European Conservatives Are Not the Enemy

I ’ve been waiting for many years to say these words: I’m not nativist enough for Jonah Goldberg.

Goldberg’s latest dispatch for the Dispatch is titled “Slouching Towards the Old World.” It was occasioned, he says, by “the reaction to the election of Giorgia Meloni.” He’s not on the same wavelength as the people on MSNBC, but he’s disquieted that American conservatives have made a 2019 speech of Meloni’s go viral. “The cheering is a sharp break with conservatism as we knew it,” he writes. He means American conservatism.

I object to Goldberg’s statement on two levels. The first and simplest is that it is a disproportionate reaction. It’s not actually suspicious to admire a clever and passionate speech, especially this one. Meloni was speaking to the World Congress of Families, which is an international organization that was founded and organized by an American social conservative, Allan C. Carlson. Its focus is one on which American and European social conservatives should be able to agree rather easily. It is dedicated to the idea that the “natural family” consists in “the union of a man and a woman in a lifelong covenant of marriage.” American conservatives look at Meloni and see a figure competing and winning in electoral politics while speaking intelligently and passionately about the social issues — abortion, adoption, surrogacy — they care about. Many Republican politicians, by contrast, are bashful or awkward when speaking about these issues if they speak about them at all.

But Goldberg’s lament is deeper and broader, and so are my problems with it. It’s part of an ongoing reaction against the rise of the NatCons, and in particular against their attraction to European conservatives such as Meloni and Viktor Orbán.

Goldberg’s “conservatism as we knew it” is a movement rooted in America, and developed in opposition to left-wing continental philosophes. Patrick Buchanan was read out of the movement in more propitious days because he “represented European Conservatism,” Goldberg writes. “Yes, we looked to some foreigners, too,” he then concedes. “Most were British or Scottish, but there was the occasional Frenchman or Austrian. But Montesquieu and Hayek, for instance, were part of our pantheon precisely because they leant heft to the vision of the Founders.” He then borrows Hayek’s assertion that there is a gulf between “Old World conservatism” — presumably represented by altars, thrones, soil, blood, and all those other heavy-metal political things — and American conservatism, which is “a defender of the liberal tradition of the founding.”

Views on this narrative may vary, but I think it could be turned on its head and remain just as true. I met Bill Buckley only twice, both times at his home in Stamford, Conn. On my first visit, we were swiftly joined by an Italian–Swiss countess of some sort, and we spent our lunch discussing a film by Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck, himself a minor German aristocrat. We were served by an English butler and Mexican staff. It was not exactly an afternoon of moonshine, pigskins, and Ralph Stanley tunes.

Buckley, National Review, and the conservative movement they represented were extremely attentive to Europe, and generally cheerleaders, not critics or opponents, of various European right-wingers and nationalists who were resisting communism — from Cardinal Mindszenty in Hungary to Francisco Franco in Spain. This was because Buckley’s conservatism shared civilizational roots with these figures that extended beyond the Scottish Enlightenment. Buckley ran Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn — an Austrian monarchist — in NR’s pages. This was a man who (like many on the continent and a few in the States) saw liberalism not as the clear vision of the Scottish Enlightenment, but as the bloody revolt against God launched with guillotines in Paris. I reject entirely the implication that I’m betraying the conservative movement because I still pay attention to figures such as Ryszard Legutko who were part of the anti-communist resistance in the 1980s and are now involved in Poland’s conservative, nationalist government. This is continuity, not change.

One could plausibly argue, in fact, that the modern American conservative movement was the vehicle for alienating conservatives from the thought of the Founders. The movement, after all, turned to Manchester School liberalism and Austrian School economics in the post-war period as part of its anti-communist, anti-statist, and anti–New Dealist project. By doing so, it blundered into conceding Abraham Lincoln, Henry Clay, and even Alexander Hamilton as the morning stars of New Dealism. The resulting alienation is so complete that when Buchanan wrote his book, The Great Betrayal, defending what was once called the American School of economics, movement conservatives couldn’t distinguish him from Huey Long or Otto von Bismarck. Now, America’s conservative politicians are struggling with the geopolitics presented by Taiwanese dominance in chip manufacturing and the Chinese lead in 5G. They wouldn’t be having nearly as much trouble if we held seminars on America’s Hamilton in between the ones on Austria’s Von Mises and socialism’s price problem.

One of George Washington’s first acts as president was to sign into law a tariff schedule. Was he betraying America’s liberal founding by doing so? Of course not. He wouldn’t have understood the founding as “liberal” at all. He was a republican. By the time “liberal” entered the American political lexicon as a noun, American liberals were — wouldn’t you know it? — thrilling to the speeches of a Hungarian nationalist, Lajos Kossuth.

America will naturally find its own American way of muddling through its problems. But some of the challenges we face now are the results of heresies stalking the body of Western civilization, or what was once known as Christendom. We in the West are all confronting plummeting birth rates, ennui, confusion about nature, the rise of international environmentalism, the political power of China and Russia as exercised through their commercial firms, and even ugly modern architecture. We are not slouching towards Gomorrah when we turn our eyes to Europe, but chatting among siblings and cousins, gathering around the table just like Bill Buckley did.