[DEBATE] : The lingering death of American conservatism

[Russell Grinker]

Guy Rundle   

The lingering death of American conservatism

In defining American conservatism against overblown enemies, William F
Buckley Jr, who died last week, gave birth to a weak and disparate grouping.

 
Last Thursday wasn't a great day for American conservatives. For a time it
looked like the New York Times' somewhat gossipy investigation into John
McCain's possible romance with a pretty blonde lobbyist had managed to swing
radio shock jocks and other right figureheads behind a man they previously
saw as an undercover liberal. Alas the reconciliation was brief, as McCain
felt obliged to denounce Bill Cunningham, a Cincinnati shock-jock who had
leant heavily on the middle name of 'Barack Hussein Obama' while introducing
McCain at a stump in Ohio. Cunningham returned the favour in spades, and the
fiasco seems to have permanently sundered any possible closeness between
McCain and the right. 


Ironic, then, that it was quickly overshadowed by announcements of the death
of the man who had practically built the base of modern American
conservatism with his bare hands - William F Buckley Jr, the improbable
upper-class New York patrician Catholic, who had spent a half-century, in
his words, 'standing athwart history, yelling stop!'. Though there was a
degree of hype in the notion that he was the single fountainhead from which
the American right poured, it was not entirely inaccurate either. American
political history would have been different had a young Bill Buckley fallen
under a trolleycar. Yet the very fact that an American conservatism had to
be forged by one single-minded individual demonstrates the paradox at the
heart of the project, and its ultimate role as political myth - illustrated
pretty effectively by the way in which it was flying apart so spectacularly
in Ohio as its magus breathed his last. 

A precocious political entrepreneur, Buckley came on to the scene in the
early 1950s, when many, such as the critic Lionel Trilling, were claiming
that liberalism encompassed the totality of the American political
tradition. Contestation, so it seemed, was limited to an internal debate
within liberablism - between statist 'New Deal' liberals, and classical
small-government free traders. At the time, the various forces of the
American non-liberal right were quarantined in a variety of largely negative
and reactionary political traditions - the Ku Klux Klan in the South,
together with the anti-desegregation 'Dixiecrats' who seceded from the
Democratic Party in 1948; small anti-immigration, overwhelmingly
anti-Semitic groups in the North; a minority tradition of Burkean
conservatives associated with Senator Robert Taft, and former Communists
such as James Burnham who had quickly tracked from Stalinism through
Trotskyism to make anti-communism their abiding passion. Much of the latter
tradition was rarefied, intellectual and abstract, focused around New York.
Russell Kirk's great volume The Conservative Mind had come out in 1953, a
volume dedicated retroactively to constructing key American figures as
conservatives, a process that was in some cases - such as the Southern
slavery defender John C Calhoun - plausible, but in others - the
revolutionary John Adams - ludicrous. But Kirk and the people around him
were no organisers, preferring instead the comfort of seeing themselves as
political Cassandras, doomed to minority dissent. 

Buckley had been 'right from the start'. Raised in a European conservative
Catholic tradition in a trilingual household, he was well-known even before
he finished college, as the author of God And Man At Yale, a critique of
what sounds like a somewhat smug liberal atheism current among the faculty
of his alma mater. The book made him famous, and connected him to the
powerbrokers of the right, especially Senator Joseph McCarthy. Indeed,
McCarthy became the hero of his second book, part of which was a defence of
the Senator's witchhunts (a third book would repudiate McCarthy). Buckley
wrote a lot of other books, too, but none approached the influence or fame
of these two, and a failed attempt to write a major founding work on
Conservatism convinced him that he was no academic. 

At about the same time, however, he founded a magazine called the National
Review. Where his book writing might have faltered, the magazine would serve
as a focus for the conservative revival. Its success was grounded as much on
the people that Buckley excluded - the old anti-Catholics and anti-Semites,
conspiratorial cranks, the burgeoning Ayn Rand-cult, vicious racism - as
those he connected to, in particular libertarians. The conclusion of Buckley
and others was that an American conservatism could not base itself
overwhelmingly on European Burkean notions of an embedded tradition, or
collective notions of organic life. Instead, as a one-time revolutionary
society based on the primacy of the individual, it had to find a place for
vigorous commerce, restrict the reach of law, codify the founders' intent
through a judicial interpretation of the constitution, and identify global
Communism as an enemy to justify a foreign and military policy well beyond
the bounds of conservative notions of prudence. 

The last of these - Communism as threat - was of course the mold within
which Buckley could shape the conservative movement. Without such an epochal
enemy, the movement would have flown apart almost instantly. Taking much of
its energy from Communism's projection of historical inevitability, its
implacable identification of itself as the expression of the future,
Buckley's challenge to the movement went beyond an assessment of its crimes
or incidental failings. Instead, it grounded itself on the notion that
Communism was deeply wrong about human nature. But Buckley's counter to
Communism's egalitarian ethos, playing upon European notions of a Christian
civilisation protected by an elite, pulled him into territory that his
current defendants are loathe to remember, from his support for racial
segregation and Jim Crow laws to defending apartheid in South Africa. 

Taking many of these European ideas from his father - an enthiusiast for
elitist thinkers such as Ortega Y Gasset, whose Revolt of the Masses had
been hugely influential in the 1920s and 30s - Buckley ranged an elite
against the masses, and brought a most unconservative style to organisation.
Founding numerous front or subsidiary organisations, putting National Review
at the centre of highbrow life, taking to the airwaves with his Firing Line
political chat show, and keeping up a gruelling speaking schedule, many saw
his method as drawing on the processes of his nemesis, the Communist
movement. In fact it was drawing on deeper Catholic, even Jesuitical,
traditions of agitation and propaganda - especially as regards the
cultivation of youth support via college groups, internships, and so on.
This sense of a political project gave him the forbearance he needed through
the 1960s and 70s, when the anti-communist crusade had become a liberal,
rather than conservative obsession and Western society was undergoing a
social revolution which politicised areas of life, such as family and gender
roles - areas conservatives had seen as the pre-political base of political
difference. 

But it was at the very depths of conservatism's fortunes that it would find
its moment, that is, when Ronald Reagan was elected governor of California
and Buckey's movement began to recruit the first members of the group who
would come to be known as the 'neoconservatives'. Reagan, backed by a
powerful group of Republican fixers who would ride his coat-tails to the
White House, was a perfect figurehead for a movement that was increasingly
drawing not on notions of prudence and tradition, but on nostalgia for a
disappearing America. The first-generation neocons such as Norman Podhoretz
and Gertrude Himmelfarb brought to the movement a notion of 'social
enemies'. This extended not merely to the tiny Communist movement in the US,
but to social liberalism and even the counterculture itself. During the
1970s this group would come increasingly to dominate the full conservative
movement - especially with the departure of many libertarians to form the
Libertarian Party in 1972. The reconstituted movement had its greatest
triumph with the election of Reagan in 1980, in the wake of an exhausted and
discredited liberalism. Millions of 'Reagan Democrats' were persuaded to
vote against their own economic interests by an appeal to cultural notions
of an alien liberal elite. Yet it was also the moment at which the
conservative movement took off into full fantasy. 

Although Reagan today is treated with almost God-ancestor fervour by the
right, his administrations were far removed from the conservative template.
Instead he presided over a massive build-up of financial deficit, the decay
of the industrial base in the northeast, and the remorseless expansion of a
sluggish and inefficient welfare state. In the world, of course, Reagan
talked a tough game, reintroducing a moral language ('the evil empire'). But
at the same time his administrations practised cautious and accomodating
realpolitik; withdrawing US forces from Lebanon after a single high-impact
suicide bomb, and continuing relations with Saddam Hussein and other people
whom Franklin Roosevelt famously called 'our sons of bitches'. 

By the end of the Reagan era, and coming into full flower in the George HW
Bush administration, the different strands of conservatism were starting to
pull away from one another, as actual success put pressure on their
substantial contradictions. For an older conservatism - now known as
paleoconservatism - the continuing decline of American industry, the rise in
poverty and the squeeze on working- and middle-class wages, was a product of
the highly unconservative practice of putting the economics of neoliberalism
ahead of the conservative notion of piecemeal measures, and a trust in
reality rather than abstract systems. For the neocons, bouyed with a sense
of mission expressed by Francis Fukuyama's 'end of history' article at the
end of the Cold War, the global extension of free trade, together with a
foreign policy to promote it, had become new articles of faith. The
paleocons saw the Cold War as an aberrant period demanding special measures,
and its conclusion as an opportunity to return to a more prudent and even
isolationist foreign policy, especially with regards to support for Israel.
The neocons, meanwhile, saw the Cold War as a template for a continuing
struggle to complete a 'new world order'. The division expressed itself in
the rise of the Reform Party, which ran first Ross Perot and then former
Reagan speechwriter Pat Buchanan in 1992 and 1996, gaining 20 per cent and
15 per cent of the vote respectively, and leaving the Republican Party clear
for a neocon takeover. 

By the mid-1990s, Buckley had largely withdrawn from day-to-day activity,
save for books and a column in the National Review. His successors found
reuniting the conservative movement beyond their abilities, but that would
have been the case for practically anyone, since, as Buchanan noted, there
had never been anything remotely conservative about neoconservatism. It was
a movement which effectively tapped into one radical strand of the American
revolutionary tradition - extending the abstract principles of the founding
declarations to the world, as expressions of a universal human truth - and
combined them with a hefty dose of vanguardism derived equally from Trotsky,
Leo Strauss and Carl Schmitt's 'state of exception' (the suspension of all
legal restrictions on the state's executive power). 

Elsewhere, paleoconservatism was increasingly returning to the notion of an
organic society, using it as bulwark both against globalisation and
especially against a liberal immigration regime. For paleoconservatives, the
porous borders of the US are the flipside of a desire to project American
power across the world. 

The other force that Buckley never really saw coming, and which was beyond
any power to assimilate to a unified conservative movement, was the
theoconservatism currently represented by Mike Huckabee. Though
conservatives had managed to corral the Christian fundamentalist movement
into the Republican party in the 1970s and 80s, they had never contemplated
that they would be anything other than a pious and faithful part of the
footsoldiery. That all began to change as the movement began to develop an
increasingly literalist tone, exemplified by rise of the
creationist/intelligent design movement and the push for a rewriting of the
Constitution on explicitly Judeo-Christian lines. Theoconservatism was a
modern irrationalism, rejoicing in the ridiculousness of its own principles
- the more you were able to swallow, the stronger your faith - and was in
that sense not conservative at all, but radical in intent, desiring
effectively to refound America by amending the Constitution to such an
extent that its original authors would have found it impossible to sign. 

Many of the commentators mourned what conservatism had become with Buckley's
passing, and it is difficult to disagree that much of the movement has
become self-indulgent, withdrawn into fantasy, and mortally stung by the
revelation that its values were not the simple translation of the
population's general will. Nowhere was this more clear than at February's
'CPAC', the Conservative Political Action Committee grand conference.
Dominated by a crowd of young ambitious student conservative activists - in
their dark blue suits, red ties, pearls and Russian-cosmonaut's-wife makeup
as tribal a subculture as any bank holiday gathering of Mods - CPAC was
dominated by one strand of the neocons, effectively those who twinned
military action abroad with a firm anti-abortion line. The paleocons were
largely absent, and the theocons only appeared when Huckabee came to speak,
a chunkier crowd clad in denim and miller shirts, whom many of the attendees
greeted with barely disguised alarm. 

Yet though the crowd was full of bonhomie, and the kids were working the
lobbies, desperate to get a summer internship, the conference was dominated
by a sense of defensiveness and slight hysteria. Session after session was
given over to a sense of threat; tales of campuses about to be taken over by
fundamentalist Islam, Christianity in a life-or-death struggle, Hollywood as
a liberal propaganda machine, and above all, the threat of Hillary Clinton,
rendered as a demonic she-goddess. These alternated with spacy ra-ra
speeches that sought to reassure the crowd that, actually, nothing was
wrong. The best - that is, the most intoxicating - of these was a closing
speech by Tony Snow, former Bush press spokesman and Fox News commentator.
'Man, things are changing so fast there's more computing power in my kid's
phone than in the computers that took us to the moon. We're the party of
ceaseless change', he told his fellow, er, Tories, a moment only surpassed
by Newt Gingrich, standing beneath a six-foot banner reading 'Conservative'
and intoning 'we are the true revolutionaries'. 

Say what? Effectively what has happened is that one strand of what Buckley
put together as 'conservatism' had returned to its radical roots. If these
people resembled any prior political movement, it was revolutionary English
puritanism. This new Cromwellism, with a hi-tech consumer society the place
where good works by material accumulation would take place, Iraq
substituting for the plantations of Ireland, and the closing of the theatres
echoed in an attack on Hollywood's corrupting secular-humanist influence. At
the same conference, Mitt Romney had wowed the crowd, telling them not only
that there must be freedom of religion, but that there is no freedom without
religion, and that Europe's low birth rate was due to them 'turning away
from the Creator' (which will be news to the Italians). Yet such sentiments,
triumphal eight years ago, are now aired with the unavoidable awareness that
much of the nation no longer believes this stuff. Instead the overwhelming
mood of the country is one of bewilderment: at a war without meaning, an
economy that delivered little before tipping into recession, and a health
system which offers adequate care only to the rich. Paranoia stands in for
lack of comprehension and thus, unbelievably, one well-attended session was
entitled 'The Clinton Era: Is It Coming To a Close?'. 

Many of Buckley's numerous obituarists took the opportunity to bemoan the
state into which conservatism had fallen from his heyday. Clownish and
cartoonish, it is now represented by figures like Ann Coulter, or Jonah
Goldberg with his notion of 'liberal fascism', a suggeston that a preference
for organic food or natural fabrics is a direct descendant of Mussolini. Yet
what they could not acknowledge was that Buckley's conservatism was less an
indigenous American phenomenon than a European import. In other words, it
borrowed from thinkers - Strauss, Voegelin and others - whose thinking had
been informed by the convulsions of twentieth-century Europe. 

Conservatism is always a retroactive construction to some degree - the
moment one can talk about an abstraction such as 'tradition', it has already
begun to depart. In the US context, however it is wholly that - a
retroactive construction. Select enemies - first communism, then liberals -
served to give the movement a unified form, but they also proved the
movement's undoing, putting a populism at the centre of the right-wing
project that would undermine any attempt to hold a more complex relationship
to the consideration of tradition. Thus, though Buckley never joined the
paleocons, he passed quickly through support for the Iraq war to an active
opposition to continued occupation, concluding that the conflict had been an
enormous error, and that Abu Ghraib had done perhaps terminal damage to a
virtuous American self-conception. This essentially made him the sole
dissenting voice in his own magazine, writing a column that would not have
survived had it not been penned by its founder. 

Above all, neither Buckley nor any recent conservative ever truly understood
that twinning libertarian economics with social conservatism would
effectively pit the economy against the desire for an archaic form of their
society. As with Thatcher's desire to return to 'Victorian values', the
American conservatives had such an animus towards Marxism that they could
not import into their arguments its essential insight - that capitalism
accumulates and, in doing so, changes the social form. For the libertarians
Buckley drew into the fold, the market is essentially an endless zero-sum
game in which the counter is endlessly set back to zero, without changing
either the character of buyer and seller or the market-form itself.
Consequently they are blindsided when it produces not a virtuous republic of
homesteaders, but a hypermodern mass society assembling their subjectivities
from a vast media flux, increasingly drawing in material from the margins -
porn, violence, drugs, the emotional S&M of reality TV - to provide new
stimuli. This, in the words of the late 1990s Channel 4 satire, Brasseye,
'is the one thing they didn't want to happen'. 

While European conservatism revives itself, a la David Cameron, by
connecting current anti-capitalist rhetoric back to the movement's
anti-capitalist origins among a landed aristocracy, American conservatism
essentially intensifies the search for social enemies to the point of
self-destructive frenzy. The 100 People Who Are Destroying America was one
of the hot books at CPAC, a predictable roll-call from Michael Moore and
Chomsky ad Janefondaeum. The continued projection of weakness and
victimhood, combined with the occasional manic triumphalism, is the death
rattle of the American conservative movement. A handful of writers - David
Frum, originator of 'the axis of evil', is one - are looking self-critically
at the conservative tradition, and concluding that it can only survive by
adopting what is essentially Blairism in America: that is, save your
politics by killing it. Still, at least that represents a response to real
problems. For the rest, Buckley's passing was an occasion for what
conservatives do best: nostalgia. 

Guy Rundle is an Arena (Australia) Publications Editor and is covering the
US election campaign for the independent online media service Crikey. He
will also be writing on-the-ground coverage for spiked. Read all of his
Crikey election reports here.