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The Future of Conservatism: Conflict and Consensus in the Post-Reagan Era
Once on the wings of the American political stage, conservatism now plays a leading role in public life, thanks largely to the dynamic legacy of Ronald Reagan. But despite conservatism’s emergence as a powerful political force in the last several decades, misunderstandings abound about its meaning and nature—economically, internationally, philosophically, politically, religiously, and socially. In examining these misunderstandings, The Future of American Conservatism: Consensus and Conflict in the Post-Reagan Era reveals the forces that unite, and the tensions that divide, conservatives today. Edited by noted Reagan scholar Charles W. Dunn, this collection casts conservatism as a collage of complexity that defies easy characterization. Although it is commonly considered an ideology, many of conservatism’s foremost intellectuals dispute this notion. Although it is thought to embody a standard set of principles, its principles frequently conflict. Although many leading intellectuals, liberal and conservative, believe that conservatism lacks a significant tradition in America, it has contributed more to American life than the credit lines indicate. And although it is usually thought to create homogeneity among its adherents, in truth conservatism is marked by a great deal of heterogeneity in both its adherents and its ideas. In fact, conservatism’s complexity may well be its strength—or so the essays gathered here suggest. In painting a bright picture of the prospects for conservatives, The Future of American Conservatism is a timely and thought-provoking volume.
174 pages, Paperback
First published May 15, 2007
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February 12, 2017
I try not to rate a book based primarily on whether I agree with its statements, but when the disagreement is sufficiently jarring, it prevents me from evaluating the book on other terms.
Here we have an anthology editor and ten contributing authors, each one with a masculine name. The editor's introduction namedrops 25 important conservative books and each of those authors, once again, has a masculine name. [The list is copied to the bottom of this review for reference.] I didn't buy the book with the intention to look for conservative women, but their exclusion was so blatant that it distracted me throughout the read. Some of the authors discussed abortion and same-sex marriage — both issues that affect women — and, despite this, there appear to be only three instances of women mentioned by name. In all cases, they were mentioned because of their positions on marriage and family. Those three instances are as follows: Marvin Olasky's essay quotes Prof. Seana Segrue complaining that same-sex marriage is a new institution that will need to be "culturally coddled." Allan C. Carlson's essay said: “Joining them [the Democrats] in the early twentieth century were a group of women sometimes called the social feminists, but better labeled Maternalists. They included Julia Lathrop, Florence Kelley, Frances Perkins, Grace Abott, Mary Anderson, Frances Kellor, Katherine Lenroot, and Molly Dewson.” Carlson also devotes an entire paragraph to "Catholic wife, mother, and lawyer" Phyllis Schafly for her heroism in starting a "pro-family movement" and defeating the Equal Rights Amendment that aimed to enshrine nondiscrimination based on sex.
The writers are certainly entitled to have an agenda, but the writing style sometimes masks it. That is to say, some sentences refer to conservatives as "they" and sometimes as "we." It flips back and forth. It feels to me a little confusing and deceptive.
Dunn's introduction creates the impression that the book is going to be more structurally rigorous than it turns out to be. He says that “the following definition captures the mainstream of conservative thought. Conservatism is the defense of inherited political, economic, religious, and social traditions from the forces of abrupt change, based upon the belief that to maintain continuity and stability in society, established customs, laws, and mores should guide change.” He says he presents a “conservative intellectual synthesis” in the form of “ten canons” that were exemplified by Ronald Reagan. These are: “continuity,” “authority,” “community,” “deity,” “duty or personal responsibility,” “democracy,” “property and its ownership,” “liberty” [as “significantly more important to the vitality of society” than “equality”], “meritocracy,” and “antipathy to communism abroad and [to] a more intrusive government at home.”
But what actually ends up happening is that there are random offensive, stultifying generalizations about anyone who is not "conservative," like this from Harvey C. Mansfield's essay: “As progressives liberals are too hard, as relativists they are too soft. Conservatives are both more tolerant and more resistant. They must help out their big brother liberals, who are weaker than conservatives in mind and spirit.” And this from Peter Augustine Lawler's essay: "All non-Western ways of life tend to be judgmental and therefore tyrannical when it comes to certain fundamental human choices — such as who to have sex with and why." It is unclear from context if the phrase "judgmental and therefore tyrannical" is meant to reflect his personal opinion or the opinions of the mythical relativists; neither seems to make sense.
On the subject of same-sex marriage, Marvin Olasky says that “students need to be reeducated to see as regular what almost all instinctively recognize as irregular" and then predicts that “the moral authority of religious institutions is undermined in the eyes of the public who are encouraged to view uncompromising faiths as unreasonable.” These two comments are in tension; if same-sex marriage is instinctively resisted, for what do we need organized religion to counsel us against it? If organized religion needs to preserve its reputation for "moral authority," doesn't that reveal its authority to be every bit as manufactured as the state's?
Throughout the book, there is unresolved (and sometimes unaddressed) tension over whether moral facts derive from human nature which is possibly independent of any God or whether it comes from divine command, that is, from God's supposed intentions for humans. It is tricky to reconcile the two sources of moral law, and simply to name both is to hedge one’s bets.
Lawler has an essay on "relativism"; I'm always interested to see how different people define this word. He says that relativism leads to the belief that "one 'value system' is finally as good as another" because values are "subjective or private — mere preferences that cannot be judged" and that relativism may be "the real enemy of liberty and virtue." He acknowledges that this approach has its limits, as intellectuals rarely extend such a nonjudgmental attitude "to opinions about race, class, gender, or even sexual orientation." This is not easily resolvable, and the essay ends up here:
Maybe those are universal human susceptibilities, but in that case it might be better to write about oneself. It's a lot to pin to an amorphous group of unidentified "them" who seem to be best tagged with the label "not conservative like me."
There was some important American history in this book that I would have liked to appreciate, but I was too distracted by the half-completed arguments for an ideological agenda I do not share and have not yet been persuaded to share.
The reading list provided by the editor:
1944, Friedrich von Hayek, Road to Serfdom
1948, Richard Weaver, Ideas Have Consequences
1949, Ludwig von Mises, Human Action
1949, Peter Viereck, Conservatism Revisited
1950, Lionel Trilling, The Liberal Imagination
1951, William F. Buckley, God and Man at Yale
1952, Eric Vogelin, The New Science of Politics
1953, Russell Kirk, The Conservative Mind
1953, Leo Strauss, Natural Right and History
1953, Robert Nisbet, The Quest for Community
1955, Clinton Rossiter, Conservatism in America: The Thankless Persuasion
1962, Milton Friedman, Capitalism and Freedom
1962, James Buchanan and Gordon Tullock, The Calculus of Consent
1965, Forrest McDonald, E Pluribus Unum
1970, Edward Banfield, The Unheavenly City
1978, Harvey Mansfield, The Spirit of Liberalism
1981, George Gilder, Wealth and Poverty
1981, Herbert Storing, What the Anti-Federalists Were For
1983, Francis Schaeffer, How Should We Then Live?
1984, Richard Neuhaus, The Naked Public Square
1984, Charles Murray, Losing Ground
1987, Allan Bloom, The Closing of the American Mind
1987, E. D. Hirsch, Cultural Literacy
1988, Stanley Jaki, The Absolute Beneath the Relative
1991, Shelby Steele, The Content of Our Character
Here we have an anthology editor and ten contributing authors, each one with a masculine name. The editor's introduction namedrops 25 important conservative books and each of those authors, once again, has a masculine name. [The list is copied to the bottom of this review for reference.] I didn't buy the book with the intention to look for conservative women, but their exclusion was so blatant that it distracted me throughout the read. Some of the authors discussed abortion and same-sex marriage — both issues that affect women — and, despite this, there appear to be only three instances of women mentioned by name. In all cases, they were mentioned because of their positions on marriage and family. Those three instances are as follows: Marvin Olasky's essay quotes Prof. Seana Segrue complaining that same-sex marriage is a new institution that will need to be "culturally coddled." Allan C. Carlson's essay said: “Joining them [the Democrats] in the early twentieth century were a group of women sometimes called the social feminists, but better labeled Maternalists. They included Julia Lathrop, Florence Kelley, Frances Perkins, Grace Abott, Mary Anderson, Frances Kellor, Katherine Lenroot, and Molly Dewson.” Carlson also devotes an entire paragraph to "Catholic wife, mother, and lawyer" Phyllis Schafly for her heroism in starting a "pro-family movement" and defeating the Equal Rights Amendment that aimed to enshrine nondiscrimination based on sex.
The writers are certainly entitled to have an agenda, but the writing style sometimes masks it. That is to say, some sentences refer to conservatives as "they" and sometimes as "we." It flips back and forth. It feels to me a little confusing and deceptive.
Dunn's introduction creates the impression that the book is going to be more structurally rigorous than it turns out to be. He says that “the following definition captures the mainstream of conservative thought. Conservatism is the defense of inherited political, economic, religious, and social traditions from the forces of abrupt change, based upon the belief that to maintain continuity and stability in society, established customs, laws, and mores should guide change.” He says he presents a “conservative intellectual synthesis” in the form of “ten canons” that were exemplified by Ronald Reagan. These are: “continuity,” “authority,” “community,” “deity,” “duty or personal responsibility,” “democracy,” “property and its ownership,” “liberty” [as “significantly more important to the vitality of society” than “equality”], “meritocracy,” and “antipathy to communism abroad and [to] a more intrusive government at home.”
But what actually ends up happening is that there are random offensive, stultifying generalizations about anyone who is not "conservative," like this from Harvey C. Mansfield's essay: “As progressives liberals are too hard, as relativists they are too soft. Conservatives are both more tolerant and more resistant. They must help out their big brother liberals, who are weaker than conservatives in mind and spirit.” And this from Peter Augustine Lawler's essay: "All non-Western ways of life tend to be judgmental and therefore tyrannical when it comes to certain fundamental human choices — such as who to have sex with and why." It is unclear from context if the phrase "judgmental and therefore tyrannical" is meant to reflect his personal opinion or the opinions of the mythical relativists; neither seems to make sense.
On the subject of same-sex marriage, Marvin Olasky says that “students need to be reeducated to see as regular what almost all instinctively recognize as irregular" and then predicts that “the moral authority of religious institutions is undermined in the eyes of the public who are encouraged to view uncompromising faiths as unreasonable.” These two comments are in tension; if same-sex marriage is instinctively resisted, for what do we need organized religion to counsel us against it? If organized religion needs to preserve its reputation for "moral authority," doesn't that reveal its authority to be every bit as manufactured as the state's?
Throughout the book, there is unresolved (and sometimes unaddressed) tension over whether moral facts derive from human nature which is possibly independent of any God or whether it comes from divine command, that is, from God's supposed intentions for humans. It is tricky to reconcile the two sources of moral law, and simply to name both is to hedge one’s bets.
Lawler has an essay on "relativism"; I'm always interested to see how different people define this word. He says that relativism leads to the belief that "one 'value system' is finally as good as another" because values are "subjective or private — mere preferences that cannot be judged" and that relativism may be "the real enemy of liberty and virtue." He acknowledges that this approach has its limits, as intellectuals rarely extend such a nonjudgmental attitude "to opinions about race, class, gender, or even sexual orientation." This is not easily resolvable, and the essay ends up here:
"Some of our conservative anti-relativists, such as Allan Bloom, have held that this relativistic talk and survivalist behavior provide evidence that sophisticated Americans have become flat-souled, that they have surrendered somehow their distinctively human longings, that they are no longer moved by love and death. They are clever, competent specialists, but they are no longer fit to be philosophers or poets or theologians. And they are virtually incapable, as the novelist Tom Wolfe complains, of practicing the stoic virtue of proud, serene indifference to fluctuations in fortune, or the martial virtue of courage in the face of death. They have lapsed into something like what Tocqueville calls apathetic individualism, unmoved by the heart-enlarging passions that connect them to large families, lots of friends, country, God, or the truth."
Maybe those are universal human susceptibilities, but in that case it might be better to write about oneself. It's a lot to pin to an amorphous group of unidentified "them" who seem to be best tagged with the label "not conservative like me."
There was some important American history in this book that I would have liked to appreciate, but I was too distracted by the half-completed arguments for an ideological agenda I do not share and have not yet been persuaded to share.
The reading list provided by the editor:
1944, Friedrich von Hayek, Road to Serfdom
1948, Richard Weaver, Ideas Have Consequences
1949, Ludwig von Mises, Human Action
1949, Peter Viereck, Conservatism Revisited
1950, Lionel Trilling, The Liberal Imagination
1951, William F. Buckley, God and Man at Yale
1952, Eric Vogelin, The New Science of Politics
1953, Russell Kirk, The Conservative Mind
1953, Leo Strauss, Natural Right and History
1953, Robert Nisbet, The Quest for Community
1955, Clinton Rossiter, Conservatism in America: The Thankless Persuasion
1962, Milton Friedman, Capitalism and Freedom
1962, James Buchanan and Gordon Tullock, The Calculus of Consent
1965, Forrest McDonald, E Pluribus Unum
1970, Edward Banfield, The Unheavenly City
1978, Harvey Mansfield, The Spirit of Liberalism
1981, George Gilder, Wealth and Poverty
1981, Herbert Storing, What the Anti-Federalists Were For
1983, Francis Schaeffer, How Should We Then Live?
1984, Richard Neuhaus, The Naked Public Square
1984, Charles Murray, Losing Ground
1987, Allan Bloom, The Closing of the American Mind
1987, E. D. Hirsch, Cultural Literacy
1988, Stanley Jaki, The Absolute Beneath the Relative
1991, Shelby Steele, The Content of Our Character
August 27, 2023
“The Future of American Conservatism,” published when the Reagan era was more than just a quaint memory, and before the movement was riven by right-wing populism, examines the forces that united, and divided, conservatives in the early 2000s. Edited by Charles W. Dunn, this eclectic collection presents a mosaic of conservative views.
Despite the inclusion of several compelling essays, it is clear that this period lacked a polemicist capable of bridging theory and praxis. Notably absent is a thinker akin to a Frank S. Meyer, who detractors notwithstanding, was able to coalesce disparate thinkers and constituencies to create a viable political movement in the post-war era..
An unapologetic individualist, Meyer argued that freedom is the proper end of politics. The State had only three legitimate functions: national defense, the maintenance of domestic order, and the administration of justice. The promotion of virtue-albeit good- was not the purview of the State; in short, Meyer held, the political end of man is freedom, the end of man as man is virtue.
That said, Meyer fully understood the significance of the great tradition of the West. As John P. East has pointed out, Meyer, despite his libertarian sympathies, affirmed a Christian ontology. For Meyer, “ truth, of course, is symbolized in the Incarnation: it is through this symbol that the individual becomes the central moral entity.”
As Meyer unequivocally stated “ moral and spiritual perfection can only be pursued by finite men through a series of choices, in which every moment is a new beginning; and freedom which makes those choices possible is itself a condition without which the moral and spiritual ends would be meaningless.”
Dunn’s book , while thought provoking, failed to elicit much confidence in the future of conservatism at the time of its publication. In the interim, the fiscal crisis of the state has deepened, the administrative state has burgeoned and become more intrusive, and our elites have grown ever more moralistic and litigious in proclaiming their non judgementalism. This is an uneven collection, but it will be of interest to students of American politics.
Despite the inclusion of several compelling essays, it is clear that this period lacked a polemicist capable of bridging theory and praxis. Notably absent is a thinker akin to a Frank S. Meyer, who detractors notwithstanding, was able to coalesce disparate thinkers and constituencies to create a viable political movement in the post-war era..
An unapologetic individualist, Meyer argued that freedom is the proper end of politics. The State had only three legitimate functions: national defense, the maintenance of domestic order, and the administration of justice. The promotion of virtue-albeit good- was not the purview of the State; in short, Meyer held, the political end of man is freedom, the end of man as man is virtue.
That said, Meyer fully understood the significance of the great tradition of the West. As John P. East has pointed out, Meyer, despite his libertarian sympathies, affirmed a Christian ontology. For Meyer, “ truth, of course, is symbolized in the Incarnation: it is through this symbol that the individual becomes the central moral entity.”
As Meyer unequivocally stated “ moral and spiritual perfection can only be pursued by finite men through a series of choices, in which every moment is a new beginning; and freedom which makes those choices possible is itself a condition without which the moral and spiritual ends would be meaningless.”
Dunn’s book , while thought provoking, failed to elicit much confidence in the future of conservatism at the time of its publication. In the interim, the fiscal crisis of the state has deepened, the administrative state has burgeoned and become more intrusive, and our elites have grown ever more moralistic and litigious in proclaiming their non judgementalism. This is an uneven collection, but it will be of interest to students of American politics.
November 14, 2007
This is a mercifully short collection of essays on the future of American conservatism as a political movement. The basic premise is that the conservative movement is a coalition of four ideological positions: libertarianism, neoconservatism, traditionalists, and the Religious Right, and that the coalition is in jeopardy due to the dissolution of the Soviet Union and the success of free-market economics. Opposition to communism was the glue that held the coalition together (Clinton-hatred also helped hold them together after the Cold War.) In the wake of the Cold War and the Bush administration's Wilsonianism, the coalition has been fractured. Most interesting is the article on the Religious Right's responsibility to maintain the coalition. Since I am not a Christian and don't traffic with born-agains, I found it really fascinating, the movement's general conception, going back to the nation's founding, that America is the New Jerusalem. The author of the article, Marvin Olasky, draws on Calvin and official Presbyterian doctrine to justify the acceptance of sin in the public sphere and to not seek the imposition of Protestant Christian morality on the national polity.
July 27, 2011
This edited volume is much better than Peter Berkowitz's Varieties of Conservatism in America. Berkowitz's little book, unfortunately, neglected Protestant evangelical conservatism, and other viewpoints as well. The Future of Conservatism is probably the best one-volume effort at demonstrating the heterogeneous nature of American conservatism.
June 14, 2014
An interesting read about the future of the conservative movement. Bill Kristol's essay in the back of the back is especially interesting. This collection of essays was written before the rise of the tea party movement, so it would be interesting to see what the various writers would say about the conservative movement today.
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