Classic Liberal Blog

“There is no commonly-acknowledged conservative position today,
and any claim to the contrary is easy to make sport of.” —William F. Buckley, Jr.

Buckley wrote those words in 1959, as the introduction to his conservative manifesto Up from Liberalism.  As we've noted in previous posts, the right-side of the political scale has always been divided ... so for now, the question remains, "What is a conservative?"

Here's a few thoughts from William F. Buckley ...

George Will and William F. Buckley (Oct. 9, 2005)

[George] Will: Today, we have a very different kind of foreign policy. It's called Wilsonian. And the premise of the Bush doctrine is that America must spread democracy, because our national security depends upon it. And America can spread democracy. It knows how. It can engage in national building. This is conservative or not?

[William F.] Buckley: It's not at all conservative. It's anything but conservative. It's not conservative at all, inasmuch as conservatism doesn't invite unnecessary challenges. It insists on coming to terms with the world as it is, and the notion that merely by affirming these high ideals we can affect highly entrenched systems.

Will: But something odd is happening in conservatism. And we have a president and an administration that clearly is conservative, accepted as that. Yet it is nation-building in the Middle East. And conservatism seems to be saying government can't run Amtrak, but it can run the Middle East.

Buckley: Yes. That's of course an effrontery that both of us are familiar with. The ambition of conservatism, I think, properly extends to saying [that] where there are no human rights, it's not a society I can truly respect. It's impossible to draw up a template that gives us an orderly sense of "send democracy there," but let this go for awhile. One recognizes that you can't export democracy everywhere simultaneously.

William F. Buckley Jr. on Conservatism: An Interview (Nov. 19, 2007)

Q: Do you feel today that that revolution peaked with Ronald Reagan?

A: Yes, I think it did. Viewed as a straight political trajectory, that, in my judgment, would be correct: It peaked in 1980.

Q: Can you give us a concise definition of conservatism?

A: Conservatism aims to maintain in working order the loyalties of the community to perceived truths and also to those truths which in their judgment have earned universal recognition.

Now this leaves room, of course, for deposition, and there is deposition -- the Civil War being the most monstrous account. But it also urges a kind of loyalty that breeds a devotion to those ideals sufficient to surmount the current crisis. When the Soviet Union challenged America and our set of loyalties, it did so at gunpoint. It became necessary at a certain point to show them our clenched fist and advise them that we were not going to deal lightly with our primal commitment to preserve those loyalties.

That’s the most general definition of conservatism.

Q: Book publisher Henry Regnery once said, “Conservatism is not a fixed and immutable body of dogma, and conservatives inherit from Burke a talent for re-expressing their convictions to fit the times.”

A: I agree with the last part of what you just said, but I’ve forgotten what the first part was.

Q: That “conservatism is not a fixed and immutable body of dogma” …

A: I agree, I agree. It is not.

Q: Yet it does have certain tenets that can’t be thrown overboard. Is that true?

A: Yeah. It is difficult to imagine a regnant conservatism which authorized random mercy killing. Or for that matter, the taking of life lightly. But there are permutations there.

Some conservatives are against capital punishment; others are not. But I think both would agree that conservatism would frown on a flippant attitude toward life which allowed capital punishment to proceed at other than a grave level of investigation.

Q: The prefix “neo” being placed in front of the word “conservative” has given conservatism quite a different spin. Many old-time or traditional conservatives are not too happy with the idea that the United States is trying to spread democracy around the world a la Woodrow Wilson, as is going on in Iraq. Is that something conservatives can be blamed for or is that something that is not conservative in nature?

A: I think it’s the latter. Conservatives can be blamed to the extent that they are thought of having acquiesced in that definition of their goal in a free society. But it has been by no means unanimous in the belief that conservatism consists in that kind of evangelistic extreme.

There are people whom I enormously admire, as perhaps you do, who take a pretty Wilsonian view about the responsibility of states like ours vis-a-vis states that simply reject learning that we consider to be primary, that’s true.

But I don’t think that the existence of the neoconservative movement has the effect of vitiating legitimate conservatism -- or even of putting such pressure on traditional conservatives as to feel that they are missing a great historical tide.

Q: You’ve said that President Bush is not a true conservative -– if that’s a fair repeating of what you said -- primarily because of intervention in Iraq and his extravagant domestic spending.

A: I have distinguished in the past between somebody who “is conservative” and somebody who is “a conservative.”

By somebody who is “a conservative,” I’m referring to people like Ronald Reagan and Milton Friedman, the totality of whose respect for those ideals is such as to say they are guided by them. But if you say of someone, “Well, he’s ‘conservative,’ ” by no means could it be said that he is guided by conservative lodestars. That would include President Eisenhower and President Bush.

In the matter of the incumbent Bush, the challenge is very keen because of the central role that Iraq is playing. It’s a challenge not only in that we are being asked to turn toward neoconservatism in our foreign policy but also in that the acid test is coming in an area of the world in which we haven’t, in my judgment, devised an arresting and persuasive stance.

We don’t really know whether Islam is a consolidated challenge to Western Christianity and, as such, we haven’t, in my judgment, come up with the persuasive weaponry with which to press our own field and deny theirs.

Q: Has conservatism made a bargain with the state or with government power that it should not have made over the last 50 years? Has conservatism forgotten the message of Albert J. Nock’s seminal book, “Our Enemy, the State”?

A: The answer is, “Yes, it has.” Accommodations have been made, the consequences of which we have yet to pay for.

Albert J. Nock, although he could express himself fanatically on these subjects, would certainly have pronounced these as major, major mistakes. So, the answer to your question is, indeed those excesses have been engaged in and they affect the probity of the conservative faith.

Q: You know who Ron Paul is -- the congressman. He’s derided and discounted by many conservatives and his fellow Republicans as a kook. Yet his strong stands in favor of limited constitutional government, lower taxes, more personal freedoms and nonintervention overseas make him in many ways sound like a conservative of old -- a Robert Taft, or a Coolidge kind of conservative in some ways.

A: I agree, yeah.

Q: Is he getting a bum rap?

A: I think that people who cast themselves as presidential contenders are almost universally derided on the grounds that they don’t have manifest orthodox qualifications.

In the case of Ron Paul, he doesn’t have a broad enough or huge following and under the circumstances he becomes rather a quaint ideological aspirant than someone who is realistically seeking for power.

Q: You’ve always had a visible libertarian streak …

A: Yes.

When Barry Goldwater passed away, William F. Buckley Jr. wrote an article in remembrance, offering anecdotes from Goldwater's life. The result is a nice picture of what Buckley meant when he said, "guided by conservative lodestars."

Barry Goldwater, R.I.P. by William F. Buckley Jr.

In 1964 the fear & loathing of Barry Goldwater was startling. Martin Luther King Jr. detected "dangerous signs of Hitlerism in the Goldwater campaign." Joachim Prinz, president of the American Jewish Congress, warned that "a Jewish vote for Goldwater is a vote for Jewish suicide." And George Meany, head of the AFL-CIO, saw power falling into "the hands of union-hating extremists, racial bigots, woolly-minded seekers after visions of times long past." On Election Day Goldwater suffered a devastating defeat, winning only 41 electoral votes.

It was the judgment of the establishment that Goldwater's critique of American liberalism had been given its final exposure on the national political scene. Conservatives could now go back to their little lairs and sing to themselves their songs of nostalgia and fancy ... 16 years later the world was made to stand on its head when Ronald Reagan was swept into office on a platform indistinguishable from what Barry had been preaching.

During the campaign of 1964, Goldwater was our incorruptible standard-bearer, disdainful of any inducements to bloc voting. He even gave the impression that his design was to alienate bloc voters. He didn't mean to do that; he was simply engaging in acts of full political disclosure in an attempt to display the architectural integrity of his views, at once simple in basic design, and individualistic and artful in ornamentation.

What finally lodged in the memory of most Americans, to be sure, wasn't so much Goldwater the Conservative as Goldwater the individualist ... The public's final impression was of a thinker—or, better, a commentator—given primarily to home-grown attachments and individualized formulations. He said what he said because he was what he was. And then too there was his personal way of living and acting. He was venturesome, proud, determined, a bit of a daredevil.

... Though it was only 8 A.M. the doorbell rang—it often rang, tourists cruising by ... Goldwater ignored the bell, continuing his conversation, but instinctively sliding his chair ... That way when Mrs. Goldwater or the maid opened it, the tourist wouldn't spot Goldwater behind the desk. But this morning the large lady had her camera in hand and called out. "Senator Goldwater? Are you there? I want just one picture."

"Okay," Goldwater called out. "Just give me a minute so I can put on my pyjamas."

From that desk, his secretary told me, he had dictated 24,000 letters the year before. The voluminous correspondence went on year after year until his first stroke, three years ago. It didn't matter that he was no longer in the Senate, or contending for one more election. That, simply, was the way he lived, the way he reacted to people. The day after he died a stranger reached me. Did I know what charity Senator Goldwater had designated to receive gifts in his name? She wanted to do something, to give something, because thirty years ago, when she was desperate to hear from her husband in Vietnam, her phone rang early one morning. It was Senator Goldwater, patching in a call from her husband.

He was that way. He was the national figure, Mr. Conservative; but his private renown derived from his character, which even strangers coming to his door with a camera could instantly experience. He never changed, friendly but firm, a very grown-up man with a boyish streak. The guest who asked a provocative question could expect a very direct response ...

He alarmed less and less, drew benevolent attention more and more ... I can guess Goldwater just smiled ... But others, looking on, would venture that, back in the eighteenth century, Barry Goldwater would have been more at home at the Convention in Philadelphia than most modern liberals.