Conservatives Without Conscience

In 1995, when the newly Republican-controlled Congress launched an assault on Bill Clinton, Will observed, contrary to the liberal shibboleth that government never contracts, “Well, it is contracting. It is contracting—and here we should honor the memory of James Burnham—because of congressional ascendancy. A traditional tenet of that fine man’s conservatism has been re-established, to the point at which the current President is the least consequential President in Washington since Calvin Coolidge.”[14]

To make his point, Burnham quoted the French historian and scholar, Amaury de Riencourt, who wrote in 1957 that “the President of the United States [was] not merely the Chief Executive of one of the Western democracies, but one already endowed with powers of truly Caesarian magnitude,” and he feared that the American presidency could result in the destruction of freedom given its “concentration of supreme power in the hands of one man.”[15] Caesarism, of course, is despotism, and Burnham urged conservatives to resist anything that enabled the rise of a potential Caesar, “that is to say, Napoleon, Mussolini, Stalin, Hitler, Peron, Franco, Khrushchev.”

Unlike many of his successors, Burnham did believe that conservatism could be described and defined, and in 1959 he did so, which provides a record of how conservatism was perceived by a well-positioned insider in its early days. “We can define conservatism and liberalism by reference to certain philosophical principles,” Burnham wrote, as he endeavored to bridge intellectual conservatism with real-world politics.[16] To define conservatism in its political context, Burnham drew a point-by-point comparison of conservative and liberal positions on specific issues that he believed distinguish each. With the caveat that “brevity brings a certain amount of distortion,” he reduced his findings to thirteen statements, which he explained “hang together: that is, to occur as a group, not merely at random. Whether the cause of this linkage—which is not absolute, of course—is metaphysical, social or psychological we do not need to decide in order to observe that it exists.”[17] Yet like Kirk’s canons, Burnham’s descriptions of the conservative approach today has little practical application.[*]

The conservatism of Burnham and of an entire generation of conservative intellectuals has virtually disappeared as a functional political force, because it proved unable to stand up to the waves of demagogues, bigots, fanatics, malcontents, and assorted populists who have claimed the label for their own extremist aims. Leaders such as George Wallace, Strom Thurmond, Jesse Helms, and Pat Robertson—along with many more pedestrian politicians, political operatives, and social activists in pursuit of whatever narrow agendas—have easily overwhelmed and pushed aside the principles of conservative’s founders.[18] Had conservatism been entrenched enough to prevent expediency from overtaking critical thinking, it might not have been so easily uprooted. But conservatism was built on an unstable ground, and was not sufficiently fortified to weather such political storms.

A Brief History of Modern Conservatism: Shallow and Twisted Roots

Numerous recent studies have traced the evolution of the conservative movement.[19] As these works show (but certainly do not concede), conservatism has too often been perverted by small minds, which has enabled any number of extremist forces to subvert its authentic principles. Unlike classic liberalism, which evolved slowly over centuries, modern conservatism was cobbled together, if not contrived, by a relatively small group of intellectuals during a brief period in the late 1940s and early 1950s. Modern conservatism was soon brought into elective politics in the 1950s; its followers then joined forces with Southern politicians in the 1960s, and began flirting with evangelical Christians in the 1970s. Conservatism’s many factions were consolidated under Ronald Reagan’s Republican Party in the 1980s. Less than satisfied with their lot under Reagan, however, evangelical Christians increased their religiously motivated political zealotry in the late 1980s, throughout the 1990s, and into the new century.