Conservatives or Counterrevolutionaries?

Notes toward defining the Conservative Movement

Definitions are valuable things. As are names. For my purposes, I tend to use the Right or right-wing to refer to thinkers, politicians, even ideas, that generally support or reinforce belief in or the maintenance of a hierarchy. I generally find Norberto Bobbio’s definition of the left/right spectrum accurate and useful. The Conservative Movement is a specific subset of the American Right: probably the dominant one over the past fifty years, but nonetheless time-bound one with particular institutional linkages, shibboleths, and images. It is broadly linked with Buckley, Goldwater, Reagan, and even Bush, and generally interested in libertarianism, traditionalism, anti-communism, and the American way. It’s certainly not the sum of the American Right (although people have pretended it was), and its boundaries are porous.

Having done some throat clearing, I would say we reflexively speak about the American Right and explicitly the Conservative Movement in terms of conservatives and conservatism. Is this devotion to conservatism actually earned, or has the Conservative Movement or the Right writ large sailed under a false banner, as they were accused of in the 1950s?

When the conservative movement emerged in the early-to-mid 1950s, there already was a group of intellectuals dedicated to the security and longevity of the mid-century political order from a self-consciously conservative perspective – the so-called New Conservatives. The men and women who formed the conservative movement blasted the New Conservatives as shills for Big Government and the New Deal Revolution.

What became the Conservative Movement has been conservative in name and often its rhetoric. At the same time it has been functionally counterrevolutionary – sometimes radically – often due to exaggerated assumptions about the world around it, and their opposition to implacable societal changes. The conservative movement always had a restorationist element that was never far from the surface.

There are many flavors of right-wing thought, or even conservatism – as we’ve seen in passing with Burnham, Jaffa, Chambers and even McGrath already. One way of getting at the distinction between conservative and counterrevolutionary, and unpacking the assumptions embedded in self-conscious conservative politics, is by considering two of the most explicit exponents of conservatism in the twentieth century English-speaking world. 

The first is Russell Kirk, whose magnum opus The Conservative Mind (1953) did much to make “conservatism” the dominant discourse of the American Right during the latter half of the twentieth century. Although, I argue, Kirk’s influence waned as he became more of a touchstone than active shaper of ideas and policy.

Kirk won some enduring influence through his key book and his cultivation of disciples who took seriously his prescriptions about the permanent things.

Kirk originally wanted to name his book The Conservative Rout. Writing after the Russian Revolution, the New Deal, and the Second World War, Kirk felt that for 150 years, “conservatives have yielded ground,” despite the odd rear-guard action. To some extent, he thought, no matter how “sound” they were, conservative ideas couldn’t resist the “unreasoning forces of industrialism, centralization, secularism, and the levelling impulse.” He gestured at the notion that the Anglo-American Whiggish tradition of conservatism he considered basically normative was in opposition to “unreasoning” modernity. It’s interesting he treated these as unreasoning – Kirk didn’t always think irrational positions were always wrong, as we will see – and as impulses. There is little room in Kirk’s outlook for people to intentionally innovate, urbanize, invest in government or simply uplift from their ancestral ways and homes.

Looking around for something hopeful to grasp on to, Kirk felt, anecdotally, the winds were changing.

Despite the disruptive forces of mass-communication, rapid transportation, industrial standardization, a cheap press, and Gresham's Law working in affairs of the mind, despite the radical effects of vulgarized scientific speculation and weakened private morality, despite the decay of family economy and family ties, most men and women in the twentieth century still feel veneration for what their ancestors have affirmed, and express a pathetic eagerness to find stability in a time of flux.

One source of stability was the American political order. Kirk, like other contemporary conservatives, worked hard to show the American Founding was, in fact, far from revolutionary, a conservative enterprise. And Kirk did not think the United States had undergone a revolution since its founding. The regime had not changed fundamentally.

In America, the Federal Constitution has endured as the most sagacious conservative document in political history; the balance of interests and powers still operates, however threatened by recent centralization; and almost no one advocates a radical revision of political establishments in America.

While Kirk hesitated to define conservatism ideologically. He nevertheless understood readers needed some articulation of its themes to navigate his enormous book. Plus, “If a conservative order is indeed to return, we ought to know the tradition which is attached to it, so that we may rebuild society.” So he distilled six principles, which are essentially the:

1. Belief in a divine or mystical order of life;

2. Affection for the variety of life;

3. Conviction that civilized society requires orders and classes;

4. Persuasion that property and freedom are inseparably connected, and that economic levelling is not economic progress;

5. Presumption in favor of tradition or even prejudice;

6. Presumption against change – although not necessarily reform.

One of Kirk’s rough contemporaries, and a major British conservative thinker, Michael Oakeshott, however did not think that “this disposition requires” the types of beliefs typically associated with conservatism “in order to make it intelligible.” Being skeptical about the capacity of politics and the people involved in it provided enough ammunition to be politically conservative, Oakeshott though. Despite this, he developed his own important articulation of the conservative disposition (“not a creed or a doctrine, but a disposition”) in an essay, “On Being Conservative” (1956).

I suspect Oakeshott’s influence on the Conservative Movement is largely cosmetic.

Oakeshott was a serious thinker. Even so, his definition of the conservative disposition is something like politicized or even aestheticized loss aversion. In perhaps the most famous passage of Oakeshott’s writing, he states:

To be conservative, then, is to prefer the familiar to the unknown, to prefer the tried to the untried, fact to mystery, the actual to the possible, the limited to the unbounded, the near to the distant, the sufficient to the superabundant, the convenient to the perfect, present laughter to Utopian bliss. Familiar relationships and loyalties will be preferred to the allure of more profitable attachments; to acquire and to enlarge will be less important than to keep, to cultivate and to enjoy; the grief of loss will be more acute than the excitement of novelty or promise. It is to be equal to one's own fortune, to live at the level of one's own means, to be content with the want of greater perfection which belongs alike to oneself and one's circumstances.

Notably, Oakeshott isn’t saying we favor some extant good against the chance of losing it. He prefers something precisely because it is present, at hand, and his – alongside recognizing the risk of loss of things we have or cherish. Oakeshott turns this into a proto-law of unintended consequences. Like Kirk, he distrusted change and thought hard about managing it. “The disposition to be conservative is, then, warm and positive in respect of enjoyment, and correspondingly cool and critical in respect of change and innovation.” Moreover, the conservative “is unadventurous.” It is the politics of someone whose identity and being is not bound up in politics.

The type of government Oakeshott favored was one that did not impose itself. A libertarianish outlook informed by the village green rather than the prairie, Oakeshott wanted a government that strictly delineated its role from that of civil society. The state must enforce agreed-upon laws and, at times, mediate between competing groups. But, as should be clear, Oakeshott set low horizons for the state. He rejected the practice of politics as divine order, preferring instead one of indifference, skepticism, and irony.

Michael Oakeshott and William F. Buckley, National Review’s 20th anniversary lecture, 1975.

In the 1950s, both men felt they represented a dying or at least repressed tradition. In their work on conservatism, Kirk and Oakeshott – like Nicolás Gómez Dávila – wrote to win converts, or awaken prospective converts to their true identity. “I've been reading Russell Kirk…to discover that I was born a conservative,” Guy Davenport wrote to a friend. As Perry Anderson notes, “Oakeshott’s declamations bear no relation to the tentative rhythm of a conversational style, such as one finds in Hume. What they are is rhetoric – a sustained exercise in the art of seduction, not of interlocution.”

In the United States, Kirk’s seductive words set the terms – for a while – in the Conservative Movement. Burke, tradition, “the permanent things,” and even conservatism itself became watchwords. Both Kirk’s critics and his rivals, however, questioned whether Burkean Anglo-Whiggery had much to do with America. Louis Hartz argued that without a landed aristocratic class or a peasantry, the United States was and would remain narrowly Lockean. Romantic conservatism had nothing to say to the American middle class. Meanwhile, every serious conservative thinker defined their political thought in contrast to Kirk. Whittaker Chambers’ letter here sets himself against “Beaconsfield,” which metonymically alludes to Edmund Burke, which probably means Burke as interpreted by Kirk. Frank Meyer criticized Kirk for not setting forth sufficient principles to repudiate the New Deal state. The Straussians thought Kirk shallowly aphilosophical. Willmoore Kendall rejected it as essentially un-American. And so on.

The point is, despite the Conservative Movement’s embrace of Kirk and the language of conservatism, there were many skeptics about its relevance to modern America. Part of what those critics found wanting was the implication that conservatism is merely maintaining the status quo (even if this wasn’t exactly what Kirk argued, his defense of prescription and suspicion of change could look that way). Even Oakeshott, the unadventurous conservative par excellence pushed his idea of conservatism beyond protecting what he had to a normative vision of a restrained state.

All of which raises the question, how can one be a conservative in the midst of – or worse, in the aftermath of – a revolution? As noted, Kirk suggested the American political order remained intact. But it rapidly became dogma among conservatives that the New Deal had fundamentally transformed the republic. Later others blamed Woodrow Wilson and the Progressive era. In general, conservatives’ catrastrophism has painted a picture of a rapidly deteriorating political order. You can’t be conservative on a moving train.

Here in the prospectus for launching National Review, the catastrophism is on display. The New Deal, in which a democratically elected genteel New Yorker arguably saved capitalism by adding the protections of the welfare state, is characterized not only as a revolutionary movement, but a “total revolution.” Kirk, William F. Buckley, and the other movement conservatives thought the time ripe to attack the entrenched New Deal.

One of the contradictions at the heart of American conservatism becomes clear. On the one hand, there is a celebration of prescription and suspicion of change. On the other, a total rejection of the modern state and a desire to essentially roll it back, or, for some, replace it with convoluted market-based systems. It possibly reflects a theory of change that assumes a linear understanding of change and time: we are to be deeply suspicious of changes moving forward, but to go backwards is not really change at all. Never mind that in reality, even in the 1950s the reversal of provisions or laws based in the New Deal would have required a dramatic upheaval.

On NR reader understood the implications early.

It seems many of the movement conservatives were odds with modernity and, when their generally hard-line anti-Communist foreign policy was factored in, incoherent. Most conservatives simultaneously wanted a Big Government foreign policy and the military Keynesianism it implies, but the governing structures and demographics of the early modern republic. But the era of the republican town had long since passed. What could it realistically tell us about how practical politics should occur in the second half of the twentieth century?

Except for a dalliance with the liberal Catholic intellectual Eugene McCarthy, Kirk staunchly supported the Republican Right, especially the isolationist Senator Robert Taft. He wrote speeches for Goldwater, supported and visited Nixon, and just before his death served as the largely honorary state chair of Pat Buchanan’s campaign in Michigan. Kirk lived life in the interstices, but his political record is generally down the line conservative Republican. After the War, the election of the Labour Government panicked Oakeshott. Per Anderson once again, “The peculiar vehemence of Oakeshott’s refusal of any idea of ‘political engineering’, no matter how piecemeal, as a malignant dream that could only be coercive and abortive, came from the ordeal of Labour rule and talk of Labour planning.”

Kirk claimed conservatism “is not a fixed and immutable body of dogma, and conservatives inherit from Burke a talent for re-expressing their convictions to fit the time.” If true, this would be a small bore sort of conservatism. One that insisted upon the limits of the state, the limits of politics, and, as part of that, the limits also of turning the clock back. Such a conservatism would probably always be in tension with the size and scope of government, but broadly accept its roles and functions as necessary. It would be deflationary in culture wars. On the grand scale of time, it would probably “lose,” from a right-wing perspective. Although it’s worth remembering conservatives in the 1950s thought Communist triumph abroad and socialist ones at home was the possible – even probable – future, so it is worth questioning both the Right’s overheated assumptions and declension narratives.

In any case, this is not the conservatism we got. Despite their grounding in Kirk, the Conservative Movement’s the-hour-is-late talk of revolution did much to set the stage for the gradual and still partial shift to the Right’s counterrevolutionary rhetoric. The paleoconservatives – the embittered heirs of failed traditionalism, many with longings for the antebellum South – were critical in this transition from implicitly counterrevolutionary assumptions to explicit calls for counterrevolution. What changed was not necessarily political, although movement conservatives hated the Great Society. Rather, where once William F. Buckley could call on a conservative culture to discipline Yale for being too liberal, by the 1980s and certainly the 1990s, paleoconservatives recognized the dominance of the white, Christian, middle class culture had eroded. Ronald Reagan was not enough to stop the sexual and other revolutions. As Pat Buchanan put it:

Buchanan’s advisor and fellow paleocon (and yet another far-right Tar Heel) spelled out the new realities as he saw them in an essay on the Conservative Movement as “Beautiful Losers.”

The earliest conservatives were closer to actual, bloody revolutions. They were perhaps less eager to apply the literal concept to their situation. In Buchanan, Francis, and so much of the right-wing intellectual establishment today, you see generational frustration at the movement’s perceived failure to achieve its goals, which, once again, means primarily its cultural ones. Of course, cultural counterrevolution is tremendously difficult short of an exigent cataclysm. The easy way out, so to speak, demands significant and coercive state power. It’s this reason, I think, we see the fetishization of certain authoritarians past and present.

It is hard to see what could possibly unite sufficient Americans in some counterrevolution against – what? The modern state? Some inchoate regime? In the past, the Conservative Movement has drawn on the mythic American political tradition and anti-Communism to some success. But the Lockean liberal elements in the American past lend themselves to liberal cultural politics as much as small government – as Kamala Harris’s evocation of freedom shows. There are right-wing influencers who talk about fighting communism, but it’s hard not to scoff at them as anachronistic blowhards. Anti-progressivism is a potent motivator, especially when reduced to simply “anti-Woke.” But its thin gruel, with none of the thick attachments surely needed to effect a cultural transformation. Racism is probably more effective than we want to believe as a political force, yet also verboten and counterproductive. Few people want to see themselves as racists. And while Christian nationalism may motivate some, it’s probably overhyped and would split the right-wing voter base. No one likes scolds.

Insofar as Donald Trump is a successful vehicle for counterrevolution, I think it is due to his vacuity. He conveys a protean mix of all of the above, with sufficient deniability and authenticity simultaneously. Trump is an ideological cipher who codes in so many ways he creates his own unique push/pull factors and permission structures.

Michael Oakeshott remained outside the Conservative Movement. He was one of those European professors movement conservatives enjoyed quoting to demonstrate their intellectual sophistication. National Review hosted Oakeshott for its 20^th anniversary lecture at Hunter College. Editor and conduit to the academic world Jeffrey Hart recalled Oakeshott delivering such an abstruse presentation people thought it was a prank. Following the speech, Oakeshott hit on women, introducing himself as “Mickey.” How’s that for conservative praxis?