I confess to this because I know I am not alone. In his 1982 book, Back to Basics, Burton Yale Pines quotes a district chairman at the 1980 Conservative Caucus conference: "I'm a conservative but don't know any longer what a conservative is. I'm so confused. Everyone now is claiming to be a conservative."

Former UN ambassador Jeane Kirkpatrick appreciates the problem. "Most of the misunderstanding concerning what it is to be a liberal or conservative today grows out of the attempt to treat this multidimensional political universe as though it all hung together," she wrote nearly twenty years ago. Her words ring as true today as they did when first published. At a time when a monolith called conservatism is said to be the law of the land, we look in vain for universal indicators of what the conservative viewpoint entails.

If the ideological tilt-a-whirl that is the modern political arena is hostile to a consistent thinking, the guidelines of ideology are less useful still when we step outside the purely political domain. For instance, if conservatism is shorthand for a given set of beliefs, what should a good conservative make of, say, the major league baseballs' ongoing labor strife? Should he side with the players, defending the hallmark conservative notion that a free market determines incomes more justly than a salary cap imposed under an antitrust exemption? Or do the owners deserve his sympathy, in line with the conservative tendency to resist aggressive organized labor? Should he, holding aloft William Bennett's Book of Virtues, dismiss both sides as unprincipled greedheads and rear his sons on collegiate basketball? Or should he remain faithful to the conservative axiom which grants humans their flaws, and another which reveres time-honored institutions such as our resilient national pastime, no matter their occasional controversies?

A short sequence of such rhetorical questions makes clear that a catch-all locution like conservatism offers at best a wobbly compass for one's specific beliefs. Many view this to be conservatism's chief virtue; conservatism is a simple state of mind which, in the words of Peter Viereck, "unconsciously incarnates concrete traditions. It embodies rather than argues; it condemns rationalist blueprints; its insights are never developed into sustained theoretical works." And so it is said that conservatism never carries the baggage of a particular policy agenda (agendas being the domain of liberals and others given to social engineering). "A conservative temperament may be, but need not be, identical with conservative politics or right-wing economics; it may sometimes accompany left-wing politics or economics," Viereck argued in Conservatism Revisited. Robert Nisbet showed how political expediency has required conservatives such as Abraham Lincoln, Winston Churchill and Otto von Bismarck to launch bold statist, i.e. liberal, initiatives. Yet time and again the casual observer of Washington, or the occasional listener to talk radio, finds political positions being justified on the basis that they uphold some monolithic "conservative" principle.

Such uncertainty about the meaning of conservatism speaks directly to this book's value to the inquiring conservative reader. With the silent majority becoming ever more vocal, there is a renewed urgency to explore the varied terrain of conservative thought. For as the competing forces of partisan politics and intellectual honesty have their tug of war, conservatism's true identity is easily lost. Conservatism is said to be in ascent, as though it presented a unified front, marching in lockstep against the crumbling battlements of the New Deal. But the full story of the flowering of conservatism's well told elsewhere by Viereck, Nisbet, and others is much more complex, and full of paradox. Right Thinking aspires to illustrate the many facets of conservatism, so that readers might pick their own way through the intellectual mine field.

Try to reconcile the Adam Smith who wrote Wealth of Nations with the Adam Smith who wrote The Theory of Moral Sentiments. Consider the incongruity of anti-government conservatives hailing the Federalist Papers the most compelling argument ever set forth for a strong central government. What do you make of liberal lion John Stuart Mill limiting the proper reach of big government in a passage that James Burnham likens to pure Barry Goldwater, while conservative columnist Cal Thomas argues that in times of moral crisis, government should act as an agent of God?

If you find beauty in paradox, you will find much to enjoy in the following pages. Paradox is former Communists like Whittaker Chambers and National Review editor Frank S. Meyer renouncing Marxism to become champions of the Right. It is a generation of 1930s Leftists Burnham, Irving Kristol, Norman Podhoretz, and Nathan Glazer among them growing weary of socialism and establishing an intellectually rigorous neoconservative movement. It is a bunch of former Soviet apparachiks paleo-Communists!who in resisting democratic, radical reform, come to be called, of all things, conservatives. It is Yale University being seen as a bastion of conservatism, and Harvard a commune of liberals, despite the fact that Yale was the liberal foil against which William F. Buckley made his name, and Harvard, home to more than a few neoconservatives, still wants $20,000 a year in tuition. It is, in sum, the story of what American Spectator editor-in-chief R. Emmett Tyrrell, Jr., has called a fractious alliance of traditionalists, libertarians, and anticommunists whose intramural spats have pitted patriotism against individualism, small government against public order, corporations against entrepreneurs, religious faith against objective reason. With the silent majority no longer silent, it is clear that conservatives make for an unlikely majority party.

Richard Brookhiser, in his excellent introduction to William F. Buckley's Right Reason, described conservatism in the 1950s as an odd mix of Marxists turned McCarthyites, and America Firsters turned globalists. There were free-marketeers and fans of Edmund Burke, defenders of business and bewailers of Appomattox. Toward the end of the decade there appeared Ayn Rand and Robert Welch who argued, respectively, that charity was criminal and that Eisenhower was a communist. And there were always, as on the margins of every movement, the trimmers, represented on the level of day-to-day politics by the prophets of Modern Republicanism, whose Sisyphean task it was to give coherence to the actions of the Eisenhower administration, and, on a somewhat higher plane, by Peter Viereck, who made a small career of explaining that the great modern conservative politicians were Adlai Stevenson and FDR.

Tyrrell, in The Conservative Crack-Up, showed how since the 1950s conservative positions toward presidential powers, tariffs, budget deficits, welfare, and states rights have swung a full 180 degrees. If today conservatism has matured to the point of being a powerful political player, it is still fails to present a single face. As the intra-party feuds over Proposition 187, abortion and other issues suggest, it is clear that conservatism represents a spectrum of ideas, a pastiche of world-views that is the farthest cry from the conservative movement Brookhiser described a cranky and recriminatory opposition that led a subterranean existence until its modern flowering in the 1950s with the founding of National Review.

Few of history's most stout conservatives can stand up to the rigors of ideological purity: Disraeli and Bismarck created the modern welfare state. The British political philosopher Roger Scruton, who wrote that a conservative attitude defies translation into a shopping list of social goals, defended taxation not only as a means of revenue generation, but of social control. Theodore Roosevelt repeatedly demonstrated his dedication to putting businesses neck under the government's regulatory heel. Richard Nixon instituted broad price controls in the seventies. Under Ronald Reagan government expenditures ballooned. That staple of any conservative platform,states rights, has been a code word for all manner of bigotry (thereby supporting the conservative's dark view of human nature). In the 104th Congress, the Speaker of the House is a student of visionary futurists who openly advocates revolution in Washington, as if Edmund Burke never had a thing to say about it. We find more and more conservatives suspiciously conversant in social theory, as if they had always admired liberals for their facility with grand socio-economic designs. And Wall Street Journal editorialists refer approvingly to reform-minded young Republicans, as if tradition were never something to be preserved and defended. What we have here, of course, is a coming full circle. Just as extremes eventually meet, at a certain point the avant-garde becomes the establishment, and the old establishment the counterrevolution. The political ideologue exits this carnival ride reeling and dizzy.

Politics, as opposed to ideology, is about compromise. With the current swing to the right, American society is seeking a counterweight to the liberalism that has tilted the social landscape for the past sixty years. Just as government, to the consternation of conservatives, has become a fixture in economic life, so too has the search for values, traditions and meaning begun to infuse public life to the chagrin of many liberals. The mix of the two is healthy. According to Clinton Rossiter and James Lare, Walter Lippman was said to have an unresolved tension in his own mind between tough-minded liberalism and warmhearted conservatism that makes him one of the most appealing modern American thinkers. To their credit, many liberals today are not resistant to a little conservatism. Liberal lion George McGovern doffed his cap in a recent Washington Post column to old-fashioned conservatism, citing the creative tension between conservatism and liberalism that is the genius of American democracy. And William A. Henry III, a staunch liberal Democrat who was the culture critic for Time before his death in 1994, published posthumously a brilliant book titled In Defense of Elitism that shot a smoking hole through the egalitarian views of his fellows. To paraphrase the founder of the Limbaugh Institute for Advanced Conservative Studies, this is the way things ought to be. We need more P. J. O'Rourkes on Rolling Stone's masthead, more Fred Barneses at The New Republic. For there is no reason a future can't be shaped out of respect for the past, or that a respect for the past forbids an intelligent program for the future. In Up from Liberalism, Buckley made just such an allowance: I mean to live my life an obedient man, but obedient to God, subservient to the wisdom of my ancestors; never to the authority of political truths arrived at yesterday at the voting booth. That is a program of sorts, is it not?

In today's political climate, sadly, such compromises are the exception, not the rule. Labels are thrown about with such pejorative vigor that the merits of whatever ideas their wearers might try to articulate are instantly nullified, pigeonholed, or ignored. John Ralston Saul, in The Doubter's Companion: A Dictionary of Aggressive Common Sense, wrote of the longstanding cooperation between the intellectuals of the Left and the Right, in which all thinkers are reduced to a caricature in order to be fitted into a closed dialectic of extremes. This is nothing to celebrate.

Labels can be simplistic and misleading, wrote Wall Street Journal publisher Peter R. Kann in a recent statement to readers. Responding to a reader's claim that the paper had Right-wing leanings, Kann stated that There is nothing conventionally conservative about a philosophy that champions free markets, free trade and open immigration; that supports entrepreneurship and open competition, sometimes against the interests of big business; that defends individual liberty against the power of states; or that has crusaded for such causes as making experimental drugs freely available to AIDS and Alzheimers victims.

As several of the writers excerpted in the following pages attest, the most striking feature of the American Revolution was the intellectually deliberate and considered manner in which the Founders justified it. Such a process tends to appreciate complexity, and has little use for labels. Irving Kristol described the Revolution as being infused by mind to a degree never approximated since, and perhaps never approximated before. By mind, not by dogma. Today, however, when media consultants script one-liners for political candidates and debates are occasions not for engagement, but the transmission of prepared messages, it is hard to imagine a time when intellectual opponents clashed from positions of mutual respect. Hence Mr. Kann's leeriness of the Journal being tabbed conservative.

Politics wasn't always such a disingenuous business, even in our century. Lady Bird Johnson, in a 1994 Texas Monthly interview, spoke wistfully of a day when you didn't hate people who had different philosophies, and you didn't oppose just to oppose. At a time when one can scarcely mention a term like conservatism (or, yes, liberalism) without battle lines instantly forming, rehearsed arguments being downloaded from left sides of brains, and the very worst being assumed about the other side's motives, Mrs. Johnson's comment sounds, sadly, quaint. And yet electoral politics has become so deeply cynical, so slickly packaged, its practitioners so impatient with complexity and so indifferent to nuance, that there are grounds to fear for the future of clear, deliberative thought. Any debate about the idea of progress can be quickly ended by studying how far the quality of political discussion has fallen since the days of the Revolution. We would all do well to read the Federalist Papers, to study the arguments made at the Constitutional Convention, and to heed Thomas Jefferson's observation that a difference of opinion is not a difference of principle.

So why this book, which purports to take such a one-sided view of things? It has been put together, firstly, for conservatives looking to gain a more nuanced understanding of conservatism, along with some good ideas about where they might go for further reading. For those who feel that conservatism resists definition (a position that today seems something of a cop-out, given the movement's political clout), the book collects some of the best definitions of conservatism formulated by conservative thinkers. It further offers a variety of issue-specific interpretations which may be useful in defining one's views. The book also has a secondary purpose. At the risk of trying to make it all things to all people, which clearly it is not, I hope that liberals, too, can find in these pages cause to appreciate some of the root values of conservatism, that they might move forward with a more respectful view of the opposition. Serious political philosophers may find here a few simplifications and glossings-over. Such is the risk of a book of quotation. They are also likely to find outright contradictions among the contributors. Such is the book's subversive intention. If some conservatives blanche at the inclusion of one or another members of what they view as the faux-right in this book critics such as Robert Hughes and Henry Fairlie have been equally hard on conservatism as liberalism, it will have achieved its end of broadening their frame of intellectual reference.

My criteria for selection were rather loose and where questions arose I erred on the side of inclusion, for debate about who and what is genuinely conservative can be a useful way to sharpen one's thinking. Of course, much of the writing excerpted here predates the modern American idea of conservatism, and as such is open to interpretation (liberals and conservatives have been fighting over Thomas Jefferson for decades). Although the quotations, removed of context, can promote simplification and distortion, I have worked toward encouraging the opposite both in the nature of the quotes selected and the amount of material used. I have sought to make the quotations as long as possible without straining the casual reader's attention span or the limits of fair use. Although I was tempted to shy from including too much wit, caprice, and playfulness, the late Mr. Fairlie having warned that it is the liberal who is a sucker for a good line, I have tried to give the book entertainment value as well, while avoiding gratuitous red-baiting aphorisms and oratorical excesses. Finally, I have looked principally to intellectuals for material, as opposed to modern politicians, the better to avoid the pervasive influence of salaried speechwriters.

Identifying conservatism exclusively with politics is a blindered view. Few traditionalists would disagree. Though liberalism has been a tradition since the New Deal (or perhaps the Enlightenment), ultimately conservatism grows out of the vast history of orthodox Western thought. And so it can scarcely be seen as parochial, rickety, and tired. Carrying the full weight of our cultural and intellectual heritage, it demands that we lay roots, find our place in the world, and approach others grounded in the knowledge of who we are. If this book enables anyone to do that with greater confidence, it will have achieved its purpose.

James D. Hornfischer Austin,Texas

NOTICE:

Copyright 1996 by James D. Hornfischer. All rights reserved

Permission to make digital or hard copies of part or all of this work for personal use, posting to other lists, or for classroom use is hereby granted provided that copies include this notice.

To republish in print form requires specific permission; please write for details:

James Hornfischer

1300 Guadalupe St. Suite 208

Austin, TX 78701

email him here

You are encouraged to send comments to him about the piece.

Back to Home Page