THE AGONY OF VICTORY
Conservatism after the Cold War
Jeroen van der Westen
Student Number: 10280626
MA Thesis in American Studies
Supervisor: George Blaustein
26-06-2018
Abstract
This thesis explores the state of the American conservative movement in the period 1989-1991, when one of its binding factors, anti-communism, loses its urgency with the fall of the Berlin Wall. This period is studied through the eyes of the flagship journal of conservatism,
National Review: A Journal of Fact and Opinion, and examines how sectarian tensions
be-tween paleoconservatives and neoconservatives gained prominence in this period. This study claims that the dominant position conservatism had at the start of the 1990’s, coming out of the Reagan era and America ostensibly winning the Cold War, allowed for a rare degree of trospection in a movement that had been focused more on an external threat before. This in-trospection was focused on what the source of American values were, because fostering American values was to be at the heart of the conservative agenda for the 1990’s. First we can see a disagreement on whether religious values or classical-liberal values were to be fostered in areas where they are in contention. Secondly that those focussing on religious values ran into the question: which religious values? This thesis then further explores how this was an in-fluencing factor in the allegations of anti-Semitism that arose around the Gulf War.
Table of Contents
Abstract... 1
Introduction... 3
Battle for the Nineties... 11
Agenda for the Nineties... 11
In Search of Opposition... 17
Formulating a Positive Agenda... 20
Conflict turned Inward: What Americans values to defend...23
The Coming Out Controversy... 24
A Straussian Debate... 27
Legacy of the Enlightenment... 31
The End of History?... 34
Judeo-Christian split... 39
Gulf War as Benchmark for Conservatism... 39
In Search of Anti-Semitism... 42
Judaeo-Christian Tradition or just Christian Tradition?...47
Conclusion... 53
Sources... 55
Primary Sources... 55
Introduction
In 1955 National Review declared as their conservative mission statement that they were going to stand athwart history and yell stop. William F. Buckley and a couple of like-minded conservatives founded a magazine to let their conservative voices be heard. National Review:
A Journal of Fact and Opinion rapidly became the best-selling conservative magazine in the
United States.1 In 1989 some thought that history finally had come to a stop, Francis
Fukuyama declared the end of history.2 The end of the Cold War meant the victory of
Western Liberal values over communism. National Review had always defined its conservatism by the fusionist philosophy as attributed to one of its editors, Frank Meyer. Fusionism is a combination of traditionalism (social conservatism), libertarianism (economic and political conservatism) and anti-communism.3 In 1989 the anti-communists got what they
wanted. First the Berlin Wall fell and with it Soviet control of multiple Eastern-European countries. Then, two years later, the Soviet Union itself fell.
There is a gap in the historiography of conservatism that this thesis will close partially. In this thesis I will study how discussions about conservatism changed in National Review after the end of the Cold War. The historiography of modern American conservatism is roughly divided in two parts. One part of the scholarship focuses on the rise of conservatism and the Republican party adopting the label Conservative. This period is roughly from 1945 to 1988, starting with Republicans like Taft opposing the New Deal and culminating in the presidency of Ronald Reagan.4 A lot of scholars studied the influence of William F. Buckley
Jr. and the magazine he founded, National Review, in this period. The other part of the scholarship on conservatism focuses on aspects of the George W. Bush administration. This administration was defined by two elements of conservatism and historians were trying to explain the emergence of these particular sectarian elements. One was the invasion of Iraq and this was studied by looking at the neoconservatives that are deemed responsible for this invasion. Secondly there is the more openly religious aspect of the Bush presidency. One of his earliest acts was the founding of the White House Office of Faith-Based and Community 1 Editors, “Our Mission Statement”, National Review (November 19 1955) 3.
2 Francis Fukuyama, ‘The End of History?’, The National Interest no.16 (Summer 1989) 3-18.
3 William F. Buckley Jr., Did you Ever See a Dream Walking? : American Conservative Thought in the 20th Century
(New York 1970) XXXIII.
4 David Farber’s book The Rise and fall of Modern American Conservatism: A short history (Princeton 2010) is a good example of a book defining modern American conservatism. The Conservative Intellectual movement in America since 1945 (New York 1976) by G.H Nash is one of the earliest scholarly works that defined conser-vatism after 1945 as a modern period.
Initiatives (OFBCI). This was part of his so called Compassionate Conservatism. Scholars approached this subject by looking at the religious right. Since National Review was
associated with un-hyphenated conservatism it was not often studied in this time period and when it was, it was only looked at by focusing on only the neoconservatives or only the Christian traditionalists who wrote in the magazine not on the total spectrum of conservative writers in National Review. There is a skip from fusionist conservatism that defined academic research on conservatism for the period until 1988 towards mono-dimensional studies of sectarian elements such as, neoconservatism and paleoconservatism, that characterize the period after 1988.
In the last ten years there have been numerous attempts at writing a general history of the modern American conservative movement. Historian David Farber attempted to describe this movement by giving an analysis of six major figures in the conservative movement in his book The Rise and Fall of Modern American Conservatism: A Short History. He argued that modern American conservatism was a reaction against Roosevelt’s New Deal, he wrote his first chapter about Robert A. Taft as an example of someone who had named himself a Conservative in his opposition to The New Deal. Farber argued that the emergence of modern conservatives such as Taft was mostly for economic reasons. The next chapter on William F. Buckley argued that he created a space in the public arena for conservatism and that Buckley bound educated religious Americans, who had been displeased since the 1920’s after the Scopes trial, to economic conservatism.5 Farber’s focus was on social and economic policies,
he did not focus on foreign policy.6 Farber’s book jumped from Ronald Reagan to George W.
Bush. He did analyse what had changed between the Reagan presidency and the George W. Bush presidency, but his book did not analyse how this change came about.
Political scientist James R. Kurth used roughly the same periods as Farber, he also pointed to 1945 as the starting point for the modern conservative movement. He used the fusionist trinity and described conservative history with those three as separate strands. He subdivided his paragraphs with themes such as economic conservatism, social conservatism and what he called “national security conservatism”.7 His chapters followed the same logic as
Farber’s, the chapter on Reagan was immediately followed by the chapter on George W. Bush largely skipping the 1990’s. Furthermore, by the 1970’s Kurth had picked up the
neoconservatives, whom he then equated with national security conservatism. He did not 5David Farber, The Rise and fall of Modern American Conservatism: A short history (Princeton 2010) 46. 6 Ibid. 4.
7 James R., Kurth, “A History of Inherent Contradictions: The Origins and End of American Conservatism” in; Levinson, Stanford V e.a , American Conservatism (New York 2016) 19.
cover the isolationist calls in the 1990’s and furthermore, he largely ignored the effect of the Cold War ending. He also started by calling American conservatism a paradox because it was founded by people who wanted to break away from European institutions.8 What he argued
was that they paradoxically tried to conserve the revolutionary element of classical liberalism. In recent years a couple of books have been published that went beyond the narrative of modern American conservatism and tried to place it in a historiographical and
philosophical context. Political scientist Corey Robin wrote The reactionary mind:
Conservatism from Edmund Burke to Sarah Palin and British philosopher Roger Scruton
wrote Conservatism. Robin argued that conservatism was not a concrete ideology but rather a reaction against change by those who had their power challenged.9 Scruton, a conservative
himself, defended the underlying philosophy of conservatism. Scruton argued that
conservatism arose as an attempt to hold on to the values of kinship and religion in a society where government tried to fill these gaps.10 Both books also talked about the role William F.
Buckley and National Review played in shaping American conservatism. Robin argued against the fusionist roots of American conservatism. He said: “Neither is Conservatism a makeshift fusion of capitalists, Christians and warriors, for that fusion is impelled by a more elemental force- the opposition to the liberation of men and women from the fetters of their superiors, particularly in the private sphere.”11 Scruton disagreed, he did argue that American
conservatism was a different incarnation of conservatism and that Buckley’s National Review was “The most convinced and convincing” of the American magazines.12
In academic scholarship, the period from Reagan to George W. Bush is characterized by the rise of neoconservatives and paleoconservatives. Political scientist Martin Durham’s article “The American Right and the Framing of 9/11” is indicative of this shift in focus and it showed how National Review was overlooked in the period after the Cold War. Durham wrote this article about how the American right changed after 9/11 but in order to do so he also gave a history of conservatism leading up to 9/11. He started his history of the American right by giving the standard explanation of the movement since the 1960’s where National Review and its fusionist inception took a leading role.13 He then jumped ahead in time and used National
8 Kurth, “A history” 13.
9 Corey Robin, The reactionary mind: Conservatism from Edmund Burke to Sarah Palin ( New York 2011) 4. 10 Roger Scruton, Conservatism (London 2017) 5.
11 Robin, Reactionary Mind 16. 12 Scruton, Conservatism 133.
13 Martin Durham, “The American Right and the Framing of 9/11, The political Quarterly” , 17.(January 2004) 17.
Review as a source for the state of conservatism during the Iraq war.14 When talking about
National Review during the Iraq War he noticed the emergence of split groups of
conservatives, paleoconservatives, neoconservatives, paleolibertarians. For the period in between Reagan and the Iraq war however, he did not study National Review but rather magazines with an outspoken sectarian conservative opinion. For example, he used the neoconservative magazine Commentary to study the neoconservatives in the period 1988-2003. He did not consider how, in this period, these sects emerged from under the broader conservative banner, represented by a magazine like National Review.
Historian Brian Farmer’s chapter ‘from Bush to Bush’ covered the time period by looking at the political developments in Washington. The only effect of the end of the Cold War he mentioned was that Clinton provided conservatives with the enemy they lost.15 This
chapter did not consider the immediate effect of the end of the Cold War before Clinton even took office. Corey Robin had a chapter that was based on interviews with Buckley. Robin summarized the post-Cold War period as the period where there was talk about the end of history and where conservatives had no real identity except for dull market joie de vivre.16 He
also quoted William Kristol, the prominent neoconservative, saying that conservatism missed an enemy. Robin described that in this period some conservatives turned left because they felt disenchanted with the focus on soulless capitalism.
Historians who focused on the neoconservatives did not use the same periodization for the emergence of neoconservatism as those that wrote broader histories of conservatism. Historian Gary Dorrien described how the neoconservatives transitioned from Hawkish democrats to integrated conservatives. Ronald Reagan was the first Republican president many neoconservatives voted for. Gary Dorrien is also one of the few historians that did a study of National Review in the period from 1989 to 2001. He specifically argued that
National Review always had been quite unusually hawkish for a conservative publication. He
attributed this to James Burnham.17 Dorrien further argued that National Review picked the
side of the neoconservatives in 1997 by appointing Rich Lowry as its new editor.18 Justin
Vaïsse argued against the hawkishness of National Review. Vaïsse’s main argument was that there were three distinct phases through which the current neoconservatives evolved. First, in the 1960’s they were democrats concerned with the democratic party moving more and more 14 Durham, “American Right”. 21
15 Brian Farmer, American Conservatism: History, theory and practice (Newcastle 2005) 363. 16 Robin Reactionary Mind 112.
17 Gary Dorrien, Imperial Designs: Neoconservatism and the New Pax Americana (New York 2004) 18 Ibid. 195.
to the left. Second, in the 1970’s they were hawkish anti-communists that tried to protect the centre, many eventually ended up voting for Reagan because of their hawkish foreign policy.19 Lastly, since the 1980’s, there was a new generation of neoconservatives that never
had been democrats and had been fully integrated into the conservative cause.20 When talking
about the first 1960’s group, Vaïsse argued that they had almost nothing in common with the “real” conservative movement that had taken shape around William F. Buckley Jr. and
National Review from 1955 on, but by the 1980’s, the neoconservatives were so integrated
that they regularly contributed to National Review.21 Jacob Heilbrunn built on Dorrien’s book
but added an important distinction. He argued that the neoconservatives changed after the end of the Cold War. He argued that there was an important ideological battle going on. The question was what kind of foreign policy America should adopt. Some argued for a realist position that can be associated with Henry Kissinger’s approach. Others opted for a more idealist position, influenced by the writings of Leo Strauss.22 Apart from small periods this
research usually focused on the neoconservative magazines like Commentary and not on how this battle played out on the pages of National Review.
The Christian Right is a second strand of conservatism that has received a lot of atten-tion by historians recently. Daniel K. Williams wrote about the origins of the relaatten-tion between Christians and conservatism. Williams wanted to dispense with the notion that the formation of the voting block resulted from Roe v. Wade and instead traced its formation down further to 1920 fundamentalists’ protestant campaigns. He thus argued against Farber and other histori-ans who thought it was the fusionist approach of National Review that brought the Christihistori-ans into the conservative party. Martin Durham made an argument for a separation between the average Christian conservatives and fundamental Christians and he wanted to challenge the way these groups sometimes intertwined. Durham wrote that there was a tension in the Chris-tian Right between those that merely wanted to defend their religious views from a secularist attack and those that wanted to restore a lost Christian hegemony.23 Durham associated the
moderate Christian Right with the former and the fundamentals with the latter. But what he also identified was that the boundary between these two positions were not clear and that one could change into the other dependent on the issue.24 Paleoconservatism became a term used
19 Vaïsse, Justin, Neoconservatism: The biography of a movement (London 2010) 10. 20 Ibid. 12.
21 Ibid. 7.
22 Heilbrunn, They Knew they were Right: The Rise of the Neocons (New York 2008) 15.
23 Martin Durham, The Christian Right, the Far Right and the Boundaries of American Conservatism (Manches-ter 2000) 107.
to distance an older tradition of the American Right from what they saw as a wrong turn led on by the neoconservatives.25 Some of the Christian Right such as Patrick Buchanan adopted
the label. What these books on sectarian aspects of conservatism have in common is that the histories of paleoconservatism and neoconservatism are far older than 1988 but in broader conservative histories that was the time in which they get introduced into the bigger narrative.
The primary source I will be using is National Review: A Journal of Fact and Opinion. It is a conservative magazine that managed to keep the highest number of subscribers out of all the conservative magazines until at least 2001.26 National Review and its founder William
F. Buckley Jr. are heavily associated with the foundation of the modern conservative movement. As one of the earliest and as the biggest conservative magazine, it is often described and widely regarded as the flagship of American conservatism.27 The magazine
considered the election of Ronald Reagan as the culmination of this movement. The modern conservative movement pushed by National Review is considered fusionist. Furthermore,
National Review took upon itself the function as a gate-keeper for conservative ideas. It
denounced the zealous anti-communists of the John Birch Society. It further worked hard to keep anti-Semites and racists out, for example, when it deemed another conservative
magazine, The American Mercury, anti-Semitic in 1957. National Review refused to publish any articles by people that were also publishing in The American Mercury.28 Lastly, another very prominent conservative thinker it rejected was the Russian-American writer Ayn Rand.
National Review considered the atheist side of her libertarianism unacceptable as its fusionist
creed deemed a social conservatism based on religious tradition a necessary component of American conservatism. 29
The academic scholarship on conservatism after the Cold War lacks a bridge between the fusionist conservatism of Ronald Reagan and National Review and the fractionated con-servatism that characterizes the George W. Bush presidency. My research of National Review will increase our understanding of what remained of the old fusionist conservatism after one of its main binding factors, anti-communism, no longer was a relevant factor. National Re-25 Ibid. 154.
26 John Micklethwait & Adrian Wooldridge, "The Right Nation: Conservative Power in America" (New York 2004) 154.
27 Durham, The Christian Right 1.
28 William F. Buckley Jr., “In Search of Anti-Semitism” National Review (30 December 1991) 24.
29 They thought Whittaker Chambers’ 1957 Book review of Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged¸ in which he systemati-cally dismantles any merit other conservatives gave to the book, was such a National Review classic that they in-cluded it in the list of top 10 book review classics in their 35th anniversary edition: Whittaker Chambers, “Big
view had always prided itself in its gate-keeping function for acceptable and unacceptable
forms of conservatism. It will be illuminating to see how they attempted this in the period 1989-1991. In this period the Cold War had just ended and the Conservatives were not yet driven into the political status of opposition party during the Clinton era. Micklethwait and Woolridge argued that by then the Bush administration had ended in fratricidal chaos and that Clinton had destroyed the conservative momentum.30
I will study how the magazine that came together with the fusionist approach to conservatism in the 1950’s handled the gate-keeping function after the cold-war ended. The structure of the magazine had sections which are going to be leading in the study. The magazine featured a rather large editorial section where the magazine was very vocal about their opinion (They actually uses phrases such as “National Review thinks..”). Apart from that there was the letters section which featured a lot of debate and comments which I will use to see what articles created controversies and sparked debate. Very often the letters were sent by academics or politicians to respond to an earlier article. Often the writer of the article itself got to write a big response to a reader’s letter in the same issue, sometimes a whole new article was written in reaction.
I will pay special attention to two other features of the magazine: The front page and Buckley’s writings for the magazine. The front page showed the items that National Review deemed most important and eye-catching for that issue. One such front page quite simply pondered the question “What Now?” (February 19, 1990). Lastly there was the column ‘On the right’ that got printed in the back of the magazine. This column by founder William F. Buckley was distributed to 320 American newspapers. Buckley himself wrote about all kinds of conservative issues. By focusing on this time period and these parts of the magazine in particular I can study the discourse of National Review and the issues that sparked
controversy and debate in this period.
This thesis deals with a set of ideas, namely conservatism, but also with a magazine,
National Review. Furthermore, it deals with individuals contributing sometimes contradicting
articles in the name of the same movement. I will assume that every opinion articulated within the pages of National Review is, in some way or form, a conservative opinion. I will define a conservative as someone who calls himself or herself conservative. It is the very nature of
National Review that the voices within it shape the conservative movement.
Firstly, I will use three big special issues of the magazine, all published within 6 months of each other in 1990, to analyse how National Review approached the topic of conservatism after the Cold War. They were challenged to redefine their movement without anti-Communism and these special issues were an answer to this challenge. Out of this emerged two different strategies: One was to find new enemies for conservatives to oppose but the second was to formulate their own agenda for which they talked about rediscovering American values and strengthening those.
Secondly, I will demonstrate that the end of anti-Communism did indeed cause fractures within the conservative movement by analysing Martin Liebman’s ‘Coming Out’ letter. His homosexuality showed that on this issue there was a division in conservatism between conserving classical-liberal values and conserving religious values. This division was at the heart of the works of Leo Strauss, a figure who was also important for the
neoconservative movement. Further I will analyse how this contention was visible in debates about the legacy of the enlightenment and Fukuyama’s end of history. Both these discussions gained renewed importance because of the end of the Cold War.
Lastly, I will analyse how the growing tension between neoconservatives and paleoconservatives came to a frontal collision when it came to discussions about foreign policy brought on by the Gulf War. I will examine Buckley’s article about anti-Semitism and how it related to the Gulf War and from there I will analyse the relationship of anti-Semitism with those conservatives that focused on religious values.
Battle for the Nineties
At the end of the 1980’s American conservatism was riding a wave of successes. Reagan had led the country with a conservative agenda for the past eight years and National Review was full of articles with nothing but praising words for the direction the country, and the world for that matter, was going. Markets were being privatized in the US under Reagan, in Britain un-der Thatcher, but also in Eastern Europe at the end of the 1980’s. The economic vision of con-servatives seemed to be prevailing. Furthermore, in the year 1989 the Berlin Wall fell. For
National Review this was proof that Reagan’s words themselves brought the wall down. With
the end of communism and the prevalence of western free-market democracy, conservatism had its glorious decade in the 1980’s. 31
Conservatives were aware that the 1990’s might change the direction of the conserva-tive movement. They were quick to respond to liberals hoping for exactly that change. Con-tributing Editor Tom Bethell responded to liberals like Washington Post’s Richard Cohen who wrote: “Anti-Communism has been the glue that held together the volatile elements of the Republican Party for longer than most of them remember.”32 The implication was that
conservatives would fall apart if they could not fight communism at each other’s side. These liberals shared Corey Robin’s view of conservatism, that it was a reactionary movement, a movement based solely on the opposition to ideas of others.33 Bethell expected this sentiment
and was ready to respond with an answer to how conservatives would define themselves post-communism.
Agenda for the Nineties
It was not just Bethell that took the end of communism as a moment for conservatives to redefine their movement. A couple of items that prominently featured in the magazine dealt with the theme of a new agenda for conservatism in the 1990’s. Firstly there was a big cover story on February 19 1990 with big letters simply asking: “What Now?”. Secondly there was a fifteen-page literary supplement attached to the issue of May 28 1990. It was called “a citi-zen’s guide to rebuilding America”. In the introduction of the supplement it was stated that its publication was directly linked to the position of conservatism after the Cold War. A third ex-ample is the 35th anniversary edition of National Review, published on November 5 1990. It
31 John O'Sullivan, "Is the heroic age of Conservatism over?", National Review (January 28 1991) 32.
32 Tom Bethell, “In from the Cold War: Will Succes Spoil Anti-Communists”, National Review (March 5 1990) 38. 33 Ibid.
reflected on what National Review and the conservative movement had amounted to in the 35 years prior and what was ahead of them. These special issues are good starting points to iden-tify how conservatives reacted to the end of communism and the challenge that was bestowed upon them.
The cover story titled “What Now?” was written by Buckley himself.34 Buckley did
not often contribute articles to the magazine outside of his normal contributions in the back of the magazine and to the editorials. This alone was indication that this article had a significant importance to the magazine as a whole. Buckley started off the article by repeating National
Review founding credo of 1955, that they would stand athwart history and yell stop. The
sig-nificance of the fall of the Berlin Wall was then immediately established because Buckley concluded that with the death of the Marxist dialectic history had finally come to a stop. Be-cause their initial goal had been achieved, Buckley’s article then pondered what would be the new agenda for conservatives now that history had stopped. He summarized the eighties as a big improvement over the Post-Vietnam malaise but then he made an interesting observation: “Some wars were never won and others must be continually refought”.35 The language of
combat and war was apparent here. Political disagreements with liberals had become wars that must continually be refought. Buckley’s agenda could thus aptly be called a battle plan, a new war to replace an ending war. He introduced twelve points in a conservative agenda for the nineties.
Coincidental or not, the first two points that made up Buckley’s battle plan concern the military. The first one called for high military spending on nuclear defence. The Soviet Union’s arsenal was still considered to be a threat and Buckley also mentioned countries such as China and Iraq which could become future nuclear threats. The message was that one could never be too vigilant about the threats other nations posed to the United States. The second point considered the geo-political role America should have played since communist expan-sion was no longer an imminent treat. Buckley engaged the topic with utmost care. He pon-dered the views of both neo-isolationists and “those who would go to the remotest beaches to midwife democracy”.36 He predicted that neo-isolationists would become more prominent
since foreign interventions could no longer be rationalized by framing them as protecting United States interests against communist expansion. He did not invalidate these positions 34 William F. Buckley Jr., “Into the New Decade: Agenda for the Nineties”, National Review (February 19 1990) 34.
35 Ibid. 36 ibid. 35.
outright, instead he remarked: “American conservatives are likelier to take differentiated posi-tions on the question.”37 Buckley was not willing to set a definitive conservative agenda for
foreign policy but he did make it clear that he favoured a realist position which carefully con-sidered the circumstances of each situation that might have presented itself.38 Buckley was
aware that there would be disagreements within the conservative movement over precisely this issue and he was already trying to mediate it.
There were two boundaries for conservatism that Buckley did set in this article. First he condemned protecting native industry, coming out strongly against protectionism as a con-servative position. 39Buckley thus came down strongly on the side of the libertarian economic
conservatives. There had always been a strand of conservatives that favoured protectionism, the best example of which, in the early 1990’s, would be Pat Buchanan’s 1992 presidential campaign which featured protectionist measures on its platform.40 Buckley used his pulpit in
this cover story to anticipate social conservatives in favour of some protectionism and coun-tered them. First he warned that the United States did not have a Divine warrant that ensured perpetual economic ascendency. He used religious language that could only be seen as ad-dressing the religious conservatives directly with this warning. He argued that the free market was necessary to create the society that they want to conserve. He also tried to convince this group by proclaiming that keeping the market free was the moral thing to do. Where the for-eign policy chapter was focused on doing what was best for American interests, this heading was suddenly concerned with the morality of excluding poor nations from competing in the American market. Buckley was attempting to keep the social conservative readers of National
Review on board with libertarian economics by appealing to their moral compass.
A second issue that Buckley saw as non-negotiable was anti-abortion.41 Buckley did
keep the means of achieving this open for discussion. Both enforcement by law or effective moral pressure were discussable means to achieve the goal, but the goal was set for Buckley. Buckley set some boundaries for conservatism that would underlie the necessity of a pro-life position. He stated that conservative politics was a politics based on the view of man as a transcendental creature. From there abortion became a morally aggressive act against the dig-nity of human life. By speaking of transcendence and morality Buckley entered the realm of religious values. The source of religious values was clear for Buckley, in the item before the 37 Buckley, “Agenda for the Nineties 35.
38 Ibid. 36. 39 Ibid.
40 Robin Toner, “Buchanan, Urging New Nationalism, Joins '92 Race”, New York Times (December 11 1991) A1. 41 Buckley, “Agenda for the Nineties 38.
one where he talks about abortion, he called for a reappearance of Judaeo-Christianity in the public sphere. 42
In the same issue under the column “the Week” the editorial staff of the magazine came to the same position. It criticized Lee Atwater and the GOP in general for being a ‘big tent’, meaning a party that held many different opinions.43 The editorial believed anti-abortion
should have been affirmed as the official GOP position and the pro-choice standpoint should not have been allowed within the tent. National Review was once again fulfilling its role as the gatekeeper and was drawing a line for what was acceptable and unacceptable conser-vatism. There were conservatives that held pro-choice opinions. For example, in April of 1990 the group “Republicans for choice” was founded. In an interview for the New York Times republican operative Roger Stone (husband of the group’s founder, Ann Stone) com-mented: “I believe this is a clear issue of government interference into our private lives. As far as I'm concerned, that's basic, Barry Goldwater Conservatism”.44 The social conservative
is-sue trumped the small government libertarian argument in this case, for Buckley and National
Review’s editorial staff. It is clear however, that abortion was already a contentious subject
and we will return to that later.
Last but not least, Buckley’s 12th point was called “E Pluribus Unum”. He called for
conservatives to investigate the ties that bound Americans together because he thought cen-trifugal forces were pulling Americans apart. For Buckley the military served as a unifying force and mutual pride. The loss of a threat to national security however, meant that there was a reduced need for the military. He thought the unifying role that the military plays needed to be compensated by something else in peacetime.
National Review published a selection of the letters they got in response to Buckley’s
article a month later.45 There were a lot of them, eight in total, in contrast National Review
normally published one reaction letter per article per issue. This establishes the importance the editorial staff of National Review itself placed on the article by giving it so much expo-sure. Furthermore, they even gave readers the option to purchase copies of his article in bulk 42 Buckley, “Agenda for the Nineties” 37.
43 Editorial, “The Week”, National Review (February 19, 1990) 11.
44 Robin Toner, “G.O.P. Group Formed to Support Abortion Rights”, New York Times (April 24 1990), http://www.nytimes.com/1990/04/24/us/gop-group-formed-to-support-abortion-rights.html 45 Various Authors, “Letters”, National Review (March 19 1990) 6.
The Authors include three whose profession is named. Richard A. Ware, President Emeritus of the Earhart Foun-dation. Donald Devine, President of Citizens for America and William Bennett, Office of National Drug Control Policy.
to distribute.46 Clearly this article by Buckley was deemed or at least made important by
con-servatives. All the letters were praising Buckley’s article and affirming the necessity for a conservative agenda for the nineties. They also concluded that Buckley still had a special place at the top of the conservative movement.
Three months later there was a special supplement that focused mostly on Buckley’s last point of the agenda for the nineties, E Pluribus Unum. They published fifteen pages of what they called “A citizen’s guide to rebuilding America”. Buckley once again affirmed in the introduction that they thought this supplement was necessary because they felt conser-vatism was entering a new era. First he stated that National Review was founded 35 years to solve a crisis in the 1950’s: “The conflict between the Social Engineers, who seek to adjust mankind to conform with scientific utopias and the disciples of Truth, who defend the organic moral order.”47 35 years later the political movement of the defenders of organic moral order
had prevailed. Buckley noted however, that now that they were governing majority, they were challenged with the task of nurturing and defending moral order. Wick Allison, the publisher of National Review, went even further to affirm that National Review and the conservative movement found themselves in a peculiar situation. He called 1989 the “Annus Mirabilis” be-cause it was the year that communist ideology failed and the biggest social engineering project, the Soviet Union, was disintegrating. The supplement served as answer to a chal-lenge: Having beaten communism overseas it was time to defeat socialism at home.48 The
tone was reminiscent of Buckley’s article from three months earlier. It provided conservatism with a new opponent, a new cause to rally conservatives together under the same banner once more. Allison’s introduction was called “Into the Nineties” as a follow up to Buckley’s earlier “An Agenda for the Nineties”.
The actual articles in the supplement were mostly practical solutions to political prob-lems. One article covered the problem of socialist public housing, another article about how bureaucratic systems create dependence on a welfare state and an article how small civil ini-tiatives were better at tackling societal problems than big government projects. The last sen-tence of the entire supplement however, was exemplary of the search for a conservative mes-sage. Republican House Minority Whip Newt Gingrich contributed to the supplement and concluded his article by saying that: "Americans must start acting like Americans again”.49
This was reminiscent of Buckley’s conclusion in “E pluribus Unum” that Americans needed 46 Ed Capano, “Notes & Asides: Memo to WFB”, National Review (March 19 1990) 19.
47 William F. Buckley Jr. “Preface”, National Review (May 28 1990) 2S.
48 Wick Allison, “Into the Nineties: Rebuilding America: A Citizens’ guide”, National Review (May 28 1990) 3S. 49 Newt Gingrich, “What can you do: The Job of Active Citizenship”, National Review (May 28 1990) 13S.
to rediscover what it was that made them American. For conservatives, the government had proven that it could not solve social problems, thus citizens themselves should step in and solve them. Their ability to do so however, would depend on their moral character, one that people like Gingrich thought the American population once had but was slowly losing due to government intervention. Conservatives though it was up to them to preserve institutions that provided Americans with their moral character.
The 35th anniversary edition of National Review repeated the themes we have seen in
these two earlier special publications. In the editorial sector at the start of issue, Wick Allison looked at the state of the magazine at the start of the 1990’s. He also addressed the same crit-ics that Bethell addressed; those that predicted the conservative movement would fall apart in the 1990’s. In addition to naming the lack of anti-communism he also mentioned critics that speculated conservatism would fall apart because Reagan’s charisma was no longer binding the movement together.50 Allison specifically mentioned they speculated conservatism would
fall apart in neoconservative and paleoconservative factions. Allison said that despite those predictions National Review’s subscription numbers soared and it had reached its highest cir-culation in history. Allison was implying that because National Review’s membership soared the conservative movement was not falling apart into camps since National Review was the magazine that stood for a unified conservative movement. Allison affirmed that National
Re-view would be a shining light for those convinced of the certitudes and institutions that lay at
the basis of the nation’s traditions.
The theme of certitudes underlying the American tradition returned multiple times in this anniversary edition. They all came back to the question of what commonalities Ameri-cans share, what makes them, out of many, one. They all assumed that these shared values used to be clear but had diminished in recent decades. Senior editor Richard Brookhiser wrote an article asserting that television was dividing the country and that in order to draw people together Americans needed some myths of commonality and some actual communalities. 51
Another senior editor, Jeffrey Hart, diagnosed that America’s civil culture was in tatters.52 His
complaints were similar to Brookhiser’s that Americans did not know any more what it meant to be American. However, he asserted that it was real history, not myths, that should permeate the education so people would become American again.53 Hart thought Americans need a
sec-50 Wick Allison, “Little Magazine, Grown Up”, National Review (5 November 1990) 11.
51 Richard Brookhiser, “Taming the Tribes of America”, National Review (November 5 1990) 65. 52 Jeffrey Hart, “Recovering America”, National Review (November 5 1990) 80.
ular Pantheon of people such as George Washington or Babe Ruth in order to reinstall some common ground.
These three special publications of National Review featured some common themes. They all affirmed that conservatism was faced with a challenge at the advent of the 1990’s. The reactions to this challenge can be separated into two different types of reactions: On one hand, conservatives tried to keep a common enemy, either by finding a new one or by keeping the old external threat of communism alive by discovering the lingering influence of its ideol-ogy. On the other hand there was also the realization that now that conservatives were in power they needed a positive agenda, one that is not merely oppositional to the liberal agenda. These attempts to formulate a positive agenda for conservatives were mostly concerned with a necessity to rediscover the basic American values in order to strengthen the American citi-zenry to deal with their communities’ problems once again on their own, in the absence of government policy. These themes can be found over and over again in articles in National
Re-view during the early 1990’s.
In Search of Opposition
Take the aforementioned article by Tom Bethell, his answer to liberals predicting the end of the conservative alliance was to point conservatives toward a new enemy: “With so-cialism on the ropes abroad, now is the time to focus on soso-cialism at home”.54 The
conserva-tive cold-warriors were being given a new target. Now that they won their battle against com-munism it was time to focus a conservative attack on liberalism.
National Review was filled with articles that attempted to identify the red roots on
their own soil. Take for example, this article title: “West meets East: Ghetto and Gulag”. The title alone revivified the ghost of the ultimate communist evil, the Soviet Union, by compar-ing somethcompar-ing American, the ghetto, to somethcompar-ing Soviet, the Gulag. In the article the author, Cassandra Chrones Moore of the Competitive Enterprise Institute, compared American social housing to the way the Soviet Union was reforming its land policy. America was at that time playing with the idea to give tenants the option to buy and own their public housing. Moore hailed private ownership as one of the Western principles that proved victorious because the ex-Soviet states adopted the same strategy when allowed a choice by the Soviet Union.55
Moore goes on to compare how American social housing restrictions were not that different from the restrictions the Soviet Union built into their recent private ownership laws, to the 54 Bethell, “In from the Cold War” 40.
disappointment of international audiences. For Moore it was obvious that the same thinking that led to the evils of the Soviet Union was identifiable at home and now that the 1980’s had proved it unviable abroad, they should be stomped out at home as well.
The same identification of communism in America was done for the universities. For example, Senior Editor Jeffrey Hart wrote about how deconstruction was used in academia by Marxists to tear down structures of power.56 He criticized the deconstructionists for hiding
be-hind a ‘Berlin Wall of jargon’ and remarked that they used militarized language: Texts were interrogated, poems were putative enemies.57 Hart concluded that for conservatives a battle
was still to be waged against Marxism, another Berlin Wall had yet to be brought down. The ultimate symbol of the Cold War, of west versus east, was identified once more. Furthermore, Hart highlighted that the deconstructionists were still fighting for their cause with their com-bative words, a challenge waiting to be answered by the traditional opponents. It is not only Hart who identified that in this period the communist ideology was still alive in American universities. Philosopher John Gray made the same point: Socialism survived most robustly in American universities.58
A third area where contributors identified remnants of communism on their own soil was within the environmentalist movement. In April and May of 1990 articles appeared sur-rounding Earth Day, a day in which a lot of rallies were held to advocate for environmental protection. The magazine’s coverage started with the April 1 issue which had this provocative title slapped across its cover: “How to Profit From the Coming Environmental Catastrophe (Just Kidding)”.59 The title played on the assumption that environmental protection was
tradi-tionally associated with the left and that the right merely wished to destroy the environment in favour of corporate profits. The April 1 issue had two articles that attempted to come up with a conservative answer towards environmental issues.6061 The second article by Smith and
Kushner put the environmental issue directly in a Cold War context. It stated that the conven-tional American environmental narrative was essentially a socialist one: Private interest in the form of capitalism caused the problem of environmental decay and public interest served by a
56 Jeffrey Hart, ‘Words in Search of Meaning’, National Review (March 18, 1991) 52. 57 Ibid. 54.
58 John Gray, “After Socialism: The end of History- or of liberalism?”, National Review (October 27 1989) 33. 59 National Review (April 1 1990) Title Page.
60 David Brooks, “A ‘Sustainable Environmentalism: Saving the Earth From Its Friends”, National Review (April 1 1990) 28-31, 59.
61 Kathy H. Kushner & Fred L. Smith, “Good Fences Make Good Neighbourhoods”, National Review (April 1 1990) 31-33.
socialist state policy was the only way to reverse it.62 This article is another example of the
strategies that conservatives used at the start of the 1990’s. One is the ever continuing search for remnants of socialism (and by extension Marxism) to oppose and the other is the search for a positive conservative agenda to answer the liberal agenda. The article by Smith and Kushner argued that by extending property rights to now publicly owned land and livestock people would be incentivized to sustain it.63
The spectre of the Soviet Union and the Cold War kept being revived. One cover fea-tured an ominous looking Soviet soldier with the question asked next to it; “Yesterday’s ene-mies?”64 The question mark was used to keep conservatives on guard. “Happy Birthday,
Vladimir Ilyich Lenin! Happy Birthday, Mother Earth”. 65 That was the conclusion to an
edito-rial which complained that socialism was being used to solve environmental problems. This editorial also made no distinction between socialism and communism in the matter. National
Review published an eye-witness account of the Washington Earth Day written under a
pseu-donym. That article also linked one speaker’s call for a constitutional amendment guarantee-ing clean air to a Soviet law that prohibited environmental degradation.66
Two articles from this period went so far as to seek an active Marxist plot in the envi-ronmentalist movement bringing back the spectre of the conservative inquisition in the Mc-Carthy era. David Horowitz started an article with a long and broad explanation of how con-servatism had fought against the radical left for 200 years, ever since radicalism originated from the Jacobin movement and how the Marxists later inherited this tradition from the Ja-cobins.67 He said that radicals made an apocalyptic claim in order to legitimize their radical
politics. This in turn caused him to argue that environmentalists used the apocalyptic vision of man destroying the planet in order to justify radical politics. The radical left had merely dropped their red flags for green ones. An editorial titled “Apocalypse Now” and published on May 19 echoed the same sentiment. It concluded that the environmentalist movement had a hidden agenda, the expansion of state power.68 Just as Horowitz did, this editorial mixed up
the colours red and green by coining the slogan: The green tree has red roots. This was to
re-62 Ibid. 31. 63 Ibid. 33.
64 National Review (September 17 1990) Coverpage.
65 Editorial, “Earth Days in Retrospect”, National Review (May 28 1990) 15.
66 J.J Autobahn (Pseudonym) , “Earth Day 1990: T-Shirts and Environmental Justice”, National Review (May 28 1990) 24.
67 David Horowitz, ‘Making the Green One Red”, National Review (March 19 1990) 39. 68 Editorial, “Apocalypse Now”, National Review (May 14 1990) 16.
mind conservatives that the reds, the communists, were still out there and that it was up to conservatives to defend America against them.
Formulating a Positive Agenda
Not only did the end of the Cold War prompt articles to be written in which conserva-tives continuously looked for new enemies; it also influenced a surge of articles which tried to establish a positive conservative agenda. For example, Paul Weyrich, co-founder of the her-itage foundation think-tank, started a September 1990 article on the topic of a new conserva-tive agenda with the sentence: “Conservatism must pay the price of its own success”.69 He
stated that the people voted for the conservatives in the 1980’s not because they were con-vinced conservatives had the answers, but they were concon-vinced that the liberals did not. The fact that the conservatives entered a position of political power meant that they now had to formulate a positive agenda. They had to articulate not only what they stood against but more than ever what they had to offer the American people. The main point of political contention that Weyrich identified was a sense of cultural breakdown. Weyrich thought it necessary that the conservative vision would stand for common American values and the root of the Ameri-can culture. Weyrich concluded that democracy depended on virtuous people and so for America to function it needed a broad consensus on what constituted virtue.70 The question
over what values to affirm also came up in relation to the newly liberated Eastern Europe.
National Review’s foreign contributor Erik Von Kuehnelt-Leddihn, who was stationed
in Munich, pondered what was supposed to happen to Eastern Europe now that they were coming out from under Soviet control. He put the dilemma in an analogy, an old story of a murderer that should not be aimlessly murdered in retaliation but re-educated: “Everyone was in favour until someone asked re-educated into what?.”71 Kuehnelt-Leddihn argued that, while
everyone agreed that it was a wonderful thing to see Eastern Europe emerge from behind the iron curtain, it was not easy to reach an agreement on how Eastern Europe should reshape it-self. The hope from most Americans was that Eastern European countries would reassemble themselves as countries with liberal multi-party free-market democracies. 72
Kuehnelt-Led-dihn wondered whether those were the quintessential hallmarks of the American society and if so, what would happen if they were exported to Eastern Europe. Fukuyama thought those val-69 Paul Weyrich, “A new Populist agenda: Conservatism for the people”, National Review (September 3 1990) 24.
70 Ibid. 25.
71 Erik Von Kuehnelt-Leddihn, “The Fog is Lifting”, National Review (December 17 1990) 60. 72 Kuehnelt-Leddihn, “The Fog” 61.
ues would reign victorious world-wide and that the end of history was reached but Kuehnelt-Leddihn was sceptical about whether those values would take root in Eastern Europe. Further-more, he feared even if they did, that they would not be enough and would lead to a society plagued by unspiritual, materialistic faith. Kuehnelt-Leddihn, just as Weyrich, was suggesting that there were certain cultural values at the root of the American liberal democracy and that without those values, liberal democracies exported elsewhere were doomed to fail.
One of National Review’s founders, Russel Kirk, also wrote an article about how self-conception for conservatives had always been troublesome. There was never a clear common-ality to point towards to define conservatism. Russel Kirk called conservatism a loose league of people and not a concrete ideology like he assumed liberalism and communism to be.73 He
credited himself with making the word “conservative” popular with his 1953 book The
Con-servative Mind.74 In the same article Kirk concluded that American conservatism had to
trans-form and articulate an effective political vision. It was made even more important for Kirk be-cause he saw that traditionalists, libertarians and neoconservatives were increasingly at odds with each other.75 For Russel Kirk the goal was to preserve and renew the permanent things
such as a moral consensus over what is good and true, echoing an agreement with Paul Weyrich,76 Kirk, however, left open how the permanent things would be defined. Within the
conservative movement there has only been consensus on what these permanent things were not compatible with, most oppositionally defined by the Soviet Union. This quest for drafting a positive agenda based on first principles proved to be a major task of contention for conser-vatives in the 1990’s. It opened conservatism up to a degree of introspection that their posi-tion of political power demanded of them and that the Cold War never allowed for.
73 Russel Kirk, “The More Things Change”, National Review (March 19 1990) 48. 74 Ibid. 46.
75 Ibid. 48. 76 Ibid. 50.
Conflict turned Inward: What Americans values to
defend
I argue that it was precisely their different conceptions of what the American values needed to be conserved were that set the neoconservatives apart from the paleoconservatives and because discussions surrounding values became more important in the 1990’s their differ-ences were set to be polarized. In this chapter I will analyse an internal division that became more pronounced within the conservative movement after the end of the Cold War. It was not a new division, as Justin Vaisse and other scholars of the neoconservative movement have concluded, neoconservatism had slowly formed since the 1960’s so they definitely did not emerge out of the blue in the 1990’s. Neither was the neoconservative conflict with the ‘Old Right’, who started to call themselves paleoconservatives as a reaction to neoconservatism, a new phenomenon in the 1990’s. The case that there already was tension between the neocon-servatives and paleoconneocon-servatives before the 1990’s is best evidenced by the May 1986
Colle-giate Review Symposium on “the state of Conservatism”.77 Discussion around American
val-ues emerged in lieu of the Cold War ending and gained prominence in redefining the conser-vative agenda going forward. The case of Martin Lieberman demonstrates best that different opinions were colliding within the conservative movement after the Cold War and that these differences were based on different interpretations of American values, one took faith as its source and the other took secular liberal values as its source. In order to explore these differ-ences, the figure of Leo Strauss becomes an important focal point of discussion in National
Review since he was an influential figure for many neoconservatives. Lastly, I will
demon-strate that these differences, revolving around the proper balance of faith and reason as the sources of American values, could be seen in fundamental discussions about the legacy of the enlightenment and the very conception of history in the wake of Francis Fukuyama article.
77 for an article describing the pre-1990 paleo-neoconservative tension culminating at the Collegiate Review symposium See: Susanne Klingenstein, “"It's Splendid When the Town Whore Gets Religion and Joins the Church": The Rise of the Jewish Neoconservatives as Observed by the Paleoconservatives in the 1980s”, Shofar, Vol 21. No 3 (Spring 2003) 83-98
The Coming Out Controversy
A concrete example of a conservative diagnosing a growing divide within the conser-vative movement as a direct result of the events of the 1980’s is Martin Liebman. He voiced his concern in a special contribution to the ‘Notes & Asides’ column. The usual ‘Notes & Asides’ column in National Review was about a page long, accompanied by a cartoon and most of the correspondence amounted to banter between Buckley and some old friend or someone trying to catch Buckley on a rare grammatical error.78 In the July 9 1990 issue,
‘Notes & Asides’ had a different tone.79 The letter started with, ”Dear Bill”, an indication that
this was correspondence of one Buckley’s close friends.80 The next two pages featured a letter
by Marvin Liebman in which he came out as a homosexual. Buckley knew him well, he served as godfather at Liebman’s adult conversion to Catholicism (Liebman was born Jew-ish). Liebman commended National Review for publishing John Woolman’s essay on support-ing gay rights four years earlier and publishsupport-ing its follow-up on the AIDS hysteria eighteen months after. These articles were part of a small cluster that Liebman called “Conservatives of Courage on the Issue of Homosexuality”. What followed was a request for National Review, to be a moral beacon for conservatives once again. He accredited National Review with pulling the American right out of the bigoted anti-Catholic, anti-Semitic and racists corners it was stuck in before. Liebman thought that now the right wing had won two of its major bat-tles, namely the Cold War and the battle over economic policy, it was receding back into the swamps it came from. Liebman was certain that the end of the Cold War was causing dra-matic changes in the conservative movement. He called anti-communism the cement that held together the modern conservative movement.81 Liebman used a comparison with
Semitism to get the readers on his side. He said that just as there was a under-current of anti-semitism among his contemporary mainstream conservatives, there was also an element of homophobia behind the scenes.
Liebman knew the part of conservatism that he was arguing against. He brought God into his argument, saying that God decreed him to be a homosexual rather than him choosing 78 Example of someone trying to correct Buckley’s prose: Paul Kircher, “Notes & Asides” National Review (May 28 1990) 18.
79 Marvin Liebman, “Notes & Asides: Dear Bill:” National Review (July 9 1990) 16.
80 The standard letter in this column starts with ‘Dear mr. Buckley’. Dear Bill only appears when it is someone from Buckley’s inner circle corresponding in the magazine. A rare other occasion when ‘Dear Bill’ appears is for example, a letter by Thomas L. Rhodes (spoken to by his nickname dusty) thanking the staff of NR for inviting him to dinner. National Review (April 30 1990) 18.
to be one.82 He defined the dark age of the American Right as an era made up of religious
medicine men, something he later compared to contemporary, allegedly Christian, televange-lists preaching hatred and fear of homosexuals. Liebman argued that being gay and conserva-tive was not a contradiction because it was the belief in the inherent right of the individual over the state that characterized conservatism for him. Liebman discredited conservatives against homosexuality as bigots hiding behind their religion.
Buckley’s response was printed right after the letter and it was not as supportive as Liebman might have hoped. He condemned “thoughtless gay-bashing” and promised that
Na-tional Review would not be tainted with it but meanwhile he defended the conservative (and
in extension his own) aversion to homosexuality as much more than ignorant bigotry.83
Buck-ley disagreed with Liebman’s interpretation of conservatism by saying that conservatism also conserved the traditional community which had no room for homosexuality, which it thought was ‘unnatural’. He bluntly stated that it is problematic for the Judeo-Christian way of life to become indifferent to another way of life. Homosexuality was for Buckley incompatible with the proper moral character that was necessary for a civil society.
A month later the magazine posted a selection of letters in response to Liebman’s coming out. Most of them also showed a clear lack of support for Liebman’s position. One reader was supportive of Liebman but the other three letters came out against Liebman. Two of them tried to give a genuine argumentation on why they believed homosexuality to be a sin and that they held this conviction as religious people. The last letter can be described as noth-ing less than the ‘thoughtless gay-bashnoth-ing’ Buckley promised to spare his friend from. The letter argued the sin of homosexuality to be equal to bestiality, paedophilia and incest.84
It turned out that Liebman’s association with conservatism was rooted in the old dic-tum: The enemy of my enemy is my friend. The Liebman letter shows that the context of the Cold War helped conservatives forget about their differences and united them against com-mon enemies, communism and taxes in Liebman’s case. The way in which Buckley ended his response letter to Liebman is indicative of this: “You remain, always, [..] my brother in com-bat”.85 This seems to be an affirmation of Liebman diagnosis that anti-communism was the
cement that kept these two men under the same conservative banner. The search for a new en-emy for conservatives became important in the 1990’s to keep the movement from falling 82 Marvin Liebman, “Notes & Asides” 17.
83 Ibid. 18.
84 Various authors, “Letters: Coming Out”, National Review (August 6 1990) 3-5. 85 Marvin Liebman, “Notes & Asides” 18.
apart since discussions that turned to values revealed fundamental disagreements such as the ones exemplified by Liebman’s situation
Philosopher Thomas Short wrote an article under the column ‘The Open Question’ to ponder the place of homosexuality within conservatism further in reaction to Liebman.86 ‘The
Open Question’ is the column in which National Review reserved space to discuss issues of contention within conservatism. Short diagnosed the problem with homosexuality within Con-servatism: Except for the true libertarians most conservatives agreed that the American free-dom depended on the moral character of its citizens. Short concluded that it was then a given that conservatives would disagree over what they saw as moral and immoral practices. 87
What Strong’s article and other responses to Liebman’s letter showed was that there was a fundamental disagreement on what the moral virtues that America was founded on were. For Liebman it became obvious that most conservatives considered homosexuality incompatible with a good moral character because their interpretation of good moral character was rooted in religious values that condemned homosexuality.
The question over what was at the heart of the American character got people to lock horns often in National Review. In the article where Paul Weyrich discussed about gathering broad consensus for what values to rally conservatives around, he mentioned pro-life. Buck-ley, in his “Agenda for the Nineties”, set the same line: pro-life as the only conservative op-tion. David Horowitz, however, wrote in disagreement with Weyrich. Both articles were pub-lished under the header “Conservative questions, an occasional series on the future of Ameri-can Conservatism”.88 Horowitz had been closely identified with the neoconservative label,
al-though he later rejected the label himself.89 He did share a couple of common characteristics,
having been a former leftist and of Jewish descent. In his article Horowitz criticized Weyrich for being part of the fundamentalist right, mostly over one issue: abortion. Horowitz did not state his own opinion on abortion, but he did affirm that America’s pluralist character should trump the wish of Christian moral purists. The lines were similarly drawn in the debate around homosexuality that Liebman sparked. Liebman thought that America’s pluralist char-acter should be the dominant American value while Buckley and like-minded conservatives thought Judaeo-Christian values took primacy on this issue.
86 Thomas Short, “The Open Question: Gay Rights or Closet Virtues?”, National Review (September 17 1990) 43.
87 Ibid. 44.
88 David Horowitz, “Back to Our Roots”, National Review (May 13 1991) 42.
89 David Horowitz, “Why I am not a neo-conservative”, FrontpageMag (March 22 2011) https://www.front-pagemag.com/fpm/88541/why-i-am-not-neo-conservative-david-horowitz.
The dispute between Horowitz and Weyrich came down to what source they properly drew from to establish America’s roots. Horowitz thought the proper source was America’s classical liberal tradition, usually identified with philosophers such as Locke and Adams.90
For Weyrich the source of these values was positioned within religious faith. I argue that these are the two distinct opinions that had emerged within conservatism as the source of American values. Leo Strauss is a pivotal figure in this because his research was precisely concerned with this issue and his followers proved to become influential conservative intel-lectuals mostly in the neoconservative camp. Jacob Heillbrunn’s book on neoconservatism put Strauss as the source of the foreign policy disputes that erupted within conservatism in the 1990’s.
A Straussian Debate
A good starting point for analysing the influence of Straussian philosophy on conser-vatism in National Review would be a book review written by Charles Kesler, Professor of government, in August 1989. Kesler argued that by the 1980’s the main divide running through American conservatism was no longer between traditionalists and libertarians. He wrote that both strands of conservatism learned from each other by being in roughly the same camp for thirty years.91 Kesler argued that traditionalists had come to doubt the government’s
ability to foster virtue and that the libertarians had come to realize that free market competi-tion and individual freedom depended on virtuous foundacompeti-tions of family and community. His argument was that by being on the same side in the Cold War, they started to adapt each other’s viewpoints. Kesler’s interpretation demonstrated a different balance within fusionist conservatism. It is not three different principles (traditionalism, economic/political conser-vatism and anti-communism) fused together as one, but rather anti-communism served as the principle that bound the other two together. This set up the conclusion that anti-communism was the linchpin keeping the fusionist conservatism together.
Kesler argued there was a split along different lines emerging in modern conservatism: Reason, Equality (of natural rights), Abraham Lincoln and the Union were on one side. Tradi-tion, inequality, John C. Calhoun and States rights were on the other side. Reason and equality of rights were associated with the Enlightenment and democracy. Inequality and tradition were associated with the landed aristocracy of the south and religion. In rough terms he called this a “North-South divide”. Kesler argued that new armies entered the conservative battle-90 Horowitz, “Back to our Roots” 44.
field to replace the old distinction between traditionalists and libertarians. The new division was between neoconservatives and paleoconservatives. The debate centred around issues such as global democracy, secularism, immigration and charges of envy and religious bigotry. What Kesler put at the root of their disagreement is how they looked at history.92 He said that
fundamentally the neoconservatives looked forward in time and the paleoconservatives looked backward in time. Neoconservatives took a Tocquevillian approach: modern capitalist democracy was here to stay, because it was at least preferable to all other options. Their poli-tics were utilitarian and melioristic but also strongly anti-utopian. Kesler concluded the divide between paleoconservatism and neoconservatism was as following: The neoconservative cau-tious historicism shaded over into a calculating utilitarianism, thus an acceptance of liberal democratic values while the paleoconservatives historicism rejected calculative utilitarianism in favour of a romantic appreciation of passion, the grandeur of the past, personal and national idiosyncrasy.93
The paleoconservatives in Kesler’s interpretation rejected democratic values because they did not view them as compatible with older traditions they perceived as the foundation for a civic society. The neoconservatives in Kesler’s interpretation thought democracy was better than the alternatives. Kesler was setting these camps up this way because he thought there was an alternative to these two options. Kesler thought both groups that he defined as paleoconservatives and neoconservatives had a lot in common: They thought that rationalism in politics led to Jacobins, the universal truths of the sort expressed in the declaration of inde-pendence (which they see as continuous with 20th century liberalism) were ultimately
destruc-tive of authentic, historically rooted human communities and that history or experience was therefore a better guide than reason in political affairs. Kesler argued that both groups thought of America as ill-founded because it rejected the classical and biblical tradition that came be-fore it in favour of a Hobbesian philosophy that was based on self-interest, atheism and mate-rialism.94 The philosophy was Hobbesian because the philosopher that influenced the
found-ing fathers most, John Locke, was in Kesler’s view primarily influenced by Hobbes. Kesler himself thought differently of America. He was of the Straussian strand that thought the American founding was not the Hobbesian rejection of biblical and classical tradition but rather the perfection of the biblical and classical tradition and that it mediated perfectly be-tween the great defining principles of the West: Reason & Revelation, Athens & Jerusalem.95
92 Kesler, “All Against All” 42. 93 Ibid.
94 Kesler, “All Against All” 41. 95 Ibid. 41.
