Forty-nine years ago, Barry Goldwater had some things to tell
conservatives that are still relevant today. Please allow a
digression, though, before we see what the late, great senator
from Arizona had to say.
This past Tuesday afternoon, the Drudge Report posted as
its lead, top-of-page item the report that Louisiana federal
district judge Martin L.C. Feldman had issued a well-reasoned
injunction to stop the Obama administration’s moratorium against
deepwater oil drilling (the judge thus would allow the drilling
to resume). At that very moment, sitting open right in front of
me on my desk was a 1963 publication that contained a poem by the
selfsame Martin L.C. Feldman. The poem isn’t very comprehensible
without familiarity with T.S. Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred
Prufrock” and with the nursery rhyme “Who Killed Cock Robin?” But
Feldman’s theme can be summed up as a criticism of those “who
think they think,” but who don’t actually come down from their
ivory towers or leave their social clubs in order to do the
practical, real-world work of… well, of making the real world
work. “The Etherized Patient,” Feldman writes, “still remains
prone/ Never wanting to rise, it seems.”
As a judge 47 years later, Feldman’s injunction stands as a
rebuke to the Obamites who “think they think” but who seem to
have no conception, from within their self-selected ideological
bubble, of how their oh-so-noble oil-drilling moratorium will
affect the practical, real-world work of many tens of thousands
of people who depend on the oil, and the drilling of it, for
their livelihoods.
All of which is fine, but, how did my desk come, purely
coincidentally, to feature a 47-year-old publication containing a
poem by now-Judge Feldman?
My godfather Ben C. Toledano had asked for copies of the
publication; that’s how. He had lost his copies in Hurricane
Katrina. The publication was “Liberator,” a conservative journal
founded at Tulane University by my father
in April 1961. As far as I can tell, “Liberator” published just
five issues in a little more than two years. Its small
contributors list, though, turned out to be a font of future
achievements. Feldman became a federal judge. Toledano, who
served as editor of the final issue (with my dad still as
publisher), was a path-breaking Republican nominee for mayor of
New Orleans and for U.S. Senate from Louisiana. My dad later
became Louisiana’s Republican National Committeeman. The first
campus correspondent (every other major Louisiana college had a
correspondent associated with Liberator) from Louisiana State
University was Stanwood Duval Jr., who also is a federal district
judge. (He turned out to be liberal, unfortunately; you can’t win
‘em all!) A campus correspondent from Louisiana Tech was one
Stanley Tiner, who later became editor in chief of the major
dailies in Shreveport, Mobile, Oklahoma City, and Biloxi — at
the last of which, in his current position, he won a Pulitzer
Prize.
A later correspondent from LSU was Morton Blackwell, now
the conservative movement stalwart who runs the Leadership
Institute and is in his sixth term as Republican National
Committeeman from Virginia. A “corresponding editor” and writer
was Helen Reddy, now known as Helen Blackwell. In addition to
being Morton’s wife, she is a longtime and cherished leader of
Republican women’s groups in Northern Virginia.
“Liberator” featured letters to the editor from William F.
Buckley Jr., Sen. Strom Thurmond, National Review’s
Frank S. Meyer (also the subject of a full-length interview), and
other worthies. And “Liberator” featured exclusive essays by
conservative intellectual theorist and historian Russell Kirk,
and — as the cover story of the very first issue — by the
aforementioned Sen. Barry Goldwater. These were all people who
did not settle for merely “think[ing] they think” while actually
“never wanting to rise” to do anything real. Not bad for a
decidedly thin little journal printed on cheap yellow paper, out
of the home apartment of a newlywed law student.
All of that digression leads us back around to Goldwater
and the exclusive essay he did for my father’s “Liberator” in
April 1961, expressing confidence in a “rapidly approaching
period of vigorous conservatism in American political thinking.”
It features an entire subsection titled with an odd-sounding (to
today’s ears) phrase, “The Whole Man.” I had heard Goldwater use
this phrase elsewhere on video, in the opening sentence of his
1964 GOP nomination acceptance speech at San Francisco’s Cow
Palace. He also used the phrase several other times in that
speech, but never explained it, not even really in context, so
that it sounded almost like an affectation. But there in
“Liberator,” three years earlier, Goldwater explained what he
meant.
Conservatives are interested in the whole man, while the
radical-liberals confine their interest to the material side of
his nature. Conservatives believe that man is in part an
economic and animal creature, but that he is also a spiritual
creature with spiritual needs and spiritual desires.… The
conservative respects the individuality of man, realizing that
man’s spiritual and material development is not something that
can be directed by outside forces. Every man, for his
individual good and the good of his society, is responsible for
his own development. The choices that govern his life are
choices that he, not a super-state, must make. And these are
choices that must involve the whole man [emphasis
Goldwater’s own], if they are to be the right choices. If life
were concerned only with material things, as the Liberal
approach indicates, then I suppose the conduct of some men
might be justified. The materialistic philosophies of Marx and
Engels, which call for the suppression of the individual and
glorify the collective, are only acceptable to people who deny
the possibility of a more significant explanation for man’s
existence….
The Liberals, with their emphasis on collectivism and
conformity, and their willingness to use compulsion to achieve
their ends, are actually suggesting a course of action which
thoughtful men have rejected throughout history. The reason man
must be treated as an individual is because he has an
individual immortal soul. Thus, his freedom comes from
God — as do all of his rights. In the scheme of things,
government’s only proper role is in the protection of man’s
God-given freedoms and rights. [All emphases again are
Goldwater’s own.]
The conservative recognizes that the concentration of
power in the hands of the few has always been the undoing of
those who aspired to the fruits of freedom. Aware of the
overbearing evidence of history as to the truth of this
postulate, the conservative is fearful of the concentration of
power which accompanies central government.
And then, with high relevance today, this: “I am convinced
that most Americans now want to reverse the trend. I think that
concern for our vanishing freedoms is genuine. I think that the
people’s uneasiness in the stifling omnipresence of government
has turned into something approaching alarm….”
If this doesn’t sound like an erudite explanation of the
roots of the TEA Party phenomenon, you’re not paying attention.
If Goldwater’s warnings don’t sound like today’s concerns about
the Obamites, you’re not listening. If the late Arizona senator
and today’s Sen. Jim DeMint of South Carolina (for one example)
do not look like philosophical twins, your eyesight clearly has
grown dim. (As an aside: It is too bad the current senior senator
from Arizona, John McCain, understands all this no better than a
rooster comprehends Aquinas. One can always hope that his primary
threat from J.D. Hayworth can make McCain learn.)
Goldwater’s ideals stem from classic, limited-government,
libertarian-leaning wisdom. They are ideals that echo today in
the well-expressed beliefs of Ohio’s Joe the Plumber, and of the
furniture refinisher in Spanish Fort, Alabama, and of the Sarah
Palin-admiring young mother in Pocatello, Idaho. These people’s
concern for vanishing freedoms is genuine. Their uneasiness about
stiflingly omnipresent government approaches alarm. And they are
absolutely right to feel that way.
But note what Goldwater said about “the whole man.” Note
that the concerns are not merely economic or material. Note that
both the roots and the fruits of conservatism are spiritual as
well. And note that the spiritual and material parts of
conservatism are not an “either/or” proposition, but a
“both/and.” They are necessarily so. They are not two separate
features grafted into a coalition, but naturally part and parcel
of each other and mutually dependent on each other as
complementary features of a single whole.
This is why it was so disappointing, for example, to hear
the splendid Indiana Gov. Mitch Daniels call for “a truce on the
so-called social issues. We’re going to just have to agree to get
along for a little while,” until the economic issues are
resolved.
In truth, that’s like calling for a truce between the
kidney and the ear drum, or between an eyeball and the heart: It
makes no sense for either of the two pairs to be at war with the
paired organ, because both serve the whole man. Gov. Daniels,
whatever his intentions, seriously
misspoke.
It has been equally inane for preacher-man
Mike
Huckabee to adopt and promulgate the left’s warnings against
“libertarians” who are “a heartless, callous, soulless type of
economic conservatism.” The Huckster is wrong: True economic
conservatism by definition cannot be heartless and soulless,
because economic conservatism derives directly from the
soul-infused freedom of the individual human person.
It is not heartless, callous, or soulless to want free
enterprise for free men; it is heartless and soulless to deny
free men their pursuit of free enterprise, all at the dictates of
a self-selected elite claiming humanitarian goals.
It is equally heartless, on the other hand, for free men to
remain as Etherized Patients (as described by Feldman,
re-channeling Eliot). On the last page of the last “Liberator,”
the editors challenged local businessmen to take a more active
part in political life — rather than remaining “only too willing
to enjoy the fruits of our political and economic freedoms, but
[not] willing to do anything to preserve the way of life that
enables you to own a business.”
Wrote Feldman in that issue:
“This world is a mess,’ wise no ones conclude
(Profound judgment over a drink) —
Then back to noon’s heat and yesterday’s rain,
And praise for Anyones who think they think.
Feldman’s poem title is “They Killed Cock Robin.”
You need not be familiar with the reference: For our purposes
(and probably Feldman’s), Cock Robin is this bright, shiny,
wonderful system of ordered liberty we enjoy. It is a system the
Obamites at best don’t appreciate, and at worst want to destroy.
But the real killers of that system are those who have the
wherewithal to defend it but who prefer to lift drinks rather
than lift fingers to help.
Whether the cause be continued deepwater drilling or
freedom from abusive lawsuits or protection from union thuggery,
whether it be battles against regulators run amuck or against
Supreme Court justices who put their own values above the law,
the duty of the whole man is to rise up from stupor on behalf of
liberty. That’s why conservatives these days need to be political
activists, whether TEA Partiers or otherwise, and need to use
their activity on behalf of both economic liberty and of
the moral order which is both its nursery and the greater result
of its full flowering. Conservatism is more than mere fusion of
economic freedom and the moral order; it is the recognition that
both are of the same root, tree and branch, and that they must
continually be watered and tended. As Goldwater wrote, “These are
the choices that must involve the whole man, if they are
to be the right choices.”
Quin Hillyer is a senior editorial writer for The
Washington Times and a senior editor of The American
Spectator.
