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.”
