What conservatives defend is the uniqueness of the American founding — it’s both what makes us different from Europe and what makes us accessible to others.
In the pages of National Review more than 60 years ago, Russell Kirk was thinking about the state of conservatism in Italy. Kirk believed that the “failure to present the traditional American arguments for ordered liberty is a contributory cause of the present intellectual ascendancy of Communists and Socialists in Italy.” As a result, the “Italian conservatives . . . have been left isolated and uninformed, and the extensive literature of American conservatism has been made known to Italians only through occasional wild diatribes against it in the radical newspapers and magazines.”
Kirk’s concern for the fate of Italian conservatives would seem to justify Michael Brendan Dougherty’s contention last week, inspired by the victory of Giorgia Meloni to become Italy’s prime minister, that American conservatives and European ones — including those outside the Anglo-American tradition — have more in common than some would like to admit. “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,” Michael writes, because “Buckley’s conservatism shared civilizational roots with these figures that extended beyond the Scottish Enlightenment.” He mentions Buckley’s running pieces by the Austro-Hungarian monarchist aristocrat Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn as further proof of American conservatism’s European ties.
I would challenge some of the specifics of Michael’s argument. I already elaborated as much in the case of EKL, a fascinatingly complex figure. Not merely a European figure important to American conservatism, he was also “a liberty-minded monarchist; a multilingual anti-nationalist; a free-market aristocrat . . .; and an America-loving Austro-Hungarian who urged our country to be more active internationally.” To this, Michael replied with the fair rejoinder that the failure of EKL’s views to map neatly onto any national tradition itself proves that “ideological lines don’t line up precisely with national borders.” But ideologies can and do begin within a nation’s borders. America, though it owes a great deal to its inheritance from Western civilization and ought to defend that civilization, embodies unique principles instantiated in a unique nation. And these principles have become both a common inheritance and accessible to newcomers in a manner distinct from other national traditions. American conservatism defends this unique inheritance, making it, as EKL argued, distinct from European varieties.
As for Buckley himself: Yes, Buckley specifically, and National Review generally, did pay attention to Europe during the Cold War. They viewed this as part of a civilizational struggle it was America’s duty to lead. In 1947, future NR editor James Burnham went so far as to make the case for an “American Empire, which will be, if not literally world-wide in formal boundaries, capable of exercising decisive world control” as the “only alternative to the communist Empire.” Common civilizational inheritance mattered in this effort, but so did strategy and national interest.
One can, moreover, make too much of Buckley’s personal idiosyncrasies. His conservatism remained fundamentally American, however many foreign butlers he had or Swiss ski trips he took. In the very first issue of NR in 1955, Buckley lamented that America had abandoned “its tradition of fixed postulates having to do with the meaning of existence, with the relationship of the state to the individual, of the individual to his neighbor, so clearly enunciated in the enabling documents of our Republic.” In 1969, he wrote that “the historical responsibility of the conservatives is clear: It is to defend what is best in America. At all costs. Against any enemy, foreign or domestic.” For a counterexample, look to L. Brent Bozell, his brother-in-law and a man of many gifts. Even so, Bozell’s admiration for Spain under dictator Francisco Franco became serious enough that, for a time, he moved to Spain, condemning America — including its Founding — from within that nation’s borders.
I would also challenge Michael’s understanding of what, precisely, distinguishes American conservatives, and what they are defending. He writes that George Washington “wouldn’t have understood the founding as ‘liberal’ at all. He was a republican.” Washington may not have called himself a liberal, but he did value liberality, and considered it a characteristic of the Founding. To the Hebrew congregation of Newport, R.I., Washington wrote in 1790:
The Citizens of the United States of America have a right to applaud themselves for having given to mankind examples of an enlarged and liberal policy: a policy worthy of imitation. All possess alike liberty of conscience and immunities of citizenship It is now no more that toleration is spoken of, as if it was by the indulgence of one class of people, that another enjoyed the exercise of their inherent natural rights. For happily the Government of the United States, which gives to bigotry no sanction, to persecution no assistance requires only that they who live under its protection should demean themselves as good citizens, in giving it on all occasions their effectual support.
He wrote to a Catholic congregation the same year:
As mankind become more liberal they will be more apt to allow, that all those who conduct themselves as worthy members of the Community are equally entitled to the protection of civil Government. I hope ever to see America among the foremost nations in examples of justice and liberality. And I presume that your fellow-citizens will not forget the patriotic part which you took in the accomplishment of their Revolution, and the establishment of their Government: or the important assistance which they received from a nation in which the Roman Catholic faith is professed.
Michael seems to separate the liberal aspects of the Founding from the republican aspects. In The Political Theory of the American Founding, Thomas West suggests this is unwise:
Why treat “liberalism” and “republicanism” as distinct traditions at all? Perhaps scholars have imagined difference where there is unity. What if individualistic “liberalism” and communitarian “republicanism” are not opposed at all, but rather complementary aspects of our founders’ political theory? Or, to put it another way, if “liberalism” is our label for the founders’ natural law theory, including its political implications, then “republicanism” might prove to be an indispensable feature of “liberalism.”
The point that West — and, among others, historian Gordon Wood — is making is that the achievement of the Founders, however much it may have owed, and still owes, to its historical predecessors, represented something new and distinct from the Old World. “The Revolution not only radically changed the personal and social relationships of people, including the position of women, but also destroyed aristocracy as it had been understood in the Western world for at least two millennia,” Wood writes in The Radicalism of the American Revolution. “The Revolution did not just eliminate monarchy and create republics; it actually reconstituted what Americans meant by public or state power and brought about an entirely new kind of popular politics and a new kind of democratic officeholder.” That made something novel in the world, something that was treated as such at the time, and remains so now. American conservatives are the defenders of the inheritance of the Founding; it should remain their political lodestar.
Ah, but Michael would say that those American conservatives who have embraced free markets are, in fact, betraying this very inheritance. “One could plausibly argue, in fact, that the modern American conservative movement was the vehicle for alienating conservatives from the thought of the Founders,” he writes, by turning to such free-market enthusiasts as the (Austrian) F. A. Hayek in reaction to the excesses of the New Deal, thereby conceding Americans such as “Abraham Lincoln, Henry Clay, and even Alexander Hamilton as the morning stars of New Dealism.” Whether we would or wouldn’t be having “nearly as much trouble” with current problems of strategically significant goods, such as computer chips, “if we held seminars on America’s Hamilton in between the ones on Austria’s Von Mises and socialism’s price problem” is beyond my ability to answer here. But I will note that the foreign-born free-marketeers were not without nuance in their views. The great German ordo-liberal economist Wilhelm Ropke, for instance, “cautioned against Western companies trading with the U.S.S.R., its satellites, or its allies,” as Samuel Gregg recounts in his forthcoming book, The Next American Economy: Nation, State, and Markets in an Uncertain World (a tremendous resource on these and other questions). And I will also note that protectionism has been a contested matter throughout American history. Hamilton himself, though given to protectionism, also warned of its limits. He wrote in Federalist No. 35:
Exorbitant duties on imported articles would beget a general spirit of smuggling; which is always prejudicial to the fair trader, and eventually to the revenue itself: they tend to render other classes of the community tributary, in an improper degree, to the manufacturing classes, to whom they give a premature monopoly of the markets; they sometimes force industry out of its more natural channels into others in which it flows with less advantage; and in the last place, they oppress the merchant, who is often obliged to pay them himself without any retribution from the consumer.
Yes, Kentucky senator Henry Clay did favor internal improvements and protectionist tariffs. But he was objected to at the time by, among others, Massachusetts senator Daniel Webster. In 1824, debating tariffs proposed by Clay, Webster rebuffed what he called Clay’s “obsolete and exploded notions” that “had their origin in very mistaken ideas of the true nature of commerce.” He continued:
The Government has already done much for [these industries’] protection, and it ought to be presumed to have done enough, unless it should be shown, by the facts and considerations applicable to each, that there is a necessity for doing more.
On the general question, sir, allow me to ask if the doctrine of prohibition, as a general doctrine, be not preposterous? Suppose all nations to act upon it; they would be prosperous, then, according to the argument, precisely in the proportion in which they abolished intercourse with one another. The less of mutual commerce the better, upon this hypothesis. Protection and encouragement may be, and are, doubtless, sometimes, wise and beneficial, if kept within proper limits; but, when carried to an extravagant height, or the point of prohibition, the absurd character of the system manifests itself.
Protectionist debates consumed American politics throughout the 19th and 20th centuries and pitted regions and factions of the country passionately against each other. They were a live and contentious issue — and remain one. As Dominic Pino has noted, “the Harmonized Tariff Schedule of the United States has 98 chapters’ worth of tariffs, and the full document comes out to 4,394 pages.” On the whole, the discussions seem largely to have vindicated James Madison’s prediction, in Federalist No. 10:
Shall domestic manufactures be encouraged, and in what degree, by restrictions on foreign manufactures? are questions which would be differently decided by the landed and the manufacturing classes, and probably by neither with a sole regard to justice and the public good.
The Founders did not belong to the Austrian school, to be sure, though they did value markets. And the rejection of excessive economic imposition is part of our inheritance from the Founding. Think of the Declaration’s complaint that King George III “has erected a multitude of New Offices, and sent hither swarms of Officers to harrass our people, and eat out their substance.” It was not strange for post-war American conservatism, in response to the challenges of the New Deal, to invoke this tradition, and to welcome help from those who thought similarly. That included from those, such as Hayek, who believed that “what in Europe was called ‘liberalism’ was here the common tradition on which the American polity had been built,” making “the defender of the American tradition . . . a liberal in the European sense.” One can dispute Hayek’s understanding of what the American tradition meant, of course. National Review editor Frank Meyer, for example, though he also questioned the same sort of conservatism that Hayek did, nonetheless cautioned American conservatives that “there is much in classical liberalism that conservatives must reject,” such as “its philosophical foundations,” “tendency towards Utopian constructions,” and disdain of tradition. But one can criticize Hayek while also accepting that the American idea was capacious enough for someone of Hayek’s stripe to find refuge among its conservative defenders.
One of the arguments for the tariff, especially in early America, was that it would help build up this nation as a going concern, especially against the depredations of such places as Great Britain, and “to dictate the terms of the connection between the old and the new world.” And yet, throughout American history, we haven’t quite been able to shake the Old World. There have been two main reasons for this. One is that Americans, in their somewhat reductive way, have been unable to help seeing in the Old World’s political struggles reflections of themselves. This was present from the very beginning of this nation, in early Federalist/Republican divides over favoring Britain over France, and in Thomas Jefferson’s misguided admiration for the French Revolution. Michael mentions the American celebrity of Hungarian Lajos Kossuth, a refugee of a failed 1848 European revolution, much-beloved by, among others, Daniel Webster and Abraham Lincoln. Michael might also have mentioned the cause of Greece’s revolution against the Ottoman Empire a few decades earlier, of which Henry Clay — he of the American system — spoke eloquently:
From Maine to Georgia, from the Atlantic Ocean to the Gulf of Mexico, the sentiment of approbation has blazed with the rapidity of electricity. Everywhere the interest in the Grecian cause is felt with the deepest intensity, expressed in every form, and increases with every new day and passing hour. And are the representatives of these people alone to be insulated from the common moral atmosphere of the whole land? Shall we shut ourselves up in apathy, and separate ourselves from our country, from our constituents, from our chief magistrate, from our principles?
These spasms of national approbation tend to have their roots in a perceived familiarity of another nation’s struggles with our own. (One might argue that broad American sympathy for the plight of Ukraine puts us in another such situation, however imperfect its institutions may be.) But such familiarity presumes a kind of transcendence of the meaning of this nation, making it something from which others can be inspired, and in which others can participate. One of the most notable such participants was the late Peter Schramm, of the Ashbrook Center, whose family fled to America after Hungary’s failed 1956 uprising. Before its crushing, Schramm notes, “the last free Hungarian radio broadcast spent its final hours repeating the Gettysburg Address in seven languages, followed by an S.O.S.” And when his family did flee, Schramm’s father, upon being asked by his son why his ultimate destination was America, replied, “Because, son. We were born Americans, but in the wrong place.” Not for nothing did Ronald Reagan call America “the last best hope of man on earth.” America is not merely an idea. But that it is not only a people of fixed ancestry, either, seems obvious in the fact that others can become part of its national traditions by sufficient will and devotion.
In this area, American principles are a surer guide than other sources. The farther afield one goes, the likelier one is to end up disdaining America in one way or another, as Bozell did. Or recall how Pat Buchanan, looking at Russia some years ago, wrote in admiration:
Putin says his mother had him secretly baptized as a baby and professes to be a Christian. And what he is talking about here is ambitious, even audacious.
He is seeking to redefine the “Us vs. Them” world conflict of the future as one in which conservatives, traditionalists and nationalists of all continents and countries stand up against the cultural and ideological imperialism of what he sees as a decadent west.
“We do not infringe on anyone’s interests,” said Putin, “or try to teach anyone how to live.”
Today, this alleged defender of Christian civilization is waging a brutal war of occupation against a fellow country, with the blessing of the head of the Russian Orthodox Church.
The other reason for American interest in Europe is, well . . . America’s interests. Always a tricky thing, and always up for debate. I am not closed off to the possibility of admiration, study, or even, when appropriate, collaboration with European nations concerning some of the problems Michael rightly says we share. The cause of British independence from the European Union was one obvious example of something with which Americans can sympathize and support; former president Barack Obama was wrong to have argued against it, and looked silly when his efforts failed. But the internationalist nationale can look silly sometimes as well. Brexit champion Nigel Farage’s stumping for Alabama Senate candidate Roy Moore was embarrassing (as Farage has since admitted). Viktor Orbán — especially his ties to the Russian and Chinese regimes — is no model for the U.S., even if he has won the support of his people. And Putin-sympathetic European political entities tend not to serve U.S. interests, though it’s worth noting that Poland is not governed by one currently.
Nor does that seem to be the case with Giorgia Meloni, who recently offered Ukrainian president Volodymr Zelensky her support. Thus, it is possible for conservatives to “greet her as an ally on some things without blindly embracing everything that comes with the notoriously dysfunctional heritage of Italian politics,” as Dan McLaughlin wrote.
Italy might have been better off as a nation if it had learned from American conservatives, as Kirk wished. But for now, it is enough to wish Meloni well and to resist forcing our own domestic politics onto Italy just as we resist crudely applying its situation onto ours. And to accept that, even if Italy buys what she is selling — no sure thing, at this time — then whatever lessons America can draw from her success will have, at the very least, to be adapted to a political context that rightly remains distinct from Europe’s, even as it can welcome others into its fold.