American Culture in Peril

Ronald Reagan and Modern Liberalism

RONALD REAGAN AND MODERN LIBERALISM Charles R. Kesler “The central conservative truth,” Daniel Patrick Moynihan once wrote, “is that it is culture, not politics, that determines the success of a society. The central liberal truth,” he added, “is that politics can change a culture and save it from itself.”1 Although there is wisdom in Moynihan’s dictum, it suffers two defects. In the first place, it leaves unclear what culture is and where politics comes from—or to put it differently, it fails to put culture and politics in the context of nature, including human nature. Second, the statement is politically mischievous insofar as it implies that politics is the liberal vocation, and culture (whatever that means) the conservative one. I suppose a liberal truth could be used for conservative purposes, and a conservative truth for liberal purposes, but Moynihan’s sly association of liberalism with deliberate, salutary change—and conservatism with cultural determinism—is hardly evenhanded. Could a conservative use politics to “change a culture and save it from itself,” or would that very endeavor militate against his being, or remaining for very long, a conservative? The dichotomy comes close to implying that liberalism’s very purpose is to reform culture for the better, and conservatism’s either to dismiss such efforts as futile or wait around for the chance to guard the new traditions faithfully. G.K. Chesterton drew the same implication, though from a different point of view, when he observed that the business of progressives is to go on making mistakes, and the business of conservatives is to prevent the mistakes from being corrected!2 Moynihan’s apothegm tends to turn the right either into apolitical fatalists who think culture is destiny, end of discussion, or 14 Charles R. Kesler into grudging custodians of liberal innovations, into Burkeans of a very dull sort whom only liberals could love. This, as it happens, is not far from Sam Tanenhaus’s point in his recent book The Death of Conservatism. Tanenhaus, who edits the Sunday New York Times Book Review, criticizes contemporary conservatism as what he calls “revanchism” because it attempts a “counterrevolution” against liberalism , rather than sensibly accommodating itself to the enduring changes in American society since the New Deal. These changes, such as the growth of Big Government and the sexual revolution, were probably inevitable and at any rate are now unrepealable, he maintains ; a political movement that doesn’t recognize this is unrealistic and therefore unconservative. By seeking to impose various forms of political, economic, and moral “orthodoxy” instead of adjusting to history’s dispensations, today’s conservatives “seem the heirs of the French rather than of the American Revolution.” They are Jacobin, not Burkean, in their political orientation, ignoring or rejecting the advice of sober conservatives like Whittaker Chambers (the subject of an excellent biography by Tanenhaus) to make peace with the elements of modern life that cannot be undone.3 As William F. Buckley Jr.’s official biographer, Tanenhaus will have to square this account of conservatism with Buckley’s own radical or anti–New Deal inclinations . If right-wingers are forbidden to stand athwart history yelling Stop, after all, what is left of the animating spirit of Buckleyite, that is, mainstream, American conservatism? Doubtless, that spirit must be disciplined by intelligence, and by a prudent regard to the difference between theory and practice, which means an acceptance of the truth that not everything can be improved that should be improved. Buckley was well aware of that. But from the imperfections of political life one should not conclude that the appeal to “orthodoxy,” to permanent or ahistorical political principles, is itself heretical. Here is Edmund Burke himself on the point: I never govern myself, no rational man ever did govern himself , by abstractions and universals. I do not put abstract ideas wholly out of any question, because I well know that under that name I should dismiss principles; and that without the guide and light of sound well-understood principles, Ronald Reagan and Modern Liberalism 15 all reasonings in politics, as in everything else, would be only a confused jumble of particular facts and details, without the means of drawing out any sort of theoretical or practical conclusion . A statesman differs from a professor in a university; the latter has only the general view of society; the former, the statesman, has a number of circumstances to combine with those...