Conservatives Without Conscience

charged”—especially since conservatives insist “their deeply pragmatic creed cannot be ideologically pigeonholed.”

In Safire’s New Political Dictionary (1993), however, the former New York Times columnist and well-respected conservative William Safire defined a conservative as “a defender of the status quo who, when change becomes necessary in tested institutions or practices, prefers that it come slowly and in moderation.” The Oxford Companion to Philosophy (1995) explained that the “conservative approach is empirical as opposed to rationalistic, cautiously skeptical rather than dogmatic, and, in certain circumstances, seeks to preserve the status quo rather than engage in wholesale revolution or overthrow existing institutions.” This source added, “It is a matter of judgment how far so-called conservative political parties are conservative in the wider, philosophical sense.”

Michael Deaver, former aide to President Ronald Reagan, asked a number of high-profile and active conservatives with varying degrees of allegiance to the former president about the source of their conservatism. Deaver published brief essays from fifty-four people in Why I Am a Reagan Conservative (2005).[5] Paradoxically, only a few actually claimed to be “Reagan conservatives,” whom Deaver rather narrowly described as those favoring “limited government, individual liberty, and the prospect of a strong America.” More strikingly, none of the contributors made an effort to meaningfully define or even describe conservatism, and only a few of them could say “why” they were conservatives, although several explained “how” they became so. Perhaps a conservative—or anyone else, for that matter—is intimately incapable of the introspection necessary to understand the psychological reasons for his own beliefs and why he is a conservative. That may also explain the fact that many conservatives have easily rejected the findings of social scientists who have recently reported many of the reasons why people become, or remain, conservatives. (A subject addressed shortly in this chapter.)

Conservatives Have No Ideology, According to Their Leading Thinkers

Leading conservative scholars reject the notion that their thinking or beliefs can be described as an ideology. For conservative scholar Frank Meyer, for example, it is heterodoxy to conclude that the “American conservative movement” is anything but just that, “a movement.” Meyer insisted conservatism is “inspired by no ideological construct.”[6] Similarly, conservative intellectual icon Russell Kirk has adopted the mind-set of John Adams, the first “conservative” president, in refusing to classify conservatism as an ideology. Adams claimed that the “proper definition” of ideology “is the science of Idiocy. And a very profound, abstruse, and mysterious science it is…taught in the school of folly.”[7] Michael Oakeshott, another prominent conservative political philosopher, has remarked that “conservatism is not so much an ideology as it is a disposition to enjoy the fruits of the past and to distrust novelty.” Ronald Reagan, throughout his political career, sought “to downplay ideology and translate the tough theory of conservatism—its libertarian harangues and traditionalist asceticism—into accessible anecdotes and sunny sloganeering.”[8] William Safire quoted Reagan as saying, “I think ‘ideology’ is a scare word to most Americans.” Republican senator Rick Santorum of Pennsylvania claimed: “Conservatism is common sense and liberalism is an ideology.”[9]

In fact, conservatism now fits the definition of ideology quite aptly, according to the HarperCollins Dictionary of American Government and Politics.[*] But regardless of how any of these terms is defined, asserting that conservatism is not an ideology is, of course, sophistry. Meyer’s belief that conservatism is a “movement” by no means precludes it from being an ideology; Kirk’s reference to Adams’s claim that ideology is idiocy has no substance; Oakeshott has inadvertently defined conservatism as an ideology rather than distinguishing the two concepts; Reagan’s claim that the word “ideology” scared people indicates only his aversion to the term, not the notion that conservatism is not an ideology.

As is typical of conservatives’ inconsistency, however, countless conservatives do refer to their set of beliefs as an ideology. In fact, numerous leading conservative publications, including the National Review, Human Events, The America Spectator, The Weekly Standard, and The American Conservative, have all called conservatism an ideology.[10]

No Classic Conservatism, Or Movement Moses

A classic is something accepted as definitive, never out of fashion (like a blue suit or a black dress), and whose excellence is generally agreed upon. Within that framework, there is no conservatism that can be considered classic. Conservatives can trace their history, but they don’t always agree upon it when doing so. There have, from time to time, been periods when there was widespread agreement among conservatives, only to have this fleeting harmony later fall apart. There is no genuine founding father of American conservatism, although Edmund Burke, the British Member of Parliament, who set forth his conservative views in Reflections on the Revolution in France (in 1790), comes close. Burke’s influence on American thinkers is indisputable (he favored the American Revolution but opposed the French Revolution), but his defense of monarchy and aristocracy never played well with American conservatives. Thus, Burke’s conservatism is not, for Americans, classical.

Conservatism is a movement with no Moses, although William F. Buckley is sometimes considered to be an analogous figure, as John B. Judis’s biography of him, subtitled Patron Saint of the Conservatives, would attest. Buckley’s support of conservatism’s latter-day saints, like Richard Weaver, Frank Meyer, Friederich Hayek, Russell Kirk, and James Burnham, through his National Review, have certainly invigorated modern conservatism. Kirk and Burnham have always been the most significant among these formative voices, although by 1986, when Russell Kirk prepared his last edition of The Conservative Mind, young conservatives were already coming to consider his work as “Old Testament” conservatism, and his once well-known canons of conservatism now reside in the dustbin of history.[*] In retrospect the only things that tie all these early thinkers together are a dark view of human nature, their strong dislike of President Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal, and an outsized fear of communism. This is about as close to “classic” conservatism as it gets.

While Russell Kirk focused on theory and philosophy, James Burnham addressed practice and process. An exemplary scholar who taught philosophy at New York University, Burnham cofounded the National Review in 1955. His Congress and the American Tradition, which describes FDR’s presidency overpowering Congress, has been called by a leading scholar of conservative intellectual history “one of the most penetrating works of political analysis produced by conservatives since World War II.”[11] Burnham understood the ebb and flow of power between the legislative and executive branches, and he appreciated the expansion of the presidency under strong presidents such as Abraham Lincoln, Andrew Jackson, and Woodrow Wilson. He believed that FDR, however, overreached, by taking away every last vestige of Congress’s power as a peer to the president and reducing the legislative branch to “a mere junior partner.”[12]

Conservative columnist George Will wrote in 2005 that the “president’s authorization of domestic surveillance by the National Security Agency [that] contravened a statute’s clear language” was a striking indication that conservatives had forgotten their roots. “For more than 500 years,” Will noted, “since the rise of nation-states and parliaments, a preoccupation of Western political thought has been the problem of defining and confining executive power.” Will, thinking like the conservative he is, invoked history as a reminder to other conservatives willing to listen. “Modern American conservatism grew in reaction against the New Deal’s creation of the regulatory state and the enlargement of the executive branch power that such a state entails. The intellectual vigor of conservatism was quickened by reaction against the Great Society and the aggrandizement of the modern presidency by Lyndon Johnson, whose aspiration was to complete the project begun by Franklin Roosevelt.” Will closed by drawing on the wisdom of the distant past. “Charles de Gaulle, a profound conservative, said of another such, Otto von Bismarck—de Gaulle was thinking of Bismarck not pressing his advantage in 1870 in the Franco- Prussian War—that genius sometimes consists of knowing when to stop. In peace and in war, but especially in the latter, presidents have pressed their institutional advantages to expand their powers to act without Congress. This president might look for occasions to stop pressing.”[13]

In 1995, when the newly Republican-controlled Congress launched an assault on Bill Clinton, Will observed, contrary to the liberal shibboleth that government never contracts, “Well, it is contracting. It is contracting—and here we should honor the memory of James Burnham—because of congressional ascendancy. A traditional tenet of that fine man’s conservatism has been re-established, to the point at which the current President is the least