Do you have a liberal friend who is reasonably intelligent and open-minded? Have you ever fantasized about giving your friend a reading list full of the iconic conservative works? Would he enjoy reading them, learn anything from them, be affected by them? Consider me a surrogate for your friend. I’m a dyed-in-the-wool liberal, and, in the course of researching a biography about William F. Buckley Jr. and the rise of the conservative movement, I’ve spent much of the past four years reading many of the great conservative books. Let me conduct something of an interview with myself, attempting to ask the questions you might ask your friend, and giving my answers.
Q. What did you read?
A. I read a lot of William F. Buckley Jr., of course — books, columns, speeches, and magazine articles — but not everything he wrote. Buckley wrote 56 books, and, if his syndicated columns were published in book form, they would fill another 28 volumes. I also read many other conservative writers from the seminal period of modern American conservatism — roughly from 1951, when God and Man at Yale was published, to 1968, by which time Buckley and National Review had redefined conservatism. I read authors within the National Review family — James Burnham, Russell Kirk, and Frank Meyer, among others — as well as conservative writers outside of National Review. I made a special point of reading (or in some cases rereading) the canon of American conservatism.
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Q. What was your favorite Buckley book, and why?
A. I liked best The Unmaking of a Mayor, Buckley’s memoir of his 1965 New York mayoral campaign. The book bursts with scintillating wit, but it’s Buckley’s position papers — set forth in full — that make the book truly special. They may be the most unusual position papers ever issued by a political candidate. Buckley had no chance of winning. He wasn’t running to win; he was running to promote conservatism, and to explore conservative approaches for urban problems. This left him free — truly free — to tell the truth as he saw it, regardless of how voters would react. While most position papers are written by campaign staffs or consultants, Buckley wrote his own. They are cast in his inimitable style (James Buckley, who was his brother’s campaign manager, confirmed for me that Bill penned them himself). Most of his proposals exhibit sophisticated research and analysis, yet are presented with elegant simplicity. Some of Buckley’s proposals might be characterized as liberal, such as constructing an elevated bikeway from 1st Street to 125th Street in Manhattan; some are outrageous: quarantining welfare recipients and drug addicts in what Buckley described as “great and humane rehabilitation centers” and his opponents called “concentration camps”; but most deal with mundane yet critically important urban problems, such as traffic congestion, public transit, water, and the like. Buckley had the rare gift of making even such prosaic topics interesting.
Q. In your opinion, what constitutes the canon of modern American conservatism?
A. There is, of course, no official list. But I think there is a consensus that at least half a dozen books deserve such a designation. In chronological order, they are: F. A. Hayek, The Road to Serfdom (1944), William F. Buckley Jr., God and Man at Yale (1951), Whittaker Chambers, Witness (1952), Russell Kirk, The Conservative Mind (1953), Barry Goldwater, The Conscience of a Conservative (1960), and Milton Friedman, Freedom and Capitalism (1962).
Q. Which of these did you respect?
A. I respected something in each of them. Witness is marvelous in terms of literary merit — unrivaled in this respect among the conservative books with which I am familiar, except perhaps Memoirs of a Superfluous Man by Albert Jay Nock, a work that made an impact on the young William F. Buckley. Today, Witness serves as a reminder to us all that conservative worries about liberals with compromised loyalties have a historical basis (although it should also remind conservatives about the origins — and sensible limits — of such worries). Goldwater’s Conscience of a Conservative, which was ghostwritten by Buckley’s friend and brother-in-law Brent Bozell, is a model polemic, perhaps the modern conservative movement’s equivalent to Paine’s Common Sense. It is reductionist, but this may be the strength as well as the weakness of the genre. By contrast, Hayek’s Road to Serfdom is nuanced. But I suppose a liberal’s saying this is merely fuel for the fire of hard-line libertarians who denounce Hayek as a “squish.”
A thoughtful article Professor Bogus. It was great that you had the time to read all those books. You have obviously benefitted.
The error you continue to make is that liberals are not ideologically driven, however. They just have different tactics in trying to win the war of ideas. They are like guerillas who nip at the edges of freedom, not seeking a grand victory, but a steady decay. They are as camels who stick their snouts in the tent hoping to be fully inside in a little while.
The motives of liberal leaders are rooted in a hatred of freedom. As Von Mises observed, they prefer Socialism, because they fear that they might not stand up to honest competition. Indeed, they would not. Note that they are unable to learn even the simplest lessons of history. Or are they? Perhaps they know them very well. As Alfred told Batman about the Joker, "Some men just want to destroy things."
How else to explain Obama and his minions? Are they just run of the mill stupid, soft-headed, bleeding-heart liberals, or are they hell-bent on the destruction of freedom?
In my mind, there are two major problems with liberal ideology. First, most problems worthy of possible government attention are sufficiently complex that their solutions require considerable thought, both for the immediate need and the long term consequences of the solution. Dashing off ad hoc answers to these problems can be expected to create more, and often worse, problems than the original.
Second, government is force. An action is either required or prohibited by law. That which is permitted is not addressed by law, and requires no government intervention. For example, a law can be made to require all citizens to reach equal potential. A law could be made to prohibit all citizens from exceeding a threshold of potential. Both of these would have an equalizing effect, but what opportunities will be lost due to excess uniformity? A law to require all citizens to maximize their potential would be impossible to administer. A law to permit them to do so would be pointless, since they already have that freedom, barring laws to the contrary.
Finally, a web of laws delineating the procedures each citizen must perform in pursuit of their potential, such as we have now, still produces very little opportunity. Instead, it forces people to subordinate development of their unique potential to mindless performance of standardized procedures. If you don't believe me, go to work on a government contract for a couple of years.
I have never understood why liberals need to force everyone to do as they say, whether it makes sense or not. Most of what they want to try can and should be done at the state or local level. We have 50 independent, sovereign state laboratories, specifically for the purpose of trying different (within limits) systems and finding out what works best. By all means, grab a handful of states, go crazy with the liberal ideas, and see what works. Just stop trying to use the Federal government to force everyone to be the same even if it ruins us.
I think his point is that their not AS indeoligically focused as conservatives. I don't think his contention is that liberals aren't ideologically driven.
This may be illustrated by asking one or the other to explain policy inconsistancies. You may find a conservative is more likely to tie the policy into a larger worldview, while the liberal may argue against any inconsistancy.
I dunno. Interesting interview/exercise, nonetheless.
"having a reasonable opportunity to realize one's potential"
My problem with liberalism is that it so often endorses policies that rob people of this very opportunity. I remember back in the 60s as the black power/black panther movement was all the rage, and the first stirrings of acting white were applied to education and learning to read. Even then, in all my naivity, I realized that this was essentially like putting the mind in chains. Yet even fairly recently Bill Cosby was denounced for telling kids that they need to be able to communicate outside their narrow neighborhoods. And today credentialling carries more weight than accomplishment. Would a Ben Franklin be possible today or would he need an Ivy degree to start a library and hospital, to say nothing of his other achievements?
I have many leftist friends, and some of them PLAY at being open-minded. However, they refer to play at whatever fake-issue-de-semain makes them feel rebelious or gives them a reason to wag their finger at others, even those that agree with them.
Having lived in East Germany before the wall fell, I have a map of the power-hungry style of attack-agitprop and style that we see today. They are nearly identical to the pretexts employed by those in the past who used it to preserve their autocratic hegemony.
"Anyone who appreciates the complexity of the world realizes that, to be truly wise, a philosophy must somehow embrace the best sentiments of both conservatism and liberalism."
While this article was otherwise interesting, the above statement struck me as absurd. Unless you're defining philosophy so narrowly as to include only political philosophy in the United States post-WWII, it's a deep disservice to imply that a nuanced appreciation of complexity involves collapsing philosophy along a one-dimensional political spectrum.
(1) Milton Friedman's book is titled Capitalism and Freedom, not Freedom and Capitalism.
(2) Regarding the contention that "the iconic conservative works are about ideology [whereas] the most influential liberal books of the era are about policy issues," Capitalism and Freedom contains two chapters on ideology followed by eleven on specific policy issues.
The point of God and Man at Yale is that alumni should have an increased say in what gets taught at Yale. Can you imagine WFB writing that book now?
The Road To Serfdom should have been entitled, "Everything Begins And Ends With Germany. It's All About Germany."
But worst of all, within the canon of conservatism, find me the voice crying out for the end to segregation -- the principal domestic issue of the time described in the article.
I think, Mike, you might want to re-read Prof. Bogus's own article. He specifically notes that canonical Right polemics have tended to be ideological, rather than policy-based. If this is true, one would expect to find few major conservative tomes devoted to denouncing OR supporting segregationist policies, any more than for monetarism, energy policy, or global hunger.
Now, one would be likelier to find an array of principles and guiding tenets that could be usefully applied against evils such as segregation ... and that is precisely the case. Without a coherent vision of man's dignity and proper ends--such as that found in books like "Witness" and "The Road to Serfdom"--why SHOULDN'T one oppress other races to the extent one can get away with it? Conversely, there are certain assumptions about human nature common on the Left that make answering that question damned difficult.
How about a recent edition - 'Demonic' by Ann Coulter. She tirelessly documents all the voices on the right fighting and beating slavery and segregation with many indexes of sources cited. Enjoy.
StevenM's point regarding state and local government is spot on. If more people would focus on their communities rather than expecting the federal government to solve problems such as education and health care, it would then be possible to determine what actually works and what doesn't. Unless and until we do so, this great nation will continue to drift regardless of which party/ideology controls the helm at the national level.
"Conservatives value above all else what Berlin called the negative vision of liberty, namely, freedom from coercion. Liberals are more willing to balance that against the positive vision of liberty — that is, having a reasonable opportunity to realize one’s potential. The negative vision focuses conservatives on restricting the government’s ability to interfere in people’s lives. The positive vision leads liberals to believe that government has a role in guaranteeing baseline minimums in education, medical care, and healthy communities."
These do not seem to be properly categorized as positive and negative, but as man-centric versus state-centric. If society is to be viewed as human nature writ large, then the society that is attuned to the essential freedom of the human spirit is the most natural.
Bogus's theory that liberalism provides a "balance" is the snake oil of socialism: it seeks to lull the lazy and envious into a lifestyle on the backs of the productive. True freedom comes from unleashing the human spirit and the only "balance" required is protecting that spirit from those who would seek to limit it. This is why an orderly society that can defend itself is essential to freedom, but the Nanny State suffocates it.
Agreed. He makes the same error that Rawls did, assuming that without government interference in the market, people at the bottom will presumably suffer more. In the real world, freeing up the market and people's freedom inevitably improves standards of living. Who benefits from cheap goods at Wal-Mart? It isn't the rich, but the poor/middle-class. Also, who is the least well-positioned to get the government boot off their back? It sure as hell isn't the little guy.
MikeB is a typical liberal. He can't see the forest for the trees, and he doesn't know history worth beans.
First, Conservatism is about more than race. Liberalism is about demolishing all freedom by concentrating on the hot-button issue of the moment. Liberals have no regard for the deleterious consquences of their policy prescriptions. Second, it was Republicans who supported the Civil Rights movement. The Democrats opposed it, until they hijacked it with their Great Society programs, to the detriment of blacks ever since.
Woodrow Wilson, that great re-segregator, was a Democrat. FDR presided over a racially divided military. On the other hand, Eisenhower sent federal troops to Arkansas. The Kennedy brothers were no fans of equal rights. Nixon signed Affirmative Action into law (big mistake).
The Road to Serfdom is universally applicable. Hardly, German-centric.
Notice that MikeB has nothing positive to offer. He'll just bide his time until another divisive issue arises so he can demogogue it.
Bogus's conclusion that the use of government force to do good is "positive" is bogus. History shows that the use of government force to do good inevitably results in doing great evil. Just look at the millions who perished under the so called do gooders like Stalin and Mao. Mao being one of the despots most admired by many of Obama gov appointees.
I agree here; a thoughtful piece. Prof. Bogus has at least followed the maxim of first trying to understand rather than be understood. As far as policies, etc. go, we've tried all liberal stuff over and over again and it doesn't work; remember Morganthough (spelling?) in 1937? The definition of insanity IS conducting the same experiment (massive gov't spending) over and over and expecting a different result. Let's TRY Buckley's bike path in Manhattan!
