. . . It's about forward or backward. I think it was Newark mayor Cory Booker who said that on one of the news shows the other day. Of course what forward means to someone who leans left vs. someone who leans right is where lies the rub. But I agree with Booker, and I'd like to talk about the tension between forward and backward, which relates to the tension between left and right, liberal and conservative. Sanity and health, as I've said before, lies in living in the tension between such polarities. Insanity follows from a one-sidedness that denies the validity of the other element in the pair. So I want to talk about how I see a more healthful relationship between conservatives and liberals, one that might actually lead to a cure of our current illness.
I've been spending a lot of time lately boning up on the thinking of conservative intellectuals, who compose a rather diverse group. But the one thing that unites them is their opposition to the flattening uni-dimensionality they associated with the Left, which they perceive to have been slowly destroying America since at least the time of the New Deal. I think it's clear that they were never really "conservative" if by conservative you mean trying to conserve something that was under threat of being lost, because in the 40s through the 70s it had already been lost, and they knew it--there was nothing for them to conserve. It was for them a question of restoration of something lost.
And so after 1964 it looked to the world as though they would be doomed forever to play the role of a minority opposition. The establishment was Liberal. And so for this reasons the most interesting among them saw themselves as a remnant of counter-revolutionaries, which would someday restore America to what it had been before the Depression and Roosevelt and the socialist apparatchiks that had infiltrated the government in the 30s had destroyed it. I think these conservatives were wrong to think that the old thing could be restored, but I think they had justifiable concerns and that it's important to take their concerns seriously without accepting their polarizing restorationist program.
The conservative intellectuals who interest me are those who were concerned about social leveling and mass man, the development of a society in which the individual was a hollow man, a non-descript cog in the machine, a faceless drone in a beehive, a gray corpuscle in the great Hobbesian Leviathan state. They were together with the Left in its opposition to the Fascism, but thought the Left naive for not seeing early enough that Communism posed the same dangers to the idea of the human that Fascism did. Russell Kirk, Whittaker Chambers, Richard Weaver and the Vanderbilt Agrarians, Willmoore Kendall were among the most effective and eloquent spokemen for resistance to the state in the name of a deeper, richer humanism.
The State was seen as the great monolith that sought to crush individual freedom and to force regimentation and conformity. Some of them, the Agrarians in particular, saw that it wasn't just the state, but the great Northern industrial/financial capitalist machine that created gray organization men. But most of these conservatives saw the state as the greater evil, a Soviet Communist Mordor was the future to which we were all headed if the social sickness and thinking tht followed from it was not vigorously resisted. New Deal America was a symptom of this sickenss, and it was phase 1 in what must eventually become Mordor. In the 40s and 50s when they wrote, they saw the Soviet Union as the greatest threat here, and the U.S. the world's last hope to oppose its grinding inevitability. The Cold War was a holy war; it was the battle to save the individual, his sacred freedom, and his right to believe from the forces that would put him through the state's meat grinder and make him into a hamburger patty that looked like every other one.
In retrospect, it all looks so hysterical, and there were fundamental elements in their analysis that I would argue make it clear that they didn't really understand the social and economic forces that were shaping the 20th Century. Their vision was partially grounded in truth, but mythologized into a Manichean struggle that created more problems than it solved. But anybody who saw clearly what had happened in Hitler's Germany and Stalin's Russia knew there were very real horrific forces afoot in the world that any humanist needed to fear and to resist.
And as repugnant as many of these intellectuals thought the methods of Joesph McCarthy, they defended him, because even though he over-reached, he was more right than he was wrong about how the nation was threatened from within. It was a matter of survival, and whether they liked him or not, he was on their side in this critical battle against a dread enemy. And while many of these conservatives understood clearly the nature of the tradeoff that required the growth and empowerment of a strong American state, which was anathema to their minimalist-state republican ideals, they saw the big state as a necessary evil for survival's sake. It was more important to be potent enough to withstand the far greater immediate threat posed by an aggressive Soviet Union. They could dismantle the huge American state after the Soviets had been defeated.
Conservatives, often critics of the toxic unintended consequences of liberal policies, are now having to confront the unintended consequences of their own philosophies which abetted in the creation of a government that the best among them in the early days would have abhorred, and their Libertarians and Paleocon heirs today do abhor. The Republicans have become a big-state party and the party of fiscal irresponsibility because the Libertarian and Neocon/Crony Capitalist wings of the party cannot sanely coordinate their agendas. The result is wild spending and government growth while reducing tax revenues which is running the country into the ground.
So it's fascinating to see how the Republican Party dominated early on by the defenders of the small 'r' republicans who fought for the minimalist state later became dominated by the big-state conservatives. The 90s were the time during which the Libertarians and Paleocons would have liked to dismantle the bloated Cold War state, but Clinton got in their way. And when Bush took over 9/ll got in the way. If anti-communism justified the need for a big state to fight for survival, then so did 9/ll. And with it we saw the ascendancy of the hubristic, idealistic, bullying Richard Perle style Neocons. And Libertarianism led, I would argue, to the ascendancy of the corrupting K-Steet system of crony capitalism.
The greater tragedy associated with 9/11 is that it happened when these big-state Neoconservatives and crony capitalists were at the helm. Sober, restrained, principled conservatism didn't have a chance when there was so much empire to be had, money to be made, and new reality to be created. Principles be damned. After all, "Reagan proved that deficits don't matter," said the crony-capitalist-in-chief. For the Neocon mentality was essentially--"We won the Cold War, dammit, and to the victor go the spoils. The Middle East with the Soviets out of the way is our sphere of influence." And we're living with the consequences of that kind of thinking.
****
Much more to be said on this theme regarding the future prospects for a principled conservatism within the Republican Party in the days ahead. I'm wondering, really if it doesn't have a more likely home in a post-Obama Democratic Party. The principled conservatives have hardly any influence in the corridors of GOP power. Do they really believe they have a future in it? When I read Douthat, a principled conservative who still strongly self-identifies as a Republican, I wonder why. Do most real Republicans identify with him? The GOP seems more of a habit than a real home for someone who thinks the way he does. And I'm sure his aversion for the Liberalism he associates with the Democratic Party makes it viscerally difficult for him to lean in its direction. I'd like to think of Bruce Fein, Doug Kmiec, the Andrews Bacevich and Sullivan as defining the right wing of the Democratic Party rather than the DLC and Blue Dog types, who are mostly meatheads.
The GOP is too far gone. It simply is no longer a home for thoughtful, principled conservatives, so unless they can wrest power back from the Palins and Bachmanns, the Kristols, Perles, and Norquists, and the NRO and Heritage Foundations types, I'd like to think the Dems could embrace these thoughtful conservatives whom the Republicans have ignored. The Dems need such conservatives to provide them with more depth and ballast, and therefore balance sanity. It's the kind of balance and sanity that I hope Obama embodies. With a coalition of the sane running things, maybe we could find a way forward. Because for me conservative doesn't mean right wing; it means commitment to principle and to the rule of law. Right wing in our context means polarizing craziness.
Conservatives in my ideal world are not about preserving the past; they are instead guardians of the dimension of depth in a world otherwise driven by surface interests. The best Liberal Dems are smart and competent, but depth is not their strong point. The typical Dem doesn't have much to offer when it comes to challenging the whatever-floats-your-boat expediency that typifies thinking in a consumption-centered society. The horizontal orientation of the Dems needs to be in a tension witht the vertical orientation that my ideal conservatives bring, and if they can't get it from the Republicans, they need to get it from a conservative wing of their own party.
So for me it's not about left or right; it's about holding the vertical and horizontal in a dynamic tension, and the ideal is to live where they intersect. For me that means standing upright, having a spine, and it means also moving forward. History does not have a reverse gear. It's about having a vertical orientation that reaches for the heavens and that digs deep into the depths, and which at the same time knows how to operate on the horizontal, ie, the dimension of history and therefore of embracing the future and what comes to us from it.