William F. Buckley and Barry Goldwater on Buckley’s tv show, Firing Line (1966). Source.
Yesterday, Washington Post columnist Anne Applebaum addressed a topic about which there’s been much discussion in recent weeks: the extraordinary, simultaneous inability of thw conservative parties in both the United States and the United Kingdom to address major governing crises of their own making. Until it finally ended today, the U.S. was in the midst of the longest shutdown of the federal government in our nation’s history. Across the Atlantic, Prime Minister Theresa May was unable to pass the Brexit plan that she had negotiated, suffering the largest Parliamentary defeat on a major issue of any government in modern times. And her Plan B seems to involve simply continuing trying to convince MPs of the virtues of the Plan A that was just rejected. In 2016, the surprise victory for Leave in the UK’s Brexit referendum and Donald Trump’s surprise nomination and victory in our presidential election were frequently compared. So it makes sense that the current (well, recent in our case) government impasses would also be seen as fundamentally similar.[1]
Applebaum’s explanation for these similarities is simple: conservatism, on both sides of the Atlantic, has run out of ideas:
Their double failure is no mere coincidence. In the 1980s and 1990s, anglophone conservatives were motivated by ideas so powerful that they spread from the United States and Britain to the rest of the world: faith in democracy, faith in free markets, faith in free trade. Pummeled by events — the financial crisis, the wars in Iraq and Syria — both parties have lost that faith. But they have failed to find anything else to replace it. Instead, they have been captured by angry minorities. They are easily manipulated by big funders and special interests. They have stopped thinking about the good of the nation and can focus only on what’s good for the party — or for themselves.
The idea of ideas bears a complicated relationship to the history of modern American conservatism. Post-war American conservatives frequently presented themselves as being about ideas. This provided a nice contrast to the Cold War liberal trope of the “end of ideology.” Liberals may have imagined themselves as, first and foremast, practical political actors, but – as the title of Richard Weaver’s classic 1948 book suggested – Ideas Have Consequences.[2] Conservative thinkers frequently suggested that liberals were unwilling or incapable of understanding the consequences of their often implicit philosophical commitments. Fail to acknowledge the ultimate sovereignty of God, Whittaker Chambers argued in the introduction to Witness (1952), and you have cast your lot in with Communism, whether you know it or not. And Leo Strauss, in the concluding sentences of his concluding essay to the 1962 collection of his students’ critiques of contemporary political science, Essays on the Scientific Study of Politics, suggested that, though contemporary political science holds much responsibility for what Strauss saw as the crisis of liberal democracy, it is unaware that this is the case:
Only a great fool would call the new political science diabolic: it has no attributes peculiar to fallen angels. It is not even Machiavellian, for Machiavelli’s teaching was graceful, subtle, and colorful. Nor is it Neronian. Nevertheless one may say of it that it fiddles while Rome burns. It is excused by two facts: it does not know that it fiddles, and it does not know that Rome burns.
In the 1970s, conservative think tanks like the American Enterprise Institute and the Heritage Foundation tried to make more practical, policy ideas central to the conservative brand. In that decade, as well, the historian George Nash produced the first major academic monograph on modern American conservatism, which he cast as a movement of ideas. Nash’s The Conservative Intellectual Movement in America remains a – perhaps the – canonical text in the study of the history of the modern American right.
In the 1990s, Newt Gingrich similarly tried to present his brand of conservatism as a movement of ideas.[3]
American liberals, needless to say, have not always bought into this conservative self-understanding. In 1950, just two years after Richard Weaver’s Ideas Have Consequences, Lionel Trilling declared in the preface to his collection of essays on The Liberal Imagination that, at least in the United States, there were no such things as conservative ideas:
In the United States at this time liberalism is not only the dominant but even the sole intellectual tradition. For it is the plain fact that nowadays there are no conservative or reactionary ideas in general circulation. This does not mean, of course, that there is no impulse to conservativism or to reaction. Such impulses are certainly very strong, perhaps even stronger than most of us know. But the conservative impulse and the reactionary impulse do not, with some isolated and some ecclesiastical exceptions, express themselves in ideas but only in action or in irritable mental gestures which seek to resemble ideas.
More recently, Democratic Congressperson Barney Frank declared that Newt Gingrich “does not have ideas, he has ideas about ideas. He keeps saying what a good idea it is to have ideas.”
With the singular exception of the early 1980s, when some self-described “neoliberals,” like Charles Peters, hoping to move the Democratic Party to the center, embraced the idea that the GOP had become the “party of ideas,”[4] liberals have tended to only see ideas in conservatism’s past. In recent decades, both the first generation of neoconservatives and the National Review under William F. Buckley have been frequent objects of retroactive liberal musings about a past golden age of conservatism. Applebaum is writing in this tradition.
The problem with this point of view is that it is both far too kind to conservatism’s past and far too invested in a cramped and limited notion of what constitutes an “idea.” Despite what Barney Frank and Anne Applebaum have suggested everybody has ideas, including Newt Gingrich and both British Brexiteers and American followers of Donald Trump. Even anti-intellectuals have them. Indeed, the very ubiquity of ideas motivates the study of intellectual history, at least as it tends to be practiced in the early 21st century.
On the other hand, there’s nothing necessarily ennobling about ideas, even sophisticated ones. As historians like Nancy MacLean have shown us, significant political ideas, including conservative ones, can have deeply destructive and antidemocratic causes and consequences.
And the ever recurring liberal view that today’s conservatives, unlike those in the past, have no ideas has tended to interfere with seeing important continuities between the (presumably idea-filled) conservative past and the (supposedly idea-vacant) conservative present.
So rather than declaring that, once, conservatives had ideas but now they have none, we need to instead do the more complicated work of understanding both past and present conservative ideas and tracing the continuities and discontinuities between them.
Notes
[1] In fact, there is one enormous difference between the two cases that helps explain why our government shutdown is over, but May seems to have no solution and No Deal Brexit still looms in March. The Republican Party is extraordinarily united, as it has been for most of the last quarter century. Republicans on the Hill overwhelmingly follow the command of their President, which is why the Senate passed a clean funding bill 100-0 in December before Trump made his Wall demand, was unable to pass anything yesterday, but today instantly passed another funding bill. They all follow what Trump (and McConnell) ask of them. In contrast, the Tories are riven by divisions over Europe. It was in the hope of solving these divisions that then PM David Cameron, himself a Remainer, promised and then held the Brexit referendum. And it’s the continuing salience of these divisions that contributed to the massive defeat of May’s Brexit deal and prevents her from solving the problem in any way. Rather than trying to forge some sort of parliamentary consensus on Brexit, she is spending most of her time desperately trying to heal the divisions within her own party. Trump, on the other hand, merely had to announce that he was demanding a wall to drag the Senate to a halt and then, today, that the shutdown was over to whip it immediately into action.
[2] According to Weaver, the decline of the West began with the philosophical nominalism endorsed by William of Ockham in the 14th century.
[3] Back in 2012, I wrote a post about Gingrich’s relationship to ideas.
[4] Lawrence Glickman delivered a very interesting paper about the trop of the GOP as the Party of Ideas in the ‘70s and ‘80s at last year’s S-USIH conference.
4 Thoughts on this Post
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Ben, this is a great post. There’s a way, I think, that it connects to some of the issues my own post of this morning grappled with — to wit, the extent to which people take ideas seriously as a disruptive or dangerous force. Some ideas are so potent, conservatives think, that they’re dangerous to even consider. “Don’t read Nietzsche; he embraces an atheistic/anti-Christian world view.” That’s the reactionary and anti-intellectual stance toward ideas. Then I guess there’s a reactionary but not necessarily anti-intellectual stance, which might go along the lines of “Read Nietzsche and understand him so that you can effectively counter his ideas.” This instrumentalizing the work of (engaging with) thought — and maybe conservatives have been more likely to do such instrumentalizing? I would have to think about that some more. Also worth thinking about: whether it is necessary to give different sorts of ideas the same sort of “hearing.” Does hearing an idea out legitimize it? Is the solution to bad speech always more speech? These are perpetual dilemmas for me.
I think my only critical comment about this post is that in one or two places it could be read as implying that Anne Applebaum is a liberal (in the contemporary U.S. sense of that word), which is not how I would characterize her.
That’s a fair objection. I wasn’t trying to characterize her, though I think it is a little tricky to do so given the lay of the political land these days. She’s certainly a liberal in the European sense. I suppose one could crudely call her “centrist” in an American context, though arguably more center-right than center-left. She’s certainly been neocon friendly over the years. Anticommunism was in many ways the foundation of her career; she’s a member of the last cohort of journalists who cut their teeth during the Cold War.
But, however you classify her, you’re right that I wasn’t clear about something that I should have been: I think the conservatism of the past that Applebaum conjures in this piece is a point of view that she’s entirely sympathetic with. So though her column is an example of golden ageism about conservatism past, it’s also arguably an instance of a Never Trumpist defense of that conservatism…though I think that Applebaum has been distant enough from movement conservatism over the years that she’s not usual thought of as a Never Trumper.
Agree, and thank you for the reply.