In 1962, Frank Meyer, a conservative thinker and the Books and Arts editor at National Review, drafted a memo on the key issues facing conservatives. Issue one: responsible conservatives needed to take leadership of the Right. Issue two: they had to magnify the movement through “United Front” tactics.
It’s a reasonably well-known memo among historians, mainly because it articulates the sometimes position the conservative intellectuals - the self described “responsible conservatives” - understood themselves to be in relation to the larger American Right. When I have read this memo, I have focused on the first half, which was about the need for responsible conservatives to develop communications with but also guiding authority over right-wing politicians of all stripes and the “hard right,” which, Meyer admitted, included “undoubtedly a strong element of know-nothingness.”
The delicate dance (or dance along the precipice) they had to maintain was to blunt the know-nothings (such as the John Birch Society and Gen. Edwin Walker) without alienating their followers. It was an error not to attack the know-nothings. Their extremism undercut the credibility of the American Right writ large, and the Conservative Movement. But attacking the know-nothing Right effectively split the right-wing coalition, hurting conservative chances at victory, and leading the know-nothings to see the responsible conservatives as tools of the left. It’s a familiar dilemma, and one that agonized the Conservative Movement intellectual set in the 1960s.
Eventually, the plan became to supplant the know-nothing institutions with more serious alternatives. One of Meyer’s specific suggestions - one that came to fruition after the 1964 Election - was to create an American Conservative Union (ACU) to rival the liberal Americans for Democratic Action. As a first order of business, the ACU had to decide what to do with members of the John Birch Society, and it almost collapsed at the first hurdle. It persisted through, though, and now the ACU is most famous for hosting the annual CPAC. I leave it to you, reader, to decide whether the responsible conservatives successfully supplanted the know-nothings.
The other part of the memo is, I think, less remarked upon. Partly because the first half lays out something so clearly and usefully for posterity. Partly because the back-half is a little technical and timebound.
In it, Meyer proposed a “United Front” approach to politics. He had once directed the Indiana-Illinois branch of the CPUSA’s education office and so was very familiar with this Leninist strategy. In fact, the Communist Party of China still openly use “united front work.”
The United Front approach is designed to attract support to the party using it, whether the Communist Party or Conservative Movement, while denying it to your foes. You do this by isolating part of the political environment and bringing it onside against your political foes, through the use of front organizations, slogans, wedge issues, or whatever cudgel is at hand. Through deliberate and cynical maneuvering, the party can assimilate or destroy its foes. Mao called it a “magic weapon.”
Meyer thought a united front approach could be the Conservative Movement’s pathway to power. Where Mao’s united front brought the proletariat together with the bourgeois stooges, Meyer’s would unite conservatives with liberals – including leaders – on specific wedge issues in order to hasten the crumbling of liberalism. This was the height of the Cold War, and Meyer thought foreign policy best for a united front, since high-profile liberal leaders were seen as so weak towards international communism. (A strident conservative assumption belied by Kennedy’s hawkishness, for example, or LBJ’s expansion of the Vietnam War, or Scoop Jackson’s good standing as a liberal.) Meyer cited conservative campaigns against Khrushchev’s visit to the United States, and the conservative campaign to support Katanga as examples of united front wedge issues.
Although he prioritized foreign policy, Meyer noted the need to look for domestic opportunities to create a united front. One he considered viable would be if there were egregious cases of bureaucracy limiting civil rights. Long-term, it was on domestic issues that the Conservative Movement would succeed.
As an aside, it’s fascinating, and I am not unique in pointing this out, to see the elements of communist influence in the history of conservatism. There were lots of important hard left to hard right defectors, including Meyer, Burnham and Chambers. Likewise, the hard-right faction of the Young Republicans explicitly learned their hardball approach to YR internal struggles from communist factional tactics. On an individual level, the intellectual and political leaps these men made from hard-left to hard-right showcase their extremity of thought, and their basic dissatisfaction - for varying reasons - with liberalism. On an organizational level, the compliment the Conservative Movement paid to communism related to the ways both were in a sense revolutionary movements.
Back to the united front. Meyer put the point in semi-Marxist jargon: conservatives must identify popular issues that motivate voters, but are objectively anti-liberalism.
He almost, but not quite, says conservatives need to heighten the contradictions of liberalism.
Once again, I really like this memo, because it makes Meyer’s perspective on the status and way forward for the Conservative Movement very clear. It’s an enlightening memo – but it’s not some secret ur-text of conservative strategy. I am not that sort of historian.
Nevertheless, I think Meyer putting in the Marxoid language he knew an instinctive conservative strategy. To be fair, perhaps simply a basic strategy of democratic politics. Any political movement will look for opportunities to win people to its coalition. But we can see how the Right strategically dwells on wedge issues that don’t necessarily hang together coherently as “conservatism.” Trans athletes in women’s sports, female boxers, DEI, academic plagiarism, gas stoves, all the absurd daily flare-ups of the culture war that suggest liberals want to take something away: subjectively popular, objectively anti-liberal. Thinking of them as instinctive front issues helps illuminate the dynamics of the Right.
The thing about the united front strategy is that the front issues or organizations are or become ultimately beholden to the partisan movement. Their core values end up being identical to the party’s. One of the critical front issues for the Conservative Movement - and I recognize there is a complex history here - has been the Pro-Life movement. A great many Pro-Lifers earnestly believe in stopping abortion because it takes a human life. It’s been an important conservative plank at least since the 1970s, although the conservative intellectual history on abortion is complex. But I would argue seamless garment of the (maximalist) Pro-Life argument is at odds with the accepted conservative positions on the death penalty, the parsimonious approach to welfare, and the at times hysterical response to COVID measures put in place to save lives. The consistent support the professional Pro-Life movement has given Donald Trump, despite his mixed positioning on abortion, is suggestive. Of course, this isn’t the full picture anti-abortion politics over the past 50 years; it’s a complex issue in which both major parties have become more polarized along ideological lines. Still, the lockstep manner in which the professional Pro-Life movement travels with the GOP looks to me like a group captured by the united front strategy. The same might be said of politicized evangelical groups.
>As an aside, it’s fascinating, and I am not unique in pointing this out, to see the elements of communist influence in the history of conservatism. There were lots of important hard left to hard right defectors, including Meyer, Burnham and Chambers.
While not part of the American Conservative Movement, Hans-Hermann Hoppe went from Marxism to Rothbardism to half-monarchism, simply because he wanted an intellectually rigorous system. Burnham was I think the same - he really did not like "the professors of the cocktail parties" whose opinions were more fashion and gossip and less precise analysis.
I dunno. In hindsight, the professors of the cocktail parties were kind of right? While a half-socialist, half-libertarian kind of stance, a welfare state without serious socialism does not make a lot of intellectual sense, the world does not always conform to the rigid ideologies of intellectuals. It seems it was pragmatic enough. Like how it was said the British Empire was made in a fit of absence of the mind, something similar can be said about the Western welfare state, there was no deep plan to rebuild society from the ground up, rather, just randomly addressing whichever problems seemed the most dire.
In a certain sense, that was conservative. In the Michael Oakeshott sense, perhaps Edmund Burke sense. If you would tell those guys you want more equality, they warn you against the dangers of ideology. But if you just want a social housing project to those particular people here, or banning the discrimination of that particular people there, they would be a lot more understanding.
Not only politicized evangelical groups, but the US Catholic hierarchy, as well. As far as I understand, Catholic teaching rejects much of the conservative movement, especially on economic matters and immigration. Catholic popular opinion is fairly closely aligned with general US popular opinion. But much of the US hierarchy has jumped the shark for the movement's priorities. They're not quite anti-immigration or pro-neoliberalism--they just a perfunctory emphasis their teachings in this area.