There Never Was a "Rational" Conservatism
by David Atkins
One of the themes that liberals and so-called moderates alike often discuss is the decline of modern conservatism into base extremism. William F. Buckley is often cited as the historical paragon of "rational" conservatism, as if there were a time at which conservatism was somehow less driven by prejudice, anti-rationalism and base paranoia than it is today.
Many writers better and more knowledgeable than myself have pointed out that the supposedly "rational" conservatives of the Buckley era were decrying Medicare and blacks marrying whites as the signs of the destruction of Western civilization. It's not as if the "responsible" conservative positions of the time were any more moral. It's just that the country as a whole had been less assaulted by a mass of conservative media institutions and think tanks connected with post-civil-rights race resentment.
But even without pointing to specific objectionable conservative positions from the past, the entire theory behind supposedly noble Buckleyan politics is seriously skewed. Buckley's agenda is famously encapsulated in the 1955 mission statement of the National Review:
The launching of a conservative weekly journal of opinion in a country widely assumed to be a bastion of conservatism at first glance looks like a work of supererogation, rather like publishing a royalist weekly within the walls of Buckingham Palace. It is not that, of course; if NATIONAL REVIEW is superfluous, it is so for very different reasons: It stands athwart history, yelling Stop, at a time when no one is inclined to do so, or to have much patience with those who so urge it.
This idea of standing athwart history yelling stop is quite famous, and few find it intrinsically silly.
But the question immediately follows: who would even try to do that, and why? Change history, yes, if possible. Prevent disaster, certainly. But to simply stand athwart history and yell stop, simply as its own ethical principle? It's madness. Change is by its very nature inevitable. Secular and religious wisdom alike, Eastern and Western, notes that change is an immutable characteristic of the universe--if you'll pardon the tautology.
Buckley tried to preserve the architecture of United States government as it existed in the 1950s, or to revert it to an era prior to the New Deal. Yet he never asked himself whether it would have served the cause of justice and human freedom to have stood athwart history and yelled "Stop" in 1850 prior to the Emancipation Proclamation. Or to have done so in 1770 prior to the American Revolution, though Buckley would certainly have objected to the French version. Or to have done so in 1350 prior to the libertine and centralizing era of the Renaissance. There were many people who stood athwart history yelling stop during those periods. They were always wrong, and were thankfully defeated at every step of the way.
And what of Buckley, that great paragon of rational conservatism? What forces was he most interested in stopping at the time? Check the paragraph immediately following the famous "stand athwart history" passage:
NATIONAL REVIEW is out of place, in the sense that the United Nations and the League of Women Voters and the New York Times and Henry Steele Commager are in place. It is out of place because, in its maturity, literate America rejected conservatism in favor of radical social experimentation. Instead of covetously consolidating its premises, the United States seems tormented by its tradition of fixed postulates having to do with the meaning of existence, with the relationship of the state to the individual, of the individual to his neighbor, so clearly enunciated in the enabling documents of our Republic.
The League of Women Voters. The United Nations. The New York Times--back in 1955. An historian who committed the great historical error of opposing McCarthyism, the Vietnam War, and Nixon's overreach of Executive authority. These are the institutions that principled, "serious" conservatism stood athwart history to stop. And in the next sentence, Buckley tries to insinuate that the American Constitution somehow presents a torment and thorn in the side to these largely uncontroversial institutions and positions. Is it really any less crazy to suggest that the League of Women Voters is somehow inherently unconstitutional, than it is to suggest the same of universal healthcare? No, it's crazier. Buckley in 1955 sounds just as unhinged as Newt Gingrich does today. It's only with rose-colored glasses that we see it any differently.
Conservatism in the United States didn't only recently become the laughably misguided province of kooks and crackpots. It has always been so, even in its period of greatest supposed respectability.
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