Defining Conservatism Downward
January 3, 2002
In the late
Sixties, the liberal cartoonist and wag Al Capp suddenly turned against the
Left. People were startled by his apparent rightward swing. I havent
changed, he insisted. Liberalism has.
Today its conservatism that has
changed. The conservative movement of yesterday has moved like a migrating herd
from most of its old principles. Staunch conservatives like Patrick Buchanan and
Samuel Francis have been excommunicated, attacked, snubbed, blacklisted.
Once upon a time, conservatives stood for
limited government, the rollback of the welfare state, strict construction of the
Constitution, and traditional morality. Today they merely want their own people to
run big government.
They used to oppose needless military
intervention abroad; today they equate militarism with patriotism. They used to
demand that the U.S. Department of Education be abolished; today they want to
expand it. They used to denounce Franklin Roosevelt; today they venerate him.
Constitutional government? Conservatives
have simply dropped the subject. They can live with the status quo, which is not
conservatisms legacy but liberalisms. Yesterdays heresy has
become todays orthodoxy.
Traditional morality? Again, conservatives
have dropped the subject. Their new hero is former New York mayor Rudy Giuliani,
who supported legal abortion and homosexual rights and brought his mistress to
official functions. Giuliani is a winner. He knows how to get and use power. The
media have adored him since the 9/11 attacks. So conservatives have adopted him
as their poster boy.
When Ronald Reagan
was elected president in 1980, conservatives (including me) wanted to feel they
had triumphed, that a victory for their movement meant the permanent vanquishing
of liberalism. Even liberals thought Reagan had turned the country
around. But Reagan, while repeating conservative platitudes, challenged
very little of the institutional structure of liberalism and in fact embraced most
of it. During his eight years in office the Federal Government continued to grow,
nearly doubling its spending. As Federal deficits mounted monstrously,
conservatives dropped another subject: the evils of deficit spending and
unbalanced budgets.
Still, conservatives pretended they had
conquered. They equated Reagans minor gains with the radical and lasting
changes Roosevelt had effected. Reagan himself encouraged this feeling by inviting
conservative leaders to White House dinners. That was all it took to sustain their
delusions. After all, most of them had never been beckoned to the White House
before. What better proof that they now reigned?
Meanwhile, a new breed was emerging: the
neoconservatives. These were former liberals, mostly pro-Israel
and anti-Communist Jewish intellectuals. There werent really very many of
them, but they had disproportionate influence; conservatives welcomed them as
allies with awe and gratitude.
In the conservative press, support for Israel
suddenly became mandatory and criticism of Israel became taboo. Conservatives
stopped complaining about foreign entanglements and foreign aid.
Yet another inconvenient subject had been dropped, to be replaced by embarrassing
fawning on Israel. Just as liberals had once turned a blind eye to Soviet spies and
agents, conservatives ignored Israeli espionage.
The neoconservatives were still basically
liberals, albeit Cold War liberals. They favored the New Deal legacy and looked
back at Harry Truman as a great president. The old conservative agenda of a return
to constitutional government left them cold; limited government would hamper
military action abroad. But they have moved to the head of the conservative
movement, and their chief followers are conservative leaders.
In short, conservatism has been swallowed up
by neoconservatism. The Weekly Standard, a neoconservative
magazine, has made William Buckleys National Review
redundant. The founding generation of National Review included men
of the stature of Whittaker Chambers, James Burnham, Willmoore Kendall, Henry
Hazlitt, Frank Meyer, and Brent Bozell; none of them could write for the magazine
today. It has no room for independent or original thinkers or even for
writers who espouse its own founding principles.
Former Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan has
observed that we have defined deviancy downward that is,
we have become so inured to behavior formerly recognized as deviant that we have
tried to cope by lowering our standards. In the same way, conservatism has been
defined downward. The principles conservatives once upheld have
been defeated politically, so conservatism has abandoned them, adopting instead
the old liberal positions and calling them conservative.
How odd, and sad, that a movement professing
to fight for tradition should drop its own past down the Memory Hole.
Joseph Sobran
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