The Dilemmas of American
Conservatism
Edited by
Kenneth L. Deutsch and Ethan Fishman
(The University Press of Kentucky, 212 pages,
$40)
Order or Liberty. Tradition and Innovation. Every year
young conservatives of an intellectual bent are introduced to the
great debates of their forebears. The colloquies and conferences by
groups like the Intercollegiate Studies Institute have been going
over the same material for years. Read some Adam Smith. Now some
Richard Weaver. Discuss. Eat chicken. Repeat next year. Perhaps
this is as it should be; we are called conservatives for a reason.
Why shouldn’t our internal debates seem so familiar that they
become comfortable?
The Dilemmas of American Conservatism
is a collection of essays that moves out of the safe
colloquies and into deeper, even dangerous intellectual territory.
The editors, Kenneth Deutsch and Ethan Fishman, cop to being
“traditionalist” conservatives, and ones that stand aloof from the
day-to-day workings of the political movement that calls itself
conservatism. After noting some of the official hypocrisies of the
Reagan and Bush presidencies (government expansion, debt) they
admit that “in a society where liberals and most conservatives
oppose traditional conservative positions we will be relegated to
the role of gadfly.… Fortunately authentic gadflies never required
large audiences.” And while this book is unlikely to reach the
best-seller list. it would profit anyone looking to take their
conservatism beyond the dorm-room debates of youth.
The book is composed of nine essays by contemporary
academics and writers on the intellectual titans of the Right.
Fishman’s own contribution on John H. Hallowell, suggests that
sometimes the fundamental debates on the right should remain open.
“To [Eric] Voegelin and Hallowell, indeed, tension is not a dilemma
to be resolved but a permanent feature of human existence to be
respected. They therefore urged students to resist the temptation
to gain a monopoly on truth and seek contentment in discovering
partial and temporary solutions to ultimately insolvable problems.”
The advice is applicable to the conservative movement’s leaders
today who too often wallow in a shallow ideology that provides
instant and clear answers that are not only politically
inexpedient, but impractical altogether.
In fact, many of the thinkers profiled in this collection
would outright despise some of the tendencies within the modern
conservative movement. Richard Weaver, author of Ideas Have
Consequences, loathed egalitarianism. Kirk abhorred freedom
when it was defined as autonomous individualism. Willmoore Kendall
had a strong distaste for traditionalism if it worked to separate
American conservatives from the mainstream of life in their own
country. It would actually be difficult to assemble a collection of
conservatives who would be more ambivalent to the modern political
movement that claims to bear the name conservatism. And that is
precisely why this collection is so challenging and
valuable.
The essays contain some surprises. Second-hand reading had
hardened me to intellectual figures like Leo Strauss and John
Courtney Murray. I had encountered these names in polemics before,
but Dilemmas provided the first occasion of truly
encountering their thought. Murray, a Catholic priest and key
intellectual figure in 20th-century Catholicism, is not nearly as
sanguine about modern democracies as I had come to expect. He found
that democracy “once a political and social idea, now pretends to
be a religion, the one true religion transcendent to all warring
‘sects.’” Traditionalists who had suspected Murray of inspiring
Catholic capitulation to modernism will find a helpful corrective
in Peter Augustine Lawler’s treatment. Murray was adept at using
the thought of one modern thinker to demonstrate the implausibility
of another, while vindicating Christian orthodoxy. And even when
his thought is implausible or oversimplified (Murray believed the
Founders’ combination of John Locke and Jean Calvin was roughly
synonymous with St. Thomas Aquinas’s political philosophy), it is
still engaging.
Readers of Dilemmas may find themselves
introduced to new political binaries to replace “left and right” or
“conservative and liberal.” Brad Lowell Stowe’s essay on Robert
Nisbet shows us a figure who saw the great battle of civilization
drawn between “political monism” and “social pluralism.”
Conservatives should be on the side of the pluralists who include
not just Edmund Burke and Alexis de Tocqueville, but even the
anarcho-communist Peter Kropotkin. Buckley collaborator Willmoore
Kendall points to the conflict between the “great tradition” of
Western philosophic and religious truths against a revolutionary
moral relativism
Stowe’s essay on Nisbet is one of the most sterling.
Nisbet was an anti-statist to the core and believed that war was
the handmaiden of the welfare state. He defined as the “sole object
of the conservative tradition” the task of protecting “the social
order and its constitutive groups from the enveloping bureaucracy
of the nation state.”
Daniel McCarthy’s takes on the challenging task of
presenting the thought of Willmoore Kendall, who struggled to make
sense of and defend the doctrine of majority rule and the
philosophy of John Locke throughout his life’s work. (Full
disclosure: McCarthy is a colleague of mine.) McCarthy’s
contribution stands out for the wonderful biographical details and
storytelling, signs that a journalist was at work. He deftly traces
Kendall’s views on majoritarian rule and legislative supremacy as
they spring forth and mature over his career.
The truly wonderful thing about Dilemmas is that
its very structure and tone embodies the best traits of
conservatism. These nine essays never descend into sloganeering, or
reduce their subject’s work to mere ideology. Instead they clarify,
distill, and in some cases begin to build upon the legacy left by
our intellectual forebears. This collection is an antidote to the
immaturity that characterizes so much conservative polemic.
Aspiring conservative intellectuals can learn not just from the
content of this collection, but from its style and generosity of
spirit.
