "may well be the worst piece of legislation ever enacted," one wonders what consideration he has given to, say, the Fugitive Slave Act.
And after excoriating Bush for the tariffs he put on steel, he properly acknowledges that they probably won Bush the last few Congressional votes he needed for the authority crucial to promoting free trade. Furthermore, Bartlett has a keen understanding of how muscular interests use government, as when "California cement producers lobbied to protect the endangered brown pelican in order to prevent construction of a new terminal in Redwood City for the importation of foreign cement."
Bush - granted, his party controls Congress - is more of a tax cutter than was Reagan, who signed tax increases in 1982 (twice), 1983 (twice), 1984, 1985 (twice), 1986, 1987 (twice) and 1988. So Bartlett faults Bush for the wrong kind of cuts. Citing, among other things, the 2002 farm bill, Bartlett says Bush the spender is utterly unlike Reagan. He may not remember this: "Through target prices, support loans and other programs, our administration has provided more support to our nation's farmers this year than did the administrations of the last five presidents all put together. Because this year alone, we'll spend more on farm support programs . . . than the total amount the last administration provided in all its four years." The farmers hearing that 11-minute Reagan speech at the 1986 Illinois State Fair interrupted it with applause 15 times.
Bartlett's book, arriving as the Abramoff scandal gathers steam, will fan the flames of anger about "the tendency of right-wing politicians to declare Washington a cesspool and then go there and treat it like a hot tub." But one wishes he had engaged the most interesting ideological development of the Bush years, the argument for "big government conservatism."
The argument is that the way ultimately to reduce the supply of government is to reduce the demand for it. And the way to do that is to use government boldly to build individuals' capacities - moral and material - for self-sufficiency. The response to this is that energetic, interventionist government is inevitably corrupting - that the more government shapes the allocation of wealth and opportunity, the more energy will be diverted to bending public power for private advantages. To the extent that this view is correct, the distinction between social conservatives concerned with virtue and libertarians concerned with limited government blurs: small government is good for the soul.
Conservatives at daggers drawn with one another (and those who take pleasure in conservatism's discontents) will enjoy both of these books, especially Hart's. His history is occasionally shaky (for example, the Berlin Wall went up in 1961, not 1962; it was in 1980, not 1976, that Ted Kennedy challenged President Carter). But his analysis is sprightly and stimulating. And there is a surprising tinge of melancholy in his account of the "tectonic shift" in the rise of Sunbelt power:
"Being displaced was the old Republican elite, based for generations on the wealth generated by hard men dealing in hard substances: coal, iron, steel, railroads, shipping, oil-drilling machinery. . . . This old elite, as is characteristic of elites, was beautiful in many ways, as were its social and educational institutions and its manners. . . . But now that elite was facing a lethal challenge, or challenges, from the direction of actuality."
In the, say, 15 minutes it has taken you to read this review, the center of the nation's population, which is now about 125 miles southwest of St. Louis, has moved another 6.3 inches south and west. Things may still be moving conservatives' way, but as these books show, it is not clear what that way is.
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George F. Will is a syndicated columnist.