The Chimera of Conservatism

The rise of conservatism among American intellectuals has provoked ironic comment here and there but few attempts to explore its sources in the condition of society or to articulate its living function or to surmise its fate.

Despite the recent attempts of Russell Kirk, Clinton Rossiter and others to suggest some canons, neo-conservatism behaves like the Cheshire cat when one examines it for a common body of doctrines and assumptions. What is “new” and unique about the movement is not at any rate doctrinal, for the doctrines have been around for a long time, but the way a multitude of diverse elements are so easily assembled and identified as “conservative.” What was formerly a chaos of trends (High and low Whiggery; laissez-faire economics as well as corporate syndicalism; all sorts of aristocratic, oligarchic, anti-democratic, xenophobic and quasi-fascist impulses) now becomes an orderly array under the arranging hand of conservatism. The unity in this farrago of notions and sentiments is simply a unity of function.

Neo-conservatism is a transitional phenomenon, modulating to rapidly changing social and political forces. Critical analysis of it is important because it reveals the direction of its movement and the forces that sustain it, but it will have little effect on the movement itself, the conservative mind being largely impervious to criticism.

Critics have been misled by the content of conservative dogmatics; it seems a waste of time to enter its soggy domain and struggle with ideas that ooze away from the bright light of criticism. Others have been misled by the faddish characteristics of the movement and the comic agility with which some frivolous minds have leaped into it. Yet, even though conservative ideas have little relevance to contemporary reality, they do correspond in function to a grave social need. In the pages that follow I propose to discuss the New Conservatism not so much in terms of its ideas—that, by now, has been done in DISSENT and elsewhere—but in terms of its significance in the American intellectual world.

The social function of the conservative movement, quite apart from the various subjective intentions of its intellectual defenders, is to lubricate the machinery of acquiescence. It provides a rhetoric of assent and an organized center from which to attack radical and, when necessary, liberal independence. From some conservative quarters one hears occasional mutterings of disaffection with the welfare-corporate-garrison state: Louis Bromfield lashes out at foreign policy, immigration practices, and the growing domination of political life by the military; Russell Kirk grumbles over the ravages of industrial capitalism. Yet Bromfield is quick to be thankful for the putative wisdom of the present administration, and Kirk bows his head in piety before the awesome mysteries of Society. The rare whispers of conserva...