When it comes to near-term Republican prospects, the punditocracy is divided. On the Left, it is doom, gloom, and gloat, as E. J. Dionne illustrates in a piece arguing that the G.O.P. is a “brand on the run.” On the right, it is doom, gloom, and gripe, as Peggy Noonan illustrates in a piece lamenting that Republicans are “busy dying.” “The brightest of them,” she writes, “see no immediate light. They’re frozen, not like a deer in the headlights but a deer in the darkness, his ears stiff at the sound. Crunch. Twig. Hunting party.”
What should we think of all these distress calls? I confess I disapprove of them. In the first place, I do not think they’re at all justified. What Victor Davis Hanson called “the echo chamber” has taken over. One creditable–or at least listened to–pundit or politician opines in a way the media likes and, presto, a new bit of conventional “wisdom” is born–or at least reinforced. A mere opinion, often ill-informed, frequently at wide variance with the truth, is repeated often enough, and it suddenly acquires the carapace of general currency that, at a distance, can easily be mistaken for fact.
Hanson was writing about the conventional “wisdom” on the war in Iraq, but the echo chamber is at work on other issues as well. One conspicuous example, I believe, is the fate of conservatism. More than two decades ago, Daniel Patrick Moynihan ruefully noted that Republicans had become “the party of ideas.” He was right about that, as recent American political history amply attests on issues from welfare and taxes to free markets and national security. But in the last couple of years, conservatives, especially conservatives in America and Europe, have seen their prospects fed into the echo chamber. Everywhere one looks, it seems, the fortunes of conservatism are–or are said to be–on the ebb. You can hardly open a newspaper or tune into a television news show without being warned (or, more often, without hearing celebratory shouts) that now, finally, at last, the forces of enlightenment and progress are once again on the ascendant, that conservative ideas and the people promulgating them are in rout. One saw this, for example, in the the aura of supposed inevitability–now conspicuously dissipated–that attended the campaign of Hillary Clinton a few months ago. People from every political persuasion simply took it for granted that the Presidency was hers for the asking. Why?
I have recently begun keeping a folder marked “Conservative Gloominess.” It is full of articles and animadversions by various hands: dire prognostications about who the next occupant of the White House will be, harrowing descriptions of disarray among conservatives, despairing portraits of U.S. or European society. What’s odd, or at least uncharacteristic about these bulletins from the abyss is not their substance–to be candid, I have written plenty of items that could justly be filed there–but their tone and what we might call their existential orientation. From time immemorial conservatives have delighted in writing works with titles like Leviathan, The Decline of the West, The Waste Land. Nevertheless, by habit and disposition conservatives tend, as a species, to be less gloomy than–than what? What shall we call those who occupy a position opposite that of conservatives? Not liberals, surely, since they are so often conspicuously illiberal, i.e., opposed to freedom and all its works. Indeed, when it comes to the word “liberal,” Russell Kirk came close to the truth when he observed that he was conservative because he was a liberal. In any event, whatever the opposite of conservatives should be called–perhaps John Fonte’s marvellous coinage “transnational progressives” is best–they tend to be gloomy, partly, I suspect, because of disappointed utopian ambitions.
Conservatives also tend to enjoy a more active and enabling sense of humor. The English essayist Walter Bagehot once observed that “the essence of Toryism is enjoyment.” What he meant, I think, was summed up by the author of Genesis when that sage observed that “God made the world and saw that it was good.” Conservatives differ from progressives in many ways, but one important way is in the quota of cheerfulness and humor they deploy. Not that their assessment of their fellows is more sanguine. On the contrary. Conservatives tend to be cheerful because they do not regard imperfection as a personal moral affront. Being realistic about mankind’s susceptibility to improvement, they are as suspicious of utopian schemes as they are appreciative of present blessings. This is why the miasmic gloominess emanating from many conservative circles today is so dispiriting. It goes against the grain of what it means to be conservative. It is dampening, and I for one hope it will prove to be a quickly passing phenomenon. Among other things, this recent access of personal gloominess makes the practice of professional gloominess–the robust deployment of satire, ridicule, and so on–much more difficult and less satisfying.
This brings me to the issue of truth. Conservatives are realists. They like to call things by their proper names. Like Oscar Wilde’s Cecily Cardew, they call a spade a spade, unless it is explicitly outlawed, just as they prefer to call “affirmative action” “discrimination according to race or sex,” taxation “government-mandated income redistribution,” and “Islamophobia” a piece of Orwellian Newspeak foisted upon an unsuspecting public by irresponsible “multiculturalists” colluding more or less openly with Islamofascists.
Towards the end of his thoughtful new book Comeback: Conservatism that Can Win Again, David Frum gently takes issue with Russell Kirk’s invocation of “the permanent things.” “How few of those there really are!” Frum writes. “The fact of change is the great fact of human life,” he says, pleading with conservatives to “adapt” to change and retake the intellectual and political initiative. Some such rhetoric might be required on the hustings. But I confess to having mixed feelings about that exhortation, if for no other reason than that I believe change to be not the but a great fact of human life. An equally great fact is continuity, and it may well be that one “adapts” more successfully to certain realities by resisting them than by capitulating to them. “When it is not necessary to change,” Lord Falkland said some centuries ago, “it is necessary not to change.”
I recognize that “change,” like its conceptual cousin “innovation,” is one of the great watchwords of the modern age. But William F. Buckley Jr. was on to something important when he wrote, in the inaugural issue of National Reviewin November 1955, that a large part of the magazine’s mission was to “stand athwart history, yelling Stop.” It’s rare that you hear someone quote that famous line without a smile, the smile meaning “he wasn’t against change, innovation, etc., etc.” But I believe Mr. Buckley was in earnest. It was one of the things that made National Review unzeitgemasse, “untimely” in the highest sense of the word. The Review, Mr. Buckley wrote, “is out of place, in the sense that the United Nations and the League of Women Voters and The New York Times and Henry Steele Commager are in place.”
The Australian philosopher David Stove saw deeply into this aspect of the metabolism of conservatism. In “Why You Should Be a Conservative,” which deserves to be better known than it is, he rehearses the familiar scenario:
A primitive society is being devastated by a disease, so you bring modern medicine to bear, and wipe out the disease, only to find that by doing so you have brought on a population explosion. You introduce contraception to control population, and find that you have dismantled a whole culture. At home you legislate to relieve the distress of unmarried mothers, and find you have given a cash incentive to the production of illegitimate children. You guarantee a minimum wage, and find that you have extinguished, not only specific industries, but industry itself as a personal trait. You enable everyone to travel, and one result is, that there is nowhere left worth travelling to. And so on.
This is the oldest and the best argument for conservatism: the argument from the fact that our actions almost always have unforeseen and unwelcome consequences. It is an argument from so great and so mournful a fund of experience, that nothing can rationally outweigh it. Yet somehow, at any rate in societies like ours, this argument never is given its due weight. When what is called a “reform” proves to be, yet again, a cure worse than the disease, the assumption is always that what is needed is still more, and still more drastic, “reform.”
Progressives cannot wrap their minds (or, more to the point, their hearts) around this irony: that “reform” so regularly exacerbates either the evil it was meant to cure or another evil it had hardly glimpsed. The great Victorian Matthew Arnold was no enemy of reform. But he understood that “the melancholy, long, withdrawing roar” of faith had left culture dangerously exposed and unprotected. In cultures of the past, Arnold thought, the invigorating “remnant” of those willing and able to energize culture was often too small to succeed. As societies grew, so did the forces of anarchy that threatened them–but so did that enabling remnant. Arnold believed modern societies possessed within themselves a “saving remnant” large and vital enough to become “an actual” power that could stem the tide of anarchy. I hope that he was right.
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18 Comments
1. Gagdad Bob:Your thinking and writing are so exceptionally lucid, I’ll bet that if they were only given the opportunity, just about any major university would love to fire you.
May 16, 2008 - 1:49 pm 2. Paul:The great problem of intelligent conservativism (no, sophomores, that is NOT an oxymoron) is now,as always in the past, to know enough about current reality to allow good probabilistic thought about what changes to resist and which ones are either not worth the cost of resisting or are truly irresistible. The former need not be resisted because they (probably) won’t make any difference. The latter needn’t be resisted because it wastes the always scant resource of conservstive intelligence. This still leaves a great deal of stupidity and outright evil to be resisted — intelligently — every day. The ultimately stupid form of conservative resistance is resistence to induction and probabilistic thought. There may be absolutes worth holding as guides to thought and action, but there can’t be many such, and there has never been any satisfying agreement worldwide on what they are.
May 16, 2008 - 4:11 pm 3. Herbert Rubin, M.D.:I like the point about unintended, unforeseen consequences of reform. Daniel Patric Moynahan had a framed pen from the signing of the bill releasing the mentally ill to the street. Kept it on the wall as an object lesson in progressivism making much worse what it intended to improve.
May 17, 2008 - 9:06 am 4. Conservatives are Cheerful at Naugblog:[...] On Pajamas Media, Rodger Kimball has aa brilliant post about why conservatives, with the exception o… Here is an excerpt: [...]
May 17, 2008 - 9:26 am 5. J in YYZ:Mr Kimball, what a superb short essay. A great friend of mine on the Left, now a prominent politician, once despaired of the sheer humourlessness of his crowd – the “Dave Spart” phemonenon of Britain’s Private Eye fame, as you note fuelled by sheer anger & contempt at the people for not moulding themesleves to the Great Utopian Vision (one sees rather a lot of this at the moment with the Obama followers).
The Right always has the best lines, because of our acceptance of the inevitable and eternal human condition, an acceptance often bolstered by a faith in a God slightly more noble than that of state power.
I’ve always thought the inner optimism of conservatives was best expressed by Auberon Waugh’s famous epigram about Our Sacred Duty:
“There are countless horrible things happening all over the country and horrible people prospering, but we must never allow them to disturb our equanimity or deflect us from our sacred duty to sabotage and annoy them whenever possible”.
May 17, 2008 - 9:26 am 6. JO'C`:Great article except for the not so minor point that both Dionne and Noonan were writing about the fall from grace of the “GOP” and “Republicans”, not “conservatives”. The fact that conservatism has little to do with the way the GOP is being run these days is the REASON for the doom and gloom. When the GOP realizes this and embraces conservative principles again than their ascendancy from the abyss will soon follow.
May 17, 2008 - 9:40 am 7. Van:“But I confess to having mixed feelings about that exhortation, if for no other reason than that I believe change to be not the but a great fact of human life. An equally great fact is continuity, and it may well be that one “adapts” more successfully to certain realities by resisting them than by capitulating to them.”
Well said.
Maybe remodeling society should be approached as if remodeling a large jet while in flight – some walls just should not be knocked down… and if you don’t know which ones are which, such changes should be something resorted to, not striven for…“When it is not necessary to change,” Lord Falkland said some centuries ago, “it is necessary not to change.”
BTW, good to see Matthew Arnold’s name in ‘print’; his Culture and Anarchy ought to be required reading for anyone convinced of the superiority of Modernity in general, and of making Progress in particular.
And just as a help in better understanding what is worth being understood, ‘yourself’ for instance, it’s hard to top these Selections from the Prose Works of Matthew Arnold.
May 17, 2008 - 10:45 am 8. James Burnham:Conservative gloominess is fully justified. The tragedy is that the historian, Niall Ferguson, saw this coming very clearly four years ago in a very prescient op-ed in the Wall St. Journal (8/27/2004), just before the Republican Convention – and no one of note was ready to comprehend the usefulness of historical insights. I am only surprised that Peggy Noonan did not reference his piece.
May 17, 2008 - 7:23 pm 9. A. Taylor:Brilliant, Mr Kimball and thank you. I shall spread this ‘essay’ as widely as I can.
Sadly, we in Australia, are now experiencing, again, your quote of Matthew Arnold “the melancholy, long, withdrawing roar”. After a much needed respite of sensible Conservatism that provided us with a vital tool for success: freedom to choose, we find ourselves being cured of that success by a Socialist government, led by a megalomaniac, determined to “reform” each of every area of our lives.
Our beds have certainly been made for some time to come, but it is not yet too late for you Americans to make the right choice that will secure that success for a future of right choices.
May 17, 2008 - 11:05 pm 10. Publius:Mr. Kimball points out for the reader a major point about form and function – conservatives have a realistic (and therefore ‘hard’) view of the world, and so they are free to enjoy the world as it is.
William F. Buckley and Ronald Reagan embodied this quality of joy and were both loved and followed for it.
Should conservatives really be so surprised with what little wisdom the world is ruled? Of course not.
So speak our mind, and enjoy what good has always been mixed with the evil in this life.
It’s how to win, and how to live.
May 18, 2008 - 7:14 pm 11. Lott:If this piece weren’t obvious bunk this liberal–that’s right, I hate freedome–would be insulted.
The Echo Chamber and the mainstream media? C’mon now. Conservatives invented the Chamber. Rush and his Dittoheads repeating false talking points until they become true–that’s the Echo Chamber, my friend. You probably don’t know it because you’re living in it.
And “liberals opposed to freedom and all its works,” two paragraphs after explaining the Echo Chamber? Seriously? Is today April Fool’s? Does anyone even remeber the Swiftboating of John Kerry? That was one serious Echo Chamber. This coming in a piece about conservatives, who as a grooup are generally against allowing people to marry whomever they wish regardless of their sexual orientation. Ludicrous.
I knew you were out of actual dicussion points when you brought up sense of humor. That’s a good recruitment pitch: “Be A Conservative! We’re The Funny Ones!” Brilliant but pointless.
Maybe the humor thing is true, though, because I laughed aloud when I read the Buckly quote chiding the League of Women Voters. And I guffawed reading the paragraphs about unintended consequences that didn’t mention the invasion of Iraq. That’s good stuff right there.
May 19, 2008 - 11:22 am 12. Lee Poteet:Lott may lamment the “Swiftboating of John Kerry,” but Mr Kerry could have easily disproved the charges (if, indeed, they were untrue) by realeasing all of his Navy military record. He did not and would not, hence the continued assumption that his fellows had him dead to rights.
May 19, 2008 - 2:18 pm 13. Lott:Conservatives may lose the coming election, but it was not they who made John McCain the Republican candidate. The truth is that we have simply forgotten just how facist the American Left is, but if the election is lost we will be more than reminded of both that and how incompetent they really are. It will be Jimmy Carter or worse all over again. And then we will see what the voters will then do, won’t we?
Fascist American left? Hello? Hello? Hello? Lee? Lee? Lee? Is there an echo? Echo? Echo?
Know what real fascists do? They accuse those who disagree with them of hating freedom. They wrap themselves in their flags and question the patriotism of their opponents. They create bogymen out a some group and place the blame on them–any kind of blame will do: loss of jobs, lack of morals and ethics–to distract the populace from the crimes they commit. The create a “with us or against us” mindset, as if these are the only positions one could take. They suspend the rule of law for the “good” of their people, laws like habeas corpus. They keep the population afraid of some force supposedly looking to destroy everything they dear. They believe in social Darwinism, and hope that the weak and ill fit will simply die off so that the strong can rule with an iron fist.
Does any of that sound familiar? It should, because these are the policies of the current batch of conservatives. I’m sure they don’t describe you, Lee, or anyone you’ve ever voted for. Then again, there’s one thing fascists never do: admit that they are wrong.
May 20, 2008 - 6:29 pm 14. Isabella:“Then again, there’s one thing fascists never do: admit that they are wrong.”
I agree, although the fascists aren’t conservatives. The fascists are the promoters of speech codes, judicial imperialism, and rabid intolerance of disagreement, democracy, or inconvenient facts. And, as Mr. Kimball notes, they are utterly humorless…
May 24, 2008 - 10:46 am 15. Bent Notes » Blog Archive » Two cheers for cheer:[...] A recent piece of his has as its thrust a reconsideration of recent conservative gloom about conserv… He offers another view, but, as one would expect from a towering giant of a wordsmith, he does much more. He offers, for example, a consideration-warranting look at where conservatives on one hand and Freedom-Haters on the other find levity and pessimistic prospects in life. [...]
May 24, 2008 - 1:53 pm 16. Lott:So, Isabella, you enjoy proving my point. You are doing exactly what the fascists do. So far in these comments, liberals have been branded as hating freedom and democracy, when it’s the conservatives that meddle in the personal relationships of Americans and engage in voter fraud by distributing fliers on election day saying that the polling place has been moved. Liberals don’t want you to call someone the N word; conservatives want to control what kind of sex consenting adults have in their own homes. Which is worse? Wait, I know the answer. I’m sure it has something to do with Jesus and how he frowns on sex education classes.
And rabid intolerance of disagreement? Have you been paying attention to the Bush administration’s war on those it deems its enemies? Inconvenient facts? Are you high? The facts that Iraq had no role in 9/11, Saddam had no ties to Osama bin Laden, and Iraq had no WMD were ignored so Bush could invade. Judicial imperialism handed Bush his presidency. Oy vey. Conservatives. The only reason your heads are in the sand is because Jesus frowns on ass play.
And I’m still puzzled by the “utterly humorless” remark. It what the office bully always claims after he calls the women “sweethearts” and the gay guys “homos.” It’s a ruse to test the boundaries, to see what he can get away with before people push back. Then he can claim to have been “just kidding.” “Whatsa matter? You aint got a sense of humor, toots?”
May 25, 2008 - 8:43 pm 17. BMoon:The lack of humor with lefties I think has to do with their inherent affliction with the messianic complex. They are out to save the world, in their delusional mindset, and that, being serious business, leaves no room for self-reflection, the essence of humor. If leftists-statists cannot learn from Robespierre (another of their pitiably humorless forbears) the dire consequences of their ghastly error in premise, I do not think they will ever learn, at least from history. They will have to, as the cliche goes, repeat it, over and over and over, like the stupid hamster and his wheel.
May 26, 2008 - 11:46 am 18. Lott:Nope, BMoon, it’s the bullying posture of the right.
May 27, 2008 - 10:09 am