Richard Weaver, Southerner: The Paradox of American Conservatism

Richard Weaver, Southerner: The Paradox of American Conservatism GERALD DE MAIO In commenting upon the vocabulary of politics of our day, Michael Oakeshott has written that "political discourse has become so thickly orchestrated that we are unable to distinguish, or even to hear, the melodies which are at the heart ofthe matter." 1 This observation is especially true in discussions of conservatism, particularly American conservatism. It is now more than a generation since the so-called 'New Conservatism' surfaced upon the American intellectual scene. The rather amorphous movement, which consisted of an assorted group of right-wing journalists and academicians, was beset by seemingly contradictory positions of libertarianism and concern for the community. (While a standard academic exercise by academicians who wrote articles on the 'New Conservatism ' in the nineteen fifties was to demonstrate the incompatibility of such positions, this type of exegesis is no longer necessary since the movement has gradually become differentiated into more or less coherent ideological postures with libertarians refusing the appellation conservative.) The conservative traditionalists can be distinguished from other rightist groups by their recognition of community as a problem in American political thought. Increasingly, a number of commentators have noted the absence ofa theory of community in the American political experience. One political scientist has remarked that "[t]he important point ... is not the low level of community in America but that by and large American political theorists remained impervious to this phenomenon." 2 This point has, of course, been made by Louis Hartz who argued persuasively in The LiberalTradition in America (1955) that the American political and social experience is suffused by a liberal ideology which has never confronted an alternative style or vocabulary of politics. The traditionalist wing of the New Conservatism, at least in part, is an exception to this view. My intention in this essay is to treat the political thought of Richard Weaver, a prominent expositor of post-War American conservatism, who rooted his communitarian concerns, in large measure, in the Southern experience. The plight of American conservatism, in many respects, is mirrored in the thought of Weaver. He is a prime example of the phenomenon which Michael Kammen has called biformity, that is, "the conjunction of two organisms without loss of identity, a pair of correlative things, a paradoxical coupling of opposites ."3 Conservatives of Weaver's type are truly 'people of paradox.' They underscore the basic problem Hartz and others have discerned in American THE CANADIAN REVIEW OF AMERICAN STUDIES VOL VII, NO. 2, FALL 1976 politicalthought, namely, the lack of competing political traditions with which to counterpoise the prevailing liberal way oflife. They are victims of what one critic hascalled 'the viscosity of (American) culture.' 4 Their inability to transcend the liberalism reflected in the basic documents of the American political order has been traced by Leo Strauss and Eric Voegelin to the "new science of politics," whose foremost expositor was Thomas Hobbes. 5 Weaver explicitly recognized and celebrated the classical liberalism reflected in the Constitution and the Federalist.Nevertheless,he recognized that the historical project of conservatism hasbeen to foster community and social friendship. The oxymoronic juxtapositionof these two tendencies reveals the paradoxical nature of the New Conservatism . Richard Weaver's work is generally not as well known as that of some other contemporary American conservative intellectuals, but he was profoundly influential within the circle of thinkers who produced the New Conservatism of the nineteen fifties and sixties. The 'conservative revival' of that era had little affinity with American rightist thinking of the previous generation, which focused mainly upon a defense of economic laissez-faire and isolationism. Weaverappeared on the scene before any of the better known names. His Ideas Have Consequences (1948) antedated Russell Kirk's work, Buckley's National Review, Modern Age, and even Peter Viereck's very influential ConservatismRevisited (1949). In fact, as Frank Meyer remarked, "the publication of Ideas HaveConsequencescan well be considered the fans etorigoof the contemporaryconservative movement." 6 I. RICHARD WEA VER, POLITICAL PHILOSOPHER Arhetorician who taught English at the College of the University of Chicago for twentyyears until his death in 1963, Weaver's true vocation was, as Willmoore Kendallhas indicated, that of political theorist. This is especially...