Why intellectual conservatism died / Michael Lind

 

Michael Lind

WHY INTELLECTUAL

CONSERVATISM DIED

The collapse of intellectual conservatism in America has been as complete as it has

been swift. Consider a few contrasts. In 1984,

the leading conservative spokesman in the

media was George Will; by 1994, it was Rush

Limbaugh. The basic concerns of intellectual

conservatives in the eighties were foreign

policy and economics; by the early nineties

they had become dirty pictures and deviant sex.

In the early 1980s, the Public Interest was

publishing scholarly analyses of public policy,

from a moderate conservative point of view; by

the early nineties, it was publishing a potted

commentary on the sexual practices of the

ancient Greeks and Chinese by a California

radio talk show host, Dennis Prager. The

American Spectator, which in the eighties had

striven for respectability by publishing neocon

scholars, had by 1994 turned into a semipornographic tabloid of a kind familiar in Britain.

Barry Goldwater was a conservative hero in the

early eighties; now he is a pariah, considered

too far to the left because he supports an end to

legal and social discrimination against gay

Americans. In the eighties, Peter Berger and

Richard John Neuhaus authored a thoughtful

monograph on the importance of intermediate

institutions; by the nineties, Berger was ranting

in Commentary about the persecution of

smokers, and Neuhaus (a convert to Catholicism) was publishing articles in his magazine,

First Things, denouncing Darwin and defending the theory that today's animals descend

from honeymoon couples aboard Noah's Ark.

In the 1980s, conservatives claimed to be

defending the color-blind civil rights idealism

of Martin Luther King, Jr.; in 1994, Charles

Murray has revived old theories about the

innate inferiority of average Latinos and blacks

compared to whites in his new book (written

with the late Richard Herrnstein), The Bell

Curve: "Latino and black immigrants are, at

least in the short run, putting some downward

pressure on the distribution of intelligence. . . .

The shifting ethnic makeup by itself would

lower the average American IQ by 0.8 per

generation."

I was present at the destruction of intellectual

conservatism over the past several years, as

executive editor of the National Interest,

published by Irving Kristol, as a research

assistant for William F. Buckley, Jr., and as a

contributor to such conservative intellectual

journals as Commentary, the Public Interest,

and National Review. What I observed convinces me that the conventional explanations

for the demise of American conservatism as a

serious intellectual force are wrong.

It is a mistake, for example, to attribute the

death of intellectual conservatism to the end of

the cold war. The loss of the Soviet enemy did

not cause the right to crack up; on the contrary,

the differences among "paleoconservatives,"

National Review conservatives, and neoconservatives have actually diminished in the years

since 1989 (as the former center-right has

enthusiastically adopted the far right's "culture

war"). What is more, it is only in foreign

policy that there have been any interesting or

rigorous debates among conservatives (chiefly

in the pages of Owen Harries's National

Interest). The foreign-policy half of the conservative brain remained alert long after the other

hemisphere was clinically dead.

The decline of intellectual conservatism has

had less to do with geopolitics than with

domestic politics. By far the most important

factor has been a process well under way

before 1989: the growing power within the

Republican party of the Protestant right.

The two main varieties of mainstream

conservatism, from the founding of National

Review in 1955 to the disastrous Houston

convention of 1992, were Buckley-type fusionism ("fusing" free-market economics and a

sort of high-church traditionalism) and neoconservatism. These corresponded more or less

with the Catholic right and the Jewish right.

Not all Buckleyites were Catholic (though the

non-Catholics tended to convert, like Russell

Kirk and Lew Lehrman) and not all neocons

were Jewish; even so, the difference between

fusionists and neocons was as much ethnocultural as ideological.

For several decades, the chiefly Protestant

and heavily southern and western mass constituency of conservatism had, as its spokesmen,

Catholic and Jewish intellectuals, most of them

Ivy League-educated Northeasterners. This was

no accident, as the Marxists say; the success of

Buckley and his allies in discrediting the John

Birch Society in the early 1960s effectively

wiped out the major rival for the leadership of

conservative white Protestant Americans.

Though the Birchers probably reflected the

views of the conservative base more faithfully

than people like Buckley or Kristol, the leaders

of the Catholic right and the Jewish right

became the only respectable spokesmen for

conservatism.

The disparity in social origins between the

conservative base and the conservative elite

became even more pronounced in the 1980s,

which saw a great influx of Thatcherite British

journalists and policy analysts and other

foreigners into the upper ranks of American

conservatism. One Englishman, Stuart Butler,

became the chief social policy thinker of the

Heritage Foundation; another, John O'Sullivan, became editor of National Review (making the United States, to my knowledge, the

only democracy in which the editor of the

leading conservative journal is not himself a

citizen of the country). A Belgian immigrant,

Arnaud de Borchgrave, edited the conservative daily, the Washington Times (itself controlled by Korean would-be messiah Reverend

Sun Myung Moon). Increasingly, conservative

leaders like Bill Buckley and Irving Kristol

socialized with foreign media tycoons like

Rupert Murdoch (Australian) and Conrad Black

(Canadian) and Greco-British-American trophy

wife Arianna Stassinopolous Huffington, a

"Minister of Light" in California cult leader

John-Roger's Movement of Spiritual Inner

Awareness (MSIA). The complaint of "paleoconservatives" that their movement was being

taken over by opportunistic (and in many cases

weird) foreigners was not completely without

foundation.

Sooner or later, it was inevitable that the

conservative masses would find leaders who

did not speak with funny upper class or foreign

accents. Indeed, this came to pass after 1988,

when Pat Robertson succeeded in converting

his presidential campaign organization into the

Christian Coalition. Here, for the first time

since World War II, was the stable infrastructure of a Protestant right with real clout. The

institutions and the leaders of the older Catholic

and Jewish conservatives suddenly became

superfluous. Pat Robertson spoke the language

of the conservative masses more authentically

than Bill Buckley or Irving Kristol (to say

nothing of Her Majesty's loyal subject John

O'Sullivan). Who needs the Philadelphia Society when you can have the Christian Coalition?

Who needs Firing Line when you can watch

The 700 Club and Rush Limbaugh?

Now that the hitherto silent majority of white

evangelical Protestant conservatives has found

its own leaders, the Catholic and Jewish (and

mainline Protestant and secular) conservatives

are at a loss. They have lost an empire, and not

yet found a role. Some of them, like R.

Emmett Tyrrell, have more or less abandoned

serious politics altogether for sensational and

lucrative tabloid journalism. A more typical

response—exemplified by William Bennett and

William Kristol —has been to seek out a new

role for Catholic and Jewish intellectuals as

middlemen between the uncouth fire-and  brimstone Protestant evangelicals and the world

of serious journalism, policy, and scholarship.

The task of the go-between is to formulate a

compromise language, a set of ambiguous code

words, which can win the fundamentalists over

to the GOP without alarming the moderate

majority. Thus, "pro-family" as a euphemism

for "antigay," and "cultural elite" as a code

word for what George Wallace more pungently

called "eggheads" and "pointy heads." But this

is image-laundering, not thinking. Indeed, the

careers of Bennett and the younger Kristol are

part of the history, not of American thought,

but of American public relations.

The eagerness with which most intellectual conservatives have embraced this degrading new role

as image consultants for Protestant fundamentalists took me and many other former conservatives by surprise. A few years ago, I rather naively expected the National Review conservatives

and the neocons to close ranks, to prevent the

takeover of the Republican party by the fundamentalists, whose leaders (not their voters) would

be sent packing like the Birchers. Remember, at

the beginning of the decade there were signs of a

purge of the far right by the center-right. Midge

Decter accused Russell Kirk of anti-Semitism,

and Bill Buckley more subtly suggested that

Patrick Buchanan was guilty of the same offense. The "paleoconservatives" of Chronicles

broke off and formed their own far-right organization, the John Randolph Society. Neocons railed

against the conservatism of "the fever swamps."

Only a few years later, however, the fusionists

and neocons had themselves adopted "fever

swamp" themes, like the so-called "culture war"

and the claim that homosexuals are trying to destroy family, religion, and Western civilization.

After Bush lost in 1992, the center-right quickly

became indistinguishable from the far right.

In hindsight, I failed to realize just how corrupt the conservative leadership had become. I

don't mean personally corrupt; as individuals,

the conservatives are no better or worse than intellectuals or activists of other political persuasions. (They are, perhaps, more hypocritical,

though: the conservative leadership is full of secular Jews recommending Christianity for other

people, closeted homosexuals condemning "alternative lifestyles," and divorcees and adulterers praising marriage and family.) The corruption of the conservatives has involved, rather, the

sacrifice of intellectual standards.

One reason is nepotism. Anyone spending any

time in conservative circles in Washington or

New York in the past decade has constantly run

across what Charlotte Allen dubbed the "minicons," the children or nieces or nephews of eminent conservatives—little Podhoretzes and Kristols, as well as junior Buckleys and Weyrichs.

An intellectual movement that hopes to endure

must constantly replenish itself by recruiting the

best outside talent and relentlessly purging its

ranks of mediocrities. Instead, the leaders of conservatism turned the magazines and institutions

of the right, like the Moonie-controlled Washington Times and various think tanks, into patronage dumps for their offspring and in-laws.

The best jobs tended to go to direct lineal descendants, minicons proper; a second tier of positions was occupied by friends of the minicons

(usually, their roommates at Harvard or wherever). The bottom tier tended to be reserved for

a mudsill class of wealthy and dense Young Republicans. It is no accident that the most impressive of the younger conservative intellectuals,

Dinesh D'Souza, was an outsider, an immigrant

from India. Even he owed his rise in part to the

fact that he was a friend, at Dartmouth, of Ben

Hart, son of long-time National Review editor

Jeff Hart. Irving Kristol's son William, Dan

Quayle's former chief of staff, has been trying to

position himself as heir to the leadership of the

movement.

Hereditary political aristocracies are not

unknown to the left of center—think of the

various Kennedys and Galbraiths. The neoconservative intellectual movement might have

survived this sacrifice of meritocracy to family

values. It could not, however, survive its

corruption by excessive partisanship in the

service of the Republican party.

The conservatives, one can argue, tried to take

over the wrong party after 1955. In many ways,

the Democratic party would have made a more

natural home for conservatives than the Republicans. This is not as crazy as it sounds. The

discrediting and political demise of the southern

segregationists in the 1960s left a void on the

right wing of the Democratic party that a nonracist conservative movement (anticipating the Democratic Leadership Conference) might have filled.

Conservatism would have had to make its peace

with the New Deal—but that should not have

been all that difficult for a Catholic-influenced

American version of European Christian Democracy, with a strong base in the unionized working

classes of the Northeast (who tend to be more

conservative in morals than the business and professional classes). First-generation conservative

thinkers like Russell Kirk, Willmoore Kendall,

and James Burnham had little use for laissez faire capitalism and were comfortable with the

idea of a conservative welfare state. Conservatism would have had far more influence as the

theory of the dominant wing of the dominant

party, and defending congressional prerogatives

against presidential Caesarism (a staple of conservative theory in the 1950s) would have been

more compatible with conservative constitutionalism than apologizing for the imperial prerogatives of a succession of Republican presidents.

If conservatizing the Democrats was ever an

option, it was foreclosed by the "Draft

Goldwater" movement, by Nixon's southern

strategy, and the defection, one by one, of the

Democrats who remained conservative to the

GOP. As the conservative movement and the

Republican party became identified, conservative doctrine began to be cut and stretched to

accommodate the short-term needs of Republican coalition strategy. The debates over first

principles that made National Review-type

conservatism lively in the 1950s and 1960s,

and neoconservatism interesting in the 1970s,

gave way to united-front solidarity on a

growing number of issues important to this or

that wing of the Republican party, from tax

cuts to the outlawing of abortion.

The point of no return, in my view, came with

the adoption of support for supply-side economics as a litmus test for true-blue conservatism. No

first-rate economist took the supply-siders seriously —even Milton Friedman scoffed at them.

Ominously, for the first time, a theory that most

serious intellectuals on the right did not believe

became the official doctrine of the conservative

movement, because it served the narrow short term interests of an important Republican constituency, the rich.

Once critical thinking had been abandoned

as a threat to the program of massive tax cuts

for the super-rich, further sacrifices of rigor

and empiricism became easy. By the mid eighties, conservatives were dismissing very

serious objections to the practicability of

space-based strategic defenses as "liberal"

propaganda (as though there were "liberal"

physics and "conservative" physics). As standards of evidence sank, conservative journals

opened their pages to previously marginal ideas

and thinkers. National Review debated the

question of whether Shakespeare's plays had

been written by the Earl of Oxford. In the

once-moderate Public Interest, editor Irving

Kristol published a rave review of a book by

Richard Epstein, a legal theorist who argues

that most federal laws against racial discrimination are unconstitutional—a view formerly

associated with the John Birch Society rather

than the neocons. Another Public Interest

author argued that the solution to the crime

problem is for everyone to own a gun.

Then there is "creation science." The silence

of serious conservative intellectuals in the face

of fundamentalist campaigns to force public

schools to teach the book of Genesis in geology

and biology classes has completely discredited

the claim of conservatives to be defenders of

objectivity and empirical scholarship against

politicization. How can intellectual conservatives credibly attack Afrocentrists for distorting

history while passing in silence over efforts to

teach American children that the dinosaurs

lived with Adam and Eve in the Garden of

Eden and drowned in Noah's Flood? Even

worse, National Review, Commentary, and

First Things have actually run essays attacking

evolutionary theory and espousing "guided

evolution," "creation science," and similar

nonsense. Who would have thought that, at the

end of the twentieth century, the remnants of

the New York Intellectuals would be refighting

the Scopes Trial—from the point of view of

William Jennings Bryan?

Kookiness has been joined by complacency.

Instead of exploring plausible conservative

solutions to genuine problems, the right began

to deny that problems existed at all. What

pollution problem? What overpopulation problem? What secondhand smoke problem? What

falling American wages? What health care

crisis? Conservatism—which historically has

tended to be pessimistic—in recent years has

become strangely Panglossian, adopting, as it

were, the motto of Mad magazine's Alfred E.

Neumann—"What, me worry?"

One aspect of conservative complacency has

been a growing toleration of the vicious lunatic

fringe. The "no enemies to the right" policy has

been symbolized in recent years by annual conservative "summits" in Washington—small, private

dinners bringing together people like Bill Buckley,

Irving Kristol, Norman Podhoretz, Charles Krauthammer, and the far-right activist Paul Weyrich.

At one of these meetings, Weyrich circulated a

proposal (which I have held and read) that the

federal government secretly lace illegal drugs with

substances like rat poison and release them into

the black market. Drug addicts would be more

easily identified and punished, Weyrich reasoned,

if, in public, they went into sudden convulsions.

None of the other conservative leaders at the meeting walked out in protest, or insisted that this man

be ostracized. On the contrary, at subsequent summits Weyrich has been welcomed by the same

conservatives who criticize the NAACP for meeting with Farrakhan.

Such latitudinarianism has become the norm.

Bill Buckley recently appeared on television as

an ally of Pat Robertson, who in print has

accused the Council on Foreign Relations—an

organization to which Buckley belongs, and to

which he successfully nominated me—of being

a secret instrument of Satan's plot to destroy

America and condemn most of humanity to

eternal damnation. Call me sensitive, but I

resent that.

By the late 1980s, the conservative movement,

drifting into crankiness and complacency under

the control of a small number of elderly men,

was in desperate need of a revolutionary renovation from within the ranks, as well as an invigorating transfusion of outside talent. At the very

least, there needed to be a searching reconsideration of first principles, a questioning of dogmas

like supply-side economics and hypocrisies like

the lip service paid to criminalizing abortion.

Such a free and frank debate within

conservatism, however, was made impossible

by the dependence of the journals of the right

on foundation money. One by one, every

leading neoconservative publication or think

tank over the past decade has come to depend

on money from a few foundations—Olin,

Smith-Richardson, Bradley, Scaife. Many were

started in the first place by seed money from

the foundations. Inevitably, this has promoted

groupthink. The foundations are the chief

reason that Commentary sounds more and more

like the New Criterion, which sounds so much

like the new Public Interest.

It is not that there is some centralized

conspiracy imposing a party line. By and large,

the program officers of the foundations, though

partisan, sincerely believe in debate among

conservatives. They do not deliberately impose

an orthodoxy. They do not have to. The editors

tend to censor themselves, for fear of appearing

"liberal" and losing that critical annual grant.

There are a few honorable exceptions—the

National Interest and the American Scholar

continue to put the life of thought above the life

of the party. For the most part, though, instead

of boldly attacking falsehoods wherever they

are found, conservative editors tend to print

only what they believe will confirm the

prejudices of the program officers.

The addiction to foundation dollars has

reinforced the disastrous "no enemies to the

right" policy. The last thing the foundations

want is for one set of grantees to criticize the

policy views or intellectual standards of other

grantees. The major conservative foundations

ended their support of Chronicles a few years

back when its editors got into a spat with

Richard John Neuhaus and the neocons — a

lesson that has not been lost on other

conservative grantees.

In addition to reinforcing groupthink, the addiction to foundation money has also led to the

lowering of intellectual standards. After all, if you,

the editor, turn down a piece by a mediocrity or

crackpot who is a friend of a program officer, this

could have consequences. Once too many Republican hacks start moving into a journal or a think

tank, serious thinkers and their audiences go elsewhere. A cycle of decline is set in motion. With

foundation money comes the implicit imperative to

avoid questioning partisan pieties—but this very

avoidance of controversy sends intellectuals away,

even as it attracts true believers (the truer they are,

the crankier). As third-rate zealots gradually replace first-rate thinkers and intelligent readers, the

beleaguered editor places the blame for the decline

of his journal's prestige on the "liberals," the "media elite," the "cultural elite" —anyone but himself

and his sponsors.

In this way, bit by bit, a number of once interesting intellectual journals on the right have

degenerated into newsletters for Chamber of Commerce Republicans, creationists, and elderly curmudgeons denouncing the music that young people listen to nowadays.

Eventually there may be a revival of serious

thought on the political right, but this seems

unlikely for at least a generation. For the

foreseeable future, American conservatism will

be defined by the fundamentalist/tabloid right,

with its program of making centrist and liberal

Christians, Jews, and secular Americans,

working women, nonwhite Americans, gay

men and lesbians, and intellectuals scapegoats

for the serious problems afflicting American

society (problems for which the conservatives I

have worked with for a decade have no

plausible answers). The new Radical Right of

Pat Robertson and Pat Buchanan, which sets

the agenda for trimmers like William Bennett

and William Kristol, has more in common with

the pre-World War II right of Father Coughlin

and William Randolph Hearst than with the

intellectual conservatism of the decades after

the war. The Radical Right has no arguments,

only hatreds.

Today, as always, it is possible to be an

American intellectual who is politically conservative. But conservatism as an intellectual

movement in the United States is dead.