A “Firing Line at 50” Conversation with Donald Devine
I used to think of Donald Devine as the Miguel Cabrera of fusionist conservatism. Cabrera, for those of you only tenuously American, is the Detroit Tigers slugger who was a perennial threat to win the Triple Crown by leading the league in batting average, home runs, and runs batted in. A versatile player, still very good, Miggy has seen his career tail off a bit in recent years. Don’s never has.
As a young Ph.D. and political scientist, Devine fought for the good and the true on college campuses, always a lonely mission and never a high-percentage shot. He then put thought to action as a senior government official, serving as the top administrator of the federal civil service in the 1980s (in which capacity, and to his deep satisfaction, the Washington Post, speaking authoritatively for the bureaucracy, described him as “Reagan’s terrible swift sword”). He then became a political activist, advising and managing campaigns at the state and, ultimately, the national level. In recent years, he has taught and mentored young people in the conservative philosophy he has done much to develop and defend over the past half-century.
Neal B. Freeman: The conservative movement has been banged around in recent times. How would you assess its overall condition? Can it be patched up in the emergency room, should it be sent to intensive care, or is it time for hospice?
Donald Devine: The conservative movement is terminal. But that’s the good news. The bad news is that Western civilization is in intensive care, too — and that’s what Frank Meyer (in his classic Modern Age essay) said the movement existed to conserve.
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Freeman: We need some diagnosis. Why is the movement “terminal,” and what caused you to think it is?
Devine: The weakness of the conservative movement is demonstrated in two ways, political and intellectual. Its political exhaustion is most dramatically demonstrated by the fact it has lost the presidential level of the Republican party. The movement’s political muscle was first flexed in the nomination of Barry Goldwater, and, although Ronald Reagan was the only movement conservative nominated thereafter, the GOP convention has been the only major political, economic, or cultural institution in which movement conservatism has had a major voice.
With the nomination of Donald Trump, that ends. The political scientist Aaron Wildavsky correctly identified four political/cultural types. The conservative coalition ties individualist/economic types to deferential/social types, while the rival coalition ties progressive/egalitarian types to fatalist/nationalist types. Trump has moved so many fatalist/nationalists into the GOP that the balance within the movement has been upset.
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Freeman: And the intellectual exhaustion?
Devine: It’s demonstrated by the fact that few intellectual conservatives define conservatism the way it was understood at the old National Review by Meyer and William Buckley. Even fewer could distinguish between fusionist conservatism as a political coalition and as an intellectual synthesis. The various hyphenated conservatisms — micro-organisms, really — thus go their own ways, with no unifying core except, maybe, disliking the other guys more.
Freeman: So your analysis would be that that the arrival of Trump didn’t cause the splintering of the movement but simply revealed it?
Devine: Yes. And I made the case explicitly in my book, America’s Way Back, where I cited Buckley’s observation in a 2005 interview: “I think conservatism has become a bit slothful. In the absence of [its earlier] challenges, there were attenuations . . . [that] at this point have not been resolved very persuasively.”
That attenuation was an example of the great Max Weber’s idea of “the routinization of charisma.” All movements have cycles, starting with a charismatic leader like Buckley, who recruit disciples like Goldwater and Reagan and may even come into power. That success attracts the increasingly less committed, who create institutions that at first advance the original cause but then become bogged down in the politics of bureaucracy. The movement is then routinized and attenuated and becomes pragmatic, establishmentarian, and slothful.
Trump took advantage of that sloth and inspired his own movement.
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Freeman: Let’s stipulate that the next phase of conservatism, at least in its colloquial version, is likely to be Trumpist. But let’s also stipulate that Trumpism is not likely to signal the end of conservative history. What, then, might the next evolutionary phase look like after Tropical Storm Trump blows through? You are known as the leader of a group of D.C. fusionists — most of them young, many of them in politics or media — that meets regularly to debate and refine the fusionist insight. Should we look at your group as a green shoot of fusionist revival, or as a nostalgic tropism?
Devine: I agree Trumpism is not the end of conservatism. He is but an obstacle, although if he were to become president, he would be a big obstacle. Our group is a small green shoot. To bud, we need a Buckley and I do not see one, but he or she might be out there somewhere.
Freeman: Waiting for the next Buckley would require as much patience, and dimwittedness, as waiting for the next Reagan. But if Frank Meyer was the father of fusionism, you would have to be considered the stepfather. As we await the second coming of Buckley, some of us more patiently than others, who among contemporary political figures strikes you as authentically fusionist?
Devine: Who? Rand Paul understands the idea, but that did not seem to help him very much. Ted Cruz appears to comprehend the idea, but I have not talked with him in depth. Other Republicans have some sense of the synthesis between freedom and tradition, but my point is that it must be refined to deal with present conditions.
Freeman: Refine away.
Devine: In the early days, Buckley annoyed me by emphasizing that conservatism was not an ideology. But I came to understand what synthesis was: Rather than a deductive rationalism that mechanically cranks out logical conclusions from one mighty axiom, as with Marxism or progressivism, synthesis has multiple principles that can be resolved only by applying them to concrete situations.
#related#Buckley led by acting as what he called a broker through a “hard-fought dialectic” among his colleagues “in an open laboratory of unhampered thought.” The principles set in Up from Liberalism were “freedom, individuality, the sense of community, the sanctity of the family, the supremacy of conscience, the spiritual view of life,” a strong defense — all meaningful “in proportion as political power is decentralized.” A synthesis of those principles worked for the 20th century. A hard-fought dialectic based on those same principles will be needed to revive conservatism in our time.
— Neal B. Freeman is a longtime NR contributor and the founding producer of Firing Line.