Frank Meyer: ahead of his time.

Of all the founders of American conservatism, it is Frank Meyer upon whom the word "conservative" sits most happily. In the beginning the movement was full of people who thought it had gotten the wrong name. Classical liberals, libertarians, traditionalists, theocrats, and others argued that however politically useful the conservative coalition might be, at bottom conservatism was a contradictory eclecticism based not on shared principle but on shared enmities. Any attempt, in particular Frank Meyer's attempt, to "fuse" the factions into philosophical unity would be based not on clear analysis but on intellectual compromise.

But Frank Meyer's analysis, as presented in the early NR columns and In Defense of Freedom, was very clear. He wasn't fusing anything. A conservative was precisely what he was, and he knew precisely what he was conserving: "the Christian understanding of the nature and destiny of man," which, in the political realm, had been best realized in the founding of the American Republic.

That Christian understanding, Meyer argued, was disserved by libertarians and traditionalists alike. The traditionalists, he explained, began with a leg up on the libertarians, because they started from the correct premise that virtue was the end of man. But they concluded from this, wrongly in Meyer's view, that virtue must also be the end of politics and freedom at best a means--as in the utility of the market--to be sacrificed as prudence dictated. The libertarians charged statism, but for their own part often sounded as if they didn't care about man's end at all, so long as they could show that in his beginnings he was free.

Meyer's answer was simple and conclusive. Freedom is neither end nor means but fact. Freedom is not a tool of men or a privilege of men, not even--not primarily anyway--a right of men. It is a condition of men. Like the God in Whose image they were created, men are persons, and freedom is an integral aspect of personality. Politics should facilitiate men's pursuit of virtue. But since virtue is the fulfillment of nature, a politics that, by attempting to compel virtue, disregards that "innate freedom [that] is the essence" of man's nature will frustrate its own purposes.

Meyere insisted that unless good acts were freely chosen they could not be truly virtuous, an argument that seemed like chop-logic to some: Weren't good acts good in themselves regardlss of motivation? But Meyer was making a metaphysical and psychological point of enormous importance. If man is to pursue virtue, i.e., fulfill his nature, he must do it through the nature, not against it. It is no accident that Bolshevik attempts to compel virtue produce evil and corruption on a Bolshevik scale.

The traditionalists viewed themselves as the protectors of the Christian tradition in politics. But Meyer, coming to Christianity through atheism and Communism, found the traditionalists insufficiently appreciative of Christianity's uniqueness. They still did political philosophy in the manner of the Greeks, who, knowing nothing of the Incarnation, held that men found their true being in the polis and the communal pursuit of virtue. To Meyer, such transcendent statism, however informed by virtue, was all but blasphemous. After the Incarnation "only the person can be the earthly pole of the discharge between the transcendent and the immanent. The sanctity is drained out of all institutions of an earthly nature ... Only persons ... can receive the beatific vision or be redeemed by the divine sacrifice of love."

To find politics truly imbued with the Christian understanding of man, Meyer argued, one should look to the founding of American Republic. If the essential political dilemma is that man can achieve the good only if he is free to reject it, then the Founders grasped it by both horns. They accepted both man's essential freedom and the reality of an objective moral order and "made the most effective effort ever . . . to articulate in political terms the Western understanding of the interrelationship" of the two. They envisioned a government that would conform itself to the freedom and dignity of persons and thus envisoned a nation whose politics would foster the public virtues of personality: responsibility, self-reliance, self-governance, moral accountability. It is from "the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, and the debates at the time of its adoption" that "irradiates the present active scene of American conservatism."

In the Fifties and early Sixties, the jibe of the intellectual establishment was that there was no legitimate conservative tradition in American politics. To all its roots America was a liberal nation. A distressing number of conservative intellectuals, perhaps intimidated by conservative political failures, seemd to concede the point, striving at best to graft conservatism onto American politics. frank Meeyr not only thought conservatism had a place in the American tradition, he lay claim to that entire tradition on conservatism's behalf.

That is precisely what conservatives need to do today. The vast and successful conservative political enterprise has become, almost overnight, subject to all the vices and temptations of power politics. The enterprise, not to be confused with the movement from which it sprang, is too large and too busy for philosophical reflection. If it does not find, or is not given, a clear, simple sense of what holds it together, it will split apart, ruptured by confusion and opportunism. Defending the Founders' vision is not only a good definition of what American political conservatism has in fact been doing, it is also a unifying principle both simple enough and profound enough to hold together a mass movement.

Three decades ago, a thousand flowers bloomed in the conservative garden. Frank Meyer, ahead of his time, planted an oak. In the next few years, its shade wil be most welcome.