Cataloging the Success of Conservatism

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Political junkies may be disappointed with this compendium of conservative thought, tradition, and influence. Search in vain in “American Conservatism: An Encyclopedia” (Intercollegiate Studies Institute,1,000 pages, $55) for an entry on Tom DeLay, Bill Frist, or Rick Santorum. But G.K. Chesterton? Check. T.S. Eliot? Check. The Kristol family? It’s a trifecta: Check and check and check again.

Oh well. Politicos still may look forward to the annual, and wonderful, “Almanac of American Politics.” This particular reference book has weightier things in mind, and it succeeds admirably in identifying the lodestars of conservative thought and values in politics, religion, and the arts.

As an encyclopedia, it’s fundamentally a list, which is both its strength and weakness.The closest it comes to defining organizing principles is in the brief introduction and when it takes on general themes, such as “conservatism,” “liberalism,” “environmentalism,” “constitutionalism,” and “communism.” Generally, it simply identifies the most important people and ideas associated with the movement and describes their contribution and/or significance.

As generations of magazine and newspaper editors have known, lists are irresistible, especially if they have some surprising inclusions and omissions. Too much quirkiness, however, is annoying. The very best of these efforts have a neat balance between authority and surprising insight. “American Conservatism” meets that test smartly with authoritative looks at contemporary conservatism’s Titanic Trio – Reagan, Thatcher,Wojtyla – and nicely nuanced takes on people who never identified themselves as conservatives but whose ideas have had consequences for the movement – Allan Bloom, Daniel J. Boorstin, Walter Lippmann.

Perhaps the most interesting entries concern philosophy, religion, and the arts, where the editors demonstrate a fine grasp of the cultural wellsprings that conditioned and nurtured conservatism.

Edmund Burke, the Irish-born British politician and thinker, whose immortal “Reflections on the Revolution in France” is one of history’s most devastating critiques of the Utopian Left, is rightly placed near the top of the conservative pyramid, along with Adam Smith and his “Wealth of Nations.” Burke is one of those figures, like Abraham Lincoln, whom both sides claim. But in a separate entry, titled “Burkean conservatism,” the editors nail their claim in the great man’s consistent and determined arguments for linking politics and the traditional natural law derived from the Greeks and the Old and New Testaments. For Burke, politics was always just a branch of ethics and always “under God.”

Similarly sophisticated are the treatments of Evangelical and Mainline Protestantism, Judaism, and Roman Catholicism. If the editors betray more interest in the latter two, it is probably because of the prevalence of Catholics (Russell Kirk, William F. Buckley, John Courtney Murray, S.J.) in the mid-20th-century conservative intellectual revival and the critical contributions of Jewish neoconservatives (Irving and William Kristol, Gertrude Himmelfarb, Norman Podhoretz, Midge Decter) from the Reagan era forward.

Literature is represented, not only by Eliot and Chesterton, but James Fenimore Cooper, Nathaniel Hawthorne, William Faulkner, George Orwell, Robert Frost, Flannery O’Connor, Walker Percy, and the southern agrarian poets John Crowe Ransom, Robert Penn Warren, and Allen Tate. A curious omission is the English novelist Evelyn Waugh, whose satires and novels represent a lifetime’s assault on modernist foibles, but somebody good always gets left off these kinds of lists. Important journals include the National Review, Commentary, the New Criterion, First Things, Crisis, and the Weekly Standard. Two Wall Street Journal editors, the estimable Vermont Royster and Robert Bartley, deservedly make the cut, as does the redoubtable Colonel Robert R. McCormick of the Chicago Tribune.

The editors of “American Conservatism” clearly recognize that the very success of conservatism since Ronald Reagan has created problems for the movement. In the general entry on “conservatism,” the editors note:

Like most movements, the conservative political movement has brought together people of differing viewpoints on the basis of certain important shared goals. The conservative movement has undergone changes in recent decades as the threat posed by communism has waned, which has deprived the movement of an issue that in the past provided significant cohesion and motivation for cooperation. As a result, philosophical cleavages in the movement have become more pronounced and cooperation between segments with differing viewpoints more difficult to sustain.

Once an insurgent group of outsiders challenging not only the Evil Empire but the most obvious liberal targets – softness on crime, manic egalitarianism, victimhood, and booty for all – professing conservatives today are in charge. In the entry on President Bush, the editors are clearly nervous, about the conduct and outcome of the war in Iraq, but also the spending on yet another entitlement like the Medicare drug benefit. The president’s personal stock will rise or fall depending on the outcome of the war, but the strains inherent in this increasingly large and powerful movement will remain. Paleoconservatives, neocons, traditionalists and libertarians – it’s a Big Tent in search of new direction. Stay tuned for the promised second edition of this comprehensive survey.

Mr. Willcox last wrote for these pages about the Western.


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