The right stuff

I remember the day very well, back in 1956, when I arrived at my office at Encounter-of which I was then co-editor-and found on my desk an unsolicited manuscript by Michael Oakeshott. This, I thought, is the way every editor's day should begin, with an over-the-transom arrival of an essay by one of the finest living political thinkers and certainly the finest stylist. The manuscript was called "On Being Conservative" and I read it with pleasure and appreciation. It was beautifully written, subtle in its argument, delicate in its perceptions, and full of sentences and paragraphs that merit the attention of anthologists for decades, perhaps even centuries, to come. Fortunately, this essay is to be found in his book, Rationalism in Politics. I say "fortunately" because, after loving every line of this essay, I sat down and wrote to Michael, rejecting it.

I forget what disingenuous circumlocutions I invented for that letter-probably something about its being both too abstract and too specifically British in its frame of reference for our journal. But the truth is that, while I admired the essay immensely, I did not really like it. Which is another way of saying that I disagreed with it. At that time, I was not sure why I disagreed with it. Today, looking back over the past 40 years, I can see why. I was American, Michael was English. I was then in the earliest stages of intellectual pregnancy with those dispositions that later emerged as neo-conservatism. And American neo-conservatism is very different from the kind of ideal English conservatism that Oakeshott was celebrating so brilliantly. It is also different from the much less ideal conservatism that still dominates the Conservative party.

Conservatism in the US today is on a different track from that of Britain and western Europe-I insist on the distinction-and it is reasonable to think that one of us may be on the better track. Oakeshott's essay focuses on what he calls "the conservative disposition." Let him describe that disposition in his own lovely language:



The general characteristics of this disposition... centre upon a propensity to use and enjoy what is available rather than what was or may be... What is esteemed is the present, and it is esteemed not on account of its connections with a remote antiquity, nor because it is recognised to be more admirable than any possible alternative, but on account of its familiarity... 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 convenient to the perfect, present laughter to utopian bliss.

These words are bound to strike a chord in the souls of any reader, since all of us, in varying degrees, participate in such a disposition. What we call civilisation is itself based on the power of this disposition. But even as I respond to Oakeshott's ideal conservatism, I know-as I knew back in 1956-that it is not for me. And this for two reasons. First, it is irredeemably secular, as I, being a Jewish conservative, am not. Were I a Christian conservative, my reaction would be the same. For it is impossible for any religious person to have the kinds of attitudes toward the past and the future that Oakeshott's conservative disposition celebrates. Our scriptures and our daily prayer book link us to the past and to the future with an intensity lacking in Oakeshott's vision. Not that this religious dimension of our humanity in any way denigrates the present, in all its fullness. Judaism especially, being a more this worldly religion than Christianity, moves us to sanctify the present in our daily lives-but always reminding us that we are capable of doing so only through God's grace to our distant forefathers. And of course, the whole purpose of sanctifying the present is to prepare humanity for a redemptive future.

In short, Oakeshott's ideal conservative society is a society without religion, since all religions bind us as securely to past and future as to the present. The conservative disposition is real enough, but without the religious dimension, it is thin gruel. In the concluding sentence of his inaugural lecture at the London School of Economics, Oakeshott made that magnificent biblical declaration to the effect that this is the best of all possible worlds and everything in it is a necessary evil. But his conservative disposition offers us no guidance in coping with all those necessary evils, which can tear our lives apart and destroy whatever equanimity we have achieved as a result of reading the writers of philosophy.

Second, Oakeshott's conservative disposition runs squarely against the American grain. Oh, Americans possess such a disposition all right. Despite all one reads about the frustrations of American life, it is the rare American who dreams of moving to another land. We are, in some respects, a very conservative people-but not quite in the Oakeshottian sense.

To begin with, we have a most emphatic relation to our past-an ideological relation, some would say. In the US today, all school children, in all 50 states, begin their day with a recitation of the Pledge of Allegiance to the flag and to the Constitution. There is no national legislation to this effect; it is entirely up to the states. Despite some efforts by radical educators, no state has removed this prescription.

In addition, there is the extraordinary fact that at the opening of every high school, college, and professional sporting event players and spectators rise to their feet and sing the national anthem. And it is not a good idea to fail to do so. The US today is the most vibrantly patriotic of all the western democracies. Some might say-a sophisticated European would surely be tempted to say-that this merely demonstrates that the US is, in some crucial respects, a pre-modern country. Perhaps so. Or perhaps we are a post-modern country; one should not exclude that possibility.

Behind this ideological patriotism is the fact that the US is a creedal nation. Being American has nothing to do with ethnicity, or blood-ties of any kind, or lineage, or length of residence even. What we scornfully call nativism in the US is what passes for authentic patriotism among many Germans and Frenchmen. None of this is surprising if you recall that the US is, literally a nation of immigrants, and in the course of time has developed astonishing powers of assimilation. What is surprising is the intensity of patriotism generated by this fact, an intensity owing to the great fact that assimilation in the US is like a conversion experience, in which a new creed replaces an old.

This creed and this ideological fervour is suffused with a kind of religious sensibility. Indeed, American patriotism was born out of the sensibility of Protestant dissent. In the last two centuries, our increasingly secular outlook has tempered this sensibility, so that sociologists now blandly refer to an American civic religion that unites the community with secular ties. The concept of a civic religion has its validity, up to a point. We are no longer the "nation under God" as we once casually defined ourselves. But that reservoir of religiosity is still there, and these still waters run deep. Most Americans thought Soviet communism to be an awful idea, and a terrible reality, simply because it was "atheistic and godless," and so doomed. They did not have to read Hayek to come to this conclusion.

There are tensions between American religiosity and the more secular civic religion, but they coexist because they also have much in common. They subscribe equally to a version of the Judaeo-Christian moral tradition. Both are individualistic when it comes to economic matters, wedding the Protestant ethic to the philosophy of Adam Smith. Both approve of economic growth, as a character building exercise and as a way of improving the human condition. And both are, in general, future oriented and progressive in their political vision. When Americans deplore the present they always assume that it can be improved upon-American politics is about the controversial choices this entails. Today there is so much to deplore in this present that Oakeshott's paean to present-mindedness is singularly inapt.

All of this is by way of a background explanation to what I see as a major divergence today between American conservatism and British conservatism. It is a divergence with significant implications for the future of the western democracies. The difference can be summed up this way: Conservatism in the US today is a movement, a popular movement, not a faction within any political party. Although most conservatives vote Republican, they are not party loyalists and the party has to woo them to win their votes. The movement is issue-oriented. It will happily combine with the Republicans if the party is "right" on the issues. If not, it will walk away. This troubled relationship between the conservative movement and the Republicans is a key to the understanding of American politics today. The conservative movement is a powerful force within the party, but it does not dominate. And there is no possibility of the party ever dominating the movement.

American conservatism after the second world war begins to take shape with the American publication of Hayek's The Road to Serfdom in 1943 and the founding in 1955 of William F Buckley's National Review. Previously, there had been a small circle who were admirers of the Jeffersonian, quasi-anarchist, teaching of the likes of Albert Jay Nock, but no one paid much attention to them. Hayek's polemic against socialism did strike a chord, however, especially among members of the business community. There may have been people converted from statism to anti-statism by that book, but my impression is that most admirers of the book were already pro-free market. What Hayek did was to mobilise them intellectually, and to make their views more respectable. I have to confess that I still have not read The Road to Serfdom, although I am a great admirer of Hayek's later writings in intellectual history and political philosophy. The reason was, and is, that not for a moment did I believe that the US was on any kind of road to serfdom. Socialism has never had much of a presence in America and, besides, having gone through a brief Trotskyist phase in my college days, I needed no instruction on socialist illusions or the evils of Soviet communism.

Still, it is fair to say that an anti-socialist, anti-statist perspective dominated the thinking and politically active part of American conservatism from 1945 to the Goldwater campaign of 1964. William F Buckley's National Review represented this point of view and it gradually helped recruit enough younger political activists to become a force within the Republican party. The Nixon elections of 1968 and 1972, however, revealed that, even when winning elections-largely through Democratic default-the basic principles of postwar conservatism had little purchase on American realities. And yet, from the ashes of the Goldwater-Nixon d?b?cles there arose Ronald Reagan, to become a popular two-term President. What happened?

Two things, I would say. First, although certainly not in order of political significance, was the emergence of an intellectual trend that later came to be called neo-conservatism. This trend, in which I was deeply involved, differed in one crucial respect from its conservative predecessors: its chosen enemy was contemporary liberalism, not socialism or statism in the abstract. (About communism-as distinct, say, from Soviet foreign policy-we had almost nothing to say, we were so utterly hostile to it.) The dozen or so academics and intellectuals who formed the original core of neo-conservatism, located at The Public Interest, a journal Daniel Bell and I founded in 1965, were all disillusioned liberals: disillusioned with the newest twists and turns of that liberalism, but also (in varying degrees) with their past liberalism whose inherent philosophical flaws now became visible.

The symbol of the influence of neo-conservative thinking on the Republican party was the fact that Ronald Reagan could praise Franklin D Roosevelt as a great American president-praise echoed by Newt Gingrich a dozen years later. The message was clear: the Republican party was no longer interested in destroying the welfare state, but intended rather to reconstruct it along more economical and humane lines. The emphasis on more "humane" is another sign of neo-conservative influence. Whereas traditional conservatism had tried to focus attention on welfare cheating, the writings of various neo-conservatives emphasised the terrible, demoralising effects of our welfare system on the recipients of welfare themselves. It was no longer a matter of simply saving the budget from welfare expenditures but of redeeming the welfare population from the kind of exploitation involved in a system that created and encouraged dependency. The new message gave a moral dimension to welfare reform that it had lacked.

To the surprise of most observers, the critique of liberalism by neo-conservative intellectuals, such as Leo Strauss, was in some ways more effective than the older attack on statism. Paradoxically, precisely because there was no socialist movement, no ideological statist movement in the US, the neo-conservative critique went deeper, and was more radical, than conservative critiques in Britain or Europe.

Who would have thought it possible, 30 years ago, that in 1996, one third of the American public would designate itself as conservative while only 17 per cent designated itself as liberal, with the rest claiming the label of "moderate." To bring contemporary liberalism into disrepute-its simplistic views of human nature, its utopian social philosophy, its secularist animus against religion-is no small achievement.

The second, and most spectacular thing that happened was the emergence of religious conservatives, as a force to be reckoned with. This has no parallel in any of the other western democracies. It has been estimated that something like one third of the US electorate are (or claim to be) regular church goers. Not all of them are conservative, but the majority are. In so far as they are anti-statist, as most are, it is not only on economic grounds. These religious conservatives see, quite clearly and correctly, that statism in the US is organically linked with secular liberalism, that many of the programmes of the welfare state have a powerful anti-religious animus. School prayer is a very live issue among the religious conservatives, not because public schools are especially suitable places for young people to pray in, but because our educational system, dominated by the teachers' unions, the schools of education and the liberal politicians, who count on their active electoral support, is biased in an anti-religious way.

Conservative politicians woo the religious conservatives, but only neo-conservatives can really speak to them. Many neo-conservative intellectuals are not themselves religiously observant in their private lives, although more and more are coming to be. This leads to accusations by liberals of hypocrisy or cold-blooded political instrumentalism. But such accusations miss the point. All political philosophers prior to the 20th century, regardless of their personal piety, understood the importance of religion in the life of the political community. Neo-conservatives, because of their interest in and attachment to classical political philosophy, share this understanding. Just as there is a difference between being pious and being observant, so there is a difference between being observant and being religious. As it happens, a disproportionate number of neo-conservatives are Jewish, and within the Jewish community such distinctions have always been blurred. In any case, more and more Christians and Jews these days, who themselves have a secular lifestyle, are seeing to it that their children are raised within a religious tradition. Modern secularism has such affinities to moral nihilism that even those who wish simply to affirm or reaffirm moral values have little choice but to seek a grounding for such values in a religious tradition.

Most foreign journalists, like their American counterparts, tend to be secularist in outlook and therefore have difficulty in understanding what is happening within American politics. One has only to read the American reporting in such a distinguished journal as The Economist to experience this difficulty-to read reporting that is sophisticated, blandly superficial, and misleading. It is not only religion that creates this difficulty, there is also the equally significant issue of populism.

American democracy regularly witnesses populist upsurges. European and British observers, along with most American scholars, tend to describe them as spasms or even paroxysms. But they are nothing of the sort. They are built into the very structure of American politics in a way that is alien to British or European politics, where "politics" is what the government says or does. In a sense, it is fair to say that contemporary political journalism, as well as most political scholarship, is statist in its preconceptions and vision. Whenever a populist upsurge occurs, as is the case today, national politics in the US trails way behind local politics.

In the US, most school boards are locally elected, and school board politics is the way most adult Americans begin their political education. If you are looking for some of the reasons for the strength of American conservatism today, watching local school board politics is a good, although difficult, place to begin-difficult because there are so many such school boards, and the issues that cause contention vary from place to place. Still, had we been paying attention, we would be better prepared to appreciate the frustrations of so many American parents with the educational establishment. It is not simply that their children do not often get a decent education in the basics, but that the counterculture born after the second world war has captured the school system itself, and has been codified in the leading schools of education. Parents are loath to argue with educators, who are presumed to be the experts, and when they do argue they are sufficiently confused and intimidated to argue badly. But anxiety, a diffuse terror even, about what kinds of mature young people their children will grow up to be, is widespread.

Sooner or later, politicians emerge to tap this kind of anxiety. That is why the so-called social issues, or more accurately moral issues, are so powerful today. The Clinton administration, convinced (as most liberals are) that economic issues are at the centre of politics, finds itself bewildered and impotent when confronted by such issues. Economic frustration liberals are sensitive to, but moral frustration is incomprehensible to them.

In Washington DC, the most liberal and statist city in the nation, school board politics is unworthy of the attention of the national media. Our liberal media do not mind presidential primaries or primaries for governorships, which fit into their framework of politics-as-a-horse-race. But they hate primaries for lower offices: that is local news and unworthy of their attention. Referendums-a legacy of the progressive movement that is institutionalised in many of our states-are now equally despised because they introduce a wild card into the established political game, and are more successfully used by conservative activists. Our secular liberal media are horrified by politicians who mix religion with politics, because they are convinced that religion is, at best, a private affair. A politician who so much as mentions Jesus Christ alarms them.

Ironically, Washington and the liberal media have been unprepared for conservative changes within the media itself. Our national news magazines, our half-dozen or so newspapers that claim national attention, and our national television networks are all liberal, more or less, and feel that they share the journalistic mission of enlightening (as well as entertaining) the American public. They have tried, somewhat less than half-heartedly, to give representation to the conservative viewpoint whenever they sense that this viewpoint has become popular. But they were utterly unprepared for the sudden emergence and swift rise of radio talk shows, which now rival television's daytime soap operas in popularity. These talk shows are overwhelmingly conservative in their politics and populist in their rhetoric.

All of this happened without anyone planning it or anticipating it. It was made possible by the federal structure of our polity and by the fact that there are well over a thousand local radio stations. Once a local programme host-a Rush Limbaugh, for instance-becomes popular, other stations, always eager for listeners, will rush to broadcast him. And if, for competitive reasons, they cannot do so, they will try hard to invent their own popular conservative talk shows. The owners of these stations are interested primarily in making money, not in spreading any kind of liberal enlightenment. And, given the near absence of government regulation, the market works.

In the US, there is always a latent populist potential simply because the structure of our polity and of our economy make it possible for vox populi to find expression. This populist potential disturbs political theorists, even conservative ones who fear that populist dissatisfaction can have an anti-capitalist thrust. In fact, this has rarely been the case in the US. Even the original populist movement at the beginning of this century, generally identified as belonging to the left, was not really so. It was hostile to big business, not to the free market. It is interesting to note that today populist opinion, as every poll shows, is more concerned about cutting the federal deficit than about lowering taxes, which has come as a great surprise to many conservatives, who learned in their political science courses that "the people" always want to be pandered to. It is also worth noting that the current Republican Congress is turning a cold shoulder to the lobbyists of the big corporations while exuding friendliness to those organisations that represent smaller businesses. This upsets many conservative economists who point to statistics that show the economic importance of multinational corporations. Which only shows that the statistics of economists, along with those of the public opinion poll, are best ignored by a conservative government that is interested not merely in being re-elected but in creating an enduring national conservative majority.

In foreign policy, too, the new conservative populism is playing a crucial-although as yet ambiguous-role. The liberal Democrats, ever since 1930, have been interventionist and multilateralist in foreign policy. The conservative Republicans have tended to be nationalist and isolationist. This situation is changing. Liberal Democrats are much less interested in seeing the US play a major role in world affairs. In contrast, Republicans now favour international free trade; while still nationalist, they are no longer isolationist. Just how those trends will develop in the future is unknowable. The Republicans have a special problem in defining a nationalist foreign policy in a post-cold war world. But multilateralism is dead, so far as both parties are concerned. This is something our European allies (and our own State Department) seem not to understand. It is not that US opinion has turned hostile to the UN and Nato. Rather, there is not enough interest in such organisations to breed hostility.

this populist conservatism-now the trend in American conservatism-has its own internal problems. There are still traditional conservatives who are suspicious of populism. Many of them are still in the Senate, but even in the House of Representatives there is internal dissent. The "right to life" movement, like the abolitionists of a century and a half ago, are fanatically determined to make the best the enemy of the good. Then there are all those newly-elected Republican governors, critical of the welfare state but reluctant to give up federal funds that help them cope with their own budgetary shortfalls. Talk of an abrupt conservative revolution is hyperbole, even if it does inspire the troops. There will surely be defeats ahead, some of them self-inflicted.

The US today shares all of the evils, all of the problems, to be found among the western democracies, sometimes in an exaggerated form. But it is also the only western democracy that is witnessing a serious conservative revival that is an active response to these evils and problems. The fact that it is a populist conservatism dismays the conservative elites of Britain and western Europe, who prefer a more orderly and dignified kind of conservatism. It is true that populism can be a danger to our democratic orders. But it is also true that populism can be a corrective to the defects of democratic order, defects often arising from the intellectual influence and the entrepreneurial politics, of our democratic elites. Classical political thought was wary of democracy because it saw the people as fickle, envious and inherently turbulent. They had no knowledge of democracies where the people were conservative and the educated elites that governed them were ideological, always busy provoking disorder and discontent in the name of some utopian goal. Populist conservatism is a distinctly modern phenomenon, and conservative thinking has not yet caught up with it. That is why the "exceptional" kind of conservative politics we are now witnessing in the US is so important. It could turn out to represent the "last, best hope" of contemporary conservatism.