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    The Death of Intellectual Conservatism

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    I was a conservative from roughly 2004 - 2011. At only 29 years old, that was a very significant amount of time and a very critical point of time for forming intellectual ideas.

    I was on a bunch of drugs most of that time too, as many of the readers and founders of this blog know well. That may very well have had an impact. Nevertheless, I read a great deal of conservative literature and genuinely believed in it.

    I still prize many of the books I read - works like Robert Nisbet's Quest for Community. Nisbet's book is still one of my favorites - I've mentioned it in my monthly interviews with Michael Maiello when he has asked me for examples of conservative thought that progressives should consider. Nisbet wrote in the aftermath of the two world wars and said that the rise of both fascism and communism were answers to the innate human need for community. I think that, if one were studying a course on postwar literature, that would fit right next to Man's Search For Meaning.

    Community had traditionally been answered by the church and other social institutions and the collapse of that community led to fascism and communism. His thesis made more than perfect sense in the 1950s:

    “Other and more powerful forms of association have existed, but the major moral and psychological influences on the individual’s life have emanated from the family and local community and the church. Within such groups have been engendered the primary types of identification: affection, friendship, prestige, recognition. And within them also have been engendered or intensified the principal incentives of work, love, prayer, and devotion to freedom and order.”  

    One documentary about World War One by Catholic News Service explains that the rise of both communism and fascism came out of a world in which the institutions governing most of history had collapsed. As one commentator says, after World War One, there was a sense something "had been lost."

     

     

    The idea that the loss of these human institutions caused human disaster was far too potent a hypothesis.

    Fascism and communism arose in the aftermath promising very different things. Communism promised a utopia completely divorced from what had gone before - with religion and the market both shed away. Fascism provided a past oriented form of the same thing - instead of pushing toward a utopian future, fascism pushed toward a utopian past that may or may not have actually existed.

    Both fascism and communism killed masses of people on levels unimaginable in any time prior. The aftermath, in the United States - the sole country left relatively untouched by the carnage and holocausts, logically gave birth to a generation of conservative and libertarian thinkers who rejected the grand schemes that brought the world to the edge and still existed in the Soviet Union, China and the Korean peninsula. The intellectual climate in the 1950s was very healthy considering the limiting dimensions of how we often perceive that decade - Whitaker Chambers, Hannah Arendt, the aforementioned Nisbet and even Ayn Rand (who I don't personally like but who certainly was influential) all paved the way toward understanding the new world we were in. 

    During the time that Nisbet wrote Quest for Community, Dwight Eisenhower, one of the greatest presidents in American history in my opinion, took overt steps toward desegregation, built our modern transportation infrastructure, defended Social Security and the GI Bill and warned us of the burgeoning "military industrial complex." Eisenhower also destroyed the libertarian notion that social programs always necessarily lead to the totalitarianism described above - his presidency was filled with both new ones and the defense of old ones. Those programs became a part of the package for American society as opposed to some sort of totalitarian mandate. Even if from a narrow mindset like that of the John Birch Society, such things were "communist," the social projects were without the hate-fueled utopian impulses of both fascism and communism - they were built to integrate a country with one of humanity's most diverse populations in history. And the vision worked! The little infrastructure we still have in this country was created in that era.

    The modern notion of conservative took shape during that era - in the aftermath of fascism and communism and with half the world dominated by the latter, notions of "individual liberty," "limited government" and civil society took shape as a retort to what had just devoured most the world. Faced with two conservative entities taking shape in the aftermath of WWII and the start of the Cold War, the Eisenhower moderate mold and the Joseph McCarthy/John Birch Society, William F. Buckley took the former and purged the JBS from their movement.

    There are people like Eisenhower in the Republican Party still - Ohio Governor John Kasich's rhetoric of inclusion stood out sharply in the Republican debates - he boasted of expanding Medicaid in his state to the chagrin of conservatives in his own party. Kentucky senator Rand Paul made many attempts to appeal to wide demographics, including a very brave call for demilitarizing the police.

    They are on the fringe, however. Paul and Kasich aren't anywhere near Donald Trump in poll numbers. The sort of person who is traditionally on the fringes is now Republican frontrunner, with the moderates unheard in the background. I doubt how many voters even know who they are - Trump is completely "dominating" them, as Josh Marshall put it. Many conservatives I talk to have conspiracies that the Clinton team collaborated with Trump to derail the Republican party but Trump wouldn't be domineering everyone like this unless Republican voters liked his message.

    William F. Buckley had the power and authority to purge the John Birch Society from the conservative movement but his modern equivalent, Jonah Goldberg, has no such authority. He clearly doesn't like Trump from his writing but he can't stop a man who will buy his way in to power. Him, Matt Lewis, Rand Paul, Bill O'Reilly, Megyn Kelly are all helpless in challenging his candidacy as a hatemonger like him is what GOP voters clearly really want. And what does it say of "limited government" that the end result is such a man amassing wealth and using it dominate people?

    Instead they are in the shadow of the sort of person who would build a statue of himself in the middle of a city and make someone else build and pay for it. We used to send Marines to free people from guys like that - now we have one as the likely candidate of a major political party. It makes me wonder if what I thought was conservative all those years was even a thing and if that crowd's not just largely now people looking for someone to hate and very little more than that.

    Comments

    Trump is not a new phenomenon. Barry Goldwater was  championing State's Rights. Martin Luther King said that while Goldwater might not be a racist himself, he would curry favor with racists to gain votes. King said that a person of good conscience could not vote for Goldwater.

    William F Buckley Jr. openly criticized the Civil Rights movement. Richard Nixon and Lee Atwater crafted the Southern Strategy. The segregationist theme was put in print in the "National Review". Ronald Reagan began his campaign in Philadelphia, Mississippi, the site where three Civil Rights workers were slain. Reagan had a state's rights message. GW Bush hoodwinked homophobic black pastors with a faith-based initiative, then abandoned the program after stealing their votes. The current GOP is focused on voter suppression and has no plans to help repair the Voting Rights Act. 

    Trump is the modern GOP. The party doesn't want its message put in such blunt terms, but it is the true message of the GOP.


    I certainly agree that the GOP made its own bed, but there is nonetheless a distinction between the old conservative intellectuals and contemporary racists and xenophobes. Buckley and Goldwater opposed civil rights legislation on libertarian grounds. Goldwater and, later, Nixon and Reagan, welcomed racists, xenophobes, and religious fundamentalists as foot soldiers in their anti-tax, small-government army. But those foot soldiers have grown into a major power in the party, while remaining intellectuals have been marginalized. So yes, Buckley and Goldwater were ultimately responsible for Trump, but they would nonetheless be appalled by his popularity in the Republican Party.


    So yes, Buckley and Goldwater were ultimately responsible for Trump, but they would nonetheless be appalled by his popularity in the Republican Party.

    Don't know much about Goldwater but Buckley was basically the kind of moneyed snob that Trump really gets a kick out of being richer than...



    Yeah, he hated those guys. He also opposed segregation, though as far as I know, he never publicly disavowed racists like Pat Buchanan.


    I agree with rmrd.  I used to lament this as well, often citing Buckley and the old National Review but have since learned that my memories of such things were more than a bit whitewashed.

    Really, who is there left to pine for from a conservative intellectual movement?  The guy who wrote The Closing of the American Mind?


    Great question.


    History repeats itself. Goldwater attracted the racists. Trump attracts the racists.

    http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/08/31/the-fearful-and-the-frustrated

    Nobody in the GOP leadership is willing to call out Trump 

    Goldwater got Jackie Robinson and most of the other blacks left in the GOP in 1964 to abandon the party. Robinson was vocal in his disgust. Unfortunately, those blacks left in the GOP today are to weak to voice any real opposition to Trump. They get labeled as"Uncle Toms" by some.

    Note that the "Uncle Tom" label refers to the servile character portrayed in many  staged versions of the book. In the book, Tom was a devout Christian who died rather than reveal the position of two escaped slaves (belated spoiler alert). There is no black in the GOP with the moral courage of the character in the original book version of "Uncle Tom's Cabin". I personally don't call them "Tom's" because Tom was heroic.


    The Southern Poverty Law Center says Trump has "White Nationalist Positions". The last time this was seen was with Republican Pat Buchanan. Buchanan was more careful in his wording and considered an "intellectual".

    http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/trump-white-nationalist-positions_55...


    When I saw the words "intellectual conservatism" , I thought you might talk about Michael Oakeshott, Leo Strauss, or perhaps Francis Fukuyama. They don't agree with each other about how we should talk about history but they all put a high premium on preserving the means at hand over reaching for methods that dissolve society's existing structure.

    I suppose Hannah Arendt could be put in that category if one ignored her caustic analysis of why the holocaust happened.

    Nesbit makes some good points but is weak beer compared to Ivan Illich. I prefer communitarians who work from the inside out.


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