MEDIA: Not exactly Leo Maxse’s NR
Conservatism and its flying buttresses
The energy and spirit of America's National Review in its early years is a thing to behold. The contrast with today’s rendition is difficult to overlook. Here is Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn in 1956, after the Hungary’s uprising against her Soviet oppressors:
Of course, one has to bear in mind that East Europeans, in the eyes of the “civilized West”, always were expendable; after all they were less “enlightened”, clean, constructive, level-headed, literate, technologically-minded than the liberal and “progressive” nations of the North. They were simply “Bohunks”. Neither in Britain nor in the United States would public opinion ever have tolerated the Soviet Union’s dealing with a Nordic country in the same summary way as with Poland. And the Hungarians, like the Poles, on top of it all were notorious for not being sufficiently “democratically minded”. At the end of World War Two a certain propaganda with White House ties denounced them as “aristocratic-fascist”, while at the same time limitless praise was heaped upon the Czechs and their allegedly shrewd and great leader, Dr. Benes, a vain nitwit who at the first opportunity sold his nation into Red servitude. It is quite true that there is an aristocratic aspect of the Polish and Hungarian character, an aspect to be found in all classes, which prompts these nations rather to die than be slaves and to put chivalry and liberty above mere physical survival.
Invigorating, isn’t it? Note that the censure came during a Republican administration. Note that it cares little for, is almost disdainful of, grandiose locutions about democracy. Note further the real admiration for something that is emphatically not American or derivative of things American. Compare this with today’s cover stories laden with cumbersome polling data; with capitulations to the drift of elite opinion; with bizarre unappealing complacency about principle; with flashes of tedious triumphalism. It is not my intention to harshly denigrate National Review in its contemporary manifestation, for the magazine is still unquestionably valuable. My intention is rather to call NR home, as it were; for my fear is that this venerable institution, with its genesis in the furnace of principled reaction to all the madness of modernity, is falling victim to its own success, and perceives itself as yet resisting that madness, when in fact it often lends its strength to it. To put it another way: while National Review at its inception was regarded as an almost ridiculous article — an anachronism from the benighted past — at some later point it became “mainstream”. Perhaps it was the 1990s, more likely it was with Ronald Reagan in the 1980s: whenever it was, the achievement of respectability initiated a decline or enervation, restricting the freedom to publish bold, even scathing opinions; hardening, by a dependence on the finances of a political party, a climate of faction — so much so that this summer it was widely controversial when NR’s editors mused, in a sensible editorial, that conservatives might find it necessary to declare their independence from the GOP.
Now it should be obvious that conservatives and Republicans are not the same. The GOP is a political party: today, the party of the Right. Conservatism, however diffuse, is a philosophy. The former is primarily about acquiring and wielding power; and only secondarily about implementing a philosophy. I wonder if it would even be admitted, in this partisan age, that a philosophy can never be the same as a party — anymore than a creed can be the same as a trade or vocation. Carpentry is a trade; it is not a creed. While there could conceivably be a Carpenters Party, it is merely absurd to imagine a creed of carpentry guiding and inspiring the lives of men. Conservatism as political philosophy primarily posits a role for government in human life: and I cannot see how a philosophy of small, limited government can continue in alliance with the party of government, if the GOP becomes, as many predict, the dominant governing party.
A historical parallel may illuminate the important distinction I am trying to tease out here. In England of the late eighteenth century, the Whigs were the “liberal” party — the party of progress and rationalism and scepticism. Yet the greatest Whig was Edmund Burke, who proved to be perhaps the most prophetic opponent of the religion of Progress, and the father of modern conservatism. Burke’s confrontation with the French Revolution (during which, as Lord Acton profoundly records, he transformed himself from being the leader of a party to a “teacher of mankind”) alienated him from his party so bitterly that many thought he had fallen into madness in his later years. The striking thing is that, with the perspective of history, Burke stands tall and his detractors (excepting Thomas Paine and a few others) are largely forgotten. Some of them indeed, like James Mackintosh, ultimately repudiated their earlier attacks, pronouncing his work a pillar of wisdom. Burke had quite plainly transcended party, and his inspiration was to correct philosophy, refine it, and cleanse it of the cancerous excesses of heady Enlightenment rationalism. This burden of instruction rent asunder party and philosophy.
I hope I am not taken to be fulminating against political parties; for they undoubtedly have their place, and are honourable in that place. But it should also be clear that philosophy is superior to party, even if philosophy aims at securing an instrument of implementation, that is, a party operating in alliance with it. It is a degradation for a journal dedicated to propounding a philosophy, and prompting a conversation about that philosophy, to become a mere party organ. Such is the vulnerability to which National Review is right now most subject.
I quote now Frank Meyer, in 1957, levelling a profound criticism against rationalism as an ideology:
With scientism, which attempts completely to destroy man’s awareness of a divine purpose and meaning to his existence, the process reached its culmination. The proper consciousness now is swept clean of the unconditioned, the mysterious, the absolute. Everything is relative, useful, instrumental. But there seems to be a law of compensation in the psyche that forbids such violence being done to the structure of reality. Men cannot live in an antiseptic universe, inhabited only by gadgets and by human beings who are nothing but particularly clever gadgets. So, as if this vacuum of meaning had called into existence myths to furnish out the dry emptiness of a soulless universe, the age of rationalism and scientism has been at the same time the age of the deification of the forces of History.
How much more serious this is compared to Jonah Goldberg’s columns of semantic fastidiousness or David Frum’s strange fancies of decadence! For here we encounter a man’s attempt to grasp hold of the nature of the dissolution around him. Meyer goes on:
From Hegel to Marx, and on to Spengler and Toynbee, powerful minds, rejecting the inspiration of their tradition but unable to believe in the meaninglessness of human life, have created these myths. They differ immensely among themselves, both in the distance of their removal from the integral tradition of the West and in the intensity of their impact upon the practical. But they have in common a double act of denial: to individual men, the denial of innate being and freedom of will; to God, the denial of transcendent being. History subordinates men to its being and replaces God, or drags Him down to a vague immanent “principle”.
In fairness, the trends and pressures of journalism today are not particularly conducive to sober reflection: and their effect on writers can be seen rather vividly in the fact that both the men I have just cited unflatteringly are capable of producing high-quality work when they put their minds to it (though no one will confuse them with Frank Meyer). And there is another factor here, which I suggested above, and which we might call the complacency of success, that should not be overlooked. The contributors to the original NR were beleaguered men and women. There was little cause for optimism. John Dos Passos, once a darling novelist of the Left, did his career no favours when began writing for National Review. Russell Kirk wanted to call his most famous book “The Conservative Rout”, Richard Weaver, his “The Fearful Descent”; Whittaker Chambers, in abandoning the Communist Party, was convinced that he had left the winning side for the losers; FA Hayek’s clarion call of a book was called The Road to Serfdom; James Burnham penned a meticulous jeremiad entitled Suicide of the West. These books were not greeted warmly. An edition of William F Buckley’s own early work Up From Liberalism reproduces on its back cover the amusing litany of abuse with which it was received, all quotes from reviews of the book containing vituperation of truly palpable rancour. Lionel Trilling’s dismissive remark perhaps sums up the reaction: to him conservatives were characterized by mere “irritable mental gestures” and nothing more.
In short, they were “outside the mainstream”, as the phrase goes today. And thus they were not the kind of people prone to consternation about whom they might offend with their opinions. Their polemical skills were honed to that sharpness and proficiency which comes only with frequent and frantic use; and their learning and intelligence always had to be proven, was never assumed.
It is to the great credit of National Review, and the host of disciples it acquired, that conservatism in America did indeed become respectable, by virtue of its forcefulness which translated ultimately into political success. The fruits of this success are evidenced by some watershed victories for a philosophy that was once seen as declining into oblivion. But the success carried a price. Part of the price consists in the clear reluctance to criticize the Party. More broadly it consists in the understandable human hesitation to jeopardize one’s social station, or to alienate one’s peers; which is another way of saying it consists in a certain capitulation to regnant dogma.
What is to be feared, and vigorously resisted, is that the price of respectability will ultimately include the betrayal of principle — the principle in question being limited government, or what was once referred to as constitutional government of enumerated powers. In this age of the modern, limitless State, a truly conservative party cannot also be a party of government. And conservatives must indeed declare their independence from a party of government if they are to retain their principles.
More Paul Cella can be found here
Paul Cella, September 10, 2003 01:17 AM