Sniffing the intellectual winds of our glorious era, and poring piously over the learned reflections on neoconservatism, we grow apprehensive.  It seems to us that the eminences of polite thought are up to something.  Their reports on the neoconservatives’ doings strike us as generally dissembling attempts at damage control and intimidation.  That is to say, they want to portray neoconservatism as a very narrowly based operation, intellectually limited, and not to be touched by any young intellectual desirous of advancement in the realm of higher celebration.

 

There is always a danger that the intellectual history of an era will be written by ideologues, and the more evidence gainsaying their prejudices the better.  With this in mind, we asked some of our younger writers to contribute to a symposium on neoconservatism, addressing themselves to the following questions:

           

(A)  What makes you neoconservative or at least not liberal in the way that term is being used today?

(B) Where have you stood in the past? 

(C) What issues—political, cultural, or economic—most disturb you today?

 

Their responses are presented here.

 

 

Christopher DeMuth:

 

I have a cute answer for people who ask about my politics.  It is that I came out of Harvard College a liberal, so I went to work for the federal government—where I looked around and realized I was really a conservative.  So I left for law school and went to work in private industry—where I looked around and realized I was really a socialist.  So I returned to Harvard.

 

This gets me off the hook at Brattle Street cocktail parties, but the punch line is only a joke, and in any event I don’t believe in dramatic ideological tergiversations.  Remember how the “Up With People” singers used to testify what rotten, delinquent kids they had been before being saved by Moral Rearmament?  Once I asked one of them what kinds of trouble he had been in before joining the group, and he told me that he had served himself first at the dinner table, almost never took out the trash, and often left his bed unmade for days on end.  Of course, there are famous stories of intellectuals who started out as Trotskyites and ended up writing for conservative journals or at the Libertarian Party, but one suspects they were never the truest believers among their young comrades, and the political movement virtually never goes in the opposite, leftward direction.

 

As for myself, I certainly counted myself a liberal during college days.  I worked in civil-rights activities in Chicago and New York City, and in my senior year impulsively blew my savings and grades to go to Martin Luther King’s funeral.  I tried to get a job working for Senator Paul Douglas’ reelection campaign in Illinois.  I put in obligatory appearances at antiwar rallies.  I also chased girls, cut classes, and didn’t make my bed.

 

Looking back, however, I realize that I was not a good liberal even then.  When I didn’t get the job working for Senator Douglas I went to work for his opponent, Charles Percy, a close neighbor and not exactly Philip Crane, but nevertheless a Republican.  Soon I was reading The Ripon Forum and sometime after that even began glancing at National Review (This last step became respectable after I asked a professor what books I should read to learn about urban politics and, to my amazement, he recommended William F. Buckley’s The Unmaking of a Mayor.)  The professors who caught my fancy were Edward C. Banfield and James Q. Wilson and Daniel P. Moynihan—for their civility and seriousness before I came to appreciate their scholarship in any depth; the crowd-pleasers on the faculty seemed glib and supercilious in comparison.  I also harbored doubts about the antiwar leaders—already the Big Men On Campus in 1968 (my senior year) and acting like it—and concerning the war itself I was always more confused than adamant.

 

So, while it would be nice to think that the evolution of my views was a conscious thing, brought about by keen observation and deep reflection, perhaps it was just a matter of growing up, and perhaps I have been a man of “conservative disposition” (Michael Oakeshott’s term) from the start.  A clue from the examples above is that in first instances I have always been attracted (or repelled) by the characters of specific individuals rather than by the abstract merits of specific policies.  But is the drift of a man’s political views as he matures simply a function of his turn of mind?  Unfocused sentimentalizing about the human situation, which is the proximate flaw of modern liberalism, is also the natural impulse of those who are just beginning to learn about the world; the enormous difficulties of human organization and cooperation, the imperative presence of the market, and the advisability of keeping your powder dry are lessons learned only at the hands of experience—and how can anyone avoid learning them?  Anyone who has worked inside a government bureaucracy must know how hard it is to coordinate the activities of a group of people to achieve a preconceived objective.  But isn’t the lesson equally apparent to anyone working in a business organization, or, for heaven’s sake, to anyone who has simply gotten married and tried to manage the affairs of a small family?  Winston Chuchill and Irving Kristol are right in saying that, in politics, liberalism is the natural tendency of the young and conservatism is the natural tendency of the adult.

 

One could say that the lessons of personal life are indeed ineluctable, and that “liberalism” in the modern sense is simply the political expression of modern man’s fear of middle age, of his clinging to his adolescence, kidding himself about life’s possibilities.  I think there is some truth in this, but as an argument it smacks of technique, like the way the New York Times used to treat conservatism matter-of-factly as a known type of social pathology.  Another answer is that in the current state of democracy there are no true liberals anymore, just as there are no true conservatives—just politicians with different constituencies, dictating appeals to different sets of general ideas according to the contingencies of the moment.  Farm-state politicians anguish over Hunger in America, just as oil-state politicians anguish over The Future of the Free Enterprise System.  This, however, is not so much an answer as a reformulation of the question, since it does not say why a particular set of ideas should be thought to have wide political appeal.

 

I do think that people are too quick to let the distant lessons of political events overrule the immediate lessons of their personal lives.  Perhaps this is because people fail to realize that rhetoric and symbolic behavior play an enormously greater role in politics than they can ever play in private life, and that for this reason there are few “lessons” of a practical nature to be learned from any singular political success or failure.  Consider the civil-rights movement of the 1960s.  The movement’s goals were so morally right, they were met with such vehement resistance, and then they succeeded so spectacularly that the movement is bound to remain the crucial domestic political experience of my generation.  But we seem to have learned from it the wrong lesson—a bad habit, really—of reflexively relying on extensions of federal power whenever any aspect of the nation’s life seems to leave room for improvement.  I have come to appreciate the substantive merits of Barry Goldwater’s arguments against the Civil Rights Act of 1964.  It was, however, manifestly a time to lay these substantive merits aside, in part to maintain a proper appreciation for them later on.  Surely things would have gone better for us in the past 15 years had Senator Goldwater voted resoundingly for the Civil Rights Act, so as to command attention as he explained the transcendency of the circumstances requiring its extraordinary provisions.  Instead, the Act somehow became an indistinguishable, irresistible political precedent.

 

But my generation does have a few things going for it insofar as clear thinking is concerned.  At least, we were spared the wrong lessons from the twenties, from the Depression and the New deal, and from the labor organization movement.  We are the first to come to maturity in an America where black citizens are not subject to institutional public humiliations.  The Vietnam war has, if anything, left us too introspective, and too morose about political action.  And we are faced with a rather dour set of objective circumstances, such as the Soviet Union’s dominance of the world’s military and political affairs, chronic inflation, and the prospect that the social security system will break down before we have worked our way up to the payout window.  At the same time, the liberal agenda of “unmet needs” is by now virtually exhausted.  (About the only thing left is the proposal to require everyone to buy a health insurance contract, and the list seems not to be expanding in advance of actual legislation; no one today is calling for government-issued work uniforms, for instance.)  Perhaps for these reasons the usual positions of the generations seem now to be strangely reversed: At least those within the opinion-making elites under 40 appear to be considerably more conservative than those over 50.  In business and in government, in the prestige academic departments of economics, government, and law, in medicine, architecture, journalism, and religion, we seem for the moment to be in a world of old swingers and young fogies.