The Conservatives

I usually think of myself as a Conservative; at least until along comes extremist on both sides of the abortion issue, interference with teaching natural selection and the fact of evolution, interference with books that libraries can lend, Terry Schiavo…need I go on. So I was attracted to this book to see if I could find an intellectual oases I might identify with. It did not work.

In an effort at full disclosure I must confess that the only presidential election I ever had any enthusiasm for in my entire life was 1964—any idea who I voted for? Don’t we all miss the iconic image of the little girl holding a flower as a nuclear bomb erupts in the background?

In spite of the discovery that there is no oases, I found the book a worthwhile read.

Patrick Allitt, “The Conservatives” (Ideas & Personalities Throughout American History), Yale Univ. Press., 2009, 280 Pages

This book traces the development of American conservatism from Alexander Hamilton, John Adams, and Daniel Webster, through Abraham Lincoln, Teddy Roosevelt, and Herbert Hoover, to William F. Buckley, Jr., Ronald Reagan, and William Kristol.

Pg. 278: Conservatism in American history has meant many different things. For some it was always a matter of securing for America a place in the high culture of Western Europe and of ensuring the education of a highly cultivated elite to sustain it through each new generation. For others, conservatism took the form of a nagging fear that equality and democracy, far from liberating the American people from the constraints of the Old World and turning them into something better in the New, would cause them to degenerate into barbarism and to suffer the politics of demagogy. Members of both these groups were more impressed by the striking outward facts of human inequality than by the abstract theory of human equality. From the late nineteenth century to the late twentieth, conservatism was also dedicated to preventing the rise and spread of socialism and communism, capitalism’s most threatening challengers.

Up until Goldwater, Conservatism was a term of description, not a political movement. Since Goldwater, the many types of political movements claiming the conservative mantel has multiplied from the Libertarians to somewhat liberal Rockefeller types.
My Notes:

Pg. 2: For more than a century one of the major political parties in Britain has called itself Conservative. In the U.S., by contrast, neither of the two parties has monopolized the political expression of conservatism. In the U.S. Conservatism is, first of all, an attitude to social and political change that looks for support to the ideas, beliefs, and habits of the past and puts more faith in the lessons of history than in the abstractions of political philosophy. The attitude long predated the movement. Conservatives were skeptical and anti-utopian. They doubted the possibility of human, social, or political perfection. Their attitude toward politics was comparable to the religious idea of original sin: people are unable to act entirely rationally or selflessly, human plans will go awry, well-meant actions will have unintended bad consequences. Planned societies are therefore impossible, and the attempt to create them will probably lead to chaos or tyranny. Similarly, they thought that human imperfection made war a permanent part of the human condition so that hopes for a world free of conflict were delusional. They thought of progress as possible, but not inevitable, and worried that ostensibly progressive changes were really sources of degeneration and decay. When they advocated reforms, they appealed to tradition, national heritage, or the wisdom of earlier generations, sometimes claiming that their apparent innovations were really a way of restoring the conditions of a better time in the past.

Pg. 3: There has never been agreement among conservatives about just what should be conserved. American conservatism has often been reactive, responding to perceived political and intellectual challenges. As the challenges and threats changed, so did the nature of the conservative response. Beliefs that once seemed radical later came to seem conservative. Arguments for the free market, for example, seemed radical in the era of the American Revolution, but arguments for the free market since 1917, when Soviet communism proposed a fully planned and centrally directed economy, have had a strongly conservative flavor.

Certain ideas and themes recur throughout the book. One is a suspicion of democracy and equality. In the earl republic, democracy seemed threatening to many property owners and members of the educated elite. The Constitution had created a republic, but it did not mention democracy; to the privileged of that era, the spread of democracy could feel unsettling. They denied that all men are equal, except perhaps in the eyes of God, and they believed that mass participation in politics, far from enhancing liberty and justice, would be more likely to degrade the republic and replace virtuous leaders with demagogues. By the late nineteenth century, to argue openly against democracy was becoming difficult, but conservatives kept up a steady drumbeat of criticism against egalitarianism.

Pg. 5: Conservatism throughout American history has often entailed the defense of privilege by the holders of privilege and has always been vulnerable to the accusation that it is really just the self-interested special pleading of men who have a lot to lose. At its worst it has indeed been little more than rich men’s defense of their material advantages; conservatism’s characteristic vices have been pessimism and complacency. However, some of conservatism’s views can be quite engaging. We so rarely hear arguments in favor of human inequality, for example, that we are in danger of forgetting that, for most of world history, inequality has been regarded as almost too obvious to require any justification. Likewise with democracy; the arguments against it are rarely voiced in public American settings today, so that it becomes easy to think of democracy as a natural or default situation rather than as an extremely unusual historical achievement. Yet conservative arguments against equality and against democracy were persuasive and influential to intelligent readers in many eras of American history.

Pg. 7: The document we now know as the Federalist papers was the new nation’s first conservative classic. Its eighty-five essays were written at high speed and published in newspapers sometimes at the rate of four per week, by supporters of the Constitution seeking to persuade their fellow citizens that this new frame of government was necessary and good, that it would make the central government effective yet preserve their liberty

Pg. 21: In 1814 a group of New England Federalists summoned the Hartford Convention to discuss the possibility of a northern secession from the Union. Only Massachusetts, Connecticut, and Rhode Island were officially represented, though New Hampshire and Vermont also sent observers. Such a meeting during war, tiptoeing to the brink of treason, was not the kind of thing the Federalists themselves would have tolerated from their rivals; they had passed the Alien and edition Acts under much less provocation in 1798.

Pg. 60: We know that the Jacksonian era would end with secession and civil war. Americans living through the decades before 1860 were probably more struck by the fact that America achieved a peaceful transition through every electoral cycle while European life was punctuated by frequent revolutionary upheavals: in 1815, with the final defeat of Napoleon; in 1830, with the July Revolution in France; and in 1848, with revolutionary outbreaks in France, Germany, Rome, and much of Eastern Europe. This was the paradox with which Tocqueville and Lieber struggled—that an America whose democracy ought to make it unstable was actually much better at transitions of government than aristocratic Europe.

Pg. 68: The deaths of Calhoun, Clay, and Webster between 1850 and 1852 marked the passing of the generation that had dominated Jacksonian politics. The sectional conciliation that Webster and Clay had tried so hard to preserve broke down in a series of escalating crises during the 1850’s: first, bitter controversy over the Fugitive Slave Law; then the Kansas-Nebraska Act and frontier warfare between pro and antislavery factions in Kansas; next the Supreme Court’s proslavery decision in the Dred Scott case (1857); and finally John Brown’s attack on the federal arsenal at Harper’s Ferry and his attempt to stimulate a slave rebellion in 1859.

Pg. 118: A new element of American elitism in the late nineteenth century was the development of scientific racism, a blend of Manifest Destiny and Darwinian biology. Its advocates argued that the Anglo-Saxons had been singled out by destiny, biology, or God as the supreme race. They were the world’s racial elite, they had built a civilization superior to all others, they were exceptionally gifted in politics, and they should now dominate the rest of the world, bringing its blessing to backward and benighted people everywhere.

Pg. 144: Prior to the New Deal, liberal had connoted giving citizens the greatest possible liberty to pursue their own concerns while minimizing government. From the New Deal onward, liberalism came to mean assigning an ever larger role to government in promoting equality and protecting citizens’ health, welfare, education, employment and access to justice. Conservatives from both major parties were shocked at FDR’s willingness to transform the traditional balance of power between state and the federal governments, at his readiness to create deficits by spending more money than taxation could raise annually, and at the idea that the federal government might, under some circumstances, offer direct relief to unemployed citizens.

Pg. 176: Buckley wrote his own conservative manifesto, Up from Liberalism (1959). Contemporary liberalism, as he described it, was philosophically incoherent, lacked moral foundations, suppressed individual freedom, and fetishized doubt rather than standing firm on the certain truths of civilization. Liberal “ten to believe that the human being is perfectible and social progress predictable, and that the instrument for effecting the two is reason; that truths are transitory and empirically determined; that equality is desirable and attainable through the action of state power; that social and individual differences, if they are not rational, are objectionable and should be scientifically eliminated; that all peoples and societies should strive to organize themselves upon a rationalist and scientific paradigm.” Liberalism was a menace because it constantly justified the enlargement of the state and its intrusion into previously private areas of citizens’ lives.

Pg. 195: While Liberalism stands for the imposition of utopian design upon the people because the Liberals know it is right, populism would substitute the tyranny of the majority over the individual, the pure will of “the people’, untrammeled by considerations of freedom and virtue”

Pg. 198: The American right had changed beyond recognition. In the 1940’s it had opposed the Cold War, NATO, and intervention in Korea because it recognized militarism and conscription as “instruments of mass slavery and mass murder.” But now it endorsed such commitments because of its obsessive anticommunism. Why had the right become internationalist and statist? First, because McCarthyism had mobilized the conservative masses in the name of anticommunism; second, because Buckley had been too willing to listen to ex-communists who dominated his journal National Review; and third, because traditionalist did not regard personal liberty as the value most to be protected and promoted.

Pg. 257: Samuel Huntington (b. 1927), a Harvard professor of politics, foresaw a future to be more challenging and bloody than the twentieth century. A “clash of civilizations,” he wrote, would be the next stage in the development of international relations. In early modern Europe great wars had been conflicts between kings and dynasties. After the French Revolution they were conflicts between nation-states. After the Russian Revolution they were conflicts between ideologies: communism, Nazism, and democratic capitalism, all taking place within Western civilization. Now, however, the world’s different civilizations were coming into conflict: “The fundamental source of conflict in this new world will not be primarily ideological or primarily economic. The great divisions among humankind and the dominating source of conflict will be cultural.”

Ideologies are comparatively shallow, he continued, but civilizations are deep, “differentiated from each other by history, language, culture, tradition, and most important, religion…These differences are the product of centuries…They are far more fundamental than differences among political ideologies and political regimes.” As economic modernization weakened old local identities, fundamentalist religion often took their place.

Pg. 258: Huntington: “Western ideas of individualism, liberalism, constitutionalism, human rights, equality, liberty, the rule of law, democracy, free markets, the separation of church and state, often have little resonance in Islamic, Confucian, Japanese, Hindu, Buddhist, or Orthodox cultures.”