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?

http://www.thefreelibrary.com/From+charity+to+’compassion.’+(Philadelphia+Society+conference+on…-a06542232

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.

http://www.thefreelibrary.com/Keeping+the+Tablets:+Modern+American+Conservative+Thought-a06542234

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.

3.   Ibid., p. 79.

4.   Cited in Nash, pp. 17-18.

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.

7.   Hamilton, p. 239.

8.   Cited in Nash, p. 353.

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.

11.   Out of Step, p. 119.

12.   Hamilton, p. 149.

13.   ISI was renamed the Intercollegiate Studies Institute after Chodorov’s death and remains in operation to this day.

14.   Out of Step, p. 248.

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

http://www.onpower.org/quotes/quotes.html

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 20^th 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 20^th 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 20^th 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’ 10^th 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.

http://blogs.tnr.com/tnr/blogs/the_plank/archive/2008/04/29/we-should-study-conservatism-in-schools.aspx

The Conscience of a Conservative by Barry Goldwater

May the Rising Generation Redeem the Time?

By Russell Kirk
The Heritage Foundation
Lecture #377
Lecture given: December 11, 1991
(published at 7 pages)

First, a few words about this concept “generation.” To generate is to beget; to bring into existence. In popular usage we mean by a generation a large number of persons brought into existence about the same time; in the same year, perhaps, or possibly in the same decade. Thomas Jefferson promulgated the somewhat vague concept of every “generation” of people making its own choices; of the generation of the living not binding the generation which soon would come into existence.

Yet, this notion cannot be sustained logically or pragmatically. For really there exists no line of demarcation parting alleged generations of men and women. Every minute, as I address you, babies are being born somewhere; and during the same minutes, old people are dying in every land.

Actually, society is an intricate continuity of lives, not a mere succession of human beings resembling the flies of a summer, generation unable to link with generation. It is possible for me to say truthfully that six generations of my family have lived in our house at the village of Mecosta, in Michigan; but those alleged “generations” have much overlapped; at no time over the past twelve decades has only a single generation lived in our family home. The notion of distinct generations, then, each generation monopolizing the earth during its brief span of existence, is merely a convenient fiction.

Nevertheless, we employ that useful fiction frequently, particularly with reference to literary and political movements. Thus Spaniards refer to the “Generation of ‘98,” made up of literary movers and shakers whose convictions were formed at the time of Spain’s naval and military defeats that caused the loss of the Philippines, Cuba, and Puerto Rico. Thus, in Britain, Wyndham Lewis referred to the “men of 1914″ — certain innovating writers who began to appear in print about the beginning of the First World War: Eliot, James Joyce, Ezra Pound, T.E. Hulme, and Lewis himself. And thus, a very few years ago, here at The Heritage Foundation, Mr. Ben Hart introduced the concept of three generations of American conservatives that have exercised influence since the late 1940s, say. Tonight, I address especially the third of those hypothetical generations.

By the First Generation, I take it, Mr. Hart means men and women of politics and letters who began to come to public attention about the end of the ‘Forties and the beginning of the ‘Fifties; who, most of them, had grown aware of the sunken state of the world about them, some time between, or during, the First World War and the Great Depression. Among such persons who grew up with a conservative inclination were Richard Weaver, Francis Wilson, Robert Nisbet, Daniel Boorstin, William Buckley, and your servant; one might add William Yandell Elliott (a little older) and William McGovern, and others who were active so early as 1933, say. There would be regarded as belonging to an earlier “generation,” both in point of years and of thought, such persons as T.S. Eliot, Irving Babbitt, Paul Elmer More, and George Santayana. Among public men, Senators Robert A. Taft and Carl Curtis, say, would be classified as members of the pre- conservative generation, I suppose, their activity having occurred mostly during the presidencies of Franklin Roosevelt and Harry Truman; while Senator Barry Goldwater, a relatively late conservative champion in arms, would be classed with the First Generation conservatives, I suppose, in Mr. Hart’s scheme. You will perceive, ladies and gentlemen, that membership in a hypothetical generation does not necessarily coincide with the date of one’s nativity.

The Second Generation of conservatives, in Mr. Hart’s categories, consists of persons of varying ages who were attracted to conservative causes, or began to style themselves conservatives, sometime after 1953, in which year The Conservative Mind was published. Thus Mr. Irving Kristol, almost so old as is your servant, is classified as Second Generation; so is my wife Annette Yvonne Cecilie Courtmanche Kirk, the first secretary at the organizational meeting of Young Americans for Freedom, twenty-one years younger than myself. I take it that Dr. Jeffrey Hart, Mr. Ben Hart’s father, is Second Generation — although very nearly meeting the requirements for Generation I; that Mr. M. Stanton Evans, despite his many years of active duty in the conservative array, is a Second Generation legionnaire; while Mr. Ben Hart himself, and his spouse are field marshals of the Third Generation.

But, more subtle distinctions and classifications I leave to Mr. Gregory Wolfe, now engaged in preparing an Encyclopedia of the Right. So far as public men go, permit me to suggest merely that such conservatively-inclined gentlemen as Senator Richard Lugar, Governor John Engler, and Mr. Patrick Buchanan seem to fall within the Second Generation fold. In brief, nowadays First Generation conservatives — such of them as have not passed unto a less troubled realm of being — usually are people in their seventies or their sixties; Second Generation conservatives, most of them, in their fifties or forties; Third Generation conservatives, in their thirties or their twenties — or even in their teens. Pass we then to these ladies and gentlemen of the Third Generations.

Few of the Third Generation folk retain personal memories of the Disaster of 1964 — that is, the defeat of Barry Goldwater’s presidential candidacy, the centralizing follies of President Johnson’s “Great Society,” the foretaste of ruin in Vietnam, the loathsome and destructive antics of the crazy black militants and the crazier young white radicals. The present members of the Third Generation were reared when the hearts of our great American cities already were dismal and rotten; when addiction to narcotics plagued every social class; when public schools, with few honorable exceptions, offered next to nothing for mind and conscience; when Demon TV offered something for every taste but good taste; when promiscuity and sexual perversity demanded recognition as normality; when it was unwise to walk the streets o’nights; when shrieking mobs dominated what had been the grove and halls of Academe; when altercations in Washington made it almost impossible to conduct the regular business of government; when American life seemed confusion worse confounded; when one came to appreciate the mordant aphorism of Albert Jay Nock: “American society is like German beer; dregs at the bottom, scum at the top.”

In short, the conservative Third Generation have not known a tranquil and pleasant and confident America. They scarcely can imagine a time, not many decades past, when it was the happy evening diversion of families or couples to stroll in New York’s Central Park of Detroit’s Belle Isle Park. They have little knowledge even of the neighborhood grocery or butcher-shop, the corner drug-store with its soda-fountain; for them is the leviathan shopping-mall, commercial collectivism. They have experienced little of continuity; the expectation of change has been greater far. Yet, they know that much remains to conserve, and that much ought to be restored.

In one respect, but in that respect only, the task of the conservative of 1991 looms less oppressive than was the task of the conservative of 1951, when my first book was published. I mean that the grim menace of the Soviet Union no longer hangs over us. Seventy years were required for the Communist ideology to work its own ruin, so that it fell to pieces at a good-natured push, quite bloodless, from Mr. Ronald Reagan. Always will there be wars and rumors of war; yet from the Soviet terror we have been saved, so that the Third Generation conservatives may address their energies to something more fundamental than resisting the armed doctrine called Marxism.

What, then, is the mission of Third Generation conservatives, young men and women who seek to preserve the Permanent Things, those elements in human existence that were not born yesterday? It is not to promulgate a “conservative ideology”: for conservatism is the negation of ideology. Ideology is an attempt to govern all life by political slogans; while American conservatives believe that no mere political formulas can make a people content. Conservatives take for their guide in politics what Edmund Burke called “the wisdom of the species”: that is, the experience of human beings in community, extending over many centuries. Thus, American conservatism is a cast of mind and character, not a neat body of political abstractions. Ideology is political fanaticism, an endeavor to rule the world by rigorous abstract dogmata. The dogmata of an abstract “democratic capitalism” may be mischievous as the dogmata of Marx.

It is possible to describe certain attitudes that make up America’s conservative mentality, even though not all Americans could express coherently their belief in such general principles, and although some conservatives would dissent from one or more of the general assumptions or principles I now mention.

First, belief in some transcendent order in the universe, some law that is more than human: a religious understanding of the human condition, if you will; a belief in enduring moral norms. As the national pledge of allegiance puts it, “One nation under God…. “

Second, opposition to totalist ideology and the totalist political order. The American conservative rejects the notion of a future earthly paradise — which the ideologue promises to attain.

Third, confidence in the American Constitution — both the written national Constitution and the intricate fabric of custom, belief, and habit that makes up the underlying “unwritten” constitution of a nation-state. Many decisions of the Supreme Court in recent decades are bitterly resented; nevertheless, attachment to the Constitution itself remains strong.

Fourth, maintenance of the rights of private property and of a free or competitive economy, as contrasted with a directed or socialist economy. This healthy prejudice persists despite the increasing consolidation of business and industry into large conglomerations or oligopolies.

Fifth, suspicion of central political direction, and preference for state and local powers: insistence upon private rights.

Sixth, a deep-rooted patriotism, joined to uneasiness at “entangling alliances”; this latter attitude, nevertheless, modified by determination to resist totalist powers that menace the American national interest.

Seventh, an awareness that change is not identical with healthy improvement; a relish for the American past; a genuine preference for the old and tried.

Such is the consensus of that very large body of Americans who choose to call themselves conservative in their politics. Within this crowd of conservative citizens exist various factions, each emphasizing some aspect or another of the general conservative attitude. There exists no “party line” to which conservatives of one persuasion or another are compelled to conform.

Retrenchment and Reform. With such assumptions as those I outlined just now, America enters upon an age of retrenchment and reform in economic concerns. If American prosperity is to endure, public expenditure and taxation must be kept in check. Conservative economic measures must be employed to prevent inflation of the currency and to reduce the national deficit — a hard necessity of which the general public is becoming aware.

In this present era when the Soviet power fades away, the majority of the American public seem disillusioned with social experiments and with the rapid pace of change; with excessive governmental regulation; with cities fallen to ruin and tormented by crime; with subsidized abortion, with judicial usurping of power, with a permissive indulgence of license and criminality, with the blight of pornography, with the whole liberal climate of opinion. For the next half-century at least, I suggest, the American democracy will tend to reject those politicians who still indulge dreams of Lotos-land. Liberalism has undone itself.

There have been ages when custom and inertia have lain insufferably upon humankind; and such an age may come to pass again; but such is not our age. Ours is an era when the moral and social heritage of many centuries of civilization stands in imminent peril from the forces of vertiginous indiscriminate change. Resistance to the folly of such change is the primary duty of the Third Generation conservative.

The continuing American conservative movement, if it is to be carried on tolerably well, must work within the minds and the consciences of a good many young men and women. I do not think that this work of conservation can be accomplished by any particular group; certainly not by any idealizing of “business rule.” I trust that Americans will conserve a market economy and all the better features of an economy marked by volition. But Americans will conserve such advantages only if they conserve something higher and older: that is, a society of tradition, diversity, and the life of spirit.

The critic Eliseo Vivas wrote once that “It is one of the marks of human decency to be ashamed of having been born into the twentieth century.” Spiritually and politically, the twentieth century has been a time of decadence. Yet, as that century draws near to its close, we may remind ourselves that ages of decadence often have been followed by ages of renewal.

What can you do to commence redeeming the time, to conserve the Permanent Things, to raise up the human condition to a level less unworthy of what Pico della Mirandola called “the dignity of man”? Why, begin by brightening the corner where you are; by improving one human unit, yourself, and helping your neighbor.

You will not need to be rich or famous to take your part in redeeming the time: what you need for that task is moral imagination joined to right reason. It is not by wealth or fame that you will be rewarded, probably, but by eternal moments: those moments of one’s existence in which, as T.S. Eliot put it, time and the timeless intersect. In such moments, you may discover the answer to that immemorial question which now and again enters the head of any reflective man or woman, “What is all this? What is this world that surrounds us, and why are we here?”

Yes, what is all this? Why, this present realm of being, in which your consciousness and my consciousness are aware of reality, is a divine creation; and you and I are put into it as into a testing- ground — into an arena, if you will. As the German writer Stefan Andres put it, “We are God’s Utopia.” You and I are moral beings meant to accomplish something good, in a small way or a big, in this temporal world.

The Roman Stoics taught that some things in life are good, and some are evil; but that the great majority of life’s happenings are neither good nor evil, but indifferent merely. Wealth is a thing indifferent, and so is poverty; fame is a thing indifferent, and so is obscurity. Shrug your shoulders at things indifferent; set your face against the things evil; and by doing God’s will, said the Stoics, find that peace which passes all understanding.

True Authority. How do we know such postulates, religious and philosophical, to be true? Why, by the common sense and ancient assent of mankind — that is, by hearkening to the voice of true authority, the voice of what G.K. Chesterton called “the democracy of the dead.” I think of what John Henry Newman wrote about Authority in 1846: “Conscience is an authority; the Bible is an authority; such is the Church; such is antiquity; such are the words of the wise; such are hereditary lessons; such are ethical truths; such are historical memories; such are legal saws and state maxims; such are proverbs; such are sentiments, presages, and prepossessions.” Believe what wise men and women, over the centuries, have believed in matters of faith and morals, and you will have a firm footing on which to stand while the winds of doctrine howl about you.

This counsel that I offer you, conservatives of the Third Generation, will not guarantee your winning any of the glittering prizes of modern society; for those too are among the things indifferent, and some of them are among the things evil. Yet, this advice from a conservative of the First Generation who has seen a good deal of the world conceivably may help you on the track toward certain eternal moments, when time and the timeless intersect. What happens at such timeless moments, such occurrences in eternity? Why, quiet perfect events, usually; among them the act of telling stories to one’s children, or of reading aloud to them.

What is all this — this confused American world of glittering material things and of appalling personal and social decay? I have found it to be a real world, sun-lit despite its vices; a real world in which one may develop and exercise one’s potential virtues of courage, prudence, temperance, and justice; one’s faith, hope, and charity. You will take your tumbles in this world, which can be rough enough in our age, Lord knows; but also you may enjoy your triumphs. It is a world in which there is so much needing to be done that nobody ought to be bored. For young Americans especially, this is still a world of high opportunity.

All this creation about us is the garden that we erring humans were appointed to tend. Plant some flowers in it, if you can, and pull some weeds. If need be, draw your sword to defend it. Do not fancy that a sorry policy of Looking Out for Number One will lead you to Heaven’s gate. Do not fail to remind yourselves that consciousness is a perpetual adventure. Do not ignore the wisdom of the ages, the democracy of the dead. Such, ladies and gentlemen, is the counsel of this survivor from the First Generation.

Those of us who aspire to conserve our inherited order and justice and freedom, our patrimony of wisdom and beauty and loving- kindness, have a hard row to hoe nowadays — that I confess. But, I am heartened from time to time by a stanza from Chesterton’s long poem, The Ballad of the White Horse. Chesterton is describing the prophets of doom, who tell us that nothing in life is permanent; that all is lost, or is being lost, in our culture; that we totter on the brink of an abyss. Such prophets of doom think themselves wise. Chesterton has in mind the typical intellectuals of the twentieth century, but he calls them the wise men of the East. Here I give you Chesterton’s lines:

The wise men know what wicked thingsAre written on the sky,They trim sad lamps, they touch sad stringsHearing the heavy purple wings,Where the forgotten seraph kingsStill plot how God shall die.

Such despairing souls, though possessed perhaps of much intelligence, in truth are not wise. In our time, ladies and gentlemen, many voices have been declaring that life is not worth living. A multitude of writers and professors and publicists and members of the class of persons commonly styled “intellectuals” gloomily instruct us that we human beings are no better than naked apes, and that consciousness is an illusion. Such persons insist that life has no purpose but sensual gratification; that the brief span of one’s physical existence is the be-all and end-all. Such twentieth- century sophists have created in the murky caves of the intellect an Underworld; and they endeavor to convince us all that there exists no sun — that the world of wonder and of hope exists nowhere, and never did exist. Plato knew just such sophists in his age. Those doctrines of despair, the rising generation of conservatives must confront and refute.

My counsels so far may have seemed somewhat ghostly, no doubt. But, I have learned from life in various regions of the world, and under differing circumstances, that it is the life of spirit which truly matters; and that the Permanent Thing most worthy of preservation is an understanding of the human soul. The conscious conservative defends the soul of humankind against the corrosive materialism and sensuality of twentieth-century will and appetite.

Let me turn, however, to the art of worldly wisdom. I can offer, too, some practical advice. How, for instance, you may ask me, does one contrive to forge ahead in practical political life in this sprawling American democracy, with the intention of conducting a conservative defense of the Permanent Things?

Why, ordinarily it is fairly simple to make one’s way in the American political structure. American political parties could not function without volunteers. Volunteer, and you will be gladly accepted, such as you being urgently needed; you will find, indeed, that a number of your fellow-volunteers are rather peculiar people, almost Outcasts of Poker Flat, but welcome in a local political organization (if not welcome in many other circles) because, whatever their peculiarities, they are willing to work for the common cause.

If you are an intelligent and adept volunteer, you will be made much of by the party leaders and faithful, and will be advanced in your responsibilities. You may be asked to be a delegate, whether elected or appointed. If chosen delegate, arrive early at caucus or convention. When the meeting proper commences, endeavor to sit at the chairman’s right hand; then others may take you for his right-hand man. There are many little arts by which one may gain ascendancy over the minds of one’s political colleagues. But, the great necessity is to have acquired previously a fund of knowledge and some mastery of rhetoric — and honest principles. That is why I sometimes advise undergraduates not to expend their time in street demonstrations, but instead to study. If Karl Marx, instead of reading books within, had spent his days parading round and round the outside of the British museum, a placard “Down with the bourgeois!” tacked to a sandwich- board over his shoulders — why, had he been so foolish, the world would be so much better off today.

Redeem the time, redeem the dream — in ways mundane as well as ways spiritual. If you should resolve really to take a vigorous part in restoring the American Republic, choose your vocation accordingly, so that the work by which you gain your livelihood, and the work by which you help to redeem the time, may coincide. Take to the law — if you can endure the boredom of our law schools nowadays. Or, take to serious journalism — or, for broader and more immediate influence, to television and radio. You may accomplish some reform of the American mind through book-publishing. Or, supposing you possess fortitude sufficient to fight your way through our PC graduate schools, aspire after a college professorship that might enable you to counteract the freaks who appear to dominate the typical campus nowadays. Or take to pedagogy, if you can surmount the dull obstacles to certification as a teacher. If you feel a religious calling — why, in no way might you accomplish more to restore meaning to lives in the twenty-first century. And, the best way to insure a Fourth Generation of intelligent young conservatives is to beget children, and rear them well: the wise parent is the conservator of ancient truths. As Edmund Burke put it, “We learn to love the little platoon we belong to in society.” The institution most essential to conserve is the family.

If we aspire to redeem this age of ours, so far gone in decadence — well, we have no time to lose before commencing our endeavors. Fixed to the walls of the entrance hall of my house are masks of the archaic god Cronos, in his role of Time the Devourer; his half-leonine, half-human face bares his fangs, which the ancient Greeks dreaded. Those masks serve to remind me daily that the night cometh when no man shall work, and that I had best turn back to my productive typewriter.

Yet, Time is not a devourer only. With proper use of the life- span that is allotted to us, we may accomplish our part in redeeming our era from its vices, terrors, and catastrophic errors. With Demosthenes, ladies and gentlemen, I beg of you to think. For only if you think soundly at this juncture in your lives will you be enabled to act decisively in those years when you have achieved some influence.

I conclude with an exhortation which Orestes Brownson, that redoubtable conservative reformer, scholar, and journalist, delivered at Dartmouth College in 1843. His topic was “The Scholar’s Mission.” He concluded, as follows, his charge to the rising generation:

Ask not what your age wants, but what it needs, not what it will reward, but what, without which, it cannot be saved; and that go and do; and find your reward in the consciousness of having done your duty, and above all in the reflection, that you have been accounted to suffer somewhat for mankind.

In the later ‘Sixties, many of the rising generation thought it amusing to pull down what earlier generations had patiently built up; their zeal extended even to the burning of university libraries. In the early ‘Nineties, I hope and trust, many of the rising generation will find it satisfying to restore and redeem their patrimony from earlier times — and so save the world from suicide. That labor will require cleverness and courage. Some of you present here tonight may choose it for your vocation.

http://users.etown.edu/m/mcdonaldw/LECT377.HTM

The Godfather Of American Conservatism

Story in .rtf

Today, whether the issue is arms control, school prayer, or tax reform, the most heated political battles are being waged among conservatives rather than between conservatives and liberals. There are as many factions of conservatives–new right, old right, neo-conservative, movement conservative, moderate conservative–as there used to be factions on the left. But beneath these divisions does there lurk a common set of assumptions which is conservatism?

The most concerted attempt to discover these assumptions was made by Frank Meyer, an ex-Communist who from 1957 until his death in 1972 was a senior editor of and columnist for National Review. Meyer was the ideological godfather of the conservative organizations and politicians who got their start in the late ’50s and the ’60s, from the Young Americans for Freedom to Barry Goldwater and Ronald Reagan.

Meyer communicated many of his ideas through countless phone calls emanating at all hours of the night from his Woodstock, New York home. But he also tried to create a philosophical synthesis of American conservatism in his writings. Meyer set out, he explained in his book, In Defense of Freedom, to “vindicate on theoretical grounds the native belief of American conservatives.”

In the minds of many conservatives today, Meyer succeeded admirably. Conservative columnist M. Stanton Evans said of his work, “In the perspective of time, we shall rank his libertarian-conservative writing among the principal achievements, not only of modern conservatism, but of political thought in general.”

David Keene, now the chairman of the American Conservative Union and in 1969 the chairman of the Young Americans for Freedom (YAF), said “YAF and the young conservative movement really looked to Frank Meyer of National Review as their philosophical leader.”

Yet neither Meyer nor his philosophy is known outside the conservative movement.

Meyer was a small, pale, gaunt man with high cheekbones, a long thin nose and protruding lips. Former New Republic editor Michael Straight, who knew Meyer as a Communist in London, described him as looking like “an Aztec priest.” He paid little attention to what he wore, except for his red suspenders, which are now fashionable on the right. He was passionate and excitable: an avid conversationalist and stirring orator. He was also a notable eccentric.

For the last twenty-five years of his life, Meyer lived in Woodstock, in a house dominated by books. Distrustful of the public schools, he and his wife educated their children themselves. Meyer was a night person. He went to sleep at seven in the morning and awoke at two. He would volunteer to perform wakeup calls for his unfortunate friends who had to keep normal hours.

Through the telephone, he kept very close track of national conservative politics. For instance, when Robert Bauman was the head of Young Americans for Freedom in the early ’60s, he recalled hearing from Meyer as many as four or five times a night on the eve of an important board meeting. He also extended coveted invitations to young conservatives to visit him in Woodstock.

Like many prominent right wing intellectuals, Meyer began on the political left. Meyer joined the British Communist Party in 1931 as a student at Oxford, to which he had transferred from Princeton. In 1932, he went to London School of Economics for graduate work and ran successfully for student president as a known Communist. After a blowup with the school’s president in 1934, he was expelled from LSE and deported from England.

Back in the United States, he rose quickly to become Educational Director of the party in the Indiana-Illinois region. Known in party circles as a “Marxist theoretician,” Meyer was responsible for educating party cadre in the latest directives from the leadership and in the most recent interpretation of the Marxist classics. “He was always able to quote what the latest line was,” William Sennett, a party comrade, recalled.

Meyer became an enthusiastic proponent of the party’s pro-New Deal Popular Front policies, epitomized in the slogan “Communism is Twentieth Century Americanism.” Unlike many other Communist intellectuals, he stuck with the party through the Moscow purge trials of the mid 30s and the Hitler-Stalin pact of 1939. It was only in 1945, when Moscow replaced Communist leader and popular front proponent Earl Browder with hardliner William Z. Foster that Meyer began to draw away from the party.

Meyer never formally resigned from the Communist party, but by 1950, he had become both an ardent anti-Communist and a proponent of free market economics. In the early ’50s, he was an expert government witness at Smith Act trials in New York and Chicago; and he was writing articles condemning the Soviet Union and praising the free market for the American Mercury and The Freeman, the two right-wing journals of the time.

Meyer later credited F. A. Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom with turning him to the right, but Hayek’s book cannot account for the speed, intensity, and extent of Meyer’s transformation. Most other former Communists or Trotskyists became liberals. Most of those who became conservatives took their time in doing so and retained, even on the right, elements of their former belief. For instance, James Burnham took almost 15 years to journey from Trotskyism to conservatism. And Wilmoore Kendall and Freda Utley both remained Keynesians.

Meyer’s commitment to communism had been philosophical rather than organizational. He did not seek the security of the party cell, but the metaphysical security of a total system of ideas. When he abandoned communism, he sought certainty in a new American conservatism. “He was the ultimate ideologue,” said John Leonard, who worked with Meyer on National Review.

Meyer’s quest for metaphysical security was borne out by his deathbed conversion from secular Judaism to Catholicism. According to his son Eugene Meyer, his father’s conversion to Catholicism did not reflect an experience of Jesus’ divinity but rather the conviction that the evil of communism had to be balanced by the goodness of Christianity. Like Whittaker Chambers, Meyer had come to identify Christianity with civilization.

As Meyer was dying of lung cancer in 1972, he consumed his last hours feverishly debating whether the Catholic prohibition on suicide and the phrase the “communion of Saints” violated his libertarian ethic. His final conversion to Catholicism consummated his journey from Communism to conservatism.

In 1955, journalist Ralph de Toledano, who had known Meyer on the left, introduced him to William F. Buckley Jr., who was then starting a new magazine. Meyer began writing regularly for National Review, and in 1957 became a senior editor. In his column, “Principles and Heresies,” Meyer began to develop a “correct line” for the conservative movement just as he had once done for Midwestern Communists.

In 1957, however, there was no conservative movement as such, but rather diverse and often fractious movements and organizations, loosely identified with the right by their common opposition to the New Deal, Communism, and federally-imposed racial integration. Nor was there a common intellectual approach associated with the right; instead, there were two principal intellectual currents, individualism and traditionalism, neither of which, in their pure form, had any embodiment in the political realm.

The individualists or libertarians, led by a young economist Murray Rothbard, hearkened back to Albert Jay Nock, the editor of the original Freeman, and to his disciple Frank Chodorov. They were right-wing anarchists who identified freedom with the free market and rejected any government intrusion upon individual rights, whether in the form of antitrust law, social security, or military spending. Many had been isolationists; and after World War II, they became vigorous critics of the America’s burgeoning military budget and Cold War policies.

The traditionalists or conservatives, typified by Richard Weaver, Eric Voegelin, and Russell Kirk, author of The Conservative Mind, viewed society as an organic whole the health of which was more important than the health of its individual parts; they regarded the inculcation of virtue rather than freedom as the supreme goal of politics; and in the name of Christianity, Tory England, or the Plantation South, they upheld tradition and prescription over ideology and reason. They abhorred socialism, communism, and liberalism not because they destroyed freedom, but because they encouraged an unnatural egalitarianism. While preferring capitalism to its rivals, they blamed it for the commercialism and materialism rampant in society.

The proponents of individualism and traditionalism had little patience or even respect for each other. Kirk once confessed to historian George Nash that “he, felt closer to socialist Norman Thomas than to anarcho-capitalist Murray Rothbard.” But Frank Meyer set out in the ’50s to incorporate elements of each philosophy into a new conservative politics that would be not only valid, but also relevant to the emerging movement of the late ’50s and early ’60s. Because Meyer’s new philosophy fused elements of both individualism and traditionalism, it was called “fusionism.”

Meyer shared the individualists’ identification of freedom with the free market. He viewed liberalism, socialism, and communism as steps on a ladder leading to the extinction of any freedom. But Meyer was also a militant anti-Communist who thought nothing should be spared in fighting the international Communist conspiracy, and a man of straight-laced morality who thought virtue rather than happiness or pleasure should be the end of existence. According to Meyer, individualism threatened to sap “the foundations of belief in an organic moral order.”

Meyer maintained that the individualists were correct in positing freedom as the “primary end” of politics, but he rejected the view that freedom was an “absolute end.” “In the moral realm freedom is only a means whereby men can pursue their proper end, which is virtue,” Meyer wrote.

But Meyer was equally, if not more, critical of the traditionalists. In reviewing Russell Kirk’s highly acclaimed The Conservative Mind in 1955, Meyer charged that Kirk, by preferring tradition to reason, had enshrined “the maxim, ‘Whatever is, is right,’ as the first principle of thought about politics and society.” According to Meyer, Kirk’s society that stressed “authority and order” over “freedom” and “status” over “contract” “would only move inevitably toward totalitarianism.”

Meyer maintained that virtue was not possible without freedom. “The simulacrum of virtuous acts brought about by the coercion of superior power, is not virtue, the meaning of which resides in the free choice of good over evil,” Meyer wrote.

But if the state could not impose virtue, how could a free society hope to inculcate it? Meyer rested his hope for virtue on a model of society quaintly similar to what the Soviet Communists initially claimed to be their ideal. “A good society is possible only,” Meyer wrote, “when the social and political order guarantees a state of affairs in which men can freely choose, when the intellectual and moral leaders, the ‘creative minority,’ have the understanding and imagination to maintain the prestige of tradition and reason and thus to sustain the intellectual and moral order throughout society.”

Meyer claimed that his ideas not only replicated everyday conservatism, but also the historic beliefs of Americans. Just as Meyer’s political economy dated from Andrew Jackson’s affirmation of the frontier’s free market, his morals reflected Puritan America’s solitary quest for a virtuous polity. The two conceptions belonged, of course, to different eras–the Puritans’ views of government was far closer to that of Kirk than Meyer–but they had co-existed in the American psyche since the early 1800s. Meyer elevated their co-existence from homily to philosophy. And in doing so, he sought not merely to ground conservatism in philosophy, but to ground conservatism in the peculiar philosophy of Americans.

Meyer did succeed in providing at least the appearance of a theoretical underpinning for the conservative movement of his time. Meyer himself wrote or helped write the founding statements of both the American Conservative Union and the New York Conservative Party, and the authors of the Young Americans for Freedom’s founding “Sharon Statement” credited him with that statement’s attempt to combine individualism and traditionalism.

Frank Meyer

Meyer used fusionism to justify the political stances of the emerging strands of the conservative movement. Meyer invoked his concept of freedom from government interference on behalf of Southern segregation, as well as Northern resistance to the enlargement of the welfare state. And Meyer’s insistence on virtue as the moral end of existence dovetailed with popular dismay at the drug counterculture and ghetto violence of the ’60s. When Barry Goldwater ran for President in 1964, or when Ronald Reagan ran for governor of California in 1966, it was substantially on Meyer’s fusionist platform. The first book of neo-conservative politics, Irving Kristol’s On the Democratic Idea in America, was virtually a gloss on Meyer’s fusionism.

Once he had worked out the central idea of fusionism in the mid-1950s, Meyer himself never budged from it. It occupied the same place in his thought as Stalin’s version of Marxism once had. It became the basis for denouncing suspected deviations from the correct line, from Rothbard’s anti-war stand to the pro-marijuana stance of the Libertarian faction of the Young Americans for Freedom.

Young conservatives found Meyer looking over their shoulder as they plied their trade. “Frank Meyer really was the conscience of the right wing,” recalled David Keene. “If you were a movement conservative, and were in a position somewhere, and were doing something that you knew you shouldn’t be doing, Frank Meyer would know about it, and he would call you on the carpet for it.”

Like Stalin’s Marxism, fusionism also became for Meyer on overarching theory in which even seemingly contradictory facts were fitted. Thus Meyer could defend Southern segregation and become an outspoken apologist for South Africa’s “apartheid” system, praising it as an attempt to develop “the black nations within South Africa to an eventual equal status with the white nation.”

Since Meyer’s death, no alternative philosophy has supplanted fusionism among conservatives. The only attempt to provide an alternative was made by columnist George Will, who in Statecraft and Soulcraft tried to revive Kirk’s traditionalist approach to the state. But Will’s book was rudely received by both National Review and Human Events. Fusionism is still the unofficial philosophy of American conservatives.

The acceptance of fusionism among the great body of conservatives does not, however, validate its theory. Viewed according to the canons of logic rather than according to the requirements of politics, fusionism does not really amount to much as political philosophy.

The most telling critique of fusionism was made two decades ago by traditionalists. In a 1962 essay, Brent Bozell, Meyer’s close friend who later became the editor of the right wing Catholic journal Triumph, challenged Meyer’s root assumptions. Meyer’s argument rested on the premise that freedom was a precondition of virtue, but Bozell demolished this premise simply by noting that a Soviet political prisoner, severely restrained by his government, was as capable of leading a virtuous life as an American businessman. “The freedom necessary to virtue is presumably a freedom no man will ever be without,” Bozell concluded. Meyer’s argument unraveled from there.

For Bozell, who was already moving toward a Franco-inspired authoritarianism, the point was that freedom is not merely irrelevant to virtue, but perhaps even detrimental to its realization. But regardless of his motives, Bozell succeeded in showing that Meyer had not theoretically reconciled freedom and virtue, but merely placed them side-by-side in the same theory. If virtue–and particularly Christian rather than Classical virtue–is the proper goal of humanity, then other justifications for freedom must be sought.

Bozell also objected to Meyer’s contention that economic freedom was a condition of political freedom. Noting the case of Great Britain, which remained a political democracy while nationalizing part of its industry, Bozell argued that its citizens could “exercise their political freedom against their economic freedom.” Meyer could only respond by circularly defining the problem out of existence. Political freedom, Meyer wrote, was “the limitation of the power of the state to the function of preserving a free order.”

Russell Kirk’s objections to Meyer were more down to earth but no less telling. Kirk pointed out that the free market whose preservation Meyer had made the goal of political society could itself encourage vice rather than virtue: whether in the form of suburban shopping malls, prostitution, television advertising, or the hunger for material success. Kirk accused Meyer of simply replacing an uncritical anti-capitalism with an equally uncritical pro-capitalism. “There was a tendency among the ex-Communists and ex-Trotskyists to go from one extreme to the other,” Kirk recalled. “Frank Meyer is the clearest example of that. Having been turned away from ideology they seek another ideology which becomes a kind of ideology of capitalism.”

Bozell’s and Kirk’s objections undercut the philosophical validity of fusionism, but in politics, as James Burnham pointed out in The Machiavellians, the usefulness of a philosophy is not necessarily related to its theoretical soundness. Rather, it is related to the degree to which the philosophy resonates with popular mythologies. Meyer’s philosophy did precisely that: invoking both the frontier free market and John Winthrop’s City on a Hill and reconciling the Chamber of Commerce’s economics with the Sunday sermon against the evils of pornography.

Political movements rarely possess coherent unified world views; instead, they are concatenations of conflicting Weltanschaungs, whose unity is predicated on common but sometimes fleeting fears and interests. Thus, both urban blacks and rural Southern whites were integral to the old Democratic majority; while “country club Republicans,” the “born again Falwellites,” and disillusioned ethnic Democrats conspired to provide Reagan with his two landslides.

The practical unity among these groups is fleeting. For instance, a serious recession under Republican rule could send the disillusioned Democrats in the North and South scurrying back to the fold. But in the absence of long-term practical unity, Meyer’s philosophy provides the appearance of long-term philosophical unity.

Meyer’s fusionism was more rationalization than theory. It is not likely to stand with the works of Jefferson, Calhoun, or Croly in the anthologies of American political thought. Nor is it likely to survive the political coalition that it helped to sustain. But for the moment it does provide a banner in which those interested primarily in school prayer or segregation and those interested in lower taxes and less regulation of their businesses can march together.

©1986 John B. Judis

http://www.aliciapatterson.org/APF0901/Judis/Judis.html

http://www.atlasusa.org/V2/main/page.php?page_id=181

IC’s Top 25 Philosophical and Ideological Conservative Books
No. 19 – Jose Ortega y Gasset: The Revolt of the Masses
by Dr. Enrico Peppe
20 February 2004

Four clear conceptions of Ortega’s thinking, as reflected by the book under review, can be found in the writings of Albert Jay Nock, Michael Oakeshott, Ayn Rand, and Murray Rothbard.
Ortega (1883-1955) was born in Madrid within a journalist-political milieu.

His father was a popular newspaperman and novelist. In his mother’s family were many politico-ideologues and ministers of sundry Spanish government agencies.

He received his Ph.D. in philosophy from the University of Madrid in 1904, and subsequently continued his studies in Germany, when the philosophic emphasis was Kantian analysis.

Eventually he secured a post at Central University in Madrid. He became an exile during the Spanish Civil War, finding teaching refuge at the University of San Marcos in Lima. After World War II, he returned to Spain where he founded the short-lived Institute of Humanities. He lectured frequently during his later years (including a stint at the Center for the Humanities in Aspen). He died in 1955. At the time of his death, he could quite accurately be described as Spain’s premier thinker.

His genre was the essay. His Castilian was vibrant, and as such he is considered one of the great writers of the 20th century, regardless of language. As a philosopher he is considered neo-Kantian and existentialist.

Professor Mary E. Giles summarizes his conceptions as follows. For Ortega:

Human beings and their circumstances exist in a dynamic interplay (‘Yo soy yo y mi circumstancia’)…How an individual influences his circumstances is his creative action (‘quehacer vital’)…The hero…creates the noble life by exerting his will to go beyond the ordinary…The opposite of the hero, the mass man, is content with his own mediocrity and relies on opinion rather than reason…Though each individual sees truth from a unique perspective, truth itself is absolute.

A synopsis of Ortega’s “The Revolt of the Masses” is in order. This work easily belongs on the IC “Top 25″ list.  (For reasons that will become clear later, however, Ortega makes the grade for reasons not in accordance with past ideological emphases as applied to Ortega’s most popular book).

The fifteen chapters are best understood as fifteen essays (Ortega’s thought-pattern tends toward the personal rather than the
thematic).

But a theme emerges nevertheless. Dr Giles sums up part of the Ortegan motif:

(He)…elaborates the theory of two classes, the masses and creative minorities…societies advance…when the creative minority is allowed to govern. Mass man is without direction, self-satisfied, and preoccupied with his own well-being…(he) is identifiable by an attitude opposite of the dynamic man of excellence… (who)…exerts his will in service to values and goals that are larger than himself…

The highly quotable Ortega on themes felt to be the crux of the book:

The multitude has suddenly become visible, installing itself in the preferential positions in society…Before it passed unnoticed, occupying the background of the social stage; now, it has advanced to the footlights and is the principal character. There are no longer protagonists; there is only the chorus.

We are, in fact, confronted with a radical innovation in human destiny, implanted by the 19th century. A new stage has been mounted for human existence, new both in the physical and the social aspects. Three principles have made possible this new world: liberal democracy, scientific experiment, and industrialism. The two latter may be summed up in one word: technicism.

Ortegan excerpts, out of context, like the brief quotations cited above, serve to place Ortega in the long line of aristocratic-metaphysical-Carlist thinking best expressed in European and American traditional conservatism (Frederick Wilhelmsem, L Brent Bozell, and Russell Kirk, the chief spokesmen). Only a pallid case can be made.

The reviewer interprets Ortega’s grand book within a different frame.

It has been customary to read Ortega in bits and then extrapolate for ideological justification. Even George H. Nash in his classic refers to Ortega as a “traditionalist saint.”

Several Ortega claims must be examined:

1. “Ortega was an existentialist.”

A few years ago the reviewer translated Ortega’s “La Rebelion…” alongside Carmen Laforet’s “Nada” in order to analyze the figurative language in both; alongside the hyper-angst emitting from Laforet, Ortega read like a proposition from Bertrand Russell’s “Principia Mathematica.” Part of the problem rests with his “Meditations on Quixote” whereby Ortega cries, “I am I and my circumstance.” But he rejected the “I.” He did not glorify it. For this Spanish empiricist, the “I” refers to one who lives in the world, and works out circumstances (step-by-step) for positive gains. There is great similarity between Ortega’s stance and Misesian (step-by-step) economic analysis (See my IC review #22).

2. “Ortega was a disciple of Burke.”

Burke wistfully looked back to the day of the aristocracy, of the day before the secular, of the day before “progress.” Ortega’s approach is subtle and different. In his words,

No one can imagine that, in the face of this fabulous seething of the masses, it is the aristocratic attitude to be satisfied with making a supercilious grimace, like a fine gentleman of Versailles – the Versailles of the grimaces – does not represent aristocracy; it is the death and dissolution of a magnificent aristocracy. For this reason, the only element of aristocracy left in such beings was the dignified grace with which their necks received the attention of the guillotine; they accepted it as the tumour accepts the lancet.

3. Ortega was anti-science — a regressivist.

Ortega pays homage to scientific and technical innovation. He is totally aware that the Masses enjoy great gains in personal and social development due to the capabilities of highly intelligent individuals. It’s just that the common man doesn’t get it.

…[the mass man]…finding himself in a world so excellent, technically and socially, believes that it has been produced by nature, and never thinks of the personal efforts of highly-endowed individuals which the creation of this new world presupposed. Still less will he admit the notion that all these facilities still require the support of certain difficult human virtues, the least failure of which would cause the rapid disappearance of the whole magnificent edifice.

4. Ortega blamed liberal democracy as propounded by early classical liberals for the rise of the masses and the resulting consequences.

The problem here has been that critics have discussed Ortega in terms of the symptoms he wrote about, and have not zoned in on what he considered the root cause.

Not that he hid the fact:

…the gravest danger that today threatens civilization: State intervention — the absorption of all spontaneous social effort by the State, that is to say, of spontaneous historical action, which in the long run sustains, nourishes, and impels human destinies…This is what State intervention leads to: the peel are converted into fuel to feed the mere machine which is the State. The skeleton eats up the flesh around it. The scaffolding becomes the owner and tenant of the house.

Capaldi interprets the above statement:

Precisely because mass man does not recognize any sense of personal responsibility and does not care to distinguish between the intended and actual consequences of any action, he acquiesces in the control of all social efforts on the part of the state. Deceived into thinking that he is the state, mass man does not see that he will soon be living for the state (or the government), and not it for him.

Nicholas Capaldi, in his magnificent 1988 piece, “Ortega on the Crisis of Western Civilization,” carefully and accurately explicates Ortega on the “liberal democracy” issue. He makes five points that go a long way toward creating a correct Ortegan hermeneutic.

Point #1 — The modern era, the period of rationalist humanism, saw the rise of technicism. While the ascendancy of such was a favorable process for the welfare of mankind, the philosophy behind it was extended to man qua man.

Man consequently believed than he was the center of all things — that he could discover structure itself.

Capaldi:  ”Carried into the social and political realm, rationalistic humanism ultimately leads to political radicalism. Utopian social engineering is the social counterpart of industrial technology.”

Point #2 — John Locke’s original conception of freedom and equality, by natural law, had a clear religious basis. In subsequent history, the religious element died. Rationalist humanism took over.

Capaldi: “…rationalist humanism amounts to the attempt to construct civil and political society from an ethical vacuum…Ortega…stressed that a prior normative context was indispensable.”

Point #3 — As rationalist humanism evolved, the pure, “Lockean” concept of liberal democracy did also, into a negative abyss. A paradox ensued.

Capaldi: “The paradox of liberal democracy is that it destroys the foundations on which it itself exists…The danger faced by the society of mass men is that ‘barbarism is the absence of standards to which appeal can be made.’”

Point #4 – Liberal democracy must be superceded. It should not be destroyed.

Capaldi: “Liberal democracy emerges in the pages of Ortega as a noble sentiment served by a shallow theory.”

Point #5 — For Ortega, there are no viable alternatives to liberal democracy other than superceding it. Certainly the “isms” of history don’t qualify.

Capaldi: “In a prescient remark Ortega lumps bolshevism and fascism together as retrogressive movements based upon failure to take history seriously. Nationalism is dismissed as a ‘passing phase of self-conceit on the part of the least developed of the nations.’”

Thomas Fitzgerald, in a 1996 “First Things” piece, “The Future of Belief,” offers a beautiful arpeggio. Ortega used the term “creencias” to name embedded certitudes and core convictions mankind takes for granted, stuff under your skin, that needs no discussion or elaboration. In what the reviewer feels is one of the best few words ever written on Our Demise, Fitzgerald writes,

The Enlightenment, in breaking with archaic and biblical forms of understanding, had asserted that things are wholly accessible to scrutiny — and hence could be known, described, and explained in direct, comprehensive, and reliable forms. When narrowed into its instrumental uses, however, rationality…fell into the service of a state apparatus and became a means for designing ‘rationalized’ exploitation of man and nature…Dispossessed of our “creencias,” people are left (as Ortega puts it) with a feeling of ’shipwreck.’…Rushing to make new shrines of the natural environment, or computers, or space travel, or ethnicity, or nationalism, we find only ramshackle, one-owner cosmologies offering poor shelter.

The ongoing policy studies and continuous writings associated with the superceding of liberal democracy today, as understood and advocated by Ortega, are only to be found in the libertarian wing of the conservative movement. Even as recently as 20 years ago, Ortegan formulations could be distinguished on the pages of National Review. As William F. Buckley supped with the Kristols, the Ortegan connection waned, and finally ceased. The reviewer does not hold lightly the enormous contributions both NR and Buckley have given to the movement — it’s just a matter of “la vida politica.”

Four clear conceptions of Ortega’s thinking, as reflected by the book under review, can be found in the writings of Albert Jay Nock, Michael Oakeshott, Ayn Rand, and Murray Rothbard.

Albert Jay Nock, the “forgotten man of the right,” read Ortega correctly as the anti-statist that he was (for a superb article on Nock, IC readers would do well to read Mises Institute’s Jeffrey A. Tucker’s piece.

In Our Enemy,The State, Nock points out that…the “state . . . whether primitive, feudal, or merchant is the organization of political means.”  Nock on Ortega:

…[Ortega]…gives a good idea of what may be expected when a third, economically composite, class takes over the mechanism of the state, as the merchant class took it over from the nobility. Surely no better forecast could be made of what is taking place in this country at the moment than, [in Ortega's words]…’The mass-man in fact believes that he is the state, and he will tend more and more to set its machinery working, on whatever pretext, to crush beneath it any creative minority which disturbs it —
disturbs it in any order of things, in politics, in ideas, in industry.’

Kenneth Hoover, author (with others) of “Ideology and Political Life,” accurately identifies Ortega with Michael Oakeshott, but fails to gauge the ideological spectrum in which both
properly belong:

In traditional conservative thought the mass man was the conceptual opposite of the individual living in a properly constituted society. (Reviewer’s note: Hoover should have distinguished between the Old Right and Traditional conservatism. For more on rightist distinctives, see my IC review #20).

As Michael Oakeshott suggests,(spirited by Ortega), …the mass man is not necessarily ignorant, often he is a member of the so-called intellegentsia; he belongs to a class which corresponds exactly with no other class.

Hoover goes on to synthesize both men of the right as believing that, “The mass man has no character: a nation-state of mass men would fall prey to tyranny because they could not supply order in their own lives. Insensitive to authority, they would become slaves to power.”

Aynist Gregory Johnson, writing in the “Daily Objectivist,” creates a tremendous case for Ortegan influence on the protolibertarian Rand. Johnson displays two paragraphs from Ms. Rand’s journal for May 16, 1934. Having copied passages from the last chapter of “The Revolt of the Masses,” she then writes in two paragraphs:

The new conception of the State that I want to defend is the State as a means, not an end: a means for the convenience of the higher type of man. The State as the only organization. Within it — all have to remain individuals. The state, not as a slave of the great numbers, but precisely the contrary, as the individual’s defense against great numbers. To free man from the tyranny of numbers.”

The fault of liberal democracies: giving full rights to quantity (majorities), they forget the rights of quality, which are much higher rights.

On her notes for The Fountainhead, she writes, “Until man’s ’self’ regains its proper position, life will be what it is now: flat, gray, empty, lacking in all beauty, all fire, all enthusiasm, all meaning, all creative urge. That is the ultimate theme of the book — Howard Roark as the remedy for all modern ills.”

Gregory Johnson: “It is seldom possible to make an airtight case for intellectual influence, but if Rand first conceived the moral project of “The Fountainhead” (and all of her subsequent works) while writing her journal entries for May 15 and 16, 1934, she did so in dialogue with Ortega.”

The late genius-economist Murray Rothbard nails down the Libertarian-Ortegan connection by melding Mises and Ortega on “The Romantic as Primitive” (how this man could work so well, and exhibit such understanding, within interdisciplinary frameworks is a marvel). First Mises:

Romanticism is man’s revolt against reason, as well as the condition under which nature has compelled him to live. The romantic is a daydreamer; he easily manages in imagination to disregard the laws of logic and nature. The thinking and rationally acting man tries to rid himself of the discomfort of unsatisfied wants by economic action and work…The romantic…imagines the pleasures of success, but he does nothing to achieve them…

Then Ortega:

This is what happens in the world which is mere Nature. But it does not happen in the world of civilization which is ours. Civilization is not ‘just there,’ it is not self-supporting. It is artificial…if you want to make use of the advantages of civilization, but are not prepared to concern yourself with the upholding of civilization — you are done.

(The IC reader would do well to read the Rothbard piece in its entirety.)

The Revolt of the Masses by Jose Ortega y Gasset is a classic in the Old Right-Libertarian-Paleoconservative tradition.

It should be read that way.

http://www.intellectualconservative.com/article3154.html