Is Conservatism Un-American?

Poor George Will. He intended his book Statecraft as Sou ¡craft: What Government Does to be seminal to modern conservative thought, but instead it received sharply critical attention in every major conservative publication. This would ordinarily not matter to the independent Mr. Will. But it has to matter when you consider that his stated intention was to re-invent American conservatism. Although many reviewers concentrated their criticism on his ostentatious embrace of the Welfare State, I doubt that this public display of affection is really the heart of the book, however much it may have endeared Will to the editors of The New Republic. The crux of Will’s analysis is the idea that the American regime—the constituent ideas and institutions of American politics—is radically defective. America is, as he puts it, “ill-founded.” To defend America adequately therefore requires an appeal to some authority or body of principles essentially foreign to it (the Welfare State, he points out, was pioneered by Disraeli and Bismarck); and the object of his book was to prove that the indispensable first step toward leading the country to health is agreeing solemnly, publicly, unflinchingly on the pathology of the American soul.

But the question for Will is whether, on the basis of his understanding of America, it is really worth saving. “We should judge a society by the character of the people it produces,” he writes. In America today, “all of the nation’s life is marked by excess and by disdain for what once was . . . thought to be a virtue: self-denial.” On considering such a charge, you might first conclude that Will is saying that we are not the men our fathers were, a proposition famously advanced by Abraham Lincoln and fully supported by the available evidence. Instead Will is saying that we are indeed our fathers’ sons. We are the incarnations of a large error that has grown out of a small, or at any rate smaller, error in reasoning at the beginning of our national life. You see, America began with a “self-conscious commitment” to rely on “self-interestedness” rather than on “better motives”; is confined to “low and narrow” governmental purposes, because it is built upon the “low but steady passions”; is dedicated to “freedom, understood as a passionate way of life”; operates under a commission “to increase pleasure and decrease pain”; has a public philosophy of “low expectations,” and public institutions that seem “unconcerned with the bridling of egoistic motives.” For the Founding Fathers, and especially for James Madison (who is Will’s anti-hero), “the political problem is seen entirely in terms of controlling the passions that nature gives, not nurturing the kind of character that the polity might need.” And since the regime “does not encourage self-restraint, self-denial, and moderation in any sphere of life,” it should not surprise us that American statesmanship exists only to serve “modest, even banal aims.”

About the Author

Charles R. Kesler

Charles R. Kesler, a professor of government at Claremont McKenna College, is the editor of the Claremont Review of Books.

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Poor George Will. He intended his book Statecraft as Sou ¡craft: What Government Does to be seminal to modern conservative thought, but instead it received sharply critical attention in every major conservative publication. This would ordinarily not matter to the independent Mr. Will. But it has to matter when you consider that his stated intention was to re-invent American conservatism. Although many reviewers concentrated their criticism on his ostentatious embrace of the Welfare State, I doubt that this public display of affection is really the heart of the book, however much it may have endeared Will to the editors of The New Republic. The crux of Will’s analysis is the idea that the American regime—the constituent ideas and institutions of American politics—is radically defective. America is, as he puts it, “ill-founded.” To defend America adequately therefore requires an appeal to some authority or body of principles essentially foreign to it (the Welfare State, he points out, was pioneered by Disraeli and Bismarck); and the object of his book was to prove that the indispensable first step toward leading the country to health is agreeing solemnly, publicly, unflinchingly on the pathology of the American soul.

But the question for Will is whether, on the basis of his understanding of America, it is really worth saving. “We should judge a society by the character of the people it produces,” he writes. In America today, “all of the nation’s life is marked by excess and by disdain for what once was . . . thought to be a virtue: self-denial.” On considering such a charge, you might first conclude that Will is saying that we are not the men our fathers were, a proposition famously advanced by Abraham Lincoln and fully supported by the available evidence. Instead Will is saying that we are indeed our fathers’ sons. We are the incarnations of a large error that has grown out of a small, or at any rate smaller, error in reasoning at the beginning of our national life. You see, America began with a “self-conscious commitment” to rely on “self-interestedness” rather than on “better motives”; is confined to “low and narrow” governmental purposes, because it is built upon the “low but steady passions”; is dedicated to “freedom, understood as a passionate way of life”; operates under a commission “to increase pleasure and decrease pain”; has a public philosophy of “low expectations,” and public institutions that seem “unconcerned with the bridling of egoistic motives.” For the Founding Fathers, and especially for James Madison (who is Will’s anti-hero), “the political problem is seen entirely in terms of controlling the passions that nature gives, not nurturing the kind of character that the polity might need.” And since the regime “does not encourage self-restraint, self-denial, and moderation in any sphere of life,” it should not surprise us that American statesmanship exists only to serve “modest, even banal aims.”