CONSERVATISM IN AMERICA: Making Sense of the American Right.

CONSERVATISM IN AMERICA: Making Sense of the American Right

By Paul Edward Gottfried

(New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007.)

The trouble with reviewing a tome by Paul Edward Gottfried is that almost the only person possessing the scholarly wherewithal to do so is Paul Edward Gottfried. Given the unfailing erudition of his mostly shortish but always densely researched books, his seemingly effortless allusions to Continental philosophy's more recondite areas, and his complete refusal to provide the equivalent of baby-food for dilettantes, the rest of us are apt to have our own intellectual limitations exposed rather embarrassingly when we attempt to summarise his work. All we can hope to do is to note the more obvious insights that Professor Gottfried (of Pennsylvania's Elizabethtown College) has supplied, to acknowledge his very considerable valour, and to trust that his latest production will win the audience it deserves. (National Observer has already run a number of his articles, while its Autumn 2003 issue discussed an earlier study by him, Multiculturalism and the Politics of Guilt.) A disclosure of personal background on this reviewer's part is necessary, even if it does compel detouring into the lotus-land of first-person singular usage: I know Professor Gottfried quite well.

In American intellectual historiography, the standard line is that American conservatism was an insubstantial, anaemic thing indeed until William F. Buckley founded, in 1955 when aged 30, the magazine National Review, with its rather self-serving proclamation in its very first number: "We stand athwart history, yelling Stop." This interpretation makes strictly limited appeal to Professor Gottfried, as does the current condition of National Review itself.

Quoting with some asperity the admiring attempts by Washington Post contributor E.J. Dionne to rewrite National Review's history--"Buckley was determined to rid the right of the wing nuts"--Professor Gottfried stresses two factors: the sheer inconsistency of Buckley's editorial purges, and the fact that even the purged National Review regularly exhibited during the 1960s various attitudes which would now be universally abominated as "sexist", "racist", and "fascist". Dionne's assertion that "He [Buckley] was, to his everlasting credit, the scourge of an anti-Semitism that once had a hold on significant parts of the right" makes strange reading: because Buckley, while he demonised the John Birch Society and suchlike non-violent organisations for purported extremism, indulged the obsessively Jew-baiting academic Revilo Oliver for years (Oliver was a member of Buckley's wedding party). Buckley even found room for an occasional affectionate remembrance of Oliver when he came to write his memoir, Miles Gone By . Moreover, Buckley's own 1960s views of Zionism, democratism, Martin Luther King, and other such gods of modern neoconserv-atism's copybook headings were furiously hostile, so hostile that today they would be unpublishable in any periodical with the slightest ambitions towards mainstream readership. It does not appear that Dionne or any of Buckley's other latter-day eulogists have bothered to learn much about their hero. This is odd, since any Internet search engine, and any bound volumes of National Review for the relevant period, could have told them how false their present assumptions are.

Professor Gottfried does not seek to condemn National Review out of hand; and nor, despite his own hostility to modern neoconservatism, does he condemn out of hand other publications broadly regarded as being within the neoconservative ambit. He has kind words for some pieces in The New Criterion (a magazine for which--if, again, first-person usage may be permitted--I have worked with considerable satisfaction, and which has never tried to exercise any political censorship over me, even though my doctrines cannot have been invariably congenial to it). Nevertheless, tolerance for baseless revisionism has its limits, and accepting Dionne--or his fellow Buckley-apologist Jonah Goldberg--as an authority on National Review's ideological background belongs well to the other side of those limits.

Before Buckley exploded onto the American cultural scene with his flamboyance, debonair disdain, and ostentatiously polysyllabic literary style, a genuine political philosopher seven years Buckley's senior had made his own impact. This was Russell Kirk, with whom Professor Gottfried had a personal acquaintanceship, and whose The Conservative Mind: From Burke to Eliot became an improbable bestseller of the early 1950s. (Time's issue for 5 July 1953 gave over its entire literature section to this book.) Professor Gottfried is notably unenthusiastic about Kirk's approach in supplying for American conservatism an eclectic, Europeanised genealogy; he likens this approach to "picking up a baron's title in the Austro-Hungarian Empire. It was a nice thing that hurt nobody but brought those looking for social status a needed lift." One does wonder if this is fair, or if his subsequent description of Kirk as "a movement player" is altogether fair either.

For a start, Kirk's whole temperament seems to have inclined him towards patrician introversion, at least in print. Incessant combativeness could hardly be expected from authors with Kirk's taste for solitude. Moreover, Kirk required no reminders--nor did anybody else with a knowledge of recent American publishing--as to the fate which, particularly during and after World War II, had befallen literary combatants more aggressive and more libertarian than he. Kirk need only have considered New Republic columnist John T. Flynn, who began the 1930s hailing Roosevelt; who soon broke with FDR, having diagnosed the New Deal as Mussolinian in its inspiration; who eventually supported the America First movement; and who had his repute and career largely ruined by 1950. Westbrook Pegler, the Pulitzer-winning journalist, travelled much the same personally disastrous route, leading in his case--unlike Flynn's--to vehement paranoia. Back then, defeated authors really were defeated authors. No cyberspace existed to give them delusions about the vast size of their reading public. Kirk can scarcely be blamed for not wishing Flynn's and Pegler's destiny upon himself, even if he did lack the metaphysical depth of Max Scheler, Carl Schmitt, Heinrich Rommen, and other Teutonic thinkers clearly close to Professor Gottfried's heart.

In any event, there is scarcely a page of Kirk which could not be read with profit by the worst of today's neocons (often former, or "former", Trotskyites), about whom Professor Gottfried is suitably scathing. For anyone too young to have personal memories of Eisenhower's reign, but well and truly old enough to recall the Reagan years, the truly amazing characteristic of Professor Gottfried's foes is not their failure to live up to the principles of an antique figure like Senator Robert Taft, but the extent to which they have dumbed down conservatism since Reagan. "The neoconservatives", in Professor Gottfried's own vivid simile, "swept through the [conservative] movement as effortlessly as Hitler's armies had marched into Austria in 1938."

At neoconservatism's theoretical end is Harry V. Jaffa, of California's Claremont Institute, whose recent encomia to Lincoln as avatar of militant egalitarianism exhibit a wilful and pharisaic disregard for anything so vulgar as historical evidence (the pre-Civil-War Lincoln favoured forcing as many blacks as possible out of America, a truth routinely suppressed by his idolaters). At neoconservatism's tabloid end are such pernicious lightweights as David Brooks, who openly appeases feminism and--along with fellow neocon John Podhoretz--defends homosexual "marriage" as compatible with "family values". Kirk, it should be noted (and Professor Gottfried does note this), dedicated some of his most astringent sentences to upbraiding the whole "values" religion: "Values", Kirk observed, "are private and frail reeds. One man's values are charitable work; another man's value is brothel-frequenting. Who can judge which is the preferable value--dogmata lacking? ... No one but an ass would die that his value preference might endure; while dogmatic belief sustains saints and heroes."

Naturally it is futile to expect from the Brookses and the Podhoretzes any serious opposition to mass Third World immigration, opposition which they regard as intrinsically "bigoted". Yet nobody should underestimate such pundits' lobbying talent and command of print media. Against these weapons, the Internet's alleged populist power--shades of Ross Perot's hubristic predictions in 1992 about the "electronic town hall"!--has, so far anyway, been largely useless.

For those seeking guidance as to how this situation developed, and whether it could have been avoided with a greater concern by establishment conservatives to avoid piggybacking on the Republican Party, Professor Gottfried's analysis will be indispensable. To cite his own severe verdict: "Neoconservatives affirm the status quo as the best of all possible worlds, as long as they can share power--and as long as they can persuade their fellow Americans to bring American democracy to other societies." A programme suspiciously redolent of Bertolt Brecht's famous recommendation that "the government ... dissolve the people and appoint a new people".

Reviewed by R. J. Stove

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:

R.J. STOVE is a writer and commentator on public affairs and has had numerous articles published in Quadrant, National Observer, Chronicles and The American Conservative. He wrote The Unsleeping Eye: A Brief History of the Secret Police and Their Victims (Duffy and Snellgrove, 2003).