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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.