George Will’s latest column is kind of amazing in its own deranged way. He’s obviously appalled at what has become of conservatism, but he’s as deluded about its past as he his about its prospects in the future. He begins with this:
In 1950, the year before William F. Buckley burst into the national conversation, the literary critic Lionel Trilling revealed why the nation was ripe for Buckley’s high-spirited romp through its political and cultural controversies. Liberalism, Trilling declared, was “not only the dominant but even the sole intellectual tradition” in mid-century America because conservatism was expressed merely in “irritable mental gestures.” Buckley would change that by infusing conservatism with brio, bringing elegance to its advocacy and altering the nation’s trajectory while having a grand time.
Today, conservatism is soiled by scowling primitives whose irritable gestures lack mental ingredients. America needs a reminder of conservatism before vulgarians hijacked it, and a hint of how it became susceptible to hijacking.
Will proceeds from there to detail Buckley’s isolationist views, mentioning that he named his first yacht “Sweet Isolation” and attended Charles Lindbergh’s America First rally in Madison Square Garden at the age of fifteen. He doesn’t even hint that this was an objectively pro-Nazi position that was naive at best and downright evil at worst. He doesn’t really go into much detail about Buckley’s opposition to the Civil Rights Movement on the basis of objective white supremacy, only going so far as to note that Buckley once said that the name of the NAACP was acknowledgment that blacks are not as advanced as whites.
As a result of soft-pedaling these aspects of Buckley’s worldview, Will is able to create a distinction between him and the “vulgarians” that existed within conservatism at the time and that have taken over his beloved GOP in the present. Buckley, in Will’s telling, effectively rescued conservatism by giving it intellectual respectability and elegance and a sense of joy in combat.
Will finishes his piece by comparing Buckley favorably with Whittaker Chambers. Chambers was an example of the wrong kind of conservative that is so recognizable in the Trump base:
[Buckley], to his credit, befriended Whittaker Chambers, whose autobiography “Witness” became a canonical text of conservatism. Unfortunately, it injected conservatism with a sour, whiney, complaining, crybaby populism. It is the screechy and dominant tone of the loutish faux conservatism that today is erasing Buckley’s legacy of infectious cheerfulness and unapologetic embrace of high culture.
Chambers wallowed in cloying sentimentality and curdled resentment about “the plain men and women” — “my people, humble people, strong in common sense, in common goodness” — enduring the “musk of snobbism” emanating from the “socially formidable circles” of the “nicest people” produced by “certain collegiate eyries.”
As for Buckley, well he was the right kind of conservative:
Buckley, a Bach aficionado from Yale and ocean mariner from the New York Yacht Club, was unembarrassed about having good taste and without guilt about savoring the good life.
“His true ideal,” Felzenberg writes, “was governance by a new conservative elite in which he played a prominent role.” And for which he would play the harpsichord.
I’m not writing about this to trash Buckley one more time, but to point out that Will has simply not come to grips with a basic fundamental fact about left/right politics.
If the right is basically the home for business interests and the left is basically the home for workers’ interests, the right will always be very badly outnumbered. Because the right has most of the money, they can mitigate these disadvantages in various ways. They can restrict the franchise. They can control most of the media and thereby dominate the national political conversation. They can outspend their opponents which gets them more ads and helps them compensate for having fewer natural followers and organizers.
But, ultimately, none of that will help them win elections and maintain their power unless they can find a bunch of workers to abandon their natural home. Conservatism is a strategy for accomplishing this. At root, it is nothing else.
The reason that, in 1950, Lionel Trilling was able to argue that liberalism is “not only the dominant but even the sole intellectual tradition” in mid-century America is because FDR/Truman had effectively led the country out of a depression and won a worldwide war. By 1950, even most of the business leaders who had opposed the New Deal in the 1930s had come to terms with it. The weakness for the Democrats was different in kind. They weren’t just a workers’ party and a party for the business establishment. They were also the party of white supremacy and Jim Crow.
What’s interesting about conservatism is that they didn’t tap into the wedge the way you’d expect. Instead of criticizing the Democrats for their backwardness and vulgarity, they sought to steal the segregationists away from the party and keep them for themselves. This is the course that Buckley pursued. Rather than strengthen the GOP in his home turf in the North by pointing out the Dems’ allegiance with the cultural neanderthals in the party’s southern congressional leadership, Buckley chose to make white supremacy respectable among the cocktail set at the Yale Club and the New York Yacht Club.
What happened in the 1970’s was similar in kind. An amalgam of Christian conservatives was brought into allegiance with Buckley’s jet-setters to form the backbone of the Reagan coalition. These new Republicans were the furthest thing from Bach aficionados and most of them had only seen yachts on television. But they served as the bodies that business interests needed to prevail politically and begin to beat back a New Deal that was no longer working as well as it had. Buckley and his allies didn’t give a damn about prayer in school or restricting abortion rights, but they needed an army that would back them on opposing federal regulations, high marginal tax rates, and strong antitrust enforcement.
Conservatism was always about raising an army of vulgarians to serve the interests of a new conservative elite in which folks like Buckley would “play the harpsichord.” That’s it. That’s all of it.
I don’t dispute that looked at from the other end of the stick, these folks weren’t just unwitting dupes but real people with real grievances and interests that didn’t necessarily coincide with the workers’ party. I don’t want to dehumanize them the way that George Will does, but I think Will’s depiction is an accurate portrayal of how Buckley viewed them.
At best, they were viewed as rough around the edges and in need of the kind of leadership that only Yale men could provide. And as long as they consented to this arrangement, George Will was fine with the conservative movement and the Republican Party.
So, my question for Will is to ask if he has the foggiest idea where he might get the votes for his post-Trump Republican Party if not from the same folks that conservatives have always attracted? Is it simply a matter of believing that better leadership will improve their morals?
If Will believes that, he needs to look around. Because the conservative movement has built a post-factual media grievance machine that churns out bile 24 hours a day. They didn’t do that for giggles. They did it because it was required to get them from near-permanent minority status to where they are today, with all the levers of government in their control.
They made this happen by showing incredibly bad leadership that destroyed people’s morals. It was intentional and it’s not going to stop both because it has been successful and profitable. To replace it with something high-minded that values high culture and the finer things in life, that would be a recipe for building a political party scarcely bigger than the editorial staff at the National Review.
I don’t know if he’ll ever fully realize it, but George Will’s life’s work has been in the service of amplifying every abhorrent and dysfunctional thing that he bemoans now. His conservatism was a con-job and a deal with the devil. In some way, on some level, I feel certain that he’s known this all along. How could he not considering his arrogance and dismissive attitude toward the horde that he’s cultivated for so long?
You’re on fire today!
In a two-party system, if Party A is the home for business interests, and Party B is the home for workers’ interests, Party A will be badly outnumbered.
So Party A must recruit an army of vulgarians.
In a two-party system, if Party A becomes the home for vulgarian workers and vulgarian business, Party B becomes the home for non-vulgarian workers and non-vulgarian businesses.
Which means there is no party that prioritizes being adversarial to business on behalf of workers.
In this fictional scheme, does Party B need to emphatically oppose business interests in order to become the home for worker’s interests?
I think you’ve mischaracterized the dichotomy: it’s not so much that the Democrats are anti-business; they’re traditionally anti-monopoly or oligopoly and they’re for making business follow sensible regulations like incorporating environmental externalities, following health, safety and anti-fraud regulations. Most Democrats have no problem with small businesses that are responsible. The fact is that the vast majority of small businesses would be far better off if all Americans had a basic healthcare package available to them. As for workers, the Democrats in the ’50s and ’60s brought investigations and prosecutions against badly run and corrupt unions like the Teamsters and the UMW. It’s all about accountability.
Well, yes. But I’m running with the shorthand from Boo’s article: “If the right is basically the home for business interests and the left is basically the home for workers’ interests, the right will always be very badly outnumbered.”
The question isn’t, are Democrats for small businesses (also: apple pie and Mom)?
The question is, are Democrats against big business*–and should we be?
(*And yes, I know that ideally Democrats are for good, wholesome, responsible big business practices and against evil, exploitive, reprehensible ones. But I’m asking the question in terms of a general orienting principle, as per Boo’s range of ‘business interests’ to ‘workers’ interests.’)
Democrats should be against the unaccountability of business, of any size. Business will interpret that as hostility — to which our only possible response could be, “We’ll give you something to cry about!”
For Will, Trump is a boorish lout who’s brought the “tone” of the Party down instead of realizing what he is, in reality: the perfect embodiment of the cons and frauds, racism and misogyny of conservatism.
Excellent analysis, but one quibble. You write: “The weakness for the Democrats . . [was] they were also the party of white supremacy and Jim Crow.”
The Democrats were an uneasy coalition of the Southern Jim Crow Democrats and the Northern Liberal Democrats. Leaving out the Northern Democrats supports the phony Republican narrative that “Democrats were the real racist party.” (Call it the “Jeffrey Lord” narrative.)
The usual answer to that is the parties switched in the South in the late ’60s and Republicans (as you point out) rushed in when Democrats breached the uneasy coalition by supporting Civil Rights. But what gets lost from the response to the Jeffrey Lord analysis is that half or maybe more than half of the Democratic Party were strong Jim Crow opponents.
Yes, the New Deal had to appease the Jim Crow Democrats, and its racist exclusionary exceptions are a prime factor holding back progress for African Americans. But those oh so civilized Republicans were bitterly opposing the New Deal even for whites. The moderate R’s acceptance of it by Ike et al should have led to elimination of the Buckley faction as a political force.
Instead, as you point out, the Buckley and Will faction (via Nixon and Reagan) rushed into the gap created when the racist South fled the Civil Rights Democrats, and the likes of Will were happy to use their support for stopping extension of the New Deal, and now, attempting to kill it.
But Northern Liberal Democrats should not be left out of the equation and the (silly) argument about who was the “racist party.” — FDR, Stevenson, HHH, JFK, Herbert Lehman et al. were as much a part of the Democratic Party as Strom Thurmond and George Wallace.
the word “also” has a pretty widely understood and appreciated meaning.
Yes, but that phrasing doesn’t make the important regional distinction and could be read as the entire Dem. party represented or incorporated all three factions. btw — while “business interests” accepted the New Deal, I wonder how many were actually Democrats — more likely they were the now extinct species of “moderate Republicans” like Rockefeller, Javits etc. The 1956 Republican party platform stressed expanding unions, social security and working conditions.
I’m not making the point to nitpick, but because the Northern Liberal Democrats often get left out of the party archetypes of the past.
The typical New York businessman in the 1960s was probably more likely to support the Democrats than the Republicans, although that began to change as the decade wore on. The true ownership class was more Republican, certainly. And Yankee Republicanism was the default position of the affluent from Greenwich, CT to the Canadian border.
Neither did Jerry Falwell and the rest of his theocrats. They merely latched on to those issues to further their main objective, which was the fight against civil rights. Don’t forget, the Religious Right was started as a political movement to fight the integration of Liberty University. They merely picked abortion as a more-palatable excuse than their innate white supremacy.
The genteel, vicious racism of Buckley and his elites and the holy roller vicious racism of Falwell and his cohort meshed perfectly.
Harnessing the power of the ‘vulgarians’ was put into place starting with Goldwater (whose only base of vote was largely the Confederate South) and culminated with Nixon hijacking the Wallace-ite Democrats in the Southern Strategy.
“Modern” conservatism has ALWASY been deeply infused with the raw “Lost Cause” white supremacy of the neo-confederacy; Buckley merely disguised it with a smoothly serpentine style.
Will just thought that “his” kind could keep the rabble at bay, and he could continue to project his genteel ‘Gracious plantation owner’ persona to the world, and keep his racist worlview carefully hidden behind his ‘cultured conservative’ facade.
Absolutely.
And more than any other reason, eventually led us to where we are right now…..Trump as POTUS, and a guy named after a ‘traitor in defense of slavery’ as Attorney General.
It’s still the same as it always was…..look for Sessions to do what he was hired to do..destroy all protections for POC.
.
Nevertheless voters got riled up enough over the fake issues, some of them very sincerely.
Neither Will nor Buckley ever had a shred of honesty.
Conservatism adapts to local conditions, but beneath the skin it is always and everywhere the same. Conservatism is the single proposition that there must be people whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside people whom the law binds but does not protect. There is nothing more to it nor ever has been, back to the millenia during which conservatism had no name because it was the only model of polity that had ever been imagined.
Just another example of his party
I think this will backfire time
look at this ad republicans are running against Jon Ossoff featuring Kathy Griffin UNBELIEVABLE
http://www.mcclatchydc.com/news/politics-government/congress4
JK Galbraith remains absolutely correct, whether it’s Will, Buckley, Reagan, Goldwater or today’s vulgarians and ruffians:
The modern conservative is engaged in one of man’s oldest exercises in moral philosophy; that is, the search for a superior moral justification for selfishness.
that their only path to power was lying, cheating, adopting Reality-Denial as a program.
Else they’re a permanent minority.
I’d put that at No. 1.
In 1950, Lionel Trilling was noting the liberal ideology of both the Democratic and Republican parties. By the 1960s, this was the equivalent of today’s “there is no alternative” (TINA).
In both parties, more liberal (in the FDR sense) politicians outnumbered their conservative counterparts with “moderates” being the swing caucus. In the 1950s on civil rights, Jacob Javitts, a Republican, was by far more aggressive about pushing civil rights legislation than his Democratic counterparts. And the seniority system meant that Southern Democrats had a lock on many key committees. Moreover that Southern Democratic (Dixiecrat, if you will) caucus after Humphrey’s speech in 1948, the Brown v. Board of Education decision in 1954, and the Montgomery bus boycott in 1955 and Browder v. Gayle in 1956 was increasingly focused on preventing any opening for desegregation. And that included many Democrats who did a 180-degree turn-about in the 1960s.
What Will is celebrating is Buckley’s (the wet-behind-the-ears Anglophile) call for the transformation of US parties into ideologically-committed parliamentary-style parties and for the Tories to have better rhetoric. That is a much more philosophical realignment than the repetition of the Mississippi Plan of 1875 in which the populist whites joined the conservative plantation owners, now recast as Southern capitalists, to seize single-party rule in the South. The latter is what Trumpism amounts to on a national (maybe even global) scale. What the TEA Party, the Freedom Caucus, and Trump blatantly showed in the past two years is that philosophy is corrupt in the Republican Party. They can’t even cover it with the erudite Buckleyan bullshit in the style of Buckley at his peak (on PBS no less) forty years ago.
Will’s dad was a professor of philosophy at the University of Illinois. Will went to Oxford and other places trying out philosophy, politics, and passed on going to Harvard Law as he originally intended. So many Republicans with serious daddy problems. But he succeeded in being famous, going weekly against Meg Greenfield in Newsweek on the back-page opinion section. And he eventually found riches. But he is still stuck, just like McCain, W, and of course Trump.
Buckley (and don’t forget David Lawrence of US News and World Report) spawned Goldwater, who allied with Strom Thurmond and elected Richard Nixon and his ethnic strategy (introducing identity politics, white working-class style). Wrapped in the American flag, enough union workers bought it; wrapped in the Confederate flag it realigned Southern voter of all economic and white social classes. The religious right-traditionalist Catholic alliance in 1978 locked it in place. As liberal Republicans and moderate Republicans were purged from office in primary after primary, they had their solidly ideological party and its ideological litmus tests. And then they built the media to campaign with propaganda 24-7-365; then that media metastasized as shock jocks began to find fame and fortune.
But George Will was watching baseball. Now he sees the world he helped create.
George Will seems a boil on our ass, who still seems sane enough to appear on MSNBC. That has to tell you something – about MSNBC. More importantly, we now have a President and Congress intent on taking our world apart and spew ever more hate. Trump has moved to ban Muslims, erect a wall, repeal Obamacare, withdraw from NATO and the latest to withdraw from the Paris accords. And no one can stop him.
So if Der Trumper simply listened to Bach’s partitas for harpsichord while lounging in his Vulgarian Versailles, he’d be a fine “conservative”, Will/Buckley style? Now the “tone” is the fucking problem?
This is an especially rich lamentation by Will, coming on the day Der Trumper repudiates the Paris Accords, and condemns the 11,000 year old stable climate to destruction—precisely what great “intellectual” Will has advocated for decades. He’s patient zero of climate denialism…Trump is right to see Will as an ingrate!
It’s simply not enough to have the “conservative” vision implemented lock, stock and barrel, it also must be done listening to Bach and drinking the proper Cabernet. Oh well, poor Johann Sebastian cannot choose his fans, an occupational hazard for artists, haha.
Anyway, forgive me if the point of the distinction is lost on me. What the great philosopher Will has sought for decades has been won, and he’s still not satisfied. A sore winner, indeed. Stop scowling and start smiling, Georgie boy, you have triumphed in the end.
“…that would be a recipe for building a political party scarcely bigger than the editorial staff at the National Review.”
I really enjoyed this line!
I agree about the smarminess and self-deception of George Will, but otherwise take exception to much of what is written in this thread.
The world is full of people one could call “cultural conservatives”. If you don’t know any, you’re truly living in a bubble. The ones I know–neighbors, co-workers–are not bigots, but they’re commonly pretty damn uncomfortable with the changes we’ve seen in the United States in the last few decades. And furthermore, many of them are the people whom the Democratic Party lost to Trump in the last election. The agonizing on this blog and elsewhere about how to recapture these voters usually frames the issue in terms of the “working class” or “white working class”, but I maintain it makes more sense to think about “cultural conservatives”, who may be neither white nor working class. In other words, I think an economic analysis falls short.
RE:
Given that you go on to also minimize “economic analysis” re: the travails of ‘the “working class” or “white working class”‘, what exactly — excluding both bigotry and economic discomfort — are “the changes we’ve seen in the United States in the last few decades” that have them so “pretty damn uncomfortable”. What non-economic, non-bigotry-driven changes are these?