The Death of American Conservatism?

Sam Tanenhaus has a brilliant essay in this week's New Republic (not yet available online) about the slow, sad decline of American conservatism as a philosophy. If Andrew Sullivan wonders why his book The Conservative Soul caused an ocean of yawns on the right when it debuted months ago, it's because our body politic has had little need for the Oakeshottian dichotomy between enterprise and civil associations. (Andrew's native Tories evidently have little need for one these days, too.)

Conservatism as a galvanizing movement has always been one of negation rather than positive assertion. Leo Strauss, discoursing on the favored twin in Isaiah Berlin's Gemini category of liberties, referred to "negative liberty" — the blessed absence of state compulsion — as "liberty with a minus sign." American conservatism has always been ideology with a minus sign. The cold war gave it its reason for being; it was religious in both the literal and metaphoric senses of the term, with the god-fearing waging their "twilight struggle" against the godless. As Tanenhaus writes, American triumphalism, which was postwar conservatism avant la lettre, was a "purifying doctrine" pitted against the "Soviets' derived from Marx by way of Lenin," yet it consisted of… "what exactly?" Nothing. It didn't need to consist of anything beyond a transcendent and apocalyptic repudiation of "Marx by way of Lenin."

So if George Bush has failed to take up the mantle of Whittaker Chambers — correctly if conveniently identified by Tanenhaus, Chambers' biographer, as the founder of American conservatism — it is because Bush has failed to understand the true menace of Islamism the way Chambers did that of Communism. (That not many Republican strategists were once Kalashkinov-toting jihadists who eventually saw the light may delay further the necessary comprehension.)

I'm not sure I buy Tanenhaus's thesis that conservatism is on the wane, but I do agree that Chambers is still worth taking seriously if for no other reason than those farcical defenders of Alger Hiss continue to view him as a threat. Here's a post I wrote a few months ago about tragic Baltimore bullfrog of the twentieth century:

"I have sometimes been asked at this point: What went on in the minds of those Americans, all highly educated men, that made it possible for them to betray their country? Did none of them suffer a crisis of conscience? The question presupposes that whoever asks it has still failed to grasp that Communists mean exactly what they have been saying for a hundred years: they regard any government that is not Communist, including their own, merely as the political machine of a class whose power they have organized, expressly to overthrow by all means, including violence. Therefore, ultimately the problem of espionage never presents itself to them as a problem of conscience, but as a problem of operations. Making due allowance for the differences of intelligence, nerve, background and political development among the individual men involved… the answer to the question must still be: no problem of conscience was then involved. For the Communists, the problem of conscience had been settled long before, at the moment when they accepted the program and discipline of the Communist Party." — Whittaker Chambers, Witness

I shall never forget the feeling of a missed opportunity when I began my first job out of college at the Queens Museum of Art. A few months before my hire, Alger Hiss's son had been invited to speak at the museum about how his poor, beloved papa was turned into a falsely accused victim of a national bugbear responsible for the insidious advent of Joseph McCarthy and the age of the "loyalty oath." It's easy to trick yourself out as a martyr — or, in Hiss, Jr.'s case, a vicarious one — when every schoolchild has been taught that America's relationship to Communism was nothing more than a series of reactionary witch-hunts. There was no real threat to national security, Communists did not infiltrate the State Department. And if you need moral surety on this question, just look who interrogated Hiss — Richard Nixon.

Political myths die hard. We now know the following about Hiss: He was a spy attached to the Washington "Ware group," who copied sensitive State Department documents and passed them along to Moscow. (His typewriter was matched with the ink on the documents, microfilms of which were buried for years in a pumpkin on Chambers' Maryland farm.) Though never a CP member (that wouldn't have looked good on his government job application), Hiss volunteered his automobile for above-ground Party use, despite being told that this was irregular and dangerous — an underground agent was not supposed to let anything that could be traced back to him come out in the open and tinctured Red. Hiss was just that eager to advance the struggle. He also thought Franklin Roosevelt, whom he publicly adulated, was a craven bourgeois guilty of resuscitating capitalism just as the revolution looked to be imminent. Whittaker Chambers, who endured no small amount of obloquy and was the target of decades-long character assassination, was telling the truth. Richard Nixon was right.