I was fascinated by conservative political philosophy as a teenager. My parents voted Republican, but my youthful rebellion against their views didn’t begin until I went to college.
In my Catholic high school from 1957-1961, almost all my teachers and peers were Democrats, so as a way of establishing my identity, I rebelled against them by reading Barry Goldwater’s Conscience of a Conservative and William Buckley’s Up From Liberalism. When I was 16, I even wrote a letter to Buckley praising his sensible views but suggesting that he could reach more readers by adopting a less intimidating vocabulary. I even (shudder) supported Nixon in 1960.
As a cerebral type, I found conservative ideas of personal responsibility, fiscal prudence, and individual freedom very rational. They were based, after all, on the liberating ideas of the eighteenth-century European Enlightenment we studied in history classes. Even my liberal priest teachers valued the principle of subsidiarity which asserted that problems should be solved from the bottom up rather than the top down. Local or state solutions to problems were preferable to national ones.
Buckley, in particular, favored a brand of conservatism that was much like nineteenth century classical liberalism. Individual businesses should be free of all but the most necessary government control. He did not try to limit government protection of and support for people through social security and unemployment compensation. Buckley wrote that “conservatism cannot be blind, or give the appearance of being blind, to the dismaying spectacle of unemployment, or any other kind of suffering.”
Neither Buckley nor other conservative leaders of the period from 1950 to 1980 saw their Democratic opponents as “enemies.” He was friends with Democratic party activist Allard K. Lowenstein as well as with liberal economist J. K. Galbraith and Democratic presidential candidate George McGovern. His principles (and perhaps his Catholic religion) allowed him to admit it when he realized he was wrong.
In the 1950s he opposed civil rights legislation but later admitted that it was needed. He admired Martin Luther King.
Significantly, the conservatives of my youth were found in both major political parties, as were liberals. Members of Congress talked and worked with each other across the aisle, and even shared meals and tennis games. This began to change in the 1980s, though Ronald Reagan and House majority leader Tip O’Neal could still work together on taxes and social security issues.
But in the mid-1990s, Newt Gingrich told members of the Republican caucus to consider the Democrats enemies instead of opponents. He was not rebuked for this by his party and “bipartisan agreement” (we used to call it “give and take”) declined and then disappeared during the past decade. I suspect that President Biden’s attempt to restore luster to this term will be no more successful than was attempts by President Obama.
Today’s Republicans are no longer conservatives as that term has been used in American political thought. An exception is David Brooks, who spoke in a recent New York Times opinion column (2-18-21) to a young Republican friend. In Brook’s words, his friend needed to engage “in a struggle to create a Republican Party that is democratic and not authoritarian, patriotic and not nationalistic, conservative and not reactionary, benevolent and not belligerent, intellectually self-confident and not apocalyptic and dishonest.”
To make this happen, Brooks wrote, his friend would have to dedicate himself to certain “ideas that are at the heart of current conservatism.” Among these he counted the threat from China, the need “to restrain the power of cultural elites and centralized government” and to “build an economy that functions for the working class.”
It would also help, Brooks declared, to “understand what was on the mind of actual voters.”
Brooks doesn’t believe that GOP has to stand for “Great Opportunist Party,” one composed of leaders more interested in having power for themselves than in using it to govern for all Americans.
I feel sure that conservative leaders of my youth, like Senators Everett Dirksen and John Sherman Cooper (and even Buckley’s Democratic opponents and friends), would support David Brook’s attempt to “salvage,” as he puts it, the Republican Party.
Electing some principled conservatives would also help in this effort.
One reply on “Where are the Conservatives?”
Egad! I never knew you voted for Nixon! That changes everything! (grin)
Yeah, I read Brooks’ column, too. The only problem is that the war on moderates and responsible legislators willing to reason and compromise within the Republican Party is intensifying, not easing up. The ever-Trumpists, combined with the rightward push allowed by gerrymandered districts, means that we are likely to see ever more radical right people elected from those conservative safe districts for some time to come.
IF — and it’s a big if — we are ever to return to a system where both parties are responsible again, I believe it will take two things above all:
First, a drastic reform of our electoral process, and not the one the Republicans keep trying to create, which is essentially where voting becomes ever more difficult and gerrymandering allows candidates to select their voters.
No, what must be done is to end the role that big money plays, above all, in the electoral process. Then we must end gerrymandering forever, using a process similar to what my home state of Iowa has been using for 50 years in which partisan politics is shut out from making such decisions. Next, we should eliminate partisan primaries, the main effect of which currently is to allow ever-more right-wing candidates to bump off reasonable, non-ideological centrists. And a whole host of other things, too, like making election day a national holiday where people who struggle to get through the time-window allowed by their jobs will be able to vote as easily as the wealthy non-worker.
Second, we must pass legislation that directly effects the majority of Americans, and I think Biden understands this. The Republicans have lost interest in passing anything except lowering taxes for the wealthy; they have blocked progressive legislation — meaning, moderate and supported by substantial majorities of American citizens — for the past 20 years. If we can once again demonstrate that government IS capable of helping the rest of us — the unemployed, those unable to pay mortgages or rent because of the pandemic, those seeking affordable health care, addressing the long-deferred needs of our infrastructure, and repairing and upgrading our badly ignored public spaces — then I think we can begin to moderate the rhetoric by pointing to actual accomplishments, rather than to continue to be mired in ideological swamps.
Take care, Wolfer!
Greg