“A perfect democracy is the most shameless thing in the world.”
—Edmund Burke

For some time now it has been the opinion of European political theorists that right and left have become antiquated points of reference. Allegedly, these terms, archaic by the time of the Cold War, were kept in use to distinguish the pro- and anticommunist sides—friends and enemies of the United States and Soviet Union. The same labels were given further lease on life by socialists and capitalists and, later, by social democrats and democratic capitalists seeking to demarcate their overlapping camps. In a frank recognition of this overlap, “conservative” and “liberal” are made complimentary terms, each referring to a moderate position on the political spectrum. These are the positions of non-extremists, as opposed to rightists and leftists, who scornfully reject consensus politics.

Such talk of consensus fits with the “end of ideology” interpretation of contemporary political life, which has been periodically reprised for almost 40 years: from the mainstream liberalism of the 50’s culminating in the book by S.M. Lipset and Daniel Bell in 1962 to recent pronouncements on the “end of history.” In this view, ideologies have been “exhausted,” or overtaken by historical progress. By now, we are led to believe, everyone but fools and idiots agrees on the same political principles—chiefly human rights, a mixed economy, and evolving constitutional government. What is left to be resolved are mere details, like the size of the payroll deduction or the best mix of state economic control and the free market. This supposed avoidance of ideology, as the late Christopher Lasch was wont to observe, is itself ideological. It is a form of intolerance that demonizes those who ask unseemly questions or appeal to “exhausted” worldviews.

But equally intriguing have been the attempts to make sharp doctrinal distinctions where none exists—and where none is even intended to be present. Why should American Democrats pretend to be the party of Jefferson and Jackson, or English Tories the aficionados of Disraeli and Salisbury, when their present character and programs are unrelated to the circumstances of past centuries? One possible answer is that political parties desire to be part of a continuum, even a contrived one, rather than to be viewed as something wholly contemporary: even innovators invoke a tradition of innovation. Another, perhaps more relevant answer is that, by tracing the present differences between largely indistinguishable parties and factions to some noteworthy split safely in the past, it is possible for partisans to participate in high drama without being disruptive. To take sides in electoral contests is to engage imaginatively in political reenactment—politics presented as virtual reality.

In Jerry Z. Muller’s account of conservatism since the 18th century, one finds an ideology that closely fits this description. Muller’s conservatism is expansive enough to include Edmund Burke, David Hume, and the 18th-century jurist and depicter of Osnabruck communal life Justus Moser, together with neoconservative celebrities Edward Banfield, Irving Kristol, and Peter Berger. If this seems like forced association, it does testify to the search by some American conservatives for a convenient, but not quite authentic, past. A look at the real past, as Muller must know, would reveal the sea change undergone by American conservatism since mid-century, from an anti-welfare state and isolationist persuasion to a globalist cause committed to what the Wall Street Journal now calls “welfare-state capitalism.”

The neoconservative guardians of this creed do not hide their feelings regarding what it is they have replaced: every several months. Commentary runs a pointed piece attacking the anti-New Deal and even the postwar right as a source and conduit of nativist bigotry. It is difficult for those who are essentially Cold War liberals to create a “rightist” genealogy for themselves with which they can feel at home. One might wonder whether this group—with which Muller strongly identifies—would wish to be linked, however distantly, to Catholic restorationists, or to appear in the same anthology with the hated Carl Schmitt. Muller does keep his book free of references to the postwar right and to its latter-day paleo representatives. But if the anthology ignores such obvious figures as Russell Kirk and T.S. Eliot, Muller does inflict on his friends the far more reactionary company of dead Europeans.

A more worthwhile survey of conservative thinkers and thought is a lexicon organized by the Bavarian nobleman and publisher of Criticón, Caspar von Schrenck-Notzing. The lexicon avoids the anachronism of throwing together anti-modernists with hypermodern democratic capitalists. Schrenck-Notzing plainly does not share Muller’s confidence that “the historical utilitarianism at the heart of conservatism” permits conservatives to scuttle what has sunk into “political irrelevance.” The traditional right, for Schrenck-Notzing, embraces primarily critics of the French Revolution and defenders of agrarian, hierarchical societies and established churches. While this right can be seen as stretching far enough into the 19th century to take in middle-class enemies of social leveling, Schrenck-Notzing nonetheless distinguishes between liberal opposition to democratizing forces and an older. presumably purer, right.

He would also have methodological reservations about Muller’s statement that “by the late 19th century conservatives had turned to a defense of elites based upon achievement and performance.” From a 19th-century perspective, the elites in question were not conservative but liberal. Schrenck-Notzing’s work also contains far fewer entries for the United States than for Western and Central Europe, and its survey of American conservatism since the 50’s raises the conceptual problem of whether the phenomenon being examined is conservative in any historical sense.

Disciples of Russell Kirk, mostly Catholic traditionalists, have defined conservatism as a defense of “transcendental values.” These values are thought to be embodied in, among others, Anglo-American exemplars of political and moral virtues; in The Conservative Mind (1953), Kirk provides a survey of conservative figures deserving emulation, from Edmund Burke to T.S. Eliot. While Kirk does not insist that Anglo-American history and culture have consistently yielded “conservative minds,” behind his rhetoric is a perfectly defensible argument: that, contrary to a once dominant view that “liberalism is the only American tradition,” there is in American life a strong conservative tradition carried over from Europe. Despite the fact that what he associates with this tradition is often a conservative variant on Victorian liberalism, as typified by Fitzjames Stephen, Kirk is right about the resistance to democratic equality mounted by theorists on both sides of the Atlantic. He also points to the practice among early American jurists and politicians of making extended references to the Bible, William Blackstone, and Greek and Roman classics. The world in which these men lived was part of a chain extending back to “Athens, Jerusalem, and Rome”: this is the teaching that Kirk hoped to illustrate when he wrote The Roots of American Order, intended as a high school text and now translated for the first time into Italian.

Because Kirk distrusted abstract reasoning and equated conservative sentiment with intuition and homespun truth, it is hard to trace to him directly the preoccupation with values typical of his followers. One link was Kirk’s midlife conversion to Catholicism, which facilitated his identification with the Catholic Natural Law tradition. Though Kirk did not offer demonstrations of that tradition in his work, he did praise Thomistic moral reasoning as a way of learning about the good. It is, however, still a stretch from there to the habitual values talk of his disciples—particularly in view of Kirk’s dismissal of values as a newfangled, individualist notion. Moreover, a cynic might ask whether the invocation by Kirkians of timeless values and “permanent things” (a phrase borrowed from Eliot) begs the question of what exactly all of them share as beliefs. Despite this repetition of certain vague terms. Kirk’s disciples have displayed considerable humanistic learning and critical energy. Among their intellectual contributions have been the literary criticism of Modern Age’s editor George Panichas, the aesthetic and political studies of Swedish philosopher Claes Ryu, Bruce Frohnen’s incisive critique of the moral emptiness of the American right (Virtue and the Promise of American Conservatism), Peter J. Stanlis’s works on Edmund Burke and Natural Law, and Marco Respinti’s elegant translation of, and introduction to. Kirk’s Roots. Among scholars who have acknowledged conceptual debts to, and expressed personal affection for, Kirk have been sociologist Robert Nisbet, historians Christopher Lasch and Eugene Genovese, and anthropologist Grace Goodell.

Despite this well-deserved chorus of enthusiasts, Kirk’s traditionalism, Greek historian Panajotis Kondylis observes, suffered from the lack of a continuing context. Kirk himself, preferring to imagine the opposite, once compared President Eisenhower to Count Metternich and himself to Metternich’s advisor Friedrich Gentz. During the Reagan years he again sounded restorationist themes, to no avail. Conservatives of the 80’s, grouped in think tanks near Capitol Hill, were turning out not Burkean oratory but “policies” and GOP electoral strategies. Interest in cultural and aesthetic questions had diminished on the authorized right—while, if necessary, such questions could be addressed in one of the multitude of glossy neoconservative magazines which graced newsstands inside the Beltway. Of the 30 million or more dollars annually earmarked for “conservative” foundations, almost all of it is now spent on ephemeral policy issues.

In his book Konservativismus (1987), Kondylis asks whether Kirk and other American traditionalists are not merely echoing European restorationist thought “as a counterweiglit to the most recent developments in a consumer mass democracy.” What renders this intended counterweight useless is its detachment from any supportive sociopolitical structure. Without such a framework, Kondylis contends, values cannot be turned into a public ethic. By creatively blending Marx and Schmitt, and by giving to both his own spin, he explains why the terms “conservative” and “liberal” cannot operate as worldviews. Ideologies are distillations of beliefs put forth by political and social elites, whether rising or falling, and they carry historical weight to whatever extent their bearers can control the lives of others. Once removed from this relation, they do not prevail— certainly not as individually chosen values formerly associated with a fallen elite.

It may be said that Kondylis preaches historical relativism, and that, like other relativists, he excepts his own “scientific” values from the judgments applied to the objects of his study. Whether that is the case or not, his observations deserve to be heeded. Ideas become part of the political conversation when they appeal to those who exercise, or effectively contend for, power. Kondylis is speaking specifically about principles and social visions whose bearers seek to implement them as public truths. For this to happen, these truths must dovetail with the concerns and interests of those who can lead. As Kondylis makes clear, he is analyzing not the ontological status of “timeless beliefs” but the conditions in which some political ideas win out in relation to others. Kondylis does not deny that failed ideas may hang around for a time before losing all cultural impact. When in the late 80’s Russell Kirk lectured on traditionalist themes at the Heritage Foundation, an institution proclaiming its devotion to a “world democratic revolution,” Heritage’s president Edwin Feulner was allowing representation to what he knew was a weakened position on the transformed American right. Kondylis might have described this as providing a semblance of continuity between “a neo-medieval rendition of the societas civilis” and consumer-democratic boosterism. Needless to say, these two ingredients in the movement conservative ragout are not equally perceptible.

Kondylis is skeptical of the claim that political conflicts will cease to occur in a consumer society, where traditional identities are diluted and in which an impersonal government hands out general entitlements. Here, too, Schmitt’s essence of the political, as the drawing of friend-enemy distinctions, will continue to operate. A desperate middle class in some situations may turn to authoritarian solutions to forestall an ominous leap into radical egalitarian polities. But Kondylis relegates this “modern rightist” possibility almost exclusively to Latin junta-prone societies or their equivalent elsewhere. He does not see it as anything likely to occur in the consumer mass democracies to which he devotes his most recent book, and also his frequent columns in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung. In the Planetarische Politik nach dem Kalten Krieg, he presents a new scenario, in which peoples struggle for both material resources and creature comforts. Like Schmitt, Kondylis believes that we have entered a great “neutralizing epoch” in which all belief-systems that are not compatible with material interest have been neutralized and devalued. In his eagerness to generalize about current Western materialism, Kondylis may go too far—for example, in dismissing entirely Samuel Huntington’s thoughtful essay on cultural and religious conflicts in an age of global politics. For Kondylis, all such disputes can be traced to the bitterness caused by material disparities. Although this recurrent judgment in his work recalls the tirades of Third World Marxists, Kondylis has come to it from a non-Marxist perspective. The descendant of a distinguished Greek military family who laments in letters his unheroic existence “as the author of long books in German,” he despises the hedonism of post-bourgeois democracy. His own sympathies are most clearly with the landed aristocracy, and, after it, with those bourgeois ascetics who built up nation-states and middle-class capitalism. One guesses from his social commentary that wine-sipping yuppies and self-actualizing feminists are less to his liking than the would-be gravediggers of the contemporary West.

It is possible, in any event, to imagine sources of conflict that are neither strictly material in motivation nor tied to obsolete labels. Besides cultural and racial struggles one may foresee other roadblocks to a not-quite-new world order, starting with populist and regional obstacles. Despite the American media’s labeling of such populist manifestations as “right wing,” present-day demands for regional, participatory democracy rightfully defy the categorization. Though regional nationalism in Quebec has flourished throughout the century, it has been wed over time to different spouses, from the francophone clericalism of Maurice Duplessis to the welfare state socialism of Rene Levesque. Regionalist movements in Europe have allied themselves with both left and right, as the occasion presents itself. In the British elections in April, Scottish nationalists, voting overwhelmingly for Labour, did so because Tony Blair promised the Scots home rule. In Italy the Lega Nord has attracted to its brand of regionalism those protesting federal control of welfare and immigration. But the appeal made by leghisti to citizen involvement in governmental decisions need not entail a market economy. The league only insists that democracy should involve authentic self-rule.

The populist, regionally based challenge to central administration has not, however, caught on equally everywhere. Unlike in Italy, Austria, and Great Britain, it has remained relatively weak in the United States, where the federal administration and federal courts have had their way with lower levels of government. Here regionalist opposition lacks the firm ethnic base or the memory of a prenational state—both of which are present in Europe—and so the challenge mounted to the central state, if occasionally violent, has been dispersed. In the United States, moreover, the respectable and well-heeled “right” consists of what Fred Barnes styles “big-government conservatives”—advocates of a pro-business welfare state combined with a vigorous foreign policy based on the promotion of “human rights.” In point of fact, there is no critical confrontation between this position and the underlying assumptions of the Clinton administration. Real confrontation lies elsewhere, beyond the reprising of antiquated right-left distinctions, and here the struggle unfolding is about nothing less than the meaning of democracy. 

 

[Conservatism: An Anthology of Social and Political Thought from David Hume to the Present, by Jerry Z. Muller (Princeton: Princeton University Press) 464 pp., $59.50]

[Lexikon des Konservatismus, edited by Caspar von Schrenck-Notzing (Graz: Leopold Stocker Verlag)]

[Le Radici dell’Ordine Americano: La tradizione europea nei valori del Nuovo Mondo, by Russell Kirk, edited by Marco Respinti (Milan: Arnoldo Mondadori Editori)]

[Planetarische Politik nach dem Kalten Krieg, by Panajotis Kondylis (Berlin: Akademie Verlag)]