Mountains beyond Mountains
Sarah Bramwell
The Philadelphia Society 40th Gala! National Meeting
May 1, 2004
In your program, you will read that I am a freelance writer. This was true at the time the program was printed, but it is no longer. I am in the employ of Colorado Governor Bill Owens as his deputy press secretary. I tell you this not only because of the obvious benefits of self-aggrandizement, but because my position obliges me to say that the following opinions are my own, and do not reflect those of the Governor.
Modern American conservatism began in an effort to do two things: defeat Communism and roll back creeping socialism. A half century later, these goals are no longer relevant. The first was obviated by our success, the latter by our failure. So what is left of conservatism?
Many conservatives, especially since September 11, believe that a major, if not the major calling of conservatives today is to articulate and defend a certain brand of international grand strategy. Let me say that I believe this view to be not only mistaken, but quite possibly harmful to the conservative movement.
It is mistaken because the truth of the matter is that conservatism neither has nor ought to have a particular foreign policy. I certainly do not mean to say that conservatives should cease to be interested in foreign policy. But the role of conservatives qua conservatives in foreign policy, as in every other area, is to resist the temptations of ideology. Everything else, like so much in politics, is a matter of prudence and judgment, on which there is wide room for legitimate disagreement.
I suspect that confusion exists today on this rather elementary point in large part because the Cold War created an artificial situation in which all conservatives agreed on the same foreign policy goal and strategy. Communism was an armed, international ideology that threatened to obliterate civilization. All conservatives, therefore, were obliged to fight it and buck up the West’s resolve in the struggle against the Soviet Union. In sum, anti-Communism was not a question on which conservatives could reasonably disagree, but an essential conservative principle.
No similar principle, however, exists today. Despite this, many conservatives have continued the Cold War habit of making foreign policy into an ideological battle. On one side we have conservatives who believe that the United States has a moral obligation to spread democracy anywhere and everywhere around the globe; on the other, we have conservatives who believe that an activist foreign policy betrays conservatism’s isolationist or “America First” roots.
Neither view will wash. Isolationism in the 1930s was nothing but a logical deduction from conservative anti-Communism. Right-wingers argued against intervening in World War II because Nazi Germany, as unappealing as it was, thwarted Stalin’s ambitions. With Nazi Germany gone, therefore, hardly a single conservative isolationist remained by the time the Cold War was in full swing. All quondam isolationists either died like Nock, or converted, like Buckley.
Isolationism, in other words, was a strategy, not a guiding principle. Today, it wears a no less utopian guise than pro-democracy triumphalism. What do we do, after all, with our myriad deployments and alliances around the world? To back out on them all immediately would be disastrous. It is all very well and good to say that in some Platonic Empyrean the United States would only worry about its own liberty and not that of others, but here in our fallen state, such a scenario is unimaginable.
We likewise have no moral obligation to spread democracy around the world. After all, democracy is not even the best form of government. Conservatives, together with the weight of the Western tradition, have always favored a mixed constitution that balances the interests of the one, the few, and the many. It goes without saying that “We must make the world safe for mixed constitutions” is not the most euphonious rallying cry.
None of this is to say that some form of isolationist or interventionist foreign policy cannot be endorsed by conservatives. On the contrary, my very point is that both policies could be seen as properly conservative grand strategies for achieving American interests. For some time now, conservatives have enjoyed the liberty to disagree on important questions of foreign policy. What I would like to see is that we be allowed to do so without fear that someone else in the movement will declare us anathema.
My own opinion is that while Islamist-inspired terrorism is the most immediate threat to our security, in the long term our major struggle is against the international class of technocrats that in the name of “international law” seeks to efface our bitterly-won rights to self-government. Conservatives must fashion a strategy not only against terrorism but also against the international New Class, and our strategy for defeating the one must not be inconsistent with our strategy for defeating the other.
In any case, the important point is once again that articulating and defending some kind of international policy is not the major goal of conservatism in the next forty years. How about the second founding goal of the conservative movement, namely, halting creeping socialism? Like it or not, the administrative state is here to stay. Conservatives can continue to nibble away at it, and the past decade has seen a small wave of reforms that leaves one with some modest hope for the future. We’re not going to abolish social security, but we are going to see private health accounts that give Americans more freedom. The public-school system will clatter along in all its disastrousness, but charter schools will become more and more popular. These and other improvements on the margins should continue, but there are other things that are more important.
So, when the two founding goals are no longer relevant, what is left for us as conservatives to do? Well, since the 1960s, the conservative movement took on a third goal, namely winning the culture wars. By culture wars, I mean everything from preserving traditional morality, to passing on the Western inheritance, to preserving a distinctly American common culture, to resisting the threat posed by biotechnology to human nature itself. To win these wars, conservatives must make the case against such things as gay marriage, stem-cell research, open borders, and our hideous suburban sprawl. All these battles are really part of the same war—a war, unfortunately, that we seem determined to lose.
Since my time is limited, I’d like to examine our losing ways by looking only at one issue: gay marriage. In college, even as we conservatives would lament the inglorious decline of the West, even as we steeped ourselves in doom-and-gloom conservatism like so many Romans in their baths, still we could not help but be mightily optimistic about the future of conservatism. Never had conservatives at Yale been so many and so active; never had conservatives had such a wealth of opportunities for writing, bringing in speakers, and influencing the debate on campus.
And yet in the past nine months, this has all appeared quite hollow to me. Why? Because of the amazing disappearing act conservatives have pulled in the face of gay marriage. After so many advances, it seems, we have rolled over and played dead.
The most rigorous and intellectually impressive conservative writers—the ones we depended upon to articulate the conservative position on such controversial issues as stem cells, abortion, and affirmative action—have, it seems, been struck dumb. They have relegated themselves to reporting on the political reaction to gay marriage or critiquing the vicissitudes of federal marriage amendment proposals. Virtually everyone has avoided the basic issue of whether sodomy ought to be normalized.
It used to be that, when challenged in the culture wars, conservatives only gain in strength. The conservative movement benefited greatly from an infusion of intellectual firepower and initiative from disenchanted liberals and democrats during the 1960s and ’70s. Ronald Reagan extended this crossover effect into the political arena, solidifying the intellectual gains that conservatism had made in a very public and concrete way. Conservatism has continued boisterously to defy the aftershocks of the 60s and 70s.
Now, by contrast, as gay marriage becomes a reality, we have amazingly only become weaker. I have no idea what accounts for this extraordinary lack of nerve. What I do know is that no sooner had the Lawrence decision come down from on high but conservatives, discouraged before the battle had even begun, lamented the inevitability of gay marriage, posited a new world of alternative arrangements, and even urged that family law be in some sense privatized. It seemed that the fighting spirit had all of a sudden departed from even the most reliable conservative organs.
That few prominent conservative thinkers and writers are making the intellectually difficult and socially risky case against homosexualism has had a devastating effect. Thousands of conservatives—college students, housewives, activists, even President Bush and members of Congress—rely on the pundit class to make the controversial arguments not just so that they know what to think and say, but because the pundit class has given them the intellectual cover to do so. The most important job of polemicists is constantly to move—or, at the very least, defend—the boundaries of debate. In effect, they are expanding and securing the perimeter for the footsoldiers to occupy. Well, when the advance guard goes AWOL, the whole conservative side in the culture wars collapses.
To say that the institution of marriage is important to Western civilization and therefore worth fighting for is an understatement. And yet when this institution is under attack as never before in Western history, conservatives are silent. One need look no further than the covers and tables of contents of the most prominent conservative journals for evidence of this. Of 50 articles, probably 40 of them will be on the War on Terror, and only two or three on gay marriage. This is the cultural battle of our age, and we write an article here and there on the subject. There is no precedent for this disappearing act in the history of the conservative movement.
This is precisely what the other side wants. This is a fight, mind you, not only for traditional sexual morality, but for the very liberty that conservatives have always prided themselves on defending. With the advent of government-mandated gay marriage, what is taught in the public schools will change: gay sex will have to be taught just as heterosexual sex is. The words “husband” and “wife” will have to go. Meanwhile, the full power of federal anti-discrimination laws will be brought to bear, making discrimination against gays illegal. Catholic charities and Christian schools may be forced to hire and teach against their religion. I am not being hysterical, for these things have already come to pass in other Western nations. Sure, we have the free speech clause of the First Amendment to protect us, but that only goes so far, and it is subject to the vagaries of Supreme Court interpretation. There is a chance that we conservatives will no longer even be allowed our saving remnant, much less be a major political and moral force.
Once we lose the gay marriage fight, the hard-won gains that have been made with regard to traditional sexual morality will be lost. How do you argue for abstinence and monogamy when there’s a whole population of people who can get married but don’t bother? Once heterosexual and homosexual sex are equated, all the arguments for traditional sexual morality—from prudence, from nature, from religion—collapse.
So, where do I think conservatism will be in the next 40 years? I must confess that I am not exactly full of hope. The danger in the next 40 years is not losing the battles but, for want of fighting them, becoming irrelevant.
The issues with which we will grapple in the coming decades—chief among them cloning and other matters biotechnological—will require our focus and our unity. If we can but put aside our differences for a while, we stand a chance. If we cannot, then we don’t deserve that chance.
Thank you.
Bramwell to Define Post-Buckley Future
July 17, 2004
Young Right Tries to Define Post-Buckley Future
By DAVID D. KIRKPATRICK
n 1954, when he was 28, William F. Buckley Jr. founded National Review to bear the standard of a fledgling conservative movement defined by three commitments: to fight Communism, to diminish the federal government and to uphold traditionalism in social affairs.
That formulation held the movement together for five decades, as Ronald Reagan brought conservatives to power, George H. W. Bush declared victory in the cold war and Bill Clinton pronounced the end of big government.
Now, many conservatives say, the current Bush administration is testing that definition of conservatism as it has never been tested before, from the expansion of federal health and education programs to the campaign to remake Iraq. And as Mr. Buckley prepares for retirement by handing over control of National Review, a new generation of young would-be Buckleys is debating just what conservatism means when their side has taken over Washington, and yet they still do not feel that they have won.
“Conservative is a word that is almost meaningless these days,” said Caleb Stegall, 32, a lawyer in Topeka, Kan., and a founder of The New Pantagruel, newpantagruel.com, an irreverent Web site about religion and politics named for the jovial drunkard created by Rabelais. “It tells you almost nothing about where a person stands on a lot of questions,” he said, like gay marriage, stem cell research, the environment and Iraq.
Austin Bramwell, 26, of Denver, one of five new trustees of National Review, is a leader in a group no longer characterized by uniform views.
The debate among members of the young right is unfolding on Web sites like Mr. Stegall’s and Oxblog, oxblog .blogspot.com, set up by three Rhodes Scholars. It is discussed at roundtables and cocktail parties organized by groups like America’s Future Foundation in Washington. In journals for young conservatives, they tackle subjects as heterodox as the perils of Wal-Mart and urban sprawl, the dangers of unfettered capitalism to family life, and the feared takeover of their movement by hawkish neoconservatives.
In May the Philadelphia Society, a prestigious club for conservative intellectuals, tapped Sarah Bramwell, a 24-year-old Yale graduate and writer, to address the views of the young right at its 40th-anniversary conference. “Modern American conservatism began in an effort to do two things: defeat Communism and roll back creeping socialism,” she began. “The first was obviated by our success, the latter by our failure. So what is left of conservatism?”
Rearing new conservatives has long been a subject of keen interest to their elders. To counter what they considered the liberal dominance of the major universities and news organizations, a handful of conservative foundations has helped build a network of organizations to train young members of the movement, most prominently the 51-year-old Intercollegiate Studies Institute. It publishes journals and books, sponsors fellowships and administers a network of 80 conservative college newspapers.
“I think one of the principal, even signal, features of the conservative movement is its overriding concern for nurturing young people,” said Jeff Nelson, 39, the institute’s vice president for publications.
Mr. Buckley recently chose Sarah Bramwell’s husband, Austin Bramwell, 26, as one of five trustees of National Review. Mr. Bramwell, a clerk for the federal appeals court in Denver and an alumnus of the institute’s programs, declined to comment because of his job at the court.
Mr. Nelson said young conservatives’ greatest challenge might come from their predecessors’ success. “Buckley started the conservative movement athwart history, yelling `stop,’ ” he said, “but there has been a subtle shift in the conservative movement’s view of itself, from history’s opponents to destiny’s child.”
“We have a lot of conservatives who reflect the values of the mainstream culture,” he continued. “There are polls that show younger-generation conservatives trust the government much more deeply than their parents did.”
The increase in federal domestic spending under President Bush would have been “unimaginable” to conservatives a few years ago, he said, and so would foreign policies like the invasion of Iraq.
Doubts about the justification for the war are a common theme among young conservatives. “Many conservatives, especially since Sept. 11, believe that a major, if not the major, calling of conservatives today is to articulate and defend a certain brand of international grand strategy,” Ms. Bramwell argued in her address to the Philadelphia Society. “I believe this view to be not only mistaken, but quite possibly harmful to the conservative movement.”
Still, Ms. Bramwell, who now works as deputy press secretary for Gov. Bill Owens of Colorado, said in an interview that she nonetheless supported the war in Iraq as a chance to advance United States interests in the Middle East.
Daniel McCarthy, 26, an assistant editor at The American Conservative, the magazine founded by Pat Buchanan, said that although many of his contemporaries questioned the war, few were willing to turn against the president, as he had.
“I say we have to go back to before the conservative movement became a movement,” he said, “back to when it was just a few tormented intellectuals who didn’t necessarily see themselves as a coherent group, and even to the so-called isolationist and noninterventionist right. America is a nation state. It is not meant to be a sort of world government in embryo, not meant to be a last provider of justice or security for the entire world.”
But some young conservatives argue that the United States may need to become more active, not less. Eric Cohen, 26, is the director of the biotechnology and American democracy program at the Ethics and Public Policy Center in Washington; the editor of its journal, New Atlantis; a consultant to the President’s Council on Bioethics; and a contributor to The Weekly Standard.
In an interview, he argued that conservatives needed to accept an active role for government in dealing with advancing technology, whether in the form of terrorists’ weapons abroad or attempts to change the nature of life at home. “The conservative project is making the case for progress abroad while confronting the dilemmas of progress at home,” he said.
Mr. Cohen defended the Bush administration’s preventive intervention in the Middle East as well as its limitations on federal financing for stem cell research.
“Medical progress is going to keep people alive longer than they would have been,” he said. “I think prudent conservatives are going to have to find some responsible way to have sensible government to deal with the needs of aging generations. We have seen a version of this in the prescription drug bill, and there are going to be other obligations.”
Mr. Stegall, an evangelical Presbyterian and the son of a minister, said he shared Mr. Cohen’s support for government social programs, but for religious reasons. He said he and other theological conservatives had founded The New Pantagruel as an alternative to the politics of the older generation of Christian conservatives.
“If I could sum up what we stand for in one word, it would be sustainability,” he said. By that, he explained, he meant theologically conservative views on sustaining family life, as well as typically liberal views on sustaining the environment and local communities and helping the poor. “For us, those two halves are inextricably linked,” he said.
But several conservatives, young and old, said the greatest division in the movement pitted young traditionalists against their more libertarian peers. David Weigel, 22, the former editor of a conservative magazine at Northwestern University, a contributor to the libertarian magazine Reason and an intern at the editorial page of USA Today, said that last spring his college paper had trouble finding any conservatives on campus who supported amending the constitution to ban same-sex marriage.
He contended that even young conservatives who maintained a strict moral code for themselves were increasingly reluctant to regulate the behavior of others. “I am personally abstinent,” he said, “and I plan to stay that way, but I have no problem with international aid programs that use or distribute condoms.”
Ramesh Ponnuru, 29, a prolific writer for National Review, complained that the Republican party had been focusing on social issues because limited government did not have as big “a political payoff.”
“There is a serious possibility that the libertarian wing of the conservative movement goes off in its own direction, either breaking off or allying with the Democrats,” he said.
Mr. Buckley, however, said he was unperturbed. “The sweep of the Soviet challenge was what I call a harnessing bias, and now that harness has come apart,” he said. “But I don’t think the threads are by any means abandoned.” He added: “There has never been a movement that doesn’t go through this perplexion and development.”
The Founders and the Rising Generation
The Founders and the Rising Generation
by T. Kenneth Cribb, Jr.
delivered at
The Philadelphia Society Meeting
Williamsburg, Virginia
November 23, 1996
Alexander Solzhenitsyn once remarked that “A people which no longer remembers, has lost its history and its soul.” That profound insight underscores the centrality of our deliberations this weekend. It is especially haunting when applied to the theme of tonight’s session: the Founders and the rising generations.
It is appropriate that we gather this weekend in Williamsburg, a city where the mist of history surrounds us, to discuss ways in which to recover our historical consciousness. The alarming rate at which historical ignorance–and worse, apathy–are advancing in the ranks of our fellow citizens puts the future of the nation as conceived by the Founders at risk. Indeed, a recent symposium in a highly regarded journal has gone so far as to suggest that the experiment undertaken by our Forefathers in erecting a republican system of limited, representative government is in acute danger of failing due to a “long train of abuses and usurpations”–to use the language of the Declaration–by the courts and by big government. The question explored in the symposium by several distinguished writers in “whether we are reaching the point where conscientious citizens can no longer give moral assent to the existing regime.” That such a question is seriously posed by leading conservative thinkers is a sobering comment on the state of the republic.
How have we come to this pass? Certainly one of the principal reasons is the ever widening gap between the Founding generation and the rising generation. This chasm is a “generation gap” of a different sort than the kind commonly referred to by political pollsters. I mean here something much different than chronological distance–I mean a separation more in consciousness than in time. Today’s high school and college youth exist, in an historical sense, a mere 220 years from the signing of the Declaration–but for most it may we well be 2020. Survey after survey confirms the basic fact that the rising generation is learning next to nothing about American history. What is at stake here is more than a lost acquaintance with names, dates, events, and figures, important as that acquaintance is. More significantly, the rising generation increasingly is being denied the acquisition of an historical consciousness and the cultivation of the discipline of historical memory.
The fact that most citizens today complacently accept the abrogation of power by governments and the courts at the expense of their own sovereignty is not surprising given the dramatic recession of historical understanding and memory among large numbers of Americans now coming of age. What is the significance of historical consciousness and its connection to our present discontents? Wilfred McClay, an historian of distinction here with us this weekend, put the connection this way in a recent, and poetic, address at The Heritage Foundation.
“Historical consciousness,” McClay writes, “is to civilized society what memory is to the individual identity. One cannot say who or what one is–one can’t say one is anyone, or anything, at all–without some selective retention of experience and source of continuity. One cannot learn, use
language, pass on knowledge, raise offspring, or even dwell in society without the aid of
memory….A culture without memory will necessarily be barbarous, no matter how technologically
advanced and sophisticated, because the daily drumbeat of artificial sensations and amplified
events will drown out all other sounds, including the strains of an older music.”
What is it about the men of America’s founding generation that makes them worthy of the memory of the rising generation? For some, the extraordinary extent to which large numbers of our forebears were prepared to sacrifice their fortunes and their very lives to preserve liberty is enough to merit historical distinction and commemoration. For still others, the extraordinary fact about the Founding era was the talent it generated. People seemed to notice from the beginning the shear number of planters and shopkeepers, men of the courts and countinghouses, coming together to fight a war and forge a nation. Silas Deane, a member of the Continental Congress wrote home in 1775 that “Times like these call up Genius, which slept before, and stimulate it in action to a degree, that eclipses what might before have been fixed as a Standard.” And in 1789, David Ramsey of my own South Carolina noted that the heroic events of the war and the succeeding years of constitutional deliberation had “not only required, but created talents. Men, he said, “spoke, wrote, and acted, with an energy far surpassing all expectations, which could be reasonably founded on their previous acquirements. And, indeed, in our own day historian Edmund S. Morgan expressed a similar sentiment when he observed that “if one were to make a list of the great men of American history, by whatever standards one chooses to measure greatness, an astonishingly large proportion would be found whose careers began or culminated in the Revolution. It would be hard to find in all the rest of American history more than two or three men to rank with Washington, Franklin, Jefferson, Hamilton, Madison, or John Adams.” When a society wishes to encourage right conduct, the ability of history to throw forward exemplars of right conduct is not to be underestimated.
But when we attempt to unveil these, and other, ways in which the Founders are worthy of a central place in the individual and collective memory, we are met by formidable obstacles. One is the reigning utilitarian approach to history, which is surely one overwhelming reason why such a large historical generation gap currently exists. A utilitarian view of historical studies is not a new problem; since the early decades of this century conservatives have waged a sustained offensive against the progressives and John Dewey, objecting principally to the transformation of the educational mission of one of “social efficiency.” Transmitting the legacy of the Founding Fathers will never be a central concern of historians chiefly occupied with constructing a program directly “relevant” to their students interests, and in concert with their students’ personal and professional goals. The extreme of this view was best expressed thirty years ago by radical educator Edgar Wesley in an infamous essay entitled, “Let’s Abolish History.” In it, Wesley argued that students need a history they can “appreciate.” “No teacher at any grade level,” he confidently asserted, “should teach a course in history as content. To do so is confusing, unnecessary, frustrating, futile, pointless, and as illogical as to teach a course in the World Almanac, the dictionary, or the Encyclopedia. [History should be] utilized and exploited–not studied, learned, or memorized.” Needless to say, such ardent utilitarianism, and even milder expressions of the same view, had proved disastrous for the study of history generally, and the cultivation of an historical appreciation for our American forebears in particular.
A corollary view to the utilitarian approach to history is the scourge of moral relativism which, in the modern academy, cloaks itself in the garb of multiculturalism.
Relativism has stalked the corridors of the academy for years, but the echoes of those footsteps resound as never before. Of the strains of academic relativism, two of the most virulent are relativism as among cultures and relativism as among standards. The transmission of culture depends on the assumption that there is in the body of Western thought truths that are worth preserving through the ages, truths that justify the immense effort and cost of the educational establishment traditionally entrusted with transmitting the culture. but what if there is no truth? Or mores specifically, what if the traditions and institutions of the West, and the moral order that these imply, are neither more nor less valuable than those of other cultures? Well then, concern for transmitting an inherited body of learning does not matter, because the culture of the West itself does not signify.
Once the leveling scythe of relativism has cut the higher achievements of civilization down to size, we are exempted from thinking through such fundamental questions as What is the good? What is just? What deserves the allegiance of duty and of honor? Why do civilizations rise? Why do they fall? For relativism also attacks any notion of standards that proceed from a moral order and that form the basis of right conduct.
Forrest McDonald has observed that the Framers themselves were not strangers to this notion of moral relativism. But, McDonald notes, the Founders “put it to their use, with their understanding that a regime must be suited to the manners and morals of a people if it is to endure.” “They would [however] have been appalled,” he argues further, “at the modern idea that Western civilization is no better than other civilizations, that the heritage of The West is not superior to as well as different from that of The East, that the Judaeo-Christian tradition is not morally superior to as well as different from that of Islam or paganism or tribalism, that one so-called life-style is as good as another. Such thinking, if it can be so described, is a rationalization for being unable to measure up to the duty of living in accordance with and transmitting the higher values.” Political correctness and identity politics are the practical manifestations of this relativistic approach to academic inquiry.
There are of course trends other than utilitarianism and moral relativism which make it difficult to advance the Founders as a group worthy of study, appreciation, and placement in a broader “community of memory.” But I want to turn finally to a brief consideration of some hopeful developments in recent years that can perhaps serve to embolden us in our efforts to close the ever widening consciousness gap between the rising generation and our Founding generation.
The first cause for tempered hope is the proliferation of idea-mediating institutions dedicated to redressing the woeful neglect of our Founding principles among the rising generation. Frank Chodorov, the man who founded ISI as many of you know, once noted that “what was done can be undone if there is a will for it.” That will has been “institutionalized” in the form of organizations like our own ISI, and like Jim Taylor and Ron Robinson’s Young America’s Foundation, Ed Feulner’s Heritage Foundation, Gene Meyer’s Federalist Society, Larry Arnn and Charles Kesler’s Claremont Institute, Father Sirico’s Acton Institute, and many, many other organizations like these now dotting our cultural landscape. Such groups exist to put ideas into action, and serve as vital mediators between an establishment treading heavily on the intellectual tradition of the West, and students wearied of politicization and in search of the historical truth and the roots of their own cultural order. And so an infrastructure now exists that was but a dream even three decades ago. Scholars, books, journals, seminars, reprints, tapes, fellowships, and similar resources are now available in abundance to provide intellectual substance for young minds. The plenitude is so great that the main problem is organizing what is available and bringing it to bear where needed.
But the will that animates institutions like those mentioned above had to come from some source: and for most of them, the direct source has been the intellectual legacy of a broad ranging group of conservative intellectuals who for the most part put aside their differences in emphasis and approach and came together as a movement at a critical moment in our history to strengthen the faltering institutions of the West. This fact is the second reason to be mildly sanguine about our prospects for recovering our past. Because while intellectuals on the Left have for decades been working to tear down the cultural bridge that extends from one generation to the next, thinkers on the Right have been laboring heroically, and I think successfully, to extend that bridge unto the next generation. While after the last great war, the circle of those concerned with the recovery of our patrimony was a small one, it has with every decade been enlarged–creating a kind of concentric development of conservative-leaning scholars that is slowly extending itself outward into the most hostile cultural venues, poised, perhaps, one day to envelop them. One need only recall the names of Kirk, Niemeyer, Weaver, Burnham, Voegelin, Kendall, Meyer, Tonsor, and Strauss; and then consider those who picked-up their mantle, more numerous and diverse, Evans, McDonald, Carey, Liggio, Edward McClellan, Campbell, Kesler; and then consider their students, still more numerous and more diverse.
And, indeed, it is this last group which represents the third reason why I believe we can be reasonably cheered by our prospects for recovering an historical consciousness among the rising generation. For there is now in place in the university classroom a generation of young faculty members who are friendly to at least the broad strokes of the above analysis and are working in the “trenches”–often against serious odds and at risk to their careers–to transmit our Founders’ intellectual, political, and cultural legacy to their students. And the numbers and quality of their graduate students–those who will succeed them–are truly impressive. The most striking testament to the truth of this proposition is this assembly itself. Present in this room is a representative sample of young scholars that prove, I believe, that our hope is not misplaced. This conference is the perfect analogue to the question at hand, senior scholars learning from and refining the energies and insights of the ascending generation; and both together looking to a previous generation–our Founding generation–for the new perspectives on the issues we confront today. This is historical consciousness at work, and we are to commend Stan Evans and Bill Campbell for seeing the need and importance of such an event.
As I mentioned, Stan and Bill have told me that their source of inspiration was a program near and dear to my heart–the ISI Richard M. Weaver and Henry Salvatori Fellowship Programs. This may be the ISI program with the smallest number of participants, but it probably has had the highest multiplier effect and the greatest impact. Both are awarded to promising students intent upon pursuing a career in the academy–with the Salvatori program focusing specifically on young thinkers with a demonstrated interest in the principles of the American Founding. Well over 400 total ISI fellowships have been awarded since 1964, with most of the Fellows now teaching or writing, as well as pursuing careers in politics and public policy. This weekend we have all had the privilege to see first-hand many products of this particular ISI program. ISI Weaver and Salvatori Fellows present please stand. Four of the other young speakers have not held fellowships from ISI, but work with us closely, and are certainly poised to make their mark on the academy and the world of affairs.
It is not inevitable, then, that our collective memory be totally lost. With the human and institutional resources such as the ones just mentioned, we should have good reason to hope that what has been done to sever the historical connection between our Founders and ourselves can be undone, in Chodorov’s phrase, and repaired by this most promising generation with us tonight.
Burke, at the moment of his most bitter parliamentary defeat, still had the confidence in the young to say: “I attest the rising generation.” And why should the rising generation listen to us?
Put yourself in the place of an undergraduate of keen mind and superior preparation, a student who likes to read and dispute and flex the muscles of his mind. What does the Left offer him? Turgid Marxists tracts. The straight jacket of the closed system. The politically correct jargon of a welter of splintered interest groups. A false compassion that is but thinly disguised lust for power in
the people’s name, but notably without the people’s participation.
And what do the conservators of the great tradition offer him? They offer a rich and various story that Russell Kirk called a tale of four cities. Jerusalem, of the one God and his Incarnation; and Athens, the birthplace of democracy and of that school of philosophy to which all other philosophical inquiries are a series of footnotes; and Rome of the stern republican fathers of the rule of law; and London, the mother of parliaments and of the chartered rights of Englishmen; and this weekend our young scholars have recommended to our attention our own Philadelphia, where just over two hundred years ago our Founding Fathers taught that self government could be preserved from the eventual corruption of power, by dividing power against itself.
And you offer not just analysis, but allegiance born of a love of the truths that our founding tradition embodies. That which has made your lives rich, you wish to share freely with those students whose life of the mind is before them. You offer them your hands, to boost them onto the shoulders of the giants of the West. And from there they will see farther than any of us.
Let us believe with the faith that abided in Burke, that the best of the new generation will clasp your proffered hands–and that they themselves, in good time, will offer theirs to those who follow.
