As someone who cheerfully owns the moniker “Rotting-Flesh Reaganite,” I might be expected to love Law & Liberty’s annual “Conservatism and Liberty” conference (which took place last week), at which we read a bunch of mid-century conservative intellectuals. And I do! I’m talking Russell Kirk, Richard Weaver, Frank Meyer, F.A. Hayek, Robert Nisbet, Roger Scruton, Michael Oakeshott etc. All those august twentieth-century conservative thinkers who laid the groundwork for Reaganism.
Even though I love this conference, though, and hold all those gentlemen in high esteem, I may in this essay cause some surprise here by saying some critical things. There is a sense in which I, Rachel Lu, card-carrying Rotting-Flesh Reaganite, think we need to move beyond those people. Although, as it turns out, my own critique is almost a complete inversion of the one normally heard from postliberals.
I will also explain in this essay why I love Frank Meyer, despite agreeing with many of the usual critiques of him, including some recently published in response to Stephanie Slade’s book. And apparently I’ve transmitted that love across generations, because the art here is actually a copy of the famous Meyer photograph, done in art class by one of my sons. He’s a fan too.
So a year ago, when I was returning from this same conference, I was musing on two things. First, why can’t we have this caliber of conversation now? I’m not saying we don’t still have some smart people, but the conversations of this period seem so much better than the ones we’re having now. In a related vein, I was overcome with indignation at the ludicrously false criticisms modern detractors tend to lob in the (proto)-Reaganites’ general direction. Seriously, could they be any more wrong?
New Right friends like to tell me, for instance, that mid-century conservatism had a blind spot in failing to foresee the impending collapse of marriage, family, and community life. That it didn’t anticipate anything nearly as bad as modern-day leftist ideologies (wokeism, Third Worldism, whatever). That it blithely took for granted the robustness of religious faith in America, whistling right past the graveyard as the churches emptied. They sure were happy campers, those mid-century conservatives!
Except they weren’t at all. The mood of these thinkers tends to range from “wistful resignation” to “apocalyptic despair.” You’ve got your godless conservatives (Oakeshott, Scruton) putting a brave face on late-stage modernity, enjoying their symphony orchestras and rose gardens while they can in what they seem to perceive as the twilight of the West. You’ve got your moral conservatives (Kirk, Weaver) actively tearing their hair out over that same decline. Nisbet explains how we’re in the late stages of a spiral that’s been sucking us downward since the Middle Ages. That’s Weaver’s thesis too, obviously. And Hayek and Meyer chime in to remind us how we’ve all become serfs of the administrative state.
The mid-century conservatives did have some major blind spots. I’m thinking now about the positive things! Wasn’t this mid-century period rather a good time for American culture, at least in some important ways? Religious faith was enjoying a major revival, inspired in part by widely-loved, mainstream apologists like Billy Graham and Bl. Fulton Sheen. Marriage and birth rates were high. High trust and strong guardrails! So many manufacturing jobs for honest breadwinners! There were some very positive things in this era that we should applaud, but you sure wouldn’t know it from the mood of the conservative intellectuals.
These men wrote volumes on all the declinist trends that they are regularly accused of missing. They were intensely fixated on the decline of faith and family, the collapse of moral standards, the malevolent influence of political ideology. They absolutely anticipated the likelihood of terrible things to come. Nothing about wokeism or Third Worldism would surprise them in the least. I understand that Reagan himself had a somewhat sunnier personality, as did W.F. Buckley, which may now obscure the gloom of the brain trust, but trust me. Plenty of storm clouds. They didn’t miss anything.
But actually, that’s not quite true. This year, re-reading the same texts, I found myself reflecting that the mid-century conservatives did have some major blind spots. I’m thinking now about the positive things! Wasn’t this mid-century period rather a good time for American culture, at least in some important ways? Religious faith was enjoying a major revival, inspired in part by widely-loved, mainstream apologists like Billy Graham and Bl. Fulton Sheen. Marriage and birth rates were high. High trust and strong guardrails! So many manufacturing jobs for honest breadwinners! Now, truthfully, I myself am not nearly so enamored of the 50s as many conservatives, for reasons I won’t get into here. But I would happily grant that there were some very positive things that we should applaud. You sure wouldn’t know it from mood of the conservative intellectuals.
Somewhat ironically, I had just written a piece on contemporary right-wing “despair books” that happened to run at Acton’s Religion and Liberty in the middle of this very conference. So, I mostly stand by this piece, except I may have overstated the extent to which this is a recent phenomenon. A lot of the stuff we were reading definitely seems to qualify as “despair literature.”
That in turn prompted another reflection. Isn’t the New Right really just cribbing off these older thinkers, even as they disparage them? We hear lots of echoes nowadays of Weaver’s thesis about Nefarious Nominalism and its destruction of the West’s moral core. The castigation of “coastal” or “cosmopolitan” or whatever-we-call-them “elites” is powerfully reminiscent of James Burnham and his crowd. Several people have told me that they appreciated Why Liberalism Failed, despite some shortcomings, for its diagnosis of “individualist statism,” the notion that radical individualism and the expansion of the state go hand in hand, destroying the “middle layers” of society where people can actually thrive. So, that is an important insight, but it’s not Deneen’s. He pulled that directly from Nisbet.
Viewing the matter from that angle, I could see more and more ways in which today’s right-wing discourse really is a kind of continuation of this conversation. Unfortunately, it’s pretty debased. It’s a clownified, shock-jockified, take-it-to-11 sort of despair lit, heavy on panic and posturing but light on fresh insights. Weaver, for all his hyperbole, was actually a wonderful writer, and there’s a sort of lightness and even humor to his prose that you definitely don’t find in a Dreher or an Anton. Kirk’s pessimism is lightened considerably by extensive historical context, a high appreciation of the redemptive possibilities of “moral imagination,” and a ready willingness to take a brave stand when occasion presented. Which of our postliberal thinkers keep those factors in good balance today? (Ross Douthat? Possibly?)
Then there was Meyer. Look, the man was not perfect. Set alongside Kirk’s nuanced, gentlemanly essays, he can come across sometimes like a peevish adolescent, and yet I cannot but love him for insisting, doggedly, relentlessly, that freedom cannot be left out of this conversation. It’s so easy, when you’re confident in your ideas and priorities, to throw freedom into a footnote somewhere, a happy side effect of achieving all the other important goals. There are real and often deep tensions between freedom and almost everything else we want: faith, family, morals, community, order, prosperity, a “way of life.” So many reasons to sideline freedom, or even knife it, probably under a label like “radical individualism.”
Look at where we are, though. Libertarianism may not be a sufficient foundation for politics, but it is absolutely true that the growth of the state has massively undermined conditions conducive to virtue. Along with a healthy culture, a rich community life, and all the other good things downstream from a morally healthy citizenry. Sometimes you need a Frank Meyer, willing to dig his heels in and take a stand for freedom. Who is that man today? (Actually we do have some, but the New Right hates them all.)
They were brilliant diagnosticians. They saw many of the bad things coming round the bend, and connected those to deeper currents in modernity, running all the way back to the Medieval world. I really do think the mid-twentieth century was a very good era for conservative political theory, and I think today’s young conservatives should read them.
But their outlook was not sunny. They didn’t have a surfeit of constructive suggestions, nor were they even attentive to things that were already going right in their own day. So maybe they do bear some measure of blame if the right in later decades met a debased culture with debased echoes of their own conversation: less light, more heat, plenty of anger and despair.
It’s time to stop wallowing. Time to recognize that even if modernity has thrown some hard punches, it’s possible for cultures to rebuild themselves, drawing resources from tradition. Time to pay more attention, not only to what’s broken, but also to places where good things are enduring or even being reborn.
Next week, moving back to my October “love” theme, I’ll be thinking about marriage and family. I’ll reflect back on the same-sex marriage fight (in which I was pretty heavily involved at one time), consider what I learned, and speculate on where marriage might be going. I’ll touch back on “libertarian pronatalism” (my personal pet cause), but in the context of thinking about what it might take for parenting and family to move back towards the center of our culture. More generally, what space should family occupy in a civic life, or a well-lived individual life?
My parents will be visiting, so perhaps I can stir up some multi-generational arguments, and pass on any insights that emerge. Thanks for reading!
Great read. In the abstract, I view fusionism much the same way that I do, say, the economic prescriptions o( Friedman (e.g. Capitalism & Freedom, monetarism), or the sociopolitical commentaries of Thatcher (“there is no such thing as society” and so forth) - an impactful set of principles and ideas, tuned for the context in which they were delivered, but not to be merely copied or resurrected for a very different world (or have their shortcomings ignored). If anything, it’s a disservice to the legacy of the great conservative intellectuals of the 20th century to simply try and revive their ideas as zombie fusionism.
(I say this as someone who still sometimes calls himself a “first-generation neoconservative”, so… take my prescriptions as you will)
Nonetheless, I still liked Slade’s book. If for nothing else, it might get a few people to read more about the rich history of conservative intellectualism in the United States, which I can always appreciate.
Also:
“And apparently I’ve transmitted that love across generations, because the art here is actually a copy of the famous Meyer photograph, done in art class by one of my sons. He’s a fan too.”
Adorable. Good recreation, too!
You are right that these thinkers, as abstracted from Republican politics, were thoughtful, mildly alarmist, very much worth reading. Plenty of conservatives were outragted by the high divorce rates in the 1930s, 40s, and beyond. If, however, we think instead of "Reaganism"--and I was a young enthusiast--it was a disaster for the social conservatives and should be a lesson for us. He brought us terrible, awful, results that only the "extreme" warned us about. I remember at my first March for Life, in 1983, hearing some of the crabby pro-life people complaining about "lip service," and I thought they were needlessly gloomy, and adversarial. They were right in many ways: Reagan, the godfather of no-fault-divorce and lax abortion laws in California, was not a reliable friend. The Reagan years got us tax cuts, deregulation, sound money, big defense buildup, victory in the Cold War...and Casey and then Obergefell, courtesy of his appointments that upheld and accelerated the anti-family policies that Reagan had championed. What was in his heart, what did he really hope, intend--I don't know, but the results speak for themselves.