Philadelphia Society conference on charity
From charity to ‘compassion.’ (Philadelphia Society conference on charity)
FROM CHARITY TO `COMPASSION’
I will tell you a Philadelphia Society secret: reporters are not allowed at its national meetings. There are always a couple of NATIONAL REVIEW editors present, but nobody thinks we qualify. So, the rule is kept, yet once a year you get some report of this most pleasant and fertile of conservative gatherings.
And an NR trade secret: the job is rotated informally among the editors, partly to keep a fresh outlook, mostly to see if anyone can think up something new to say about the unvarying meeting routine, which is as familiar and comfy as cotton. I’m not even going to try.
What is ever fresh and fascinating is the ground covered. The more so this year, because the subject lent itself to such sharp, factual focus: “Charity, Philanthropy, and the Welfare State.” Most of the speakers were either in the front lines of research or in the last redoubts of a true charitable impulse for organized philanthropy. Veterans, with scars to prove it. The picture that emerged was so widely agreed upon I’ll try to summarize it before taking up individual contributions.
Irving Kristol titled his keynote remarks, “No Good Deed Goes Unpunished.” This gloomy title introduced an appropriately bleak view of institutional philanthropy today that was echoed, refined, and elaborated by other speakers. Some in the audience thought this view too pessimistic in details. But no one, either speaker or auditor, was willing to say that things go well in the non-profit establishment.
Not long ago, the shining hope of non-profit enterprise was to foster independence: to compete, as it were, with government’s misguided do-goodism, which only turns its “beneficiaries” into dependent wards of the state. But all this has been turned upside down, said Kristol. Institutions that were supposed to rescue us from the worst of welfarism–churches, philanthropies, higher education, especially the tax-exempt general-purpose foundations–developed an insatiable affinity for the state and a hunger to serve its purposes. What we get is a whole class of what Kristol bitingly called “professional altruists”–the irony will be lost on the Left–feeding Moloch.
What is the purpose of philanthropy? The great Jewish philosopher Maimonides, as Forrest McDonald reminded us, said that the highest form of philanthropy is to help one’s fellow man stand on his own. Present-day “philanthropic” institutions invert this and recreate serfdom.
Older charities were based on the Christian vision of a city on a hill. Wealth was not sought for its own sake but to foster virtue, family, and community. Charities had the philosophy, “No relief given here!” Instead, they worked toward such self-help institutions as day nurseries, libraries, and savings banks.
This vision weakened after the Civil War as religious belief waned and industrialism boomed. What came in, with an assist from Marxist group-think, was the idea of social insurance, followed inevitably by the idea of entitlement. The philanthropist’s gift became the recipient’s right. With this inversion, the seeds of the welfare state are firmly planted. But in the process, a welfare class is created, dependent as well as parasitic, and the charitable impulse is taken away from the involuntary giver.
Concurrently, the focused charity gave way to the general-purpose foundation. Professional managers, guided by “science” instead of philanthropy, allocated foundation funds to the social agenda. The philanthropists’ original purpose is almost always distorted or even perverted.
Moreover, the big foundations turn their statist lust into potent leverage in tax dollars. For every dollar they spend setting up the outlines of a liberal program, they may squeeze twenty or fifty dollars out of taxpayers.
In a word, the non-profit sector belongs almost exclusively to the liberals and the Left. Even business goes along: 70 per cent of corporate donations go to left-wing groups. Nineteen of the top 25 corporate donors support radical feminist groups, and many now support gays and lesbians. The “philanthropic” network aggrandizes government, attacks the market, and works to subvert the American system. Yet it is the market that promotes private charity–and, of course, provides the resources–and the state that chokes it.
A generalized view like this cannot convey either nuance or the richness of detail the speakers offered. In the little space that remains, I would like at least to make introductions, and mention a few more specialized arguments. And assure you that, however bleak the prognosis, the meeting could not have been more good-humored and cheerful.
Forrest McDonald opened the Friday evening keynote session by refusing to introduce Arthur Schlesinger Jr. and discussing the history of philanthropy from potlatch to the constitutional meanings of the three-point shot in basketball. Well, that’s close.
Nothing new at the members’ breakfast meeting the next morning except that the Treasurer actually used two (albeit rounded and vague) numbers in discussing Society finances. One may infer that the financial picture has improved.
The Saturday morning session, titled “Charity, Welfare, and the State,” was chaired by William Campbell (now at Heritage) and featured Allan Carlson of the Rockford Institute, Eric Mack of Tulane, Les Lenkowsky of the Institute for Educational Affairs, and James Gwartney of Florida State. Professor Gwartney’s argument, being specialized, was shortchanged above, but was one of the most interesting offered. Namely, that income transfer has done very little to help the poor and, in theory, never can. Whatever you have to do to get the benefit defeats its purpose. If, say, you have to stand in line to get a government check, the line will be exactly long enough to reduce the value of standing there to zero. Or, if you have to be poor to get the check, the law will be that you have to stay poor to keep getting it–and there you are, trapped. Moreover, the marginal tax rate on escaping the trap is terrible. And so it goes. The transfer is capitalized in terms of entry costs, and disappears.
Luncheon speaker Charles Lichenstein is a man of courage and humor. It was he, you recall, serving with Jeane Kirkpatrick at the UN, who told the UN whiners that if they didn’t like it here, he’d be delighted to escort them to (and off) the pier. Ta-ta. He needed both resources to address a gathering split into two dining rooms, one served by a video gadget and also, oddly, having much the younger audience. Mr. Lichenstein made the most of it, and if he ever abandons the government-UN-Heritage circuit in favor of gainful employment, he’ll be a natural at the comedy club.
But he was of serious purpose in his remarks on the Ford Foundation. Ford, he said, practically invented arms control, and was busy putting termites in the woodwork as early as 1952. They are still feeding. The effect of arms control is always to disarm the good guy while the bad guy prepares for war. Similarly, public TV and radio are the product of Ford, which even helped develop the first PBS communications satellite. For its own relatively modest cost, it is extracting millions in taxes and corporate donations to finance the “principal transmission belt of [the] dominant liberal culture.”
Willa Johnson chaired the first afternoon session, “Charitable Giving and Social Change.” The speakers were Stanley Rothman of Smith College; Ernest Lefever of the Ethics and Public Policy Center; Marvin Olasky of the University of Texas; and Michael Joyce of the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation. As outlined above, they all argued vividly that the “social change” discussed was for the worse.
Frank O’Connell chaired the last session, which was given over to the professionals in conservative foundations; they are so few in number that most were represented here. The subject was “The Role of Philanthropy in a Free Society.” The speakers were W. W. Hill of the Liberty Fund; James Piereson of the John M. Olin Foundation; Robert Russell, management consultant; and Donald Coxe, an NR associate, representing the Donner Canadian Foundation. What was interesting in this segment was the unanimity of purpose. The founders of these philanthropies were all businessmen concerned about the encroachments of government not only into the market but into the charitable act. They had in common also education in classical teachings, and a clear understanding of where the trends they saw would lead. So these few, at least, took great precautions that their philanthropy would be rightly used. It has been. The present managers, sharing both these ideals and these understandings, have preserved what is left of genuine philanthropy.
Meeting adjourned–but by no means over. There was an optional dinner meeting Saturday night, and another for Sunday breakfast. And of course friends to yak with and Chicago spots to visit and all the sense of reunion until next year’s meeting in–Philadelphia. Do you suppose it will be the Chicago Society meeting there?
| Author: | Wheeler, Timothy J. |
|---|---|
| Publication: | National Review |
| Date: | Aug 5, 1988 |
Keeping the Tablets: Modern American Conservative Thought
Keeping the Tablets: Modern American Conservative Thought.
THE DREAM WALKS AGAIN
As the Reagan Presidency enters its final months, a specter is haunting conservatives: the specter of a return to the wilderness. Whether the next occupant of the White House be an unreconstructed McGovernite from Massachusetts or the incumbent Vice President from Texas, increasing numbers of conservatives fear that the new Administration will not be theirs and that political initiative in the Nineties will return to their foes on the Left. Like aging New Dealers after the passing of Franklin Roosevelt, anxious Reaganites have begun to lament that the euphoria of 1981 may not recur in their lifetimes.
The mounting restiveness in conservatives’ ranks transcends their immediate political prospects. As the unifying and invigorating struggles of the early 1980s recede from consciousness, disturbing signs of sectarianism have begun to afflict an always multifarious movement. Spreading, too, among older conservative leaders is the unsettling conviction that far too many “third generation” activists are insufficiently grounded in the historical and philosophical sources of their beliefs. Thus the Heritage Foundation has instituted graduate-level seminars for young rightists on such topics as “Classics of Twentieth-Century Conservatism”–surely an unusual project for a public-policy think tank to undertake. Thus the Intercollegiate Studies Institute has revived its summer-school program for college students–and has been overwhelmed by the response.
Meanwhile evidence accumulates that Academe, never very hospitable to conservative intellectuals and their world view, is becoming even more antagonistic. What do conservatives stand for if not the preservation of the best in Western civilization? And yet, this spring, in a decision of devastating symbolism, one of the trend-setting universities in the country abandoned its required “Western Culture” course for freshmen, and replaced it with something called “Cultures, Ideas, and Values.” Dropping many Western classics from the reading list, the new course will instead emphasize “cultural diversity” and “cultural interaction”–as if the best way for students to learn more about other cultures is to learn less about their own. As the American academy shows increasing signs of sclerosis, the need becomes more imperative to develop alternative means by which at least a Remnant may be educated.
At this critical juncture in the nation’s political and intellectual journey, it is singularly fitting that William F. Buckley Jr. has compiled an anthology of modern American conservative thought, with the able assistance of Charles R. Kesler, a frequent contributor to NATIONAL REVIEW. Although officially a revised edition of American Conservative Thought in the Twentieth Century (published in 1970), the volume at hand is essentially new. Less than one-third of the material appearing in the 1970 edition is reprinted here, enabling the editors to assemble a fresh, updated, and, in Kesler’s words, “representative selection of the best of American conservative thought.”
Usually, when one inspects an anthology, a few of its components seem marginal. Not here: every one of this hefty volume’s 26 selections truly belongs. Here one finds seminal essays and excerpts from books by such luminaries of the post-1945 conservative renaissance as Richard Weaver, Friedrich Hayek, James Burnham, Milton Friedman, and Russell Kirk. Here, too, are generous samplings from some of the Right’s leading political philosophers (Strauss, Voegelin, Kendall, and Jaffa, among others), as well as such influential younger thinkers as Charles Murray, Thomas Sowell, and George Will. The neoconservative impulse is represented by Norman Podhoretz and Jeane Kirkpatrick (although not, oddly enough, by Irving Kristol). And topping off the confection are sublime and moving contributions by Whittaker Chambers and Albert Jay Nock.
Reading this impressive collection prompts many thoughts. First, one is struck anew by the philosophic introspection, literary breadth, and historical learning of most of the contributors. As their frequent and unforced allusions to ancient and modern figures attest, these are individuals who are genuinely at home in Western civilization. For them our heritage matters; it can teach. One wonders whether an anthology of modern liberal thought would disclose the same attributes in such abundance.
Moreover, while some of the essays in the Buckley/Kesler volume are polemical, and nearly all are marked by certitude that the West’s very survival is at stake, entirely absent from these pages are the rancor and shrillness that one associates with ideologues. One does not detect here the pent-up bitterness that seems to drive so many of conservatism’s enemies on the Left.
Keeping the Tablets is more than a timely compendium of estimable writings, however. As part of its scholarly apparatus, Buckley has reprinted “Did You Ever See a Dream Walking?” (his introduction to the 1970 edition). In it he recounts some of the treacherous intellectual shoals through which the good ship NATIONAL REVIEW navigated in its early years. His essay contains an important lesson in prudence.
Charles Kesler’s introduction is differently focused and more ambitious. After identifying the principal intellectual components of the conservative Grand Alliance, he addresses the disconcerting fact that, for all its recent victories and hard-won status, American conservatism “cannot claim to be successful.” A former student (and now a colleague) of Harry Jaffa at Claremont McKenna College, Kesler contends that conservatism has fallen short because it “has not yet learned the vernacular of American politics”–above all, the teaching of the Declaration of Independence that “all men are created equal.” According to Kesler, too many conservatives have denied “the first principles of the American founding” and have permitted liberals to pervert the Declaration’s true meaning. Thus Kesler has fired a new salvo in one of the longest-running internal battles on the American Right.
Not surprisingly, the contents of Keeping the Tablets to some degree reflect Kesler’s desire to remedy what he sees as conservatism’s deficiencies. More than the 1970 edition, the volume at hand deliberately emphasizes the continuing intellectual fissures on the Right–in order, says Kesler, “to spur the rethinking and crystallization of conservatism’s first principles.” Thus, for example, Willmoore Kendall’s strictures on Abraham Lincoln and the equality principle are immediately followed by Harry Jaffa’s rejoinder. In a subtle way this anthology attempts not just to represent modern conservatism but to further its self-definition.
Needless to say, many readers of NATIONAL REVIEW will not be persuaded by Kesler’s diagnosis and will be quick to propound other explanations for conservatism’s tenuous ascendancy. But in one sense, at least, his point clearly seems well taken: if conservatives are to prevail in the public arena, they must speak in recognizably American terms. Surely the ability to do this accounts in part for the success of postwar conservatism’s most popular political embodiment, Ronald Reagan, and his continuing hold on America’s affections. Whatever its limitations, his rhetoric and vocabulary are undeniably indigenous–hence comprehensible by everyday people leading everyday, untheoretical lives.
Indeed, after reading Buckley and Kesler’s volume one has precisely this wish: that it somehow could have been even longer and have incorporated more essays in applied conservatism–conservatism accessible to grassroots America. Of all the contributions to this volume, only Joseph Sobran’s “The Abortion Culture” discusses the religious and social issues that have mobilized millions and made possible the Reagan Presidency. Similarly, no contributor confronts head-on the two most revolutionary intellectual currents of our era: feminism and environmentalism. Both have had far more impact on American law and mores than postwar conservatism so far has–a matter worth sober reflection.
How one wishes also that there had been room for the now-classic essay “Goodbye to All That” by the ex-New Leftists Peter Collier and David Horowitz. And if conservatism be best understood in contrast to its principal domestic adversary, one wishes that the editors could have stretched their volume to include James Burnham’s unforgettable dissection of secular liberalism in Chapter 15 of Suicide of the West.
But all anthologies necessarily have their limits. As it happened, the editors of this one were obliged to drop eight essays from their final selection. In any case, this reader’s yearning for even more delectables on the menu does not diminish the feast put before us. Keeping the Tablets is indeed just that: a veritable picnic spread of wisdom and purposive scholarship.
Contemplating its varied riches reminds us of one thing more. The conservative intellectual movement since 1945 has become in a way like a hand, comprising five separate yet associated digits: traditionalist, libertarian, anti-Communist, neoconservative, and New Right. If any one of these is severed and removed, or tries to function to the exclusion of others, the hand as a whole loses effectiveness.
In this season of conservative discontent, then, as the American Right gropes for its compass, those within it who seek to rediscover their heritage now have an excellent place to begin. Buckley and Kesler deserve our thanks–and our readership.
| Author: | Nash, George H. |
|---|---|
| Publication: | National Review |
| Article Type: | Book Review |
| Date: | Aug 5, 1988 |
http://www.thefreelibrary.com/Keeping+the+Tablets:+Modern+American+Conservative+Thought-a06542234
Frank Chodorov: Champion of Liberty
Frank Chodorov: Champion of Liberty
By Aaron Steelman
Mr. Steelman is a staff writer at the Cato Institute.
December 28, 1996, marks the thirtieth anniversary of the death of Frank Chodorov, one of the giants of the American Old Right. It seems appropriate to look back at his life and career, not only to pay homage, but also to rediscover some of the fundamental insights he brought to the fore in his many books, articles, and speeches.
Frank Chodorov had a profound influence on the postwar American Right. Murray N. Rothbard, William F. Buckley Jr., James J. Martin, and many other exponents of the free market have cited Chodorov’s work as vital to the formation of their worldviews. Indeed, Buckley once said, It is quite unlikely that I should have pursued a career as a writer but for the encouragement he gave me just after I graduated from Yale.[1]
Born in New York City in 1887, Chodorov graduated from Columbia University in 1907, and spent the next 30 years working in a variety of jobs, including a stint as an advertising representative and running a clothing factory. From four to seven years was about all I could take of any occupation throughout my life. I went at each job I undertook with verve, mastered it and when it became routine I lost interest and went looking forsomething else, Chodorov wrote in his 1962 autobiography, Out of Step.[2]
Besides working in various fields, Chodorov read widely in the literature of liberty, and was particularly impressed by the work of Henry David Thoreau, Albert Jay Nock, and Henry George. By the time he was offered, and accepted, the directorship of the Henry George School of Social Science in 1937, he counted himself firmly within the classical liberal tradition.
For the first time—at the age of 50—his position afforded him an opportunity to write and speak widely on the issues of the day and to spread the anti-statist gospel. He and his students started a school publication, The Freeman, borrowing the name from the then-defunct journal Nock had edited in the 1920s. In its pages Chodorov found his ultimate calling: journalism with an intensely personal, individualist flair.
Chodorov pulled no punches in his many articles for The Freeman. He viewed the state as the greatest threat to individual liberty and human happiness. In the tradition of Cobden, Bright, and Nock, he did not limit his disdain for the use of state power to domestic actions; he feared the state’s ability to conscript its citizens and use them to wage war as much as, if not more than, he did its ability to control the economy. This intellectual consistency eventually gained Chodorov many devoted followers but, for the time being, it attracted some important opponents. In The Freeman I took delight in attacking the New Deal and Mr. Roosevelt, mainly on economic grounds. That went well until Mr. Roosevelt started preparing the country for war, in 1939. Prudence should have prompted me to avoid the war issue, but prudence was never one of my virtues, and I continued to hammer away at the war measures right up to Pearl Harbor.[3] The school’s board regarded his principled and steadfast opposition to American involvement in the war as too controversial and too frightening to potential donors and, therefore, relieved Chodorov of his duties in 1942.
Fulfillment of a Dream
Following his dismissal, Chodorov looked for a new medium for spreading his ideas. The result was his creation of analysis, which he later called the most gratifying venture of my life. An unpretentious four-page broadsheet published from 1944 to 1951, analysis was hard-hitting and uncompromising, just like The Freeman. Unlike The Freeman, however, analysis did not actively solicit articles from outside writers; nearly every issue was written entirely by Chodorov.
In an early promotional letter to would-be subscribers, Chodorov summed up his paper’s editorial position concisely and accurately:
. . . analysis . . . stands for free trade, free land and the unrestricted employment of capital and labor. Its economics stem from Adam Smith and Henry George.
. . . analysis goes along with Albert Jay Nock in asserting that the State is our enemy, that its administrators and beneficiaries are a professional criminal class, and interprets events accordingly. It is radical, not reformist.
In short, analysis looks at the current scene through the eyeglass of historic liberalism, unashamedly accepting the doctrine of natural rights, proclaims the dignity of the individual and denounces all forms of Statism as human slavery.[4]
In issue after issue of analysis, Chodorov kept the flame of the anti-statist, antiwar cause burning during some of classical liberalism’s darkest nights. He approached myriad topics from the same perspective: voluntary, peaceful actions are moral and productive and should be encouraged; coercive actions are immoral and should be condemned. As both an anti-statist committed to individual liberty as a great moral ideal and a social scientist examining past events objectively and empirically, Chodorov was a formidable and prescient critic.
The Ratchet Effect Theory
For example, in the 1940s Chodorov hit upon the ratchet effect theory to explain the growth of government, thereby setting the stage for some of the most incisive and probing work by classical liberals in the decades to come. In the August 1950 issue of analysis, he wrote: All wars come to an end, at least temporarily. But the authority acquired by the state hangs on; political power never abdicates. Note how the `emergency’ taxes of World War II have hardened into permanent fiscal policy. While a few of the more irritating war agencies were dropped, others were enlarged, under various pretexts, and the sum total is more intervention and more interveners than we suffered before 1939.[5]
In a pamphlet distributed by Human Events, he struck a similar chord, using the ratchet effect theory to explain the rise of direct taxation in the United States:
When war or the need of ameliorating mass poverty strains the purse of the state to the limit, and further indirect impositions are impossible or threaten social unrest, the opposition must give way. The state never relinquishes entirely the prerogatives it acquires during an emergency, and so, after a series of wars and depressions direct taxation became a fixture of our fiscal policy, and those upon whom it falls must content themselves to whittling down the levies or trying to transfer them from shoulder to shoulder.[6]
On education, Chodorov was ahead of his time, developing a radical critique of government schooling long before the so-called school choice or voucher movement got on its feet many years later. To Chodorov, it was no surprise that students were receiving subpar educations at government schools. As he saw it, the purpose of the public school was not to educate children, but to turn them into good citizens—schooled in the ways of the democratic system and taught that they were the government despite the obvious absurdity of such a claim. By controlling the schools, the state could control, to a large degree, the minds of future generations, thereby limiting the possibility of dissent.
In Chodorov’s mind, the only solution to the education problem was to separate schooling completely from politics: If we would reform our education system basically, we must desocialize it. We must put it back where it belongs, in the hands of parents. Theirs is the responsibility for the breeding of children, and theirs is the responsibility for the upbringing. The first error of public schooling is the shifting of this responsibility, the transformation of the children of men into wards of the state.[7]
Editing analysis brought great joy to Chodorov, but the journal was financially shaky. At its peak in 1951, it had no more than 4,000 subscribers. Edmund Opitz recalls that Chodorov was pouring so much of his own money into his enterprise that he was sustaining himself on one meal a day.[8] In 1951 analysis was merged with Human Events, a Washington-based publication founded in 1944 by Felix Morley, Frank Hanighen, and Henry Regnery. Chodorov became an associate editor at Human Events and stayed there until 1954, when Leonard Read chose him to edit a revamped version of The Freeman, which Irvington Press (a subsidiary of FEE) had recently purchased.
The Later Years
By the early 1950s, Chodorov was already well established as an individualist writer of the highest quality. In his view, the movement he had helped to preserve and shape in the 1940s was not conservative; it was individualist.[9] He was disturbed by the growing influence of a system of thought he viewed as fundamentally majoritarian in nature. The new conservatism of Russell Kirk, Walter Berns, and Harry Jaffa did not in any way resemble the historic liberalism that Chodorov and other prominent Old Right figures held dear. This new strain of thought held that unbridled individualism, not an omnipotent federal state, posed the greatest threat to the social order. Moreover, Jaffa and company believed that the Soviet Union placed the United States in imminent danger and that decisive federal action was needed to thwart Soviet expansion.
Over the next ten years, Chodorov spent as much time trying to check this new brand of conservatism as he did refuting the myths and dogmas of the Left. In Chodorov’s mind, only individuals themselves could, and should, make all relevant personal decisions. To rely on the vague notion of the community to make such decisions, as Kirk and others urged, was to subjugate the individual to the collective, and this subjugation was to be avoided at all costs.
The Cold War
Chodorov’s unwavering defense of individualism and the minimal state also led to clashes with other American rightists regarding foreign policy. By the late 1950s, most conservatives agreed that noninterventionism no longer constituted a viable option; Soviet power was so immense and threatening that the United States needed to prosecute another expensive war, the Cold War. Chodorov balked. The Soviets, he argued, were a threat to the United States only if Americans allowed them to be. The real danger was not that the Soviet Union would conquer the United States militarily but that in the name of a strong national defense, the United States would take actions that would thoroughly collectivize the nation—this time, for good. Increasing the power of the state in response to the Soviet menace would not defeat socialism in Russia but bring it to the United States.[10] For these reasons, he called the Cold War a war to communize America.
In a brilliant essay on Isolationism, Chodorov once again stated his position for those who had ignored it the first time. He believed that isolationism was not only the type of foreign policy that kept the state to a manageable size, but also the one compatible with the makeup of human beings. It is in the nature of the human being to be interested first, in himself, and secondly, in his neighbors. To ask someone in Michigan, for example, to be interested in the affairs and political stability of Tennessee is slightly unreasonable; to ask that same person to be interested in the affairs of a far-off Latin American country is simply absurd.
For Chodorov, a noninterventionist foreign policy was incompatible with protectionism or a restrictionist stand on immigration. Noninterventionism restricted the power of the state; tariffs and immigration quotas expanded it. Noninterventionism, free trade, and open borders belonged in the same package. To accept one part of the package while rejecting the others was not only to give in to the state, but to flirt with nativism. In chastising the America First Committee’s defense of trade and immigration restrictions, he wrote:
One flaw in their program was a tendency toward protectionism; the anti-involvement became identified with Buy American slogans and with high tariffs; that is, with economic, rather than political, isolationism. Economic isolationism—tariffs, quotas, embargoes and general governmental interference with international trade—is an irritant that can well lead to war, or political interventionism. To build a trade wall around a country is to invite reprisals, which in turn make for misunderstanding and mistrust. Besides, free trade carries with it an appreciation of the cultures of the trading countries, and a feeling of good will among the peoples engaged. Free trade is natural, protectionism is political.[11]
Chodorov also parted company with most of the conservative movement regarding big business. Unlike many of his colleagues, Chodorov did not hold a romantic view of corporate America; and he certainly did not agree with Ayn Rand’s belief that big business is America’s most persecuted minority. Instead he saw big business as all too willing to compromise with big government, producing a disastrous result for most Americans. In this way, he foreshadowed the arguments made by William Appleman Williams and Gabriel Kolko in the 1960s. Chodorov argued that in America it is the so-called capitalist who is to blame for the fulfillment of Marx’s prophecies. Beguiled by the state’s siren song of special privilege, the capitalists have abandoned capitalism.[12] And to abandon capitalism was to abandon the very system necessary for the preservation of individual liberty and the attainment of human happiness.
Despite Chodorov’s differences with many on the Right—and there were a number of significance—he maintained a position of prominence even after he left The Freeman in 1955. This was largely because of the Intercollegiate Society of Individualists (ISI), which he founded with Buckley in 1953 and continued to oversee until his death in 1966.[13] ISI was the first large free-market organization to focus its efforts on influencing college students. Its goal was to be an effective antidote to the well-organized Intercollegiate Society of Socialists. It attempted to accomplish its mission by distributing free-market books and pamphlets to interested students, sponsoring classical liberal speakers on the campuses, and organizing discussion clubs. By the early 1960s, more than 40,000 students had taken part in its programs.
ISI was an important part of Chodorov’s strategic program for turning back the tide of statism. Having tired of attempts to directly influence the political process (he did not vote after 1912), Chodorov became convinced that the only way the individualist tradition could be saved was by spreading classical liberal ideas among young people, who would one day be the opinion-shapers. Students, he believed, could be influenced and, thus, attention should be directed toward them. What the socialists have done can be undone, if there is a will for it. But, the undoing will not be accomplished by trying to destroy established institutions. It can be accomplished only by attacking minds, and not the minds of those already hardened by socialistic fixations. Individualism can be revived by implanting the ideas in the minds of the coming generations. . . . It is, in short, a fifty-year project.[14]
Unfortunately, Chodorov did not have 50 years left to see what would come of his prediction. He suffered a stroke in 1961 while teaching at Robert LeFevre’s Freedom School in Colorado. The stroke limited his activity sharply, and his output dwindled continuously until his death five years later. Yet, in many ways, his work had already been accomplished. He had done more than his part to ensure that the great American tradition of individualism would not die—at the hands of either the socialists or the growing legion of conservatives who saw little value in the ideals of classical liberalism. And he had built upon the intellectual foundations of this tradition himself, adding many keen and original insights.
As libertarians continue to wage an intellectual war against the omnipotent state, they would be wise to consult Frank Chodorov’s writings. For as William F. Buckley Jr. has said, everybody is bound to benefit from exposure to his purist and dogged battle against institutionalized power, and the case he weaves for the presumptive denial to the central government of every additional BTU it asks for.[15]
1. Cited in George H. Nash, The Conservative Intellectual Movement in America Since 1945 (New York: Basic Books, 1976), p. 380.
2. Frank Chodorov, Out of Step: The Autobiography of An Individualist (New York: Devin-Adair, 1962), p. 75.
5. Charles H. Hamilton, ed., Fugitive Essays: Selected Writings of Frank Chodorov (Indianapolis: Liberty Press, 1980), p. 363.
6. Frank Chodorov, Human Events Pamphlet Number 15, Taxation is Robbery (Chicago: Human Events Associates, 1947), p. 9.
9. In a 1956 letter to National Review, Chodorov stated: As for me, I will punch anyone who calls me a conservative in the nose. I am a radical. Cited in Hamilton, p. 29.
10. In Chodorov’s mind, the Soviet Union was not a viable experiment; it would eventually implode. Thus, the United States didn’t need to wage an activist battle against it. As he liked to state: Private capitalism makes a steam engine; State capitalism makes pyramids. To him, the Soviet Union was in the process of making a number of pyramids, while neglecting the production of things that sustain a society.
13. ISI was renamed the Intercollegiate Studies Institute after Chodorov’s death and remains in operation to this day.
15. William F. Buckley Jr., Nay-Sayer to the Power-Hungry, National Review, December 4, 1962, p. 447.
http://www.fee.org/Publications/the-Freeman/article.asp?aid=4691
We should study conservatism in schools
We Should Study Conservatism In Schools
It’s high time Americans start learning about the conservative movement. For whatever reason, we can identify feminists, Islamists, environmentalists, abolitionists–but very few of us know that conservatism, a coherent ideological movement, even exists. For example, when you open up the Columbia Encyclopedia, Sixth Edition and look up “progressivism,” you get:
In U.S. history, a broadly based reform movement that reached its height early in the 20th cent.
Yet when you look up conservatism, there is no mention of the conservative movement:
In politics, the desire to maintain, or conserve, the existing order. … By the 20th cent. Conservatism was being redirected by erstwhile liberal manufacturing and professional groups who had achieved many of their political aims and had become more concerned with preserving them from attack by groups not so favored.
No mention of the American political and intellectual movement that has a distinctive philosophy, infrastructure, and policy preferences–and whose thirty-year ascendance (after twenty years in the wilderness) has been one of the defining events of the late 20th century.
As Sean Wilentz notes in this week’s issue of TNR, the conservative era has been longer than the eras of “either Thomas Jefferson or Andrew Jackson, longer than the Gilded Age or the Progressive Era, and as long as the period of liberal reform that stretched from the rise of the New Deal to the demise of the Great Society.” Yet we don’t learn about it in high schools, and seldom–if ever–in college history courses.
This puts the American left–and indeed, the American public–at a disadvantage, because it leads fair-minded people to assume conservatives are basically just people with bowties or people who like guns (or both)–rather than a serious, rather militant ideological movement to be understood and reckoned with.
This is partially the result of inertia. High school history books, for example, are often loathe to discuss contemporary issues. (Although my twin sisters’ 10th grade textbooks certainly mentioned neoconservatism.)
It’s also partially the result of ingrained liberal perceptions. Most liberal thought arose in opposition to entrenched business and political interests, so it’s easy to assume modern conservatism is simply another manifestation of the same.
Finally, it’s Russell Kirk’s fault. His book, The Conservative Mind, tries to establish a genealogy for modern conservatism that stretches back to Edmund Burke and T.S. Eliot–much in the way that the Mormon Church posthumously insists Shakespeare was indeed a Mormon. This gives off the misimpression that modern conservatism is simply a cautious cast of mind, no different from the conservatism of Burke or Eliot.
Yet American conservatism actually has nothing to do with Burke, other than drawing street cred off his deceased personage. The conservative movement began with William F. Buckley, Frank Meyer, and Russell Kirk himself during the 1950s, in a magazine called National Review–and it was revolutionary, bombastic, and eager to overhaul American society, not Burkean. Unfortunately, whenever anyone does try to read up about the conservative movement, he is inevitably handed Kirk’s book–along, perhaps, with a copy of Patrick Buchanan’s A Republic, Not An Empire, or something similarly misleading–and hustled off to learn nothing about his intended subject.
It’s a pathetic state of affairs. In political matters, an uneducated citizenry is as good as defenseless–and on this issue, it would seem that Americans are, and continue to remain, uneducated.
Update: Some commenters are asking for a recommended basic text. George H. Nash’s The Conservative Intellectual Movement In America Since 1945 is the authoritative one.
