American Conservatism: Thinking It, Teaching It

Introduction: What Is American Conservatism?

1 Introduction What Is American Conservatism? I begin with my dissatisfaction with the ways in which American conservatism has been defined and represented over the past half century. Perhaps there is something in the American water that distills and sanitizes conservative ideas and sensibilities, transforming them from their quintessential caution into a Reaganite “Morning in America,” just as we turned Freudian psychoanalysis into the power of positive thinking. Perhaps Louis Hartz was right that a political philosophy grounded in a dour view of human nature cannot take root in a culture committed to “the pursuit of happiness.”1 At the core of conservatism is Edmund Burke and the notion that imperfection is congenital, that change must be pursued with sobriety and caution, that the human animal is flawed and prone to irrationality. Instead we seem to have invented an indigenous “conservatism” that apes the very worst of social Darwinism and laissez-faire ideology. My discontents have been exacerbated by the striking ignorance of both my conservative and liberal students concerning the mode of thought the former embraces and the latter eschews. As such I seek to help both, as well as those less ideologically committed, engage in a long-delayed conversation about traditional values. The beginning of my own story can be set during both my undergraduate and graduate education at Rutgers, when I found myself inspired by several studies by the historian William Appleman Williams: The Tragedy of American Diplomacy, The Contours of American History , and The Great Evasion. Williams, an Annapolis graduate and founding spirit of what used to be called the revisionist school of U.S. foreign policy, expressed considerable respect for the perspectives of conservatives such as John Quincy Adams and Herbert Hoover. Several of my own graduate school mentors, most especially Warren Susman and 2 American Conservatism: Thinking It, Teaching It Gene Genovese, shared the view that Burkean, traditionalist conservatives understood the limitations of an unfettered capitalism, including its tendency to destroy community, threaten individuality, and subvert oldfashioned values. Thus I began my own academic career believing that radicals and conservatives had more in common than either had with mainstream—or what we then called “corporate”—liberals.2 I was profoundly wrong on this last prejudice, not so much because I overvalued conservatism, but because I undervalued liberalism and was not yet prepared to question the weaknesses of my own New Left neo-Marxism. At one point I found myself attracted to Daniel Bell’s self-definition; he understood himself to be a socialist regarding the economy, a liberal in terms of politics, and a conservative concerning the culture.3 Why was I drawn to this formulation? First of all, I continued to find capitalism falling short in its ability to eliminate in a larger context of affluence the worst forms of human suffering. To my eyes, this was and remains disgraceful, to tolerate unnecessary suffering when society has the capacity to lift all people to a level of basic security in education , housing, food, clothing, and health. In that regard, the Rawlsian notion of “fairness” strikes me as the barebones of political ethics.4 Increasingly I have shrunk my utopian expectations regarding socialism to a welfare state bottom line within which there remain rich people, most folks are middle income, and poverty, at long last, is eliminated. Bell’s political liberalism made and makes sense to me because it addressed what all too many Marxists denigrated as mere bourgeois liberties . In fact those liberties of expression, religion, and assembly must be the core of any decent social order. Without choice, the ability to challenge the state, the corporation, and, yes, the trade union, freedom rings false. The social democrats who created the journal Dissent have, to their credit, always understand this central fact, that socialism without democracy is a fraud whereas democracy without socialism still offers human possibility. My understanding of Bell’s cultural conservatism was driven by the distance I felt from what, for lack of a better term, may be called “Woodstock Nation.” I was taken aback by the self-destructive and infantile elements within the counterculture. The notion that the new socialist man (or woman) was in essence Peter Pan repelled me, possibly because I had appropriated the most compelling insights of psychoanalysis, especially Freud’s understanding of the trade-offs required in sustaining civilization , his keen awareness of the irrational and of aggression in human What Is American...