As is typical of conservatives’ inconsistency, however, countless conservatives do refer to their set of beliefs as an ideology. In fact, numerous leading conservative publications, including the National Review, Human Events, The America Spectator, The Weekly Standard, and The American Conservative, have all called conservatism an ideology.[10]
A classic is something accepted as definitive, never out of fashion (like a blue suit or a black dress), and whose excellence is generally agreed upon. Within that framework, there is no conservatism that can be considered classic. Conservatives can trace their history, but they don’t always agree upon it when doing so. There have, from time to time, been periods when there was widespread agreement among conservatives, only to have this fleeting harmony later fall apart. There is no genuine founding father of American conservatism, although Edmund Burke, the British Member of Parliament, who set forth his conservative views in Reflections on the Revolution in France (in 1790), comes close. Burke’s influence on American thinkers is indisputable (he favored the American Revolution but opposed the French Revolution), but his defense of monarchy and aristocracy never played well with American conservatives. Thus, Burke’s conservatism is not, for Americans, classical.
Conservatism is a movement with no Moses, although William F. Buckley is sometimes considered to be an analogous figure, as John B. Judis’s biography of him, subtitled Patron Saint of the Conservatives, would attest. Buckley’s support of conservatism’s latter-day saints, like Richard Weaver, Frank Meyer, Friederich Hayek, Russell Kirk, and James Burnham, through his National Review, have certainly invigorated modern conservatism. Kirk and Burnham have always been the most significant among these formative voices, although by 1986, when Russell Kirk prepared his last edition of The Conservative Mind, young conservatives were already coming to consider his work as “Old Testament” conservatism, and his once well-known canons of conservatism now reside in the dustbin of history.[*] In retrospect the only things that tie all these early thinkers together are a dark view of human nature, their strong dislike of President Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal, and an outsized fear of communism. This is about as close to “classic” conservatism as it gets.
While Russell Kirk focused on theory and philosophy, James Burnham addressed practice and process. An exemplary scholar who taught philosophy at New York University, Burnham cofounded the National Review in 1955. His Congress and the American Tradition, which describes FDR’s presidency overpowering Congress, has been called by a leading scholar of conservative intellectual history “one of the most penetrating works of political analysis produced by conservatives since World War II.”[11] Burnham understood the ebb and flow of power between the legislative and executive branches, and he appreciated the expansion of the presidency under strong presidents such as Abraham Lincoln, Andrew Jackson, and Woodrow Wilson. He believed that FDR, however, overreached, by taking away every last vestige of Congress’s power as a peer to the president and reducing the legislative branch to “a mere junior partner.”[12]
Conservative columnist George Will wrote in 2005 that the “president’s authorization of domestic surveillance by the National Security Agency [that] contravened a statute’s clear language” was a striking indication that conservatives had forgotten their roots. “For more than 500 years,” Will noted, “since the rise of nation-states and parliaments, a preoccupation of Western political thought has been the problem of defining and confining executive power.” Will, thinking like the conservative he is, invoked history as a reminder to other conservatives willing to listen. “Modern American conservatism grew in reaction against the New Deal’s creation of the regulatory state and the enlargement of the executive branch power that such a state entails. The intellectual vigor of conservatism was quickened by reaction against the Great Society and the aggrandizement of the modern presidency by Lyndon Johnson, whose aspiration was to complete the project begun by Franklin Roosevelt.” Will closed by drawing on the wisdom of the distant past. “Charles de Gaulle, a profound conservative, said of another such, Otto von Bismarck—de Gaulle was thinking of Bismarck not pressing his advantage in 1870 in the Franco-Prussian War—that genius sometimes consists of knowing when to stop. In peace and in war, but especially in the latter, presidents have pressed their institutional advantages to expand their powers to act without Congress. This president might look for occasions to stop pressing.”[13]
In 1995, when the newly Republican-controlled Congress launched an assault on Bill Clinton, Will observed, contrary to the liberal shibboleth that government never contracts, “Well, it is contracting. It is contracting—and here we should honor the memory of James Burnham—because of congressional ascendancy. A traditional tenet of that fine man’s conservatism has been re-established, to the point at which the current President is the least consequential President in Washington since Calvin Coolidge.”[14]
To make his point, Burnham quoted the French historian and scholar, Amaury de Riencourt, who wrote in 1957 that “the President of the United States [was] not merely the Chief Executive of one of the Western democracies, but one already endowed with powers of truly Caesarian magnitude,” and he feared that the American presidency could result in the destruction of freedom given its “concentration of supreme power in the hands of one man.”[15] Caesarism, of course, is despotism, and Burnham urged conservatives to resist anything that enabled the rise of a potential Caesar, “that is to say, Napoleon, Mussolini, Stalin, Hitler, Peron, Franco, Khrushchev.”
Unlike many of his successors, Burnham did believe that conservatism could be described and defined, and in 1959 he did so, which provides a record of how conservatism was perceived by a well-positioned insider in its early days. “We can define conservatism and liberalism by reference to certain philosophical principles,” Burnham wrote, as he endeavored to bridge intellectual conservatism with real-world politics.[16] To define conservatism in its political context, Burnham drew a point-by-point comparison of conservative and liberal positions on specific issues that he believed distinguish each. With the caveat that “brevity brings a certain amount of distortion,” he reduced his findings to thirteen statements, which he explained “hang together: that is, to occur as a group, not merely at random. Whether the cause of this linkage—which is not absolute, of course—is metaphysical, social or psychological we do not need to decide in order to observe that it exists.”[17] Yet like Kirk’s canons, Burnham’s descriptions of the conservative approach today has little practical application.[*]
The conservatism of Burnham and of an entire generation of conservative intellectuals has virtually disappeared as a functional political force, because it proved unable to stand up to the waves of demagogues, bigots, fanatics, malcontents, and assorted populists who have claimed the label for their own extremist aims. Leaders such as George Wallace, Strom Thurmond, Jesse Helms, and Pat Robertson—along with many more pedestrian politicians, political operatives, and social activists in pursuit of whatever narrow agendas—have easily overwhelmed and pushed aside the principles of conservative’s founders.[18] Had conservatism been entrenched enough to prevent expediency from overtaking critical thinking, it might not have been so easily uprooted. But conservatism was built on an unstable ground, and was not sufficiently fortified to weather such political storms.
10.
A less than exhaustive search of these conservative publications revealed a number of references to conservatism as an ideology. For example, the December 11, 1995,
*
Kirk’s canons are concisely explained on the Web site of the Russell Kirk Center for Cultural Renewal, which is devoted to his thought. See http://www. kirkcenter.org/kirk/thought.html.
*
Burnham found that conservatives believe: 1) there is a transcendent factor vital to successful government; 2) human nature is corrupt, and therefore conservatives reject all utopian solutions to social problems; 3) tradition must be respected, and when change is unavoidable it must be undertaken cautiously; 4) governmental power must be diffused and limited by adhering to the “separation of powers” and “checks and balances” of the Constitution; 5) direct democracy must be rejected because people are not well informed and are easily misled; 6) in states’ rights; 7) each branch of government must be autonomous and must resist encroachment or usurpation by any other; 8) public support of limited government must be encouraged in order to keep government in check; 9) the Constitution’s principles have permanent value; 10) government must be decentralized and localized so that power is diffused; 11) private enterprise should be encouraged; 12) morality begins with the individual; and 13) Congress should be more powerful than the executive branch. An expanded summary version of these statements are found at Appendix A.