The Conservative Cause
To the Editor:
In “Is Conservatism Finished?” [January], Wilfred M. McClay, a Bush appointee to the National Council on the Humanities, attempts to discount the information in my book, Conservatives Betrayed: How George W. Bush and Other Big Government Republicans Hijacked the Conservative Cause, on the grounds that I had also criticized President Reagan four times during the eight years of his administration.
In response to an op-ed I published in the Washington Post last year, “Bush’s Base Betrayal,” the White House sent out an e-mail to an unknown number of persons citing my previous criticisms of Reagan. Each of the four points mentioned by Mr. McClay is from the White House talking points.
One of my criticisms of Reagan was that in his cabinet selections he had given conservatives the “back of his hand.” Another was that as he left office, he left the conservative movement “directionless.” I was right about both of these. In the two other criticisms cited by Mr. McClay, he does not provide the context of my remarks. Thus, Mr. McClay writes that I once accused Reagan of “changing sides” to line up with former adversaries. He does not say what issue I was referring to, but I recall that it was Reagan’s decision to go ahead with the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) treaty with the Soviet Union, reducing our armaments.
Then Mr. McClay notes (again failing to provide the context) that I published an op-ed headlined (by Washington Post editors) “For Reagan and the New Right, the Honeymoon Is Over,” less than four months “after Reagan had nearly been killed by an assassin’s bullet.” The implication is that I was heartless, or at least impolite, for daring to criticize Reagan at that time. But three months after the attempt on his life, Reagan was healthy enough in body and mind to act as leader of the free world, and surely capable of handling criticism on policy from those who had helped to get him elected. Perhaps Mr. McClay can instruct us on the politically correct waiting period for criticizing a recovered President.
Of course, I was not alone in criticizing the Gipper. According to Norman Podhoretz, writing in 1998, neoconservatives in 1982, notably including himself, felt “disappointment, bordering on despair, over the record of [the Reagan] administration up to that point.” Podhoretz noted that when conservatives defended Reagan by blaming certain problems on the people around him, it “raised the question of why he had surrounded himself with such people in the first place and why he did not fire them and bring in others who would be loyal to his stated policies.” In the same article, Podhoretz also referred to Reagan’s response to events in Poland as “tepid” and “disheartening.” And, he wrote, Reagan’s arguments in his own defense were “unresponsive to my criticisms and unconvincing in their own terms.”
Podhoretz’s criticisms did not detract from his conclusion that Reagan was a special man who played a special role in history, and that “we shall not look upon his like again.” Nor would his criticisms of Reagan lessen the value of any criticism he might make of the current President. The same, surely, goes for me.
Today, the conservative movement is fractured, with libertarians and religious conservatives reading each other out of the movement and paleoconservatives and neoconservatives at each other’s throats. The movement has always had factions—factions that need not be any less compatible than those of the New Deal coalition, which brought together segregationists and civil-rights advocates.
I believe that Bush and the big-government Republicans came to power by exploiting hairline fractures within the conservative movement, and that they compounded those fractures while pursuing policies that, yes, Reagan would have found abhorrent. If we do not revitalize the conservative movement as a force independent of any party or individual politician, the years to come will be disastrous for conservatives, the country, and the world.
Richard A. Viguerie
Manassas, Virginia
_____________
To the Editor:
Wilfred M. McClay’s article offers an acute perspective on the ideals that have shaped and fortified conservatism. He rightly notes that there is a whiff of utopianism about much of the anti-Bush sentiment among some conservatives, who often give full display to the tone and temperament of disillusioned idealism.
A similar disillusionment flung many liberals into a mood of pacifism and isolationism after World War I. A warning from Lewis Mumford, written as Hitler threatened all of Europe, seems especially apt today:
My generation . . . failed to understand the task that history had given it; and it thus did not rise to the demands of peace as those who had been maimed or killed had risen to the demands of war. In an orgy of debunking, my generation defamed the acts and nullified the intentions of better people than themselves.
Some conservatives have indulged in their own orgy of debunking, and have made orthodox religion one of its victims. Mr. McClay rightly points out the churlishness of those pretending that robust faith must play no role in politics, conservative or otherwise. Indeed, the “epistemological modesty” of critics like Andrew Sullivan who espouse a “conservatism of doubt” is really a lip-biting pose: they are not at all modest about their own epistemology of government, society, sexuality, or the family. Their rejection of “absolutism” and “fundamentalism” looks more like an evasion of moral truths that appear too demanding or personally unsettling.
A little more intellectual honesty about democracy’s moral and philosophical anchor—the frankly religious belief in the transcendent dignity of every person, regardless of color or creed—is in order. Bush’s detractors on this score willfully ignore the most salient facts about conservatism and American democracy: no humane social or political movement in America was ever built upon the soft sands of agnosticism. It is believers, mostly in the Judeo-Christian tradition, who have been at the front lines of democratic renewal and reform. They remain central to the success, however partial and imperfect, of the American creed.
Mr. McClay’s conclusion about Bush’s conservative critics seems inescapably correct: their deepest revolt is not against Bush or the direction of conservatism. It is a revolt against the American proposition—which makes them anything but conservative.
Joseph Loconte
Ethics and Public Policy Center
Washington, D.C.
_____________
To the Editor:
Thanks to Wilfred M. McClay for his thoughtful article on the continuing vitality of conservatism despite the cries from the sidelines. His article brings perspective and depth of insight, as historians do at their best, to a topic that has been treated with a great deal of muddled thinking. I found particularly insightful Mr. McClay’s point about the need to face up to a world in which terrorism is ascendant rather than simply clinging to abstract principles of conservative restraint. Ironically, many critics of Bush’s supposed “utopianism” are themselves guilty of wishing the world were different from what it actually is.
Martin Goldberg
Great Falls, Virginia
_____________
To the Editor:
Wilfred M. McClay’s essay is a timely reminder that the nostalgic tributes now paid to Reagan by some on the Left represent nothing so much as the predictable tendency of pundits to align retrospectively with populist sentiment when history accords one of their antagonists a measure of respect.
Faced with unique domestic and geopolitical circumstances, every President must abandon ideological purity in order to lead, and be prepared to weather harsh criticism from friend and foe alike. When skewered by the press and some Republicans for his support of a bloodless coup in Panama, a necessary antecedent to the construction of the Panama Canal, Teddy Roosevelt responded with characteristic candor: “In this Panama business, the Evening Post and the entire fool mugwump crowd have fairly suffered from hysterics, and a goodly number of Senators, even of my own party, have shown about as much backbone as so many angleworms.”
John Fahnley
Boothbay, Maine
_____________
Wilfred M. McClay writes:
Richard A. Viguerie is a confused man. He claims to be concerned about the “fracturing” of the conservative movement, and regrets that various factions comprising it, groups that ought to be broadly “compatible,” now find themselves “at each other’s throats.” But how is one to take any of this seriously when in the same breath he reads a two-term President of the United States out of that movement, when he actively and enthusiastically supports the defeat of the Republican party at the polls, demands, as he did in a self-important press release issued the day after last fall’s elections, that “every single member of the Republican leadership in the House” be replaced—even while calling for conservatives to “reach out” to the Democrats? Just what does he think all of this huffing and puffing in every direction accomplishes?
If Mr. Viguerie is so concerned about fractures and division, why does he seem so intent on promoting them? And if it is true that the movement he claims to speak for is so wide and deep, and is being thwarted only by George W. Bush’s clever exploitation of “hairline fractures,” why has it failed to produce any viable presidential candidates since Reagan? Just where, one wonders, was Mr. Viguerie’s candidate in 2000? And where is his candidate for 2008?
The fact is that the wing of conservatism that Mr. Viguerie claims to speak for, and which has so much to offer America, has suffered from nothing so much as its petulant, ineffectual, bullying, and small-minded leaders. By dismissing my own criticisms in the sadly (and laughably) ad-hominem way that he does, he only confirms this.
In contrast, I am grateful to Joseph Loconte for his eloquent letter, particularly for its citation of Lewis Mumford’s lapidary lament and for its sensible insistence on conservatism’s moral foundations; to Martin Goldberg for his insight that one can hardly be called “utopian” for facing up to the world as it is; and to John Fahnley for his reminder that governing can often be a lonely business.
