Conservatives Without Conscience

A classic is something accepted as definitive, never out of fashion (like a blue suit or a black dress), and whose excellence is generally agreed upon. Within that framework, there is no conservatism that can be considered classic. Conservatives can trace their history, but they don’t always agree upon it when doing so. There have, from time to time, been periods when there was widespread agreement among conservatives, only to have this fleeting harmony later fall apart. There is no genuine founding father of American conservatism, although Edmund Burke, the British Member of Parliament, who set forth his conservative views in Reflections on the Revolution in France (in 1790), comes close. Burke’s influence on American thinkers is indisputable (he favored the American Revolution but opposed the French Revolution), but his defense of monarchy and aristocracy never played well with American conservatives. Thus, Burke’s conservatism is not, for Americans, classical.

Conservatism is a movement with no Moses, although William F. Buckley is sometimes considered to be an analogous figure, as John B. Judis’s biography of him, subtitled Patron Saint of the Conservatives, would attest. Buckley’s support of conservatism’s latter-day saints, like Richard Weaver, Frank Meyer, Friederich Hayek, Russell Kirk, and James Burnham, through his National Review, have certainly invigorated modern conservatism. Kirk and Burnham have always been the most significant among these formative voices, although by 1986, when Russell Kirk prepared his last edition of The Conservative Mind, young conservatives were already coming to consider his work as “Old Testament” conservatism, and his once well-known canons of conservatism now reside in the dustbin of history.[*] In retrospect the only things that tie all these early thinkers together are a dark view of human nature, their strong dislike of President Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal, and an outsized fear of communism. This is about as close to “classic” conservatism as it gets.

While Russell Kirk focused on theory and philosophy, James Burnham addressed practice and process. An exemplary scholar who taught philosophy at New York University, Burnham cofounded the National Review in 1955. His Congress and the American Tradition, which describes FDR’s presidency overpowering Congress, has been called by a leading scholar of conservative intellectual history “one of the most penetrating works of political analysis produced by conservatives since World War II.”[11] Burnham understood the ebb and flow of power between the legislative and executive branches, and he appreciated the expansion of the presidency under strong presidents such as Abraham Lincoln, Andrew Jackson, and Woodrow Wilson. He believed that FDR, however, overreached, by taking away every last vestige of Congress’s power as a peer to the president and reducing the legislative branch to “a mere junior partner.”[12]

Conservative columnist George Will wrote in 2005 that the “president’s authorization of domestic surveillance by the National Security Agency [that] contravened a statute’s clear language” was a striking indication that conservatives had forgotten their roots. “For more than 500 years,” Will noted, “since the rise of nation-states and parliaments, a preoccupation of Western political thought has been the problem of defining and confining executive power.” Will, thinking like the conservative he is, invoked history as a reminder to other conservatives willing to listen. “Modern American conservatism grew in reaction against the New Deal’s creation of the regulatory state and the enlargement of the executive branch power that such a state entails. The intellectual vigor of conservatism was quickened by reaction against the Great Society and the aggrandizement of the modern presidency by Lyndon Johnson, whose aspiration was to complete the project begun by Franklin Roosevelt.” Will closed by drawing on the wisdom of the distant past. “Charles de Gaulle, a profound conservative, said of another such, Otto von Bismarck—de Gaulle was thinking of Bismarck not pressing his advantage in 1870 in the Franco-Prussian War—that genius sometimes consists of knowing when to stop. In peace and in war, but especially in the latter, presidents have pressed their institutional advantages to expand their powers to act without Congress. This president might look for occasions to stop pressing.”[13]