The high-end blogosphere has been aflutter over "Conservatism is Dead," the latest of Sam Tanenhaus' many long elegies in The New Republic for conservatism as a movement and an ideology. But no one has recalled, much less revisited, his dirge in a lecture at the heavily neo-conservative American Enterprise Institute in November 2007. Perhaps inadvertently, he put his finger then on American conservatism's original sin.
Tanenhaus, who edits The New York Times Book Review and the "Week in Review" section of that paper, began by noting that while American conservatives had once chafed under the New Deal's soulless managerialism, they'd allowed ex-leftist conservatives such as James Burnham and Irving Kristol to lead them on a long march through institutions that they despised, in an effort to build a managerial class of their own.
In Tanenhaus' telling, Kristol showed conservative business and political leaders that New Deal managerialism had bred a liberal "new class" of academic, think-tank, and media experts who trafficked in policy intellection more than in policymaking, but with significant consequences for the latter. He counseled conservatives to outdo liberals at this game in order to rescue liberal education and liberal democracy for the kind of capitalism and politics conservatives could profit from and enjoy. They might even restore virtue to Progressive reforms and secure the enlightened "national greatness" conservatism of British Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli, whose American admirers would soon include Kristol's son Bill and Tanenhaus himself.
Jim Sleeper is a writer and teacher on American civic culture and politics and a lecturer in political science at Yale.
He is the author of The Closest of Strangers: Liberalism and the Politics of Race in New York (W.W. Norton, 1990) and Liberal Racism (Viking, 1997, Rowman & Littlefield, 2002). Kristol's auditors took his advice seriously enough to compound American conservatism's original sin - its incapacity to reconcile its yearning for ordered, sacred liberty with its obeisance to every riptide of the global capitalism that's destroying the nation, the republic, the values, and the customs that conservatives claim to cherish.
Through lavishly-funded initiatives such as New York City's Manhattan Institute, campus organizations, and private ventures such as Rupert Murdoch's journalism, conservatives generated a parody of the liberal "new class" - an on-message machine of talkers, squawkers, apparatchiks, and greedheads that Slate's Jacob Weisberg dubbed "the Con-intern."
The Con-intern's social ideas resembled Margaret Thatcher's more than Disraeli's. They were driven by a capitalist materialism that was as soulless as the Marxist dialectical materialism of their nightmares. That gave a false ring to conservative rhapsodies about civic-republican virtue. It glossed the displacement of the liberal counterculture with a degrading over-the-counter culture. It ignored conservatism's displacement of the New Deal's supposed "make-work" programs with the non-response to Katrina. It countered the "Vietnam syndrome" with the worst foreign-policy blunder in American history. Beneath the Con-intern's civic chimes and patriotic bombast, the civic republican spirit writhed in silent agony, forsaken by conservatism itself.
Tanenhaus knows all this, and at AEI he hinted that Irving Kristol knows it, too, but has become cynical and followed the money: "One could look over the trajectory of Mr. Kristol's brilliant career and see that he's in a different place in the 1990s than he was in the 1970s," Tanenhaus said, recalling that Kristol used to cite Matthew Arnold's cultural visions against Milton Friedman's vindications of greed.
Tanenhaus' wistful pleas for a politics of decency made me wonder then what conservatism could do besides push profits and spew guns, racism, sexism, and war to distract us all from the heartbreaking dissolution of the civic-republican ethos of getting along in the pursuit of a common good, of handling our losses without developing longstanding grudges.
Without question, the Con-intern has destroyed a lot of trust. While Tanenhaus stopped short of saying so in 2007, many conservatives of reputed discernment and high purpose had been sucked into the maelstrom, including the Kristols, the Podhoretzes (Norman and Norman's son John), the humiliatingly honor-obsessed Kagans (Thucydides scholar Donald and his sons Robert, the grasping power historian, and Frederick [the Great], an AEI military strategist), and the sophistical New York Times columnist David Brooks.
Tanenhaus did plead for a conservatism of virtue and moral poise. He credited "my hero Bill Buckley" for pushing anti-Semitic and other extremists out of the movement. He cautioned against trying to destroy liberalism with "a language of accusations, ... of treason at home and of leftists who have the same values as Osama Bin Laden." He called for a culturally textured, sophisticated conservative critique and assailed "magazines I used to write for, such as Commentary, which accused the New York Times magazine, my newspaper, of violating the Espionage Act because it published an article exposing a surveillance program. That's revenge," he said.
But there was no such moral poise or textured critique in the preponderance of liberal-bashing book reviews that Tanenhaus was running in the Times. And the person in his AEI audience with whom he seemed most engaged - referring to him respectfully at least four times - was David Frum, a former Bush speechwriter who has sought to roll back the welfare state and a conservatism like Disraeli's that would have some care for the poor, but apparently is now reconsidering.
Tanenhaus invoked Lionel Trilling's distinction between an honorable sincerity that's anchored in faithfulness to a culture and a phony, individualist "authenticity" that reflects the narcissism in modern liberalism. He didn't mention Trilling's observation that, against even the vapid liberalism of his time, American conservatism had become a set of "irritable mental gestures which seek to resemble ideas." In response to a question from AEI vice president Henry Olsen, Tanenhaus mentioned Whittaker Chambers' observation to Buckley that, as Tanenhaus paraphrased it, "You can't build a clear conservatism out of capitalism because capitalism disrupts culture."
Well, what about that? Surely markets should be honored only in their place, and there are occasions when the polity must be sovereign over the economy. New Deal "liberal" managers knew that that requires a republican vigilance that profit-maximizing corporations, as much as big government, inevitably try to subvert. Asked by historian Michael Kazin to explain the prospects for a small-government conservatism that's still tied to big government, including a military operation that's a virtual welfare state for its participants, Tanenhaus responded, "I'd be interested to hear what David Frum has to say on that," confessing himself a "total ignoramus about globalization issues."
The poignancy of Tanenhaus' predicament reminds us that conservatism's original sin lies not in its bombastic and noxious neo-conservative interlopers, accelerants of republican decay though they may be, but in the tragic nature of American conservatism itself.
When conservatives vow to rescue liberal education and democracy from liberals, they mean sincerely to defend a classical, 18th-century liberalism that balances individuals' rights to life, liberty, and property with individuals' responsibilities as republican citizens to rise sometimes above narrow self-interest, to act on shared moral commitments and sentiments.
Conservatives know that a balanced society, like a whole person, strides forward on both a left foot of social education and security - without which conservatives' cherished individuality couldn't flourish - and a right foot of irreducibly individual freedom and responsibility - without which even the best social engineering will turn persons in to clients, cogs, or worse. Society protects and nourishes the individual flame, but it cannot light it and should not try to extinguish it.
One's readiness or failure to light that flame originates in faith or natural law, which even a covenanted society may honor but cannot itself create or, ultimately, control. Conservatives charge, rightly, that many liberals have lost sight of this sublime truth and have over-emphasized public provision, swelling the left foot and hobbling everyone's stride.
Few elite liberals have a credible answer to this. Too many of them have done too well by the corporate capitalist system to attack its growing inequities with more than symbolic, moralistic gestures. Yet they can't bring themselves to defend it wholeheartedly, either. Sensitive to individual rights and sufferings, they try to strengthen the left foot of social provision without strengthening personal responsibility. For that they rely on outside incubators of the virtues and beliefs which the liberal state and free markets need but by themselves cannot nourish or enforce.
But most of the social mayhem rising around us is driven by the seductions and stresses of corporate consumer marketing and employment and of a capitalism that only opportunistically invokes John Locke's Christian strictures, Adam Smith's theory of the moral sentiments, or a civic-republican nationalism that might reasonably be elevated by serious "liberal education."
Instead of taking these things as seriously as they claim to, conservatives careen back and forth between conflicting loyalties to a national-security state and to a post-nationalist global capitalism that dissolves republican virtue far more than terrorism has done: There is such a thing as "economic violence." It does eviscerate the villages that raise the children. Wall Street does subvert Main Street and morals.
The follies of Marxist ideologues have left a taboo against criticizing capitalism, whose twilight they'd announced a few times too often. But aren't we now in a relationship to capitalism analogous to that of American colonials to the British monarchy early in the 1760s? Colonials then still ardently professed affection for and dependence on the crown, even as they began to sense that their own sovereignty and dignity couldn't be reconciled with the empire's. They wound up risking their lives, fortunes and sacred honor to rearrange that.
Similarly, something basic will have to change relatively soon in how we configure and charter the vast profit-making combines that are degrading social equality and the rhythms and security of our daily lives and incapacitating many Americans as cultural actors and, hence, as free citizens.
Tanenhaus tried fruitlessly in his lecture to square the circle of deceit that has drawn around us by the yawping brigades of conservative opportunists and partisans spawned by Irving Kristol and others. At AEI he presented himself - a bit disingenuously, I think, considering his accomplishments at the Times - as a learned, unassuming fellow who would lead no one anywhere. No wonder that other conservatives think that ex-liberals like Tanenhaus and, for that matter, Irving Kristol, who came to conservatism offering strategic savvy and rhetorical cover for excellent adventures, have only worsened its plight.
Conservatives and liberals alike need to rediscover the American civic-republican tradition and to sacrifice some comforts to revive it. A few years ago I sketched that challenge in an essay about a long-forgotten uncle of the Connecticut anti-war Senate candidate Ned Lamont who had a "conservative" sensibility that many liberals are the poorer for missing. And I waited for Tanenhaus to admit that conservatives can't reconcile their keening for an ordered, sacred liberty with their obeisance to every riptide of a capitalism that's dissolving the republic, values, and customs they claim to cherish.
Now, in The New Republic, he has admitted it. And he has resisted commendably his old temptation to blame liberals. Conservatives who dine out too often on liberals' follies forget how to cook for themselves and the whole society, and Tanenhaus has been a poor chef at the Times, as I showed in The Nation. But I hope that his coming biography of William F. Buckley, Jr. will equal his delicious one of Whittaker Chambers. And I hope that he, Frum, Brooks, and other erstwhile neo-cons who are now very busy trying to re-position themselves will take time to re-ground themselves in presumptions less damaging to the American civil-society and republic.
Comments
Since when do the so-called "neoconservatives" have anything to do with conservatism?
Ah, I see Mr Sleeper writes about somebody called "American conservatives", who are in fact just free-market liberals or even libertarians.
I have recently attended a lecture on Edmund Burke given at the AEI by Gertrude Himmelfarb.
It was really amusing to see her using the most cautious words to explain to the surprised "American conservatives" gathered in the room that Burke actually did not really like the idea of democracy. That Burke actually opposed and abhorred the idea of democracy...
Of course conservatives (as opposed to "American conservatives") are sceptical if not hostile to capitalism, financial speculators and the globalisation promoted by them. Of course conservatives (as opposed to "American conservatives") are highly suspicious of democracy. And of course conservatives (as opposed to "American conservatives") do not "cherish individualism" and "liberty" as Mr Sleeper believes.
As Mr. Continental European Catholic noted at the start of his message but seems to have forgotten before he reached the end, Mr. Sleeper made quite clear that he was writing about American conservatives and therefore did not say or imply that British or other conservatives cherish "individualism" and "liberty" in any (American) liberal understanding of those terms.
Non-American conservatives have different conundra to resolve, not to mention self-contradictions that cannot be mediated by faith. But that was not a proposition Mr. Sleeper put forward or pursued in this column about U.S. neo-conservatives and their departure from the American conservative movement.
Also of interest may be Mr. Sleeper's concurrent column, in Talking Points Memo, entitled "The Pity of It All" and available at
http://tpmcafe.talkingpointsmemo.com/2009/02/10/the_pity_of_it_all/index.php
Jim Sleeper
I very much like the suggestion that civic republicanism needs to be rediscovered by right and left. I think that the two great failures of the post cold war -- represented by Iraq and the financial crisis -- will be seriously faced by enough on both left and right that there is a real chance for a wise, open, de-gigantified civic republicanism to emerge. After all, much of the left embraced the market after '89, just as much of a traditionally isolationist conservatism embraced neo-con foreign adventuring. Iraq and the Economy shout out to us how badly false our post-89 moral and ideological maps had become. In both cases, serious re-appraisal is in order. And, as we come out of the "denial" phase on both mistakes, new attempts at constructing a "best of" will be made. Non-manageerlist and yet collectivist; libertarian yet non-corporate; culturally rich yet not exclusive; open yet autonomous. These are not oppositions---there is a path.
tony
I become more and more confused what a "conservative" actually is, let alone a "neo-conservative". As labels, they seem to be used by many (I do not here accuse the author of the column above) as a convenient shorthand excuse for failure of precise definition or thought. The picture appears to be worse in the USA than Europe; in the USA all are apparently conservatives, and "liberal" is now meaningless, having become a term of mere abuse.
Speaking of the economic axis, the conservative is usually pictured as belonging somewhere on the free-market, unregulated, right wing, as opposed to regulated or planned collectivism of whatever kind (note to right wing polemicists; Marxism is not the only collectivism, just as Thatcherism is not the only free market-ism). On the control axis, the conservative is supposedly free to wander between autocracy and liberty; in reality, most are in practice autocratic or very autocratic - probably a natural conclusion of their free-marketism; control is necessary when you use the market to enrich one small sector massively at the expense of the bulk of the population. I know that there are some conservative "libertarians", but most seem to be marginal lunatics in the mountains with squirrel rifles.
I suppose I am making a plea for two things; the first is more clarity in explaining precisely what agenda we're talking about; what particular variety of -ism and what it means. Only with greater clarity can we distinguish between the traditional conservative, the neo-conservative (and what broad churches they are) and any yet newer variety.
The second is that if capitalism is to evolve or die, or to be challenged by some new paradigm in addition to collectivism, or divide into yet more competing varieties, as well as a clear definition of the paradigm or variety we need a new geometry to replace the traditional left-right model, just as that model only began to make sense when market capitalism was first invented.
I suspect the control or autocracy/liberty axis will remain, but perhaps in the future we need to consider a higher number of dimensions than two.
Clear skies!
If the 'new class' being talked of is analogous with Milovan Djilas' use (even his invention) of the term then we can only be talking of a corrupt and self-perpetuating political and social elite that overthrew and replaced an equally unpalatable hierachy, but promised change. Is this valid? For the point being made by Djilas was that nothing had really changed, certainly not for the vast bulk of the population still debarred from the upper strata.
As for comparisons between Thatcher and Disraeli, there is a term - less frequently used since the advent of New Labour - that was often employed to describe a Conservative with a social conscience. That term was, 'One Nation Tory'. Thatcher washed away such ideas; her attitude encapsulated perhaps in the frightening remark: "There is no such thing as society", merely greedy individuals in the aggregate. Unfortunately, and confusingly, 'the Tories' long ago became journalistic shorthand for 'the Conservative and Unionist Party'.
I say "confusingly" because where this debate seems to take us is back to the old - and now little understood - distinction between conservative or Conservative and Tory. If the latter label were used more correctly this side of the Atlantic and understood better in the US it might make life, and political commentating, even name-calling, a lot easier.
A few very interesting observations here prompt me to add a few more of my own. In response to Jac Llosin, I think that the term "new class," as Irving Kristol urged it upon American conservatives, was a more colloquial, perhaps euphemistic term, referring to the chattering classes, including academics, whom conservatives perceived to be hopelessly "liberal" in the American, big-government sense of the term.
In response to Michael Calder, American liberals came to believe, after the Great Depression and via Roosevelt and the New Deal, that there can be neither communal solidarity nor Lockean individual liberty without government intervention to shore up both individual rights and the minimum sustenance that saves people from becoming so "necessitous," in T.H. Marshall's term, that they are no longer really free. Liberals in America therefore defend not only individual rights but what they consider the economic underpinnings of liberal rights. In that sense, they have sometimes been akin to Labourites, not to conservatives. They are not "liberals" in the continental and European sense.
Most conservatives in America have remained classical, free-market, bourgeois (or petty-bourgeois) liberals, angry at big-government social engineering. They defend of a somewhat libertarian, free-market strain that they connect to the American Lockean, entrepreneurial spirit. At the same time, though, many conservatives are civic republicans or even Burkean, "great melody" communitarians of a certain sort.
When Thatcher said, "There is no society," she surprised American conservatives (except the diehard liberatarians) almost as much as she shocked and offended American liberals. Ronald Reagan, that spinner of civic-republican myths, would never have said what she did. Ironically, it was American liberals who were successfully cast by Reagan in the popular mind as sterile, bureaucratic destroyers of social solidarity.
The main reason for this was that American liberals were extending social provision to a black "underclass" that conservatives believed would never become self-sustaining in the Lockean sense, let alone solidaristic in any civic-republican sense. For anyone really interested in this matter of how racism derailed both "liberals" and "conservatives" in America, I'll commend my own The Closest of Strangers: Liberalism and the Politics of Race in New York. (W.W. Nortion, 1990). I got a lot of unwanted support from neo-cons because I argued that American liberals and leftists had over-racialized their remedies for racism and had therefore become justly susceptible to conservative charges that they were dissolving the American civic-republican balance of individual rights and social responsibilities, of capitalism and comity.
But that is a longer story for some other time. I will, though, also mention my latest short statement on this, an essay posted the day Obama was inaugurated, as part of a symposium on equality in America; http://tpmcafe.talkingpointsmemo.com/2009/01/20/to_help_the_minority_reach_for_the_majority/
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Mr. Sleeper,
You might rephrase, "In response to a question from AEI vice president Henry Olsen, Tanenhaus mentioned Whittaker Chambers' observation to Buckley in 1970 that, as he paraphrased it, 'You can't build a clear conservatism out of capitalism because capitalism disrupts culture.'"
My grandfather made no observations to Buckley in 1970; he died in 1961. Perhaps you (or Tanenhaus) are referring to one of the letters by my grandfather to Bill Buckley, which Bill published in Odyssey of a Friend in 1969 and 1970.
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Thanks for this note. I was quoting from what I heard Tanenhaus say in the videotape of his lecture. Apparently he was referring to Buckley's publication of the letters. I appreciate the clarification and ought to have wondered about the date myself, since I do know that your grandfather did not live to see the late 1960s, let alone 1970.
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