There’s room under the tent.
There’s room under the tent.
K evin Williamson’s piece this morning, “A Marxist Homecoming,” explores some of the modern crossovers between the populist-nationalist Right and the socialist Left — from Marine Le Pen’s offer “to appoint socialists to high government offices if she is elected president” in France to the notable parallels between Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders on trade and immigration here in the U.S.
These parallels, of course, are real. But that doesn’t make right-wing nationalism — or skepticism of internationalism writ large — the same thing as anti-capitalism, unless one holds that capitalism is necessarily in tension with the integrity of the nation-state. So I think Kevin errs when he argues that “the shared theme of these globe-trotting political adventurers is anti-capitalism, which is one prominent expression of a more general anti-liberalism.” Many conservatives have traditionally distinguished between a skepticism of globalism and a skepticism of a decentralized market economy. The late, great Roger Scruton put it well in a 2019 panel discussion with Douglas Murray:
At the heart of conservatism is this idea of belonging to a community, and, as it were, responding to that community with gratitude and a sense of membership and a sense of duty. . . . Although I’m very much in favor of the free market, I’m very suspicious of the globalized form of it, and the way in which it does not respond to the demands of local communities and local forms of value. So this is a problem for real conservatism — to develop an economic doctrine that does not menace the local communities on which we all depend.
That position seems entirely at home in the Anglo-American conservative tradition. But Kevin argues that the nationalist strains on the modern American Right are a betrayal of an authentically American conservatism: “American conservatism is rooted in the values of the American Revolution and the American founding, which are largely liberal values in the classical sense, a source of some confusion to modern conservatives,” he writes. It “does not offer the romance and pageantry of Europe’s throne-and-altar rightism,” but “it does offer an open society in which those and many other bad ideas can find adherents and be discussed freely.”
Of course, some of the self-styled “nationalists” here in the U.S. are enamored of a distinctly European — and distinctly un-American — brand of right-wing politics. As someone who has no qualms about describing himself as a “nationalist,” I’m on the record as being firmly opposed to that project: “Freedom matters,” I wrote in a recent Spectator symposium on the future of the Right. “We should resist the effort, now popular in some corners of the right, to remake American conservatism in its European counterpart’s image. But an authentically American conservatism is rooted in the traditions, customs and ways of life that are unique to this shared home of ours.”
This view is hardly antithetical to American conservatism. In fact, I would argue that it’s foundational to it — and that the modern “classical liberal” innovation is actually a departure from how a good number of conservatives traditionally thought about these questions. Kevin acknowledges this when he distinguishes himself from William F. Buckley Jr., who described himself as a “radical” and a “counter-revolutionary” on numerous occasions: “With all due respect to this magazine’s beloved founder, I am not sure that there is any such thing as a ‘radical conservative,’” he writes. That’s all well and good, but then what to make of his broader point that all of the resurgent strains on the right are a necessary betrayal of conservative principles? As Kevin points out, Buckley aligned himself with the “radical conservatives” — in contrast to “the well-fed Right, whose ignorance and amorality have never been exaggerated for the same reason that one cannot exaggerate infinity” — in this magazine’s mission statement.
Buckley’s God and Man at Yale — one of the founding documents of the conservative movement — was hardly a “liberal” text, and its thesis was diametrically opposed to the “open society” lauded by many classical liberals today. The book’s subtitle was The Superstitions of “Academic Freedom,” and it described academic freedom as “that handy slogan that is constantly wielded to bludgeon into impotence numberless citizens who waste away with frustration as they view in their children and in their children’s children the results of laissez-faire education.” Buckley wrote:
I hasten to dissociate myself from the school of thought, largely staffed by conservatives, that believes teachers ought to be “at all times neutral.” Where values are concerned, effective teaching is difficult and stilted, if not impossible, in the context of neutrality; and further, I believe such a policy to be a lazy denial of educational responsibility.
Buckley was profoundly skeptical of the “open society.” In a 1966 episode of Firing Line, titled “McCarthyism: Past, Present, Future,” Buckley was challenged by his interlocutor, Leo Cherne: “The open society,” Cherne said, “is an urgently necessary aspect of all that we both value.” Buckley wasn’t so sure: “I don’t agree,” he responded. “I don’t want the society to be open to certain ideas. I am an epistemological optimist. That is the unfortunate word they use to describe people who believe that by reason you can make certain exclusions, and those exclusions don’t have to be reconsidered. I don’t feel any obligation to protect the liberties of a Nazi or of a communist.”
It wasn’t just Buckley, either. Many of American conservatism’s most trenchant thinkers spoke in similar terms. In an essay-long critique of John Stuart Mill titled “The ‘Open Society’ and Its Fallacies,” Willmoore Kendall — Buckley’s mentor at Yale and the main intellectual inspiration for God and Man at Yale — wrote that there is no “surer prescription for arriving, willy nilly, in spite of ourselves, at the closed society, than is involved in current pleas for the open society.” Russell Kirk echoed the sentiment in his 1981 essay “Libertarians: The Chirping Sectaries,” writing that “it is consummate folly to tolerate every variety of opinion, on every topic, out of devotion to an abstract ‘liberty’; for opinion soon finds its expression in action, and the fanatics whom we tolerated will not tolerate us when they have power.” Kirk distinguished his brand of traditionalist American conservatism from the libertarianism that had captured the imagination of some corners of the Right:
The libertarian takes the state for the great oppressor. But the conservative finds that the state is ordained of God. In Burke’s phrases, “He who gave us our nature to be perfected by our virtue, willed also the necessary means of its perfection. He willed therefore the state — He willed its connexion with the source and original archtype of all perfection.” Without the state, man’s condition is poor, nasty, brutish, and short — as Augustine argued, many centuries before Hobbes. The libertarians confound the state with government. But government — as Burke continued — “is a contrivance of human wisdom to provide for human wants.” Among the more important of those human wants is “a sufficient restraint upon their passions. . . .” In short, a primary function of government is restraint; and that is anathema to libertarians, though an article of faith to conservatives.
To these and other conservatives, the “open society” was not a fundamental principle of American conservatism. Liberty was, of course; but liberty, properly understood, is distinct from license, and is thus subject to natural constraints. Today’s libertarians see statism lurking in the language of “order” and “virtue.” But this is the historic language of the American conservative tradition. It is not totalitarian. And it is not anti-capitalist, either: As Kevin points out, Irving Kristol — the godfather of neoconservatism — famously authored a book titled Two Cheers for Capitalism. Kristol also penned “The Case for Censorship,” which lauded “an older idea of democracy . . . which was fairly common until about the beginning” of the 20th century that “was solicitous of the individual self, and felt an obligation to educate it into what used to be called ‘republican virtue.’” And he called for a “conservative welfare state,” writing that “the demand for a ‘welfare state’ is, on the part of the majority of the people, a demand for a greater minimum of political community, for more ‘social justice’ (i.e., distributive justice) than capitalism, in its pristine, individualistic form, can provide. It is not at all a demand for ‘socialism’ or anything like it.” Contrary to what Kevin writes, Kristol did not see this project as incompatible with capitalism:
Nor is it really a demand for intrusive government by a powerful and ubiquitous bureaucracy — though that is how socialists and neo-socialists prefer to interpret it. Practically all of the truly popular and widespread support for a “welfare state” would be satisfied by a mixture of voluntary and compulsory insurance schemes — old-age insurance, disability insurance, unemployment insurance, medical insurance — that are reasonably (if not perfectly) compatible with a liberal capitalist society.
Kristol even praised “populism” — an especial bête noire of many classical liberals today. In his 1996 essay “The Right Stuff,” he wrote:
The US today shares all of the evils, all of the problems, to be found among the western democracies, sometimes in an exaggerated form. But it is also the only western democracy that is witnessing a serious conservative revival that is an active response to these evils and problems. The fact that it is a populist conservatism dismays the conservative elites of Britain and western Europe, who prefer a more orderly and dignified kind of conservatism. It is true that populism can be a danger to our democratic orders. But it is also true that populism can be a corrective to the defects of democratic order, defects often arising from the intellectual influence and the entrepreneurial politics, of our democratic elites. Classical political thought was wary of democracy because it saw the people as fickle, envious and inherently turbulent. They had no knowledge of democracies where the people were conservative and the educated elites that governed them were ideological, always busy provoking disorder and discontent in the name of some utopian goal. Populist conservatism is a distinctly modern phenomenon, and conservative thinking has not yet caught up with it.
None of this, of course, is to say that one must agree with what Buckley, Kendall, Kirk, Kristol, and any number of other like-minded luminaries of the American conservative tradition have said. Nor is it to deny that there are strains of right-wing thought today that genuinely are in tension with traditional conservative principles. But I would respectfully maintain that Kevin’s definition of “American conservatism, not the imported kind,” as he puts it, is too narrow. Conservatism, like any political movement, contains its fair share of tensions and internal contradictions. But it is more than just “liberalism” — even the classical kind.