Tea at Trianon: The History and Future of Conservatism

John Wilson Croker on Marie-Antoinette

"We have followed the history of Marie Antoinette with the greatest diligence and scrupulosity. We have lived in those times. We have talked with some of her friends and some of her enemies; we have read, certainly not all, but hundreds of the libels written against her; and we have, in short, examined her life with– if we may be allowed to say so of ourselves– something of the accuracy of contemporaries, the diligence of inquirers, and the impartiality of historians, all combined; and we feel it our duty to declare, in as a solemn a manner as literature admits of, our well-matured opinion that every reproach against the morals of the queen was a gross calumny– that she was, as we have said, one of the purest of human beings."

~from History of the Guillotine by John Wilson Croker, 1844

Edmund Burke on Marie-Antoinette

"It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the queen of France, then dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely there never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she had just begun to move in, glittering like a morning star full of life and splendor and joy. Oh, what a revolution....Little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fall upon her, in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honor and of cavaliers! I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards, to avenge even a look which threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone; that of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded...."

~Edmund Burke, October 1790

Sunday, October 15, 2023

The History and Future of Conservatism

From The Public Discourse:

George H. Nash: I should begin by saying that the subject of my book is the conservative intellectual movement in America since 1945. The book is not primarily focused on political figures during that period, like Senator Taft, Senator Goldwater, or Ronald Reagan, but more on the intellectuals, the scholars, the publicists, the journalists, the foundation people to some extent. The people who created what I call an intellectual movement with political aspirations and ramifications. And I think one of the most important things to remember, when considering the history of American conservatism since the Second World War, is that it is not and has never been univocal. It has never been a monolith. It has evolved into a coalition of different elements that had different origins and trajectories, but which came together in the 1950s, partly under the leadership of William F. Buckley Jr. and his magazine National Review, which became the flagship journal for conservatism for a couple of generations and is still important today. It acted as a kind of command center for those who were trying to devise strategies for advancing conservative principles and conservative political philosophy and social policy. There has never been a period when all has been serenity and suddenly we woke up and found Donald Trump on the front stage. There have been many moments of conflict and contention and efforts at definition.

What does it mean to be a conservative? What does it mean to be a conservative in America? These were recurrent questions. In fact, there were several components of what we think of, broadly speaking, as the modern American Right or conservatism. [I trace these intellectual strains] in my book but in summary form they are as follows:

The first grouping was the classical liberals, or as we tend to say today, the libertarians, who were in revolt, as all these elements were, against what they saw as a threat from the Left. In the case of the libertarians, the danger that they perceived was from the advance of New Deal-style liberalism and the massive growth of the welfare state, or what we might today even call the administrative state. They were defending free markets, capitalism, and private property, against what they saw as this peril from the Left.

Simultaneously and concurrently, a rather separate grouping of conservative intellectuals emerged who became known as the traditionalists. People like Russell Kirk, Richard Weaver, Peter Viereck, and Robert Nisbet were among the early luminaries. Their argument was that liberalism was a disintegrative force in Western society in the 20th century. It was dissolving the social, moral, and religious substrate and foundations of Western civilization, thereby creating a vacuum in which people were searching for meaning and finding it in totalitarian ideologies on the far Left and Right such as Nazism, fascism, and communism. The traditionalists were concerned with bolstering the spiritual and intellectual defenses of the West, including what we now call the Judeo-Christian tradition.

Third, there developed in the same decade or so after World War II a group of people, the Cold Warriors, some of them ex-radicals and even ex-Communists, who were opposed to what they saw as the greatest force for evil in the modern world: Communism, and what Reagan called “the evil empire.” The Soviet Union, headquartered in Moscow, was to them the center of a worldwide network of implacable revolutionaries seeking to overthrow freedom, tradition, and the democratic regimes of the West.

These three groups coalesced around National Review, but they were not all in the same communities of discourse. They were people who came from different backgrounds and read different books, but suddenly found themselves in league against a perceived enemy on the Left. To them, it appeared that the Left—whether socialists, progressives, liberals, or communists—was collectively a threat to what they held dear. And in the case of Communism, they could all agree on resisting it because Communism was a threat to both religious faith and to libertarian values. Anti-communism was something that nearly everyone on the Right could share. And this became a crucial cement for an otherwise disparate group of people who did not have the same intellectual backgrounds and systems of thought.

Quite early on, it became necessary to bring these groups together in an enterprise that entailed more than just sloganeering, or complaining about the drift of the times, or standing athwart history yelling “Stop!” as Buckley famously put it in the opening issue of National Review. They had to ask themselves, “What do we believe?”

What do conservatives wish to conserve? Now, they were being called “conservative” by the late 1950s because of the success in 1953 of Russell Kirk’s magnum opus, The Conservative Mind. That volume really pinned a label on this rather nebulous constellation of people. And it also undermined the liberal sense of superiority: the notion that only liberalism was an intelligent person’s point of view. [The term conservative] provided gravitas and a sense of identity to many people on the Right who had hitherto called themselves classical liberals and individualists. (Read more.)