This story was originally published by Real Clear Wire
By Peter Berkowitz
Really transparent thread
Members of moral, political, and religious traditions share basic assumptions, fundamental principles, and central beliefs about their associations and institutions. Because humans are selfish and fallible, words and concepts are multifaceted and ambiguous, and justice makes conflicting demands, traditions—no matter how noble and good their purposes—naturally divide into rival camps that espouse conflicting interpretations of their shared heritage. . Addressing this diversity and this dissent within a framework of overall unity is the sign of a living and vital tradition.
Thus understood, American conservatism constitutes an exemplary tradition.
The most recent battle over the future of conservatism has been raging for several years. The aggressor, the new New Right, condemns as moribund the conservative movement that descends from the old New Right represented primarily by William F. Buckley, Jr. and Ronald Reagan. Contemporary conservatives seek to overthrow a once-dominant conservative sensibility that they believe is shackled to an antiquated agenda and out of touch with the needs of the moment.
In 1955, the 29-year-old Buckley founded National Review. The magazine, which quickly established itself as the flagship publication of the then-nascent American conservative movement, brought together traditionalists and libertarians under one tent. Traditionalists emphasize the preservation of ancestral morality and the religious faith that supports it. Libertarians focused on maximizing individual freedom through government limited to a few indispensable, well-defined tasks. Traditionalists and libertarians tended to see each other as political adversaries.
Despite their mutual antagonism, traditionalists and libertarians forged an alliance in the 1950s and 1960s against the growing progressive state at home and the expansion of Soviet communism abroad. At the same time, and although they rarely appreciated it, the rival camps made up for each other’s deficiencies. As National Review senior editor Frank Meyer explained in 1962 in the National Review, in a diverse, transcontinental republic, limited government provides essential protection for traditional morality. And thriving families, communities, and civic life promote the virtues and instill dedication to duties that sustain free societies.
This conception of conservatism, in which the preservation of limited constitutional government and the preservation of traditional morality go hand in hand, has strong roots in the political thought of America’s founding era. Sometimes it goes by the name of fusionism.
Fusionism found its main political leader in Ronald Reagan. Serve as 40th President of the United States from 1981 to 1989, Reagan honed his rhetorical skills in Barry Goldwater’s 1964 presidential campaign and his political acumen from 1967 to 1975 as two-term governor of California. Reagan’s tax cuts and deregulation turned around the shattered American economy, while his military buildup and diplomacy – based on his conception of the Soviet Union as an “evil empire” – led the nation to victory in the Cold War . He championed individual liberty, limited government, traditional morality, and promoted a U.S. foreign policy that sought peace through strength and promoted human rights.
But that was two generations ago. Impatient with its intellectual and political legacy, the new New Right aims to break free from the conservative movement supported by Buckley and consolidated by Reagan and to implement dramatic change in response to what it sees as a precipitous American decline.
The new New Right finds disorder and decadence in America everywhere it looks. He sees a popular culture that caters to the left. He sees academia converting the classroom into a vehicle for the delivery of progressive propaganda and limiting speech that deviates from campus orthodoxy. He sees a deliberate policy of expanding illegal immigration. It is expected to be a weaponization of the federal bureaucracy that dates back to when the Obama administration’s IRS targeted Tea Party civic groups. He sees an increase in the criminalization of political differences with the prodigious but failed efforts of the FBI and the Department of Justice to prove that Donald Trump collaborated with Russia to steal the 2016 election. He sees partisan legal action in pursuit of the former President Trump for withholding classified documents while declining to press charges against President Joe Biden and former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton for indistinguishable if not likely more serious mishandling of classified documents. And he sees a foreign policy – conservative and progressive – that pursues elusive goals at extravagant expense.
The new New Right, argues Charles Kesler, is right. But, according to him, it also leads one astray. In “National Conservatism vs. American Conservatism ,” appearing in the winter 2023/24 issue of the Claremont Review, of which he is also the editor, Kesler argues that the old American conservatism is better suited to American political culture and constitutional government than the new New York Times. Right, and more appropriate to the full constellation of challenges facing the nation.
What goes by the name of “national conservatism,” Kesler observes, “is perhaps the most visible, identifiable and successful part of the New Right.” She admires many of the intellectual architects of the movement, but finds her judgment that “the former New Right of Buckley and Reagan” was “shortsightedly libertarian and temperamentally unserious about politics and morality” “exaggerated and unfair.”
National conservatism, it is true, faces new disorders: social justice warriors; the area of diversity, equity and inclusion; wakefulness; and globalization. However, the emergence of new disorders, Kesler argues, does not eliminate old disorders. The challenges to which the conservatism of Buckley and Reagan responded remain: the transformation of the federal bureaucracy into a mechanism for promoting progressive values; the promulgation of the idea of a living Constitution, which gives judges the authority to read their moral judgments promiscuously into the charter of the American government; a welfare state that instead of allowing citizens – assisted by their families and communities – to take care of themselves, encourages dependence on government; and a communist superpower that threatens the free world.
Kesler delves into his substantive agreement with Natcon and his considerable discomfort through a discussion of their 2022 manifesto: “National Conservatism: A Declaration of Principles.” National conservatism, he argues, rightly intervenes in defense of the nation when it is under attack, “both from above – by international and transnational organizations, laws and ideological-religious movements, and from below – by racial and , ethnic, sexual, and tribal-cultural factions asserting claims against national citizenship.” But again, Kesler points out, the old conservatism of Buckley and Reagan holds it axiomatic that the first duty of an American statesman is to honor the nation’s guiding principles and advance its vital interests.
What then distinguishes national conservatism? Rather than putting America first, Kesler argues, Natcons prioritize a theory of the nation and international relations, then reconfigure the national spirit in America according to their idealized model. According to the opening paragraphs of their statement, Natcons “emphasize the idea of nationhood because we see a world of independent nations – each pursuing its own national interests and upholding its own national traditions – as the only true alternative to the universalist ideologies that now they seek to impose a homogenizing, locality-destroying empire over the entire globe.” This, however, is the kind of political abstraction that Edmund Burke, one of the founding fathers of modern conservatism, warned against. The Natcon statement does not provide an alternative to the universalist ideologies it denounces, but an alternative universalist ideology.
With signatories to its declaration of principles coming not only from the United States but also from Austria, Canada, Croatia, France, Hungary, Israel, Italy, Poland, Portugal and the United Kingdom, national conservatism is proudly international. “How paradoxical,” observes Kesler, “is an openly international movement in favor of nationalism.”
Furthermore, national conservatism – at least in the writings of its most eminent theorist, the Israeli Yoram Hazony – does not simply abstract itself from the central features of American nationalism. Hazony, president of the Edmund Burke Foundation, which hosts Natcon’s statement of principles, attacks them: His version of national conservatism defames the American Enlightenment and classically liberal roots. The self-evident truths of the United States Declaration of Independence, not least the inalienable rights – the rights shared by all human beings – and the primary responsibility of government to secure them, reflect for Hazony falsehoods that undermine “the idea of the nation.”
However, as Kesler points out, American nationalism is “limited and shaped by equality, freedom, and consensus.” In the founding era, all major political parties embraced natural rights, individual liberty, and limited government based on the consent of the governed.
Failure to appreciate this constitutive characteristic of America produces other errors. Contrary to Hazony, the surge of progressivism in post-1960s America was not fueled by confused libertarians and neoconservatives advocating natural rights and limited government. Rather, progressivism was unleashed because of a failure to adhere to America’s founding principles and their caution in applying them to new circumstances. And contrary to Natcon’s ambition to leverage the state to support Christianity, such an alliance between faith and government, as America’s founding legacy teaches, would undermine both.
“What national conservatives are actually offering,” Kesler writes, “is not so much the return of American nationalism – or a purely traditional form of American conservatism, free of neos and libertarians – but a rewriting of American conservatism along new, less blatantly American, assimilating it, in fact, to the nationalism of other nations, starting with Great Britain”.
The problem is not that Natcon takes the American national spirit and the American conservative tradition seriously. The problem is that they don’t take them seriously enough.
This article was originally published by RealClearPolitics and made available via RealClearWire.