Morality & Politics
Conservatism Can Be Revived:
Unmasking Neocons
Just a Beginning
By Joseph Baldacchino
Despite the apparent momentum of the Republican Party in the
presidential race, it is clear that the party is tottering on the edge
of intellectual and moral bankruptcy. Americans by overwhelming margins
have had their fill of the George W. Bush Administration, and they have
little faith in the GOP's nominee to succeed Bush. It is only because
the Democrats have put forth a candidate who raises even more serious
doubts that the Republicans may be able to avert electoral disaster.
Americans are tired of the Administration’s policy failures—the
costly and unnecessary war in Iraq, with its attendant torture and abuse
of prisoners; the assault on Americans’ constitutional liberties,
including protections against warrantless searches and spying; the
concentration of power in the executive branch at the expense of
Congress, the courts, and the states; and its commitment to economic
practices that have damaged the nation’s manufacturing base, brought its
financial system to the brink of insolvency, and made America dependent
on foreign debt to finance its wars and government and to keep afloat
its increasingly fragile standard of living.
Yet even more than the almost perfect storm of policy disasters, what
has undermined the Republicans’ credibility is their blatant refusal to
recognize the complexities of historical reality and to adjust their
responses accordingly. Having made a fetish of abstract, a priori
principles like the “free market,” “democracy,” and “national security,”
the GOP and its intellectual allies have perpetrated and excused
irresponsible behavior by individuals and government.
For example, under one part of the “Bush Doctrine” that still has not
been revoked, at least not explicitly, the United States has asserted a
prerogative unilaterally to invade sovereign nations for the purpose of
installing a better regime, ostensibly to promote democracy. Yet it
condemns military interventionism by other nations as grounds for
expulsion from the community of nations.
Thus President Bush, complaining that the Russian incursion into
Georgia might have been designed to unseat the pro-U.S. government
there, solemnly proclaimed that invading other countries “is
unacceptable in the 21st century.” This, as if the invasion of Iraq had
never occurred or had taken place in some dimly remembered epoch,
perhaps the Middle Ages.
The Administration’s aggressive foreign policies and cavalier
disregard of its legal and constitutional responsibilities have stirred
alarm even within the Administration itself, including senior officials
in the Departments of Justice, Defense, and Treasury. Many registered
Republicans, among them admirers of Texas Rep. Ron Paul, are vowing to
sit out this election or to vote for the Constitution or Libertarian
Party candidates.
The National Republican Congressional Committee openly advised GOP
candidates not to run this year as “traditional Republicans,” even in
normally hospitable parts of the South and Midwest. Most tellingly, John
McCain and Sarah Palin are going out of their way to distance
themselves from the party’s record of the past eight years, though they
have given little indication of moving in a well-considered alternative
direction.
Failure of this magnitude might have suggested to some the need for
systematic rethinking of the party’s approach to politics and
governance. But not so for the Rush Limbaughs and Sean Hannitys, the Ann
Coulters, William Kristols and other loud media voices who represent
what passes for Republican wisdom today. Nor have second thoughts been
expressed by President Bush, who calls himself the “decider,” or by Vice
President Cheney, who has sometimes been the real “decider.”
By the lights of such as these, to question acts of aggression
against other nations or worry about the erosion of civil liberties or
criticize the economic and regulatory malfeasance that now threatens the
nation with financial ruin is to be “anti-American” or “soft on terror”
or a “socialist.” They know what’s best not only for Americans but for
everyone else in the world, and they have only contempt for opinion to
the contrary. This was starkly illustrated earlier this year by Cheney,
who, when told by a television interviewer that “two-thirds of Americans
say [the Iraq war] is not worth fighting,” sneeringly responded with a
single word: “So?”1
These policies and this arrogance were bound to elicit growing
criticism. Since the Cheneys, Limbaughs, et al., are popularly
identified as conservatives, it is not surprising that their opponents
in the media and academia have been pouring out books and articles
gleefully chronicling what they call the “end of conservatism.”
But the ideology that is losing its credibility after coming most
fully to fruition in the current Bush Administration is not the
intellectual conservatism that arose in the 1950s and that took its name
and outlook in part from Russell Kirk’s 1953 book The Conservative Mind.
On the contrary, the political ideas and attitudes that have held sway
under the second Bush were brought into the GOP beginning in the late
1970s by former Democrats, many of them also former Marxists, who became
known as and often called themselves “neoconservatives.”
Those ideas are in many ways antithetical to the traditional
conservatism exemplified by Kirk. Neoconservative thinking greatly
resembles the ideas of the French revolutionaries, the Jacobins, who
turned against the long-held views of human nature and society that are
associated with the classical and Christian Western heritage.
Ironically, it was opposition to Jacobin ideology that brought modern
conservatism into existence more than two centuries ago.
Modern conservatism originated with Edmund Burke (1729-1797) as a
reaction against the ahistorical and reckless attacks by the French
Jacobins on the classical and Christian tradition of the West. Burke
contrasted the purportedly universal but flimsy and abstract principles
of the Jacobins with the more profound and well-supported insights of
what he called the “general bank and capital of nations, and of ages.”2
Burke’s notion of universality, shared by Irving Babbitt, Russell
Kirk, and others in the twentieth century, was indistinguishable from a
sense of man’s flawed nature and the insight that what is good in
particular situations is seldom easily discerned or achieved. Wisdom and
prudent action require the self-discipline, balance, and maturity of
civilized judgment and character.
Burke flatly rejected Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s conceit that man is
naturally good and that morality consists of giving free rein to one’s
impulses. For Rousseau (1712-1778)—who provided the spark for the
Jacobins’ inflammatory vision of “liberty, equality, and fraternity”—the
source of evil in the world was the restraints imposed on man by ideas
and institutions external to self. Hence the most effective way to
improve the world was to replace old institutions and customs with
revolutionary measures inspired by the strongest desire of the moment.
For Burke, the result of thus removing historically evolved restraints
on personal behavior would be, not liberty but anarchy and, finally,
tyranny.
In his Letter to a Member of the French Assembly, published
in 1791, Burke famously wrote, “Men are qualified for civil liberty in
exact proportion to their disposition to put moral chains upon their own
appetites; in proportion as their love of justice is above their
rapacity . . . . Society cannot exist unless a
controlling power upon will and appetite be placed somewhere, and the
less of it there is within, the more there must be without.”3
In America the framers of the Constitution held a view of human
nature and society very similar to Burke’s. James Madison, in Federalist
51, wrote,
[W]hat is government itself, but the greatest of all
reflections on human nature? If men were angels, no government would be
necessary. If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal
controls on government would be necessary. In framing a government which
is to be administered by men over men, the great difficulty lies in
this: you must first enable the government to control the governed; and
in the next place oblige it to control itself.
To help force the government to control itself, the framers
established a variety of institutional checks and balances, including
the division of powers among the three branches at the national level
and the division of authority between the general and state governments.
But, like their contemporary Burke, they knew that the tendency of the
natural man toward selfish power seeking would overwhelm external
constitutional checks unless the latter were bolstered by inner personal
restraint on the part both of leaders and the citizenry.
As George Washington wrote in his Farewell Address, it “is important
. . . that the habits of thinking in a free country should
inspire caution [on the part of public officials] to confine themselves
within their respective constitutional spheres.”
Fortunately for the framers, the moral, religious, and social habits
and beliefs that were then prevalent in America were grounded in the
Christian tradition of “love of neighbor.” As such, the public ethos was
conducive to humility, compromise, and the questioning of one’s own
motives—traits that must be present in high degree if a Constitution
prescribing political checks and balances is to be paid more than lip
service.
Describing the necessary prerequisites for a free society, the
constitutional framer John Dickinson noted in Fabius Letter 3: “Humility
and benevolence must take place of pride and overweening selfishness.
Reason . . . will then discover to us, that we cannot be true
to ourselves, without being true to others—that to love our neighbors as
ourselves, is to love ourselves in the best manner
. . . .”4 Imbued with this ethic, Americans
strove to control evil within themselves, to strengthen their own
character in order to be able to build more loving relationships within
their own families and local communities.
Yet, as mentioned above, at the very time that the old religious,
moral, and other traditions brought by their ancestors from Europe were
helping Americans to launch a successful constitutional republic, those
same traditions were encountering wholesale rejection on the European
continent. Influenced by Rousseau, the French Jacobins violently
overturned or badly damaged not only the French monarchy but virtually
all of that country’s political, religious, and social institutions.
They then launched wars of aggression meant to spread their utopian
vision across much of Europe. The Jacobins’ excesses brought their
political downfall, but traditional beliefs continued to lose ground to
other modern doctrines that looked to science, economics, and other
rationalist techniques to bring moral progress.
Instead of moral progress, the new doctrines brought, besides better
health, hygiene and material wealth, increasing levels of personal and
social disorder not only in Europe but also in America. As the old ethos
gave way to various forms of progressivism, Americans came to rely less
on personal acts of character in relation to those near at hand as the
way to promote a better society. Rather than the difficult effort of
ordering one’s own soul toward the transcendent good, morality became
associated in the public mind with abstract principles such as “freedom”
and “democracy” and with “idealistic” caring for amorphous distant
groups or for mankind-at-large.
Criticizing these trends as unrealistic and deleterious, the Harvard
professor Irving Babbitt (1865-1933) wrote early in the twentieth
century that man is intuitively aware of an ever-present conflict at the
center of his experience between two competing qualities of will, and
this inner conflict constitutes man’s fundamental moral predicament. The
lower will, described by Babbitt as man’s “impulsive,” “natural,” or
“ordinary” self, is toward self-indulgence or arbitrariness for oneself
or one’s group. The “higher” or “ethical” will, which is a constant will
to do what is right, is experienced in particular situations as an
“inner check” on merely selfish impulse.
Babbitt noted that man’s higher and lower qualities of will are
accompanied by corresponding qualities of imagination. Only men and
women of character allow themselves to view the world without pleasing
illusions, and thus to recognize the need for difficult self-improvement
by all persons, beginning with self. Knowing from personal experience
the sense of meaning and happiness that accompanies acts of personal
responsibility, such individuals are able imaginatively to apprehend
life’s transcendent purpose through noble examples from both history and
the arts and humanities.
In each particular situation, the individual’s imagination presents
images of possible ends or desires that might be satisfied with the
unique set of means at hand. Among this panoply of potential ends, the
higher imagination is looking for the one that is most likely to further
life’s highest potential in those given circumstances. In the moment of
incipient action, the higher will, experienced as conscience, favors
one end while discouraging the others, thereby ordering desires and
changing situations to its eternal purpose.
By way of contrast, some persons habitually indulge their changing
impulses without regard to a universal moral imperative. They favor
visions of life that accentuate the pleasures that flow from morally
unchecked activity. Such visions tend to ignore the unpleasant
consequences of a morally uncentered existence. Any pangs of conscience
are easily dismissed as mere residue of superstitious dogmas. If
uncentered imagination becomes culturally predominant, whole nations and
civilizations can be captivated by worldviews based on self-serving
illusion.
The chief crisis of the modern world is a crisis of moral character
in which perverse imagination provides seemingly plausible excuses for
almost everyone to evade responsibilities to self and others. Babbitt
noted that, by painting the indulgence of our dominant desires as
acceptable and even noble, the lower imagination, collaborating with a
self-indulgent will, distorts our perception of reality. It also gives
rise to an “imperialistic” personality standing at opposite poles from
the traditional personality of restraint and humility that had made the
American Constitution possible.
In his books Babbitt described the harmful effects of the
“imperialistic” personality across a broad range of American life,
including education, religion, business, politics, and foreign policy.
Regarding the latter, Babbitt wrote in 1924:
We are willing to admit that all other nations are
self-seeking, but as for ourselves, we hold that we act only on the most
disinterested motives. We have not as yet set up, like revolutionary
France, as the Christ of Nations, but during the late war we liked to
look on ourselves as at least the Sir Galahad of Nations. If the
American thus regards himself as an idealist at the same time that the
foreigner looks on him as a dollar-chaser, the explanation may be due
partly to the fact that the American judges himself by the way he feels,
whereas the foreigner judges him by what he does.5
Babbitt’s insights along with Burke’s would exert a profound
influence on Russell Kirk and such other founders of the conservative
intellectual movement that emerged in the 1950s as Milton Hindus, Robert
Nisbet, Peter Stanlis, Peter Viereck, and Richard Weaver. Babbitt, Kirk
would record, “has influenced me more strongly than has any other
writer of the twentieth century. It was through Babbitt that I came to
know Edmund Burke, and Babbitt, as much as Burke, animates my book The Conservative Mind.”6
Thus, a strong case can be made that the conservative intellectual
movement that coalesced in the 1950s and later would come to be
associated with the politics of Barry Goldwater and Ronald Reagan was,
at its philosophical core, a revival of interest in ideas previously
explored by Edmund Burke and Irving Babbitt. Kirk, elucidating Babbitt,
summed up such conservatism as
the belief that man is a distinct being, governed by laws
peculiar to his nature; there is law for man and law for thing. Man
stands higher than the beasts that perish because he recognizes and
obeys this law of his nature. The disciplinary arts of humanitas
teach man to put checks upon his will and his appetite. Those checks
are provided by ethical will and reason—not by the private rationality
of the Enlightenment, but by the higher reason that grows out of a
respect for the wisdom of our ancestors and out of the endeavor to
apprehend that transcendent order which gives us our nature.7
Boiled down to its essence, conservatism is first and foremost an
ethic of personal responsibility. It consists of inner and outer
restraint of self in furtherance of an order that transcends individual,
group, or nation. Whether particular actions or policies are good or
bad depends not on how we justify them to ourselves but on the actual
historical effect on real people in particular instances. Abstract
principles and a priori slogans, however loudly proclaimed, count for
naught. We know on good authority that the true test of character, the
true test of right and wrong willing, is, “By their fruits ye shall know
them.”
By this test, neoconservatism in its main thrust is anything but
conservative. It espouses not a personal ethic that enriches or enhances
the community from within but an ideology that announces through a
megaphone principles for the remaking of the world, such as “democracy,”
“freedom,” and “capitalism.” It espouses not an ethic of personal
responsibility and communal effort but proclaims, again through a
megaphone, the need for big, muscular government to act in our name. It
espouses not a virtue of individual character and love of neighbor but
declares, again through a megaphone, that America should rule the world.
This imperialistic mindset could not be more alien to the traditions
that made the American Constitution possible. Yet it is this mindset
that, more than any other, has given shape to the Bush II policies and
worldview.
For tactical reasons neocons frequently downplay for public
consumption the chasm that separates their position from that of
conservatism proper. Yet, often enough, when they have felt sufficiently
secure in their power, they have acknowledged that the differences
between the two worldviews are fundamental. In his new book Fighting Words: A Tale of How Liberals Created Neo-Conservatism,
veteran neocon activist Ben Wattenberg praises such past Democratic
politicians as Lyndon Johnson, Robert Kennedy, Hubert Humphrey, and
Henry “Scoop” Jackson as having helped in various ways to launch
neoconservatism. Wattenberg complains that neoconservatism may forever
“be confused with conservatism, with the key differences never quite
understood.”8
Even more candid is an article by Irving Kristol in the August 25, 2003, edition of The Weekly Standard,
the magazine edited and published by his son William with massive
infusions of financial support from billionaire publisher Rupert
Murdoch. The elder Kristol, who is widely known as the “godfather” of
neoconservatism, reports that, “ever since its origin among
disillusioned liberal intellectuals in the 1970s,” the “purpose of
neoconservatism” has been “to convert the Republican party, and American
conservatism in general, against their respective wills, into a new
kind of conservative politics.”
This “new kind” of conservatism, Kristol explains, is “far less risk
averse” concerning budget deficits “than is the case among the more
traditional conservatives.” Moreover, in contrast to those who have long
resisted big government, “[n]eocons do not feel that kind of alarm or
anxiety about the growth of the state.” Apparently not, since Kristol
goes on to lump “the United States of today” with “the Soviet Union of
yesteryear” as “ideological nations”—a comparison that he remarkably
does not find disturbing. Such nations, he insists, should be willing to
use robust military force to spread their ideologies globally.
With such notions widely regarded as representing the mainstream of
conservative thought, is there any hope for a revival of the morally and
culturally grounded conservatism that guided the framers of the
Constitution and inspired the conservative intellectual movement of the
1950s? Some who have belonged to that movement from its early days might
think that returning to the ideas and concerns that preoccupied them
circa 1970, before the neocon influx into the GOP, would provide a
sufficient solution. If so, they’d be wrong. For many members of the
conservative movement had only very selectively and imperfectly absorbed
the central moral and philosophical insights of the thinkers mentioned
above, and they had manifested dubious inclinations well before the
advent of the neocons.
As explained above, the main concern of traditional conservatism was
not systems of politics or economics but the maintenance of an ethical
realism of inner restraint “that grows out of a respect for the wisdom
of our ancestors,” and it was from the latter circumstance that
conservatism drew its name. What separated conservatism from all the
other isms—and why it was not an “ideology,” according to Russell
Kirk—was its agreement with Irving Babbitt that what is important to the
man of character “is not his power to act on the world, but his power
to act on himself.” Conservatism valued philosophy, theology, history,
literature, and the arts—the best that has been thought and done—as
supports for man’s disposition to put restraints on his lower
inclinations.
But, beginning early in the 1960s, partly as an outgrowth of the
Goldwater presidential candidacy, conservatives became increasingly
infatuated with practical politics. More and more the “power to act on
the world” displaced the power to act on self as the conservative
touchstone, and the philosophical discernment that previously had
distinguished conservatives from their intellectual adversaries went
into prolonged eclipse.
Traditionally, conservatives had understood that terms like “freedom”
or “free market” were abstractions that could have different—even
opposite—meanings in different contexts. As Burke had aptly noted, “Is
it because liberty in the abstract may be classed among the
blessings of mankind, that I am seriously to facilitate a madman, who
has escaped from the protecting restraint and wholesome darkness of his
cell, on his restoration to the enjoyment of light and liberty?”9
Previously, therefore, conservatives had recognized that, as Wilhelm
Röpke pointed out, for an economy to be civilized it must draw upon
moral, imaginative, and intellectual habits and preferences that do not
arise spontaneously from the economy as such.10
With Burke and the American constitutional framers, conservatives
knew that the less control that men have within, the more they must have
from without, so that, if men and women desire freedom, including a
free market and constitutionalism, the prerequisite is to put chains
upon their own will and appetite and to avail themselves of the
historically evolved norms and prejudices that will assist them in that
effort. If traditional conservatism were to be reduced to a single
maxim, this last might suffice as well as any other.
But with the turn toward a crude pragmatism that accompanied their
new preoccupation with winning elections and controlling public policy,
conservatives and the Republican party came for the most part to
identify the free market not as a means to a higher end but as an end in
itself, leaving businessmen and women without any restraints or
responsibilities other than those imposed by the free market alone.
Conservatives forgot the extent to which, as my NHI colleague Claes Ryn
noted recently in Modern Age, “purely economic considerations
need to be subordinated to other motives and . . . habits, institutions,
and gatekeepers must help foster moral restraints, good taste and
respect for truth.”11
The costs of letting purely economic motives run amok are now starkly
evident in the financial meltdown on Wall Street. Concerning the
latter, columnist Robert J. Samuelson writes: “It wasn’t that Wall
Street’s leaders deceived customers or lenders into taking risks that
were known to be hazardous. Instead, they concluded that risks were low
or nonexistent. They fooled themselves, because the short-term rewards
blinded them to the long-term dangers.”12
In fact, this is a prime example of self-serving imagination
distorting historical perception, as described by Babbitt. What
Samuelson could have said is that Wall Street’s leaders—along with their
enablers in the think tanks, news media, and both political
parties—deceived themselves about the risks, so that they could deceive
others in exchange for millions of dollars in fees and bonuses without
having to face the truth of their actions. They did not want to see the truth.
In an earlier America infused with Christian culture, indulging the
desire for material things beyond a certain degree was considered
unacceptable, and all the more so if borrowing were required. Only
shysters or flimflam artists—certainly not upstanding merchants or
bankers—would encourage fellow citizens to buy what they plainly could
not afford. Respectable businesses would not think of facilitating such
purchases with loans. Yet now the “business model” for virtually the
entire economy has become dependent on immoderate practices previously
frowned upon. “Just do it.” Hardly a peep of protest has been uttered
by persons who are today known as conservatives. Indeed, many seem to
equate commercialism with conservatism.
Conservatives forgot the central truths which they had proclaimed and
upheld since Burke’s time a century and a half earlier. The
consequences of this “derailment” could not have been more tragic. First
of all, the neocons never could have succeeded in changing
conservatives and the GOP “against their respective wills,” as Irving
Kristol has boasted, if their will and imagination had not already been
moving in the direction of what Babbitt termed the “imperialistic”
personality.
Equally important, had it not been for this derailment conservatives
would have been among the most incisive critics of—rather than the
loudest cheerleaders for—the shoddy political and economic policies and
practices that have plunged this country into a trough of enormous
indebtedness and unfunded liabilities, massive trade imbalances, and
staggering budget deficits from which it may not recover for many
decades, if ever. It is becoming increasingly difficult to conceal from
Americans that they and their nation are getting poorer and that the
middle class is endangered.
If there is good news, it is that a recovery of genuine conservatism
may come sooner than an economic recovery. For nearly a quarter of a
century now, the National Humanities Institute has emphasized the moral
and cultural foundations of a good society. NHI has shown the central
role of the imagination and the arts in shaping the individual and
society. During most of those years that message seemed to fall largely
on deaf ears. Recently, a growing number in America and
abroad—especially the more reflective young writers and thinkers—have
taken up our theme, perhaps partly in reaction to the calamitous results
of not heeding NHI's message.
The intellectual and literary sources needed for a conservative
philosophical revival are available, however neglected they have been by
self-described conservatives. To get it right this time, conservatives
will have to give much closer, more serious attention to sometimes quite
demanding works of thought and imagination. Mind-numbing a prioristic
ideology must be abandoned. Those who pay only lip service to the higher
values that Burke called “the permanent part of their nature” will pay
only lip service to personal and constitutional restraint. That way lies
desolation and tyranny.
Notes
1. Mike Nizza, “Cheney Unconcerned by Iraq War’s Unpopularity,” The
Lede: Notes on the News –Blog on the Internet, New York Times, March 19,
2008. Available from:
http://thelede.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/03/19/cheney-
unconcerned-by-iraq-wars-unpopularity/.
2. Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1968 [1790]), 183.
3. Edmund Burke, A Letter from Mr. Burke to a Member of the French Assembly (Paris and London, 1791), 68-69.
4. John Dickinson, The Letters of Fabius (No. 3), in Paul L. Ford, ed., Pamphlets on the Constitution of the United States (New York: DaCapo Press, 1968), 163-216.
5. Irving Babbitt, Democracy and Leadership (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1979), 295.
6. Russell Kirk, “The Enduring Influence of Irving Babbitt,” in George A. Panichas and Claes G. Ryn, eds., Irving Babbitt in Our Time (Washington, DC: The Catholic University of America Press, 1986), 20.
7. Ibid., 21.
8. Ben J. Wattenberg, Fighting Words: A Tale of How Liberals Created Neo-Conservatism (New York: Thomas Dunne Books, 2008), 12.
9. Burke, Reflections, 90 (emphasis added).
10. Wilhelm Röpke, A Humane Economy: The Social Framework of the Free Market (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1971).
11. Claes G. Ryn, “The Decline of American Intellectual Conservatism,” Modern Age 49:4 (Fall 2007), 540.
12. Robert J. Samuelson, “Wall Street’s Unraveling,” The Washington Post, September 17, 2008, A19.
Joseph Baldacchino is president of the National Humanities Institute and editor of Humanitas.
