Conservatives Without Conscience (7 page)

By laying claim to the Constitution as part of their own antiliberal tradition, conservatives have, even Nash seems to believe, gone too far. “In sharp contrast with many (including some of the Founding Fathers) who believed that the Constitution was intended to set up a stronger national government than the one under the Articles of Confederation,” Nash wrote with a tone of apology, “many conservatives stressed the powers of individuals and states under the federal system.” Even more inexcusable is that some conservative thinkers “seemed to infuse an almost anti-Federalist understanding of the Constitution” into its interpretation.
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Anti-Federalists, of course, opposed its ratification, so to take that line of thought its full distance would have us still operating as European colonies. Absurd? Apparently not, as one influential Southern conservative historian, Clyde Wilson, has argued that the anti-Federalists were the only true American conservatives.
³⁵
Fortunately, such thinking did not carry the day, but it has been prevalent from the outset of the conservative movement.

Had conservative scholars of the 1950s conceded the nation’s liberal legacy, and stated at the time that they were formulating a conservative philosophy based on a century and a half of history since the nation’s founding, a legitimate conservative foundation could have been built on the American tradition. Nash isolated the key question facing the early conservatives: “How could a nation conceived in violence and dedicated to universal rights ever be called ‘conservative’?” Political scientist Clinton Rossiter, considered one of the first neoconservatives, answered this question head-on, and unlike his peers, honestly, in his early study
Conservatism in America,
stating correctly that America’s political roots were “progressive” and the United States was conceived out of “a Liberal tradition.”
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Goldwater Conservatism Is Dead, R.I.P.

Barry Goldwater defined conservatism for my generation and several others. Incongruously, many former Goldwater conservatives have been instrumental in reshaping conservatism, but in doing so they have abandoned the senator’s own philosophy and the sense of conscience that anchored his thinking. The senator explained that much of his own conservative thinking had come from his mother’s “wonderful common sense” as well as his experiences as an Arizona businessman during the period that he and his brother ran their chain of successful department stores. Before Goldwater ran for Congress, Senator Everett Dirksen (R-IL) sent him speeches and background papers of his own, and had the Library of Congress gather a number of speeches by Senator Robert Taft (R-OH) for the candidate to study. Although he had never been much of a student as a young man, the senator became one, and spent the first ten years of his Senate career fascinated by books and reading, not to mention studying the workings of government. Herbert Hoover, who in 1932 was the first president for whom Goldwater had voted, became the senator’s friend and mentor after he arrived in Washington, and he collected all of Hoover’s published works to study them.

Senator Goldwater wrote a thrice-weekly column on conservatism for the
Los Angles Times
for almost four years.
³⁷
He was frequently asked to define conservatism and did so over the course of several of those columns.
The Conscience of a Conservative
(1960) attempted to refine that definition, but it was over the next decade that he distilled it into its final form. In
The Conscience of a Majority
(1970) he defined conservatism as the belief that “the solutions to the problems of today can be found in the proven values of the past.”
³⁸
(He elaborated later, saying that “in its simplest terms, conservatism is economic, social, and political practices based on the successes of the past.”)
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As for the
conscience
of the conservative, he wrote that it was “pricked by anyone who would debase the dignity of the individual human being.”
⁴⁰
When I asked him years later what now “pricked” the conservative conscience, he said that he should have written that the conservative conscience is “pricked by anyone or
any action
” that debases human dignity. “Doesn’t poverty debase human dignity?” I asked. “Of course it does,” he replied, and went on to say that if family, friends, and private charity cannot handle the job, the government must.
*
When I pressed him on conservatives being opposed to equality, he chuckled. “Those are the intellectual conservatives’, who couldn’t get themselves elected dog-catcher.”
⁴¹
(Sadly, this once may have been true, but it is certainly not the case today.)

“Politics is the art of achieving the maximum amount of freedom for individuals that is consistent with the maintenance of social order,” Senator Goldwater wrote, and in balancing between these forces, he argued, “the conservative’s first concern will always be:
Are we maximizing freedom?
”
⁴²

I have always thought of these fundamentals—draw on the proven wisdom of the past; do not debase the dignity of others; and maximize freedom consistent with necessary safety and order—as conservatism’s “paragon of essences,” and have considered them broad enough to address a wide range of issues, from fiscal responsibility to libertarianism (toward which the senator was strongly inclined) to acknowledging the threat of communism (and today, terrorism) without getting hysterical about it. Distinctly absent from Goldwater’s conservatism was any thought of the government’s imposing its own morality, or anyone else’s, on society. In other words, the values of today’s social, or cultural, conservatism had no place in the senator’s philosophy.

Philip Gold, who campaigned for Goldwater in 1964, argued in
his meditative
Take Back the Right: How the Neocons and the Religious Right Have Betrayed the Conservative Movement
that conservatives should have retained a covenant with the fathers of conservatism, for “continuity across generations [is] the essence of conservatism.” What has breaking that covenant, as has clearly occurred with Goldwater, meant? It is a serious loss, believes Gold, for Goldwater “cared deeply about civilization…. He also was humane, one of his party’s few who took issues such as civil rights, women’s rights and the environment seriously.”
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Conservatism Today: A Dysfunctional Family

No doubt the adamancy with which some conservatives insisted on their interpretations, or views, of history led to the movement’s eventual splintering into several factions. Whatever the origin of their disagreements, however, they remain a divided family. Today the Republican Party strives to contain conservatism’s constituent groups, some of whom get along and others who do not. It is not possible to identify precise divisions within conservatism, because many conservatives identify with more than one dogma. William Safire cleverly made this point when he conducted a personal “depth-poll” of his own brain to find out what held together at least “five Republican factions.” Safire, it appears, sees himself as an “economic,” “social,” and “cultural” conservative with “libertarian” impulses and the idealistic instincts of a “neoconservative.” “If these different strains of thought were held by discrete groups of single-minded people,” acknowledges Safire, “we would have a Republican Party of five warring bands.” He concedes that all these varying attitudes cause him “cognitive dissonance,” which he experiences as “the jangling of competing inclinations, with the owner of the brain having to work out trade-offs, suppressions and compromises until he or she achieves a kind of puzzled tranquility within.” Safire said his dissonance is “forced into harmony by the need to choose one leader who reflects the preponderance of” his views.
⁴⁴

In 1996 the
Washington Times
’s magazine
Insight
examined “Who’s Who in America’s Conservative Revolution,” an article that highlighted the remarkable degree of sectarianism in the right wing, a fact well known to most conservatives.
Insight
noted that there were thirteen print journals geared toward the various factions of conservative readers.
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These journals represented “distinct, though overlapping, philosophies,” which the magazine, a well-known conservative publication itself, divided into ten different species of conservatives. Here, in highly compressed, occasionally paraphrased, and updated form, is a glimpse of the modern conservative family tree:
*

Austriocons:
The paleoconservatives (paleocons), so called because they were conservatives back when most of the neoconservatives (neocons) were still Trotskyites, are split over the issue of free trade. Those paleos who are followers of the “Austrian” school of economics, i.e., the free-trade libertarians who honor Ludwig von Mises, were dubbed by
Insight
as “Austriocons.”

Buchanocons:
Paleos who have rebelled against free trade and the unaccountable global bureaucracies that they believe it is producing. Their political leader is Patrick Buchanan. Since 2002, they have had their own journal,
The American Conservative.

Neocons:
Intellectuals who drifted from the far left to the center to the right, carrying their flagship magazine,
Commentary,
with them. They are mostly Jewish, and mostly New York based. Neocons
tend to be militant internationalists. They publish their own inside-the-Beltway weekly,
The Weekly Standard.

Aquinacons:
Neocons acquired a Christian wing when the Reverend Richard John Neuhaus founded his monthly magazine,
First Things,
patterned after
Commentary.
However, this is an increasingly distinct group, one that can be called “Aquinacons” because its members focus on the work of a rising generation of academic experts on the natural-law theories of Aristotle and Thomas Aquinas.

Radiocons:
(Just kidding, says
Insight.
) This group includes talk-radio conservatives like Rush Limbaugh, Gordon Liddy, Mike Reagan, Blanquita Cullum, Dr. Laura Schlessinger, and other popularizers of the political and cultural right, if not their enormous middle America audiences.

Sociocons:
Often lumped with the religious right, these social conservatives advance secular arguments for curbing abortion, divorce, illegitimacy, rights of homosexuals, and drugs. Its leading lights are the Family Research Council, the Institute for American Values, and columnist Cal Thomas.

Theocons:
Conservatives who actually favor a more or less theocratic application of biblical law. Unlike Aquinacons, they reject natural law. In fact, this faction is far smaller than some in the news media believe, according to
Insight.

Republicons:
Young people who learned their conservative theory back in college and since have given themselves over to activism, either as Republican campaign strategists or as policy advocates. Newt Gingrich is their hero, and Grover Norquist (of the Americans for Tax Reform) is their leader. They have politically gold-plated résumés and no time for pessimism.

Catocons:
Hard-core libertarians who recognize that even if your goal is to dismantle government, you have to play the Washington policy-wonk game to change things. Their leading think tank is the Cato Institute.

Platocons:
Allied with, but different from, the Aquinacons, the Platocons are the disciples of the late Leo Strauss, who excited generations of students at the University of Chicago about classical political philosophy. Not all Straussians are conservatives, however. Still, their belief that ideas are intrinsically important, and are not just manifestations of class interest or historical prejudice, puts them at odds with the academic left.
⁴⁶

There is almost no end to the ways in which the conservative factions can be sliced and diced.
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Nonetheless, they all fall neatly within three general categories, with their current significance determined by poll numbers that indicate their relative size within the conservative movement.
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In February 2004 TechnoMetrica Institute of Policy and Politics (TIPP) conducted a nationwide survey that gathered information across the left/right political spectrum. It found that conservatives constituted 43 percent of their respondents, with moderates at 35 percent and liberals at 18 percent. The TIPP poll sample revealed a higher percentage of conservatives than has been the norm for other polls. For example, the national election exit polls for eight elections between 1976 and 2004 have fairly consistently shown conservatives at 33 percent, moderates at 47 percent, and liberals at 20 percent.
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But the size of the conservative response to the TIPP poll provides an excellent basis for the poll’s follow-up question, which asked conservatives about the nature of their conservatism. In response, 52 percent of conservatives described themselves as
social conservatives,
49 percent as
fiscal conservatives,
and 13 percent as
neoconservatives.
(The 114 percent total appears attributable to overlapping responses, for there is no doubt that some social conservatives would also view themselves as fiscal conservatives.)
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Absent from this TIPP poll are breakdowns for categories like traditional conservatives, religious conservatives, and right-leaning libertarians, because these groups can easily fall within social conservatism, fiscal conservatism, and neoconservatism.
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Most revealing in the TIPP poll is the strength of social conservatism.