LECTURE 1: THE NEXT CONSERVATISM
By Paul M. Weyrich and William S. Lind (source)
This is the first of a series of columns I intend to write on “the next conservatism.” In them, I will lay out where I think conservatism needs to go after the end of President George W. Bush’s second term.
Some people may wonder about the theme, “the next conservatism.” Isn’t conservatism always the same? Don’t we call ourselves conservatives because we believe in what Russell Kirk called “the permanent things,” truths that hold for all time?
Of course we do. We believe that truth comes from God, who does not change. We hold certain beliefs, such as the impossibility of perfecting man or human society, that define conservatism in any period. In fundamentals, what was true for Russell Kirk was also true for Edmund Burke. We are not relativists. We do not hold that there is or can be a different “truth” for each time, place or person, depending on what is “true for them.”
Yet it is also true that conservatism changes over time. Sometimes, that is because ideologies that are not really conservative try to disguise themselves with the conservative label (real conservatism is not an ideology at all). But more often, it is because new events face conservatives with new challenges. While our basic beliefs do not change, the circumstances to which we must apply those beliefs do. Burke and Churchill were both conservatives, but in the face of the French Revolution Burke stressed the importance of hierarchy and order, while under the threat of Nazism Churchill spoke of defending liberty. Their views were not contradictory, but the situations they faced were different.
If we look at the American conservative movement since World War II, we see that it has undergone a number of changes. In the early 1950s, conservatism was defined by Senator Robert A. Taft. It meant a non-interventionist foreign policy ((which has been mislabeled “isolationism”), a small federal government of limited powers, states’ rights and scrupulous observance of the law (Taft opposed the Nuremburg Trials on the grounds that American law did not accept ex post facto justice). I continue to believe that much of what Senator Taft stood for was correct.
However, with the coming of the Cold War American conservatism headed in a somewhat different direction. Led by William F. Buckley and other thinkers associated with National Review, conservatives accepted the need for a large proactive military and extensive foreign alliances in order to counter the threat of Soviet Communism. At the same time, conservatism adopted the economics previously known as liberalism: the belief that free markets and free trade are the best paths to national prosperity. Traditionally, conservatives had been for high tariffs. To some extent, in the late 1950s and the 1960s American conservatives also moved away from states’ rights and strict construction and toward accepting a more active role for the federal government, especially in enforcing civil rights.
With the end of the Cold War around 1990, American conservatism changed again. Traditional conservatism was eclipsed by so-called neo-conservatism, which envisioned some form of American world empire in which America would bring “democratic capitalism” to every country on earth, whether they wanted it or not. This was really Wilsonianism, which traditionally was considered the opposite of conservatism.
That is where conservatism has been. Where does it need to go? I think new developments and new challenges will bring forth a “next conservatism” after President Bush leaves the White House. What that next conservatism might look like will be the subject of my upcoming columns.
At the heart of the
challenge facing the conservative agenda lies one simple fact: while we focused
our efforts on politics, our opponents on the left focused instead on
culture.
Each of us won. Compared to where the conservative movement was
the year I came to Washington, 1967, we are today immensely stronger
politically. Republicans, most of whom are at least nominally conservative,
control both Houses of Congress and the White House. That is success on a grand
scale.
Unfortunately, our opponents have won an equally large victory over our culture. Today, what was called the “counter-culture” in the 1960s now controls almost every cultural venue: the entertainment industry (which is now the most powerful force in our culture), the government schools, the media, even many churches. The ideology usually know as “Political Correctness,” which is really the cultural Marxism of the infamous Frankfurt School, is using every type of cultural institution in our country to achieve its purpose, which is the destruction of traditional Western culture and the Christian religion. All we have to do is look around us and compare what we see with the America of the 1950s to understand how vast their victory is. The old sins have become virtues and the old virtues have become sins.
The nub of the problem is this: culture is stronger than politics. Despite everything conservatives have achieved in politics, the left’s cultural victory trumps ours. That is why even when we win election after election, our country continues to deteriorate.
The next conservatism will have to have solving this problem as its central theme. Conservatives have already taken some important steps in doing so. Starting in the mid-1980s when the Free Congress Foundation introduced “cultural conservatism,” parts of the conservative movement have come to realize that if we lose the culture war, we also lose everything else. Culture is no longer at the periphery of conservatives’ concerns, although it may not yet be at the center where I think it needs to be. And, I have to add, some neo-conservatives have been quite helpful to other conservatives in the fight to save our traditional culture, while others have had foreign policy as their focus. They ignore the cultural issues.
The question is, how can we win this fight? In 1999, I wrote an open letter to conservatives with a somewhat radical answer to that question. Instead of trying to retake existing institutions from the cultural Marxists, a battle I do not think we can win, I proposed we separate our lives and the lives of our families from those institutions and build our own institutions instead. In that letter, I wrote,
What I mean by separation is, for example, what the homeschoolers have done. Faced with public school systems that no longer educate but instead “condition” students with the attitudes demanded by Political Correctness, they have seceded. They have separated themselves from public schools and created new institutions, new schools, in their homes.
I suggested conservatives should consider doing the same thing in many other areas of our lives (entertainment might be the most important with health care a close second).
At the time, some people misinterpreted what I wrote as saying that conservatives should abandon politics. I said no such thing. Conservatives must remain strongly involved in politics, to prevent the cultural Marxists from mobilizing all the power of the state to crush us. What I am saying is that we cannot reasonably expect to reverse America’s cultural decay through politics alone, because culture is stronger than politics. We must continue our political work, but we must also do something more, something that works directly on the culture. I thought then and I think now that building our own institutions, institutions that reflect and reinforce traditional, Western, Judeo-Christian culture, may be the most effective strategy in that regard.
The next conservatism may end up taking this approach or another approach. But unless it offers some strategy with a realistic hope of reversing conservatism’s cultural defeat and restoring our country to its rightful mind where morals and culture are concerned, it will not be worth calling “the next conservatism.” The decline, decay and seemingly endless degradation of America’s culture must be recognized as conservatism’s most important and most difficult challenge in any new conservative agenda.
If there is one clear lesson from the 20th century, it is that all ideologies are dangerous. As Russell Kirk wrote, conservatism is not an ideology, it is the negation of ideology. Conservatism values what has grown up over time, over many generations, in the form of traditions, customs and habits. Ideology, in contrast, says that on the basis of such-and-such a philosophy, certain things must be true. When reality contradicts that deduction, reality must be suppressed. And when an ideology takes over a state, the power of the state is used to accomplish that suppression. The state’s citizens are forced to mouth lies.
One of the new facts the next conservatism must address is the fact that America, for the first time in its history, has become an ideological state. The ideology commonly known as “political correctness” or “multiculturalism” now shapes the actions of government in thousands of ways. Under the rubric of “hate crimes,” it sentences American citizens to additional time in jail for political thoughts. As “affirmative action,” it “privileges” women, blacks and homosexuals over heterosexual white males. In some cases, it requires private businesses to give their employees “sensitivity training,” psychological conditioning in obedience to the state ideology, including its demand that everyone express approval of homosexuality. Employees who demur lose their jobs.
It is ironic that after the catastrophic failure of ideologies in the 20th century in Russia, Germany, Italy and many other countries, America should now head down the same road. How did it happen? While conservatives slept, ideology crept in on little cat feet, taking over all our cultural institutions, just as Gramsci demanded in his “long march.” As I have said before, culture is more powerful than politics.
What should the next conservatism do about it? First, it needs to reveal this ideology for what it is. In terms of its historical origins and basic nature, it is Marxism translated from economic into cultural terms. The translation was undertaken largely by the unorthodox Marxists of the Frankfurt School – Horkheimer, Adorno, Fromm, Reich and Marcuse, to
name the most
important players. Contrary to Marx, they said that the culture is not just part
of society’s “superstructure,” but an independent and very important variable.
They concluded that for Communism to be possible in the West, traditional
Western culture and the Christian religion first had to be destroyed – a
destruction to be accomplished by “critical theory” and “studies in prejudice,”
to use their terms. Most important, they realized they could not destroy our
historic culture through philosophical arguments. They turned instead to a much
more powerful weapon, psychological conditioning, in effect crossing Marx with
Freud. Marcuse then injected the whole poisonous brew into the baby boom
generation in the 1960s. The result? A brilliant success for them: America now
has a Marxist ideology, not the Marxism of the Soviet Union but cultural
Marxism, imbedded in and supported by the power of the state.
The next conservatism needs to shout from the housetops, “People, here’s what this stuff really is. It's not about ‘being nice’ or ‘toleration.’ It’s about destroying our culture and our religion, and it is succeeding.”
Then, when we have
the American people behind us, which we will once they learn the real nature of
“PC,” we need to comb through every law, every government regulation, every
federal office and department and weed the cultural Marxism out. The goal should
not be to replace it with any ideology of our own – again, if we are real
conservatives, we don’t have one – but to restore a non-ideological American
state, which is what we had up until the wretched 1960s.
Cultural Marxism
is a particularly nasty ideology, as we see all around us in its products (just
turn on the television; the cultural Marxists took over Hollywood decades ago).
But all ideology is wrong, because the concept of ideology is wrong in itself.
Society cannot be made to fit some abstract scheme dreamed up by this or that
thinker, and attempts to make it do so always result in disaster. To see the
truth, all we need to do is compare most aspects of life in America in the
1950s, our last non-ideological decade, with life now. The next conservatism
should work to get our old country back.
READING FOR THE NEXT LECTURE
