The Brain Death of Conservatism

We have another entry into the "conservatism is in trouble" sweepstakes. I have already written here about this exhausting phenomenon in conservative history, but this particular submission departs from the others and offers, I think, much food for thought.

Not least because of its author. Steven Hayward is a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and an eminent historian of conservatism having just completed the 2nd volume of his excellent work on The Age of Reagan.

Mr. Hayward's point, made in an opinion piece on The Washington Post's Op/Ed page, is as follows:

During the glory days of the conservative movement, from its ascent in the 1960s and '70s to its success in Reagan's era, there was a balance between the intellectuals, such as Buckley or Milton Friedman, and the activists, such as Phyllis Schlafly or Paul Weyrich, the leader of the New Right. The conservative political movement, for all its infighting, has always drawn deeply from the conservative intellectual movement, and this mix of populism and elitism troubled neither side.

Today, however, the conservative movement has been thrown off balance, with the populists dominating and the intellectuals retreating and struggling to come up with new ideas.

It's important to note what Mr. Hayward is not saying here. He is not saying, as most of the shallower critics do, that conservatism is a moribund philosophy, irrelevant to these modern times. However, he is also not allying himself with those, like Peter Wehner, who advance a more sophisticated argument, that the rise of the so-called populists is bad for conservatism and conservative politics and they need to be replaced with people more like Buckley and Friedman.

For Mr. Hayward, the problem is not the populists and their influence over the movement, but that their influence is not balanced, as it used to be, by an equally strong cadre of conservative intellectuals. It was the synergy between the populists and the intellectuals that was so important to the success of conservatism in American politics, and that synergy now appears to be lost.

Mr. Hayward raises an interesting point, and you should read the whole article. However, I do not entirely agree with him.

Continue .....
I have a minor quibble with his use of the term "populist." Strictly speaking, a populist is a government official, or one running for some government office, who influences and controls large numbers of the "common people" in furtherance of his political goals. As such, the only people he mentions who might arguably be populists are Phyllis Schlafly and Paul Weyrich. But neither one sought a political office per se, but only to lead political movements that would influence those in office.

Mr. Hayward, I think, intends by "populist" to mean "popular," as in people that are well known and influential in the public square.

This points us to the deeper problem with Mr. Hayward's thesis. In fact, its hard to place movement conservatism squarely in either the intellectual or the populist camp. No one is more central to the rise of conservatism than William Buckley, and certainly he moved easily in intellectual circles as the Editor, writer and public face of National Review, a magazine which employed some of the deepest intellects of the early conservative movement. But he was also a prize fighter in the public arena, taking on liberal orthodoxy in whatever media forum he could find, whether in his long-running Firing Line debate TV show, his nationally syndicated newspaper column, or as commentator for national TV networks. In short, he was a very well known public figure who commanded a large following over and above the regular readers of National Review, which is to say, he was a populist.

It also should be remembered that Milton Friedman enjoyed this same kind of dual citizenship as an intellectual (Nobel Prize winner) and populist (appearing on Phil Donohue, as well as PBS in his highly acclaimed series "Free to Choose").

I would submit that our current populists are simply heirs of Mr. Buckley's groundbreaking work in extending the conservative debate from traditional print media into the new media of TV. By its nature, the new media required that any participant establish some sort of personal national persona, and Mr. Buckley forged one of the most memorable and striking persona's of the post War era. In the last 20 years, Rush Limbaugh has done the same, and done it so well that he actually revived an entire spectrum of the non-print media, radio, that before him was considered moribund.

As for the "brains" of conservatism, you still have a robust National Review, The Weekly Standard, Commentary and a host of others, together with that team of talent at the Heritage Foundation and other think-tanks, all of whom are consulted regularly by Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity and the rest, and in turn are promoted by them.

In other words, I don't see an absence of balance in conservatism, I see an extremely effective balance between those who have mastered the new media and those who do the hard intellectual work that supports conservatism's biggest stars.