Conservatism is Dead Without Pragmatism

For the past two decades, Tanenhaus has been writing and thinking about two giants of the early conservative movement, Whittaker Chambers and William F. Buckley, Jr.  (I was his research assistant when he began work on his Buckley biography.) Tanenhaus’ analysis in The Death of Conservatism in a sense grows out of the differences between the two as revealed in their letters during the 1950s and early ‘60s (later published as Odyssey of a Friend). Chambers was Buckley’s mentor and hero, but each man embodied an aspect of conservatism that was in tension with the other. In Tanenhaus’ depiction, Chambers was a realist conservative in the tradition of Edmund Burke and Benjamin Disraeli, suspicious of all ideologies and reverent toward tradition and constitutional order, but aware of the need to preserve the state and civil society by adjusting to changing conditions.  Buckley, on the other hand, began as a self-proclaimed intellectual revolutionary: purist, uncompromising, eager to overturn the New Deal by any means necessary and create a new conservative movement.

Tanenhaus’ point is not that Chambers’ realist view was right and Buckley’s idealist view wrong, but that the tension between them was highly productive for conservatism as a whole.  Buckley’s idealism kept Chambers and other conservatives from resigning themselves to liberal dominance, while Chambers’ realism influenced Buckley to move conservatism toward the political center in the 1960s and 1970s and establish it as a responsible philosophy capable of governing the nation. Ronald Reagan incarnated both strands of conservatism, restoring American pride and economic prowess while demonstrating flexibility in retaining the social safety net and helping to negotiate an end to the Cold War.

The problem with modern-day conservatism is that the realists have been vanquished by the ideologists, with dire results for the conservative movement and the Republican Party that is now wholly identified with the movement.  As conservative idealists no longer feel any restraining Burkean influences, intellectuals have grown complacent while movement leaders have given free rein to what Tanenhaus calls “revanchists” – throwbacks to the Old Right of the 1930s and ‘40s who consider liberals to be traitors and oppose progressive change of any kind.

“Revanchist” is a provocative term, and Tanenhaus could be clearer on the difference between unalterably partisan but rational conservatives on the one hand and outright crackpots on the other.  The danger for modern conservatism, however, is that this distinction is becoming blurred.  Buckley once observed that “I’ve spent my whole life separating the right from the kooks.” Who presently performs this function for conservatism? John Birch Society-style paranoid claims of the sort repudiated by Buckley are now repeated by prominent Republican politicians.  Million-selling kook books like Fred Kamp’s Hitler Was a Liberal and John Stormer’s None Dare Call It Treason were rejected by the Buckley-era conservative intelligentsia, while Jonah Goldberg’s Liberal Fascism and Ann Coulter’s Treason are now embraced. Where for that matter are the equivalents of Buckley’s Up from Liberalism, Russell Kirk’s The Conservative Mind, or Charles Murray’s Losing Ground, intellectually sophisticated works that didn’t merely preach to the already converted?

The process by which the dialogue within conservatism was replaced by what Tanenhaus calls “exhortations from the Right to the Right” was long and involved.  His whirlwind historical tour of conservatism’s rise and fall is suggestive rather than comprehensive, and one can argue with a number of his historical assertions. (Has the Democratic Party since 1960 really been choosing “centrist, explicitly non-ideological presidential candidates” – like Hubert Humphrey, George McGovern, and Walter Mondale?)  Neither is it self-evident that a classical conservative perspective would lead a modern-day Whittaker Chambers to consider David Souter a true Burkean or homosexual marriage the capstone of the “family values” movement, although Tanenhaus makes a plausible case.

Tanenhaus is correct, though, in pointing out that there has been no agonizing reappraisal within conservative circles following the failures of George W. Bush’s presidency, that the movement no longer attracts intellectuals and centrists as Buckley did in his heyday, and that classical conservatives have “deserted the Right or been evicted from it.” The massive conservative infrastructure of think tanks and journals and pressure groups remains in place, but it has become a sort of Maginot Line locking conservatives into outdated positions rather than a source of fresh, contrarian thinking and positive solutions to current problems. Tanenhaus doesn’t tell how to revive the classical component of conservative thought, but it’s hard to find fault with his diagnosis of how badly the absence of such pragmatism has hurt the movement.

Conservatives will not thank Tanenhaus for telling them how they have failed to live up to Buckley’s legacy, any more than dissolute heirs who have squandered their patrimony appreciate being reminded of that fact.  But they ought to listen to him.