Sunday, June 10, 2012
Sunday Question for Conservatives
Who are the overlooked and unappreciated conservative heroes? I don't really mean Edmund Burke...I'm thinking about the heroes of contemporary, mainstream movement conservative history. I head about Ronald Reagan and Barry Goldwater...and that's about it. Buckley. Who doesn't get a lot of attention, but should?
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Robert Welch, Fred Koch, Revilo Oliver and the other founders of the John Birch Society. When the extremism and the silly political battles are set aside, the thought and the people coming out of the JBS were and are fundamental to modern movement conservatism. A survey of the JBS's notable positions over the years (positions, not its conspiracy theories) encompasses pretty much every major important position of modern movement conservatism, and little that isn't at home within the movement.
ReplyDeleteAnd, the Society itself is becoming more and more mainstream in modern movement conservatism. But it's not the Society that's changed, or not much; it's movement conservatism that has finally embraced it.
I'm not a conservative, but I have always admired and respected Russell Kirk. His book The Conservative Mind (1953) is the foundational text of modern conservatism. He influenced Buckley, wrote more effectively about political principles than Buckley, and wrote some excellent ghost stories as well.
ReplyDeleteHe always thought of conservatism not as an ideology but as the art of the possible, and in his later book, "The Politics of Prudence" (1993), he reserves some of his harshest criticisms for the neoconservatives, whom he fears may soon transform the movement into an ideology, and who, by their naive advocacy of the enforced exportation of "democratic capitalism," may enmire the USA in military conflicts just as deadly and debilitating as Lyndon Johnson's Vietnam.
Not a conservative, but it should go without saying that Robert Taft is severely overlooked. He led the Republican charge against the New Deal and co-sponsored Taft-Hartley, guaranteeing that labour would never against acquire as much power as it had when the Republicans were shut out of federal office in the 1930s and 1940s. His politics were continued by Goldwater, who took over as leader of the wing of conservative Republicans. As a coincidence, John Boehner hails from the same part of Ohio as Taft. One can draw a through line from Taft to Paulist palaeoconservatism.
ReplyDeleteAnd since we're on the topic of palaeoconservatism, Henry Cabot Lodge was a generation ahead of Taft, holding the line against the League of Nations and Treaty of Versailles, denying Wilson a capstone victory and ensuring the United States remained isolationist until Pearl Harbour.
Bill Buckley, for starting National Review. Hard to imagine conservatism since the 1950's without NR!
ReplyDeleteHenry Regnery for Regnery Books, giving conservative intellectuals a non-crackpot venue for books.
Ayn Rand, for Libertarianism.
Dave Nolan, for starting the Libertarian Party.
Milton Friedman, and Friedrich von Hayek for economic contributions -- the one intellectual field in which conservatism has made a contribution recognized one both left and right.
Robert Nozick, for Anarchy State and Utopia, which helped make some strands of conservatism respectible in modern academia.
As for the prior suggestions, I'd agree with Robert Welch being a seminal figure. Not the hero we'd like to claim perhaps, but ... yeah, he shaped a lot of views.
About Russell Kirk, I'm less enthusiastic. He appeals to some intellectuals, but he was a pretty dated figure by the 1960's. In the light of history, he'll be seen as one of NR's spear carriers, something like John Chamberlain, Brent Bozell, Frank Meyers, James Burnham, Whitaker Chambers, and others. Unfair, perhaps, but history isn't fair.
Finally, Adolf Hitler and associates, for setting pretty stringent limits on just what sort of things modern conservatism should NOT become part of.
Not a conservative, but I would have to throw a flag on Ayn Rand. Not that she isn't a conservative hero--she is. But, she certainly isn't unappreciated.
DeleteHayek is more influential, both for his economic and political ideas. Ironically, he also refused to call himself a conservative: http://www.lewrockwell.com/orig6/hayek1.html
Delete"Henry Regnery for Regnery Books, giving conservative intellectuals a non-crackpot venue for books."
ReplyDeleteI have to ask whether this was a serious comment, given the astounding array of crackpots and frauds that Regnery has published over the years.
Among historical figures, I would strongly agree with Robert Taft being of paramount importance. Without his sponsorship of the Taft-Hartley Act in 1947, crafting the bill to get nearly unanimous support from Southern Democrats as well as Republicans to override Truman's veto, economic conservatism would have had almost no chance in the polictical arena. Section 14(b) of Taft-Hartley, forbidding closed shops and permitting the states to forbid union shops (and today 23 states, including most recently Indiana, have adopted right-to-work laws prohibiting usion shops) has undermined private sector unions by allowing competitors in right-to-work states to undercut unionized firms' prices.
ReplyDeleteAmong current conservative writers, I think Steve Sailer, who blogs at isteve.blogspot.com, is the most overlooked. He is one conservative writer who has mastered Excel, and his quantitative analyses of voting behavior, racial differences in IQ, developments in genetic research, and similar topics are consistently insightful and far from the beaten path of Fox News and Republican Party talking points.
Can someone tell me why 'racial differences in IQ' is such a popular hobby-horse among conservatives? What political position is it supposed to advance?
DeleteWhite supremacy covers for white inadequacy. It's also a way to try to externally validate feelings of cultural superiority. Specifically, it gives white working class something to look down upon black people with. Why else would such people support positions that obviously screw them? In other countries less riven by race, conservatives don't go to this well as hard and certainly don't retrench on the parts of the welfare state that help out their working class supporters just to spite the face of minorities.
DeleteI'll throw in some underappreciated British names - Andrew Bonar Law, Michael Oakeshott, Enoch Powell, Keith Joseph.
ReplyDelete