By Donald Devine
Daniel Oliver is a great stalwart of the modern conservative movement starting his involvement with its founder William F. Buckley Jr. serving as Ronald Reagans chairman of the Federal Trade Commission and generally filling the role of a creative thinker on the right over the years.
Recently in The American Spectator he gives conservatives the bad news good and hard:
the Movement Bill Buckleys Movement the struggle of the few the happy few the band of brothers is over. It ended in 1980 when Ronald Reagan was elected president.
Interestingly he does not see this as bad news. The conservative movement is over because the battle it was created for had ended and the movement had won." He cites the scores of new journals college organizations think tanks radio shows television programs speakers and even about government policy where a whole generation! of deregulation privatization and tax cuts" have occurred. The major reason conservatism won he says is not its mass appeal there were as many self-described conservatives before the movement began but the number of intellectual operations there are" and that these shape the zeitgeist" today. It sounds very impressive. Why then do conservative leaders seem so desolate? There is not one I know who is not dissatisfied with the drift and confusion on the right partially as a consequence of the multiplicityto say nothing about their inability to shape the national political and cultural zeitgeist. Of course Oliver concedes After the last election it became clear that we need new formulations." But he adds We always need new formulations." He attributes the continuing desire for a movement as nostalgia on the part of older conservatives and a misplaced longing for struggle and fellowship on the part of the younger ones seeking a challenge. Still why is there such a yearning? Did conservatism in fact win? Has there been real deregulation or privatization since the Reagan years or was that the generation he was speaking about? If so the moment the movement died according to Olivers calculation it then immediately lost its influence over much of public conservatism and almost all of
Republicanism. If one doubts the facts please read Clyde Wayne Crews annual surveys of government regulation titled Ten Thousand Commandments.
Regulation has increased substantially under both Democratic and Republican presidents ever since. Taxes were increased by the first President Bush and even the seconds successes have begun to be overturned and of course George W. Bush increased spending more than any recent president which eventually will be paid for by taxation or destructive inflation.
The worst part of the matter is that much (but by no means all) of the vaunted conservative infrastructure accommodated itself to the Republican departure from orthodox Buckley conservatism and even joined in the cheerleading for the apostasy. One could argue that it was buyers remorse that fed the vestiges of the conservative movement more recently to produce a Mount Vernon Statement a Manhattan Declaration and a new version of the Contract With America to set a new direction after the failures of the George W. Bush years.
The very fact it was necessary to create more than one such statement of principles merely confirms the confusion.
Some would say that confusion has been there from the beginning. Early movement conservatism was called fusionist" under Buckley and his ideological associate Frank Meyer because it included both libertarian and traditionalist strains within its doctrine. Their Sharon Statement drawn up at and named for Buckleys home in Connecticut by M. Stanton Evans fused" the two into one. The new statements however stretched the philosophical fusionism of Meyer who most influenced the happy few" intellectuals who constituted the movement to become political fusion" as one organizer labeled it. A political coalition must be as inclusive as possible including groups that do not fully accept its philosophy.
Irving Kristols The Neoconservative Persuasion" (although not earlier arguments) specifically rejected being fused philosophically with the freedom side of the equation explaining Neocons do not feel that kind of alarm or anxiety about the growth of the state in the past century." Likewise social conservatives who rejected the liberty aspect were appeased by adding statements that muted philosophical fusionisms stress on libertarian means (to achieve traditionalist ends).
In this regard it is important to make a distinction between synthesis syncretism and coalition. Synthesis is the philosophical tension that Meyer argued was the essential mechanism of Western civilization what produces its vitality in balancing between freedom and tradition to solve the social economic and political problems of life. Syncretism may be defined as combining inconsistent elements into a forced philosophical unity that is simply illogical. Kublai Khans claim that his philosophy included that of Confucius Buddha Moses Jesus and Mohammed is an example or perhaps Barack Obamas insistence that all Americans share common goals" his goals.
Coalition is different in that it does not claim ideological coherence but only that groups coalesce for practical political purposes to achieve common goals.
The recent conservative declarations therefore are fine and even necessary as statements of political coalition but not as philosophical proclamations such as the earlier Sharon Statement. In fact a coalitional statement rather than a syncretic one allows those who cannot accept the totality of fusionist dualism" (as they would characterize it) to retain their monist social or foreign ideologies rather than being pressured to support a doctrine they cannot fully accept as morally valid.
Accepting the idea of coalition likewise prepares the groups for the necessary as opposed to nihilist compromises that will take place between the elements when in power.
The reason fusionists synthesize freedom and tradition however is not for political purposes wrote Meyer but because the two elements must both be in constant tension for this to be the conservatism of the Western tradition at all. It is interesting though that as a practical matter these later coalitional statements were conceived managed and adopted primarily through the efforts of fusionists. Only they have an intellectual and even moral motivation to see both tradition and freedom coming together.
Fusionists even desire to include foreign policy in a coalitional document although as a pragmatic aspect of the tradition as in the Sharon Statement rather than as a matter of principle.
Fusionists support synthesis not for practical purposes but because they believe both freedom and tradition are true and essential. As Oliver notes teaching the next generation and refreshing the current one are still required today. Yet who can teach the core if not those who believe it for principled as opposed to political reasons? Even in the practical world of politics if there is not some core group motivated by the truth of the synthesis who will even make the effort to form coalitions that retain any sense of values?
A political party without a committed philosophical movement core will make any deal that meanders by. This has been precisely the problem over the past eight years.
This is precisely why the conservative movement molded by William Buckley cannot be allowed to die.
Without some happy band of brothers" including Oliver deeply schooled in the philosophy of the West and committed to its institutions experiences and values there will still be something called conservatism but it will have no life and no idea of where it is going since it would have no idea of where it began.
Donald Devine the editor of ConservativeBattleline Online was the director of the U.S. Office of Personnel Management from 1981 to 1985 under Ronald Reagan.
