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The Fall Of Howard Stern, The New Abortion Wars, Afghanistan, Australia’s Covid Lockdown (9-23-21)
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Religion in Secular Society: Fifty Years On
Here are some excerpts from the updated 2016 edition:
* Bryan Ronald Wilson came from unusually humble origins. He was born in 1926 in a working-class terrace in Leeds. The house had no running hot water, and the communal toilet, which was emptied once a week, was ‘up the street and 30 yards around the corner’. The identity of his biological father was not known to him, and he was given the name of his mother’s first husband. The family was not particularly religious, but Wilson was sent to a Methodist Sunday School to give his parents some privacy in a tiny crowded house. Wilson’s schooling ended at the age of 13, when he started work as an accountant and office boy.
* Religious thinking, religious practices and religious institutions were once at the very centre of the life of Western society, as indeed of all societies. That there were, even in the seventeenth, and certainly in the eighteenth and nineteenth, centuries many unchurched people to whom religious practices and places were alien, and whose religious thinking was a mixture of odd piety, good intentions, rationalizations and superstitions, does not gainsay the dominance of religion. It was entrenched, if not always strictly by law, then by some of the institutions of society, in the customs of the people and by the precepts of the ruling classes. That there were other countervailing forces, economic or political necessity, which frequently overrode God’s will, or churchmen’s apprehension of it, does not contradict the fact that religious motives, religious sanctions and religious professionals were all of them socially of very great influence indeed.
In the twentieth century that situation has manifestly changed, and the process of change continues.
* People’s religious orientations to the world occur within a wider social context with which they interact in highly complex ways. It would be impossible to ignore the growth of new channels for emotional expression, new prospects for the realization of wishes, and new agencies which function for people in ways which, in the past, have been more or less a monopoly of religious agencies. Thus, to choose almost at random, if we look at political movements, we see that the development of industrial society and the emergence of democratic patterns of political behaviour have had diverse consequences of importance for religion. The very conception that social arrangements, distributions of power, wealth, prestige, life chances and the general pattern of life circumstances can be affected by instrumental action, and primarily by mass decision-making (or decision-making in the name of the masses), has in itself gradually altered people’s recourse to demands for supernatural intervention in their affairs. The widespread religious teaching that we must show contentment with our lot, and fulfil our obligations, or, alternatively, the religious hope that God will enter the human scene (again) and impose a new dispensation, are both orientations which diminish in strength as realistic political possibilities are increasingly apprehended. The change of focus from the afterlife to this one has obviously been strongly associated with this development of the sense of social self-direction.
* If, as is common, we recognize that we are less effectively selfdirecting than ideally we should like to be, increasingly we acknowledge that this is the consequence of the complexity of human purposes and emotions, and not God’s disposition ‘to try us in this world’ or to ‘give each his cross to bear’. Religious–moral interpretations of factual circumstances have disappeared and politico-moral interpretations have taken their place. Preoccupation with the morality of nation states has largely replaced individual morality as a dominant concern of the intellectuals in modern society. Moral suppositions which are now applied to international affairs are dismissed at the individual level of behaviour.
As scientific orientations increase, and in particular those of the behavioural and organizational sciences, so we can expect conceptions of society itself to become increasingly affected by rationalistic assumptions. As social processes are increasingly subjected to rational planning and organization, so people are more and more involved in social activities in which their own emotional dispositions are less immediately relevant. They may have become more rational, and their thinking may have become more matter of fact, as Veblen expressed it, but perhaps even more important is their sustained involvement in rational organizations—firms, public service, educational
institutions, government, the state—which impose rational behaviour upon them. The Churches, with their dominant function as the institutionalization of emotional gratification, necessarily stand in sharp and increasingly disadvantageous contrast.
Political movements, and the growth of organizational and manipulative techniques, have not only affected our sense of social decencies and proprieties and our judgement about them, and about suitable action to be taken in regard to deviations; they have also provided new outlets for individual effort and energy.
* In Methodism, despite its somewhat reactionary character, the process of laicization went further, and the layman acquired, despite a somewhat reluctant Wesley, the preaching role, as, in that more circumscribed context, he had previously done among Quakers. Even the celebration of the sacraments was now open to laymen. The floodgates were open now for a wider participation of volunteering laymen in diverse religious activities. Opportunities for prestige, good-standing in the community acquired by voluntary effort, now became possible. In some ways this was the first process of mass social mobility in modern society—not necessarily involving change of occupation, income or formal position, but certainly presenting opportunities for acquiring new prestige
and general respectability, which was often itself a first step to mobility of other kinds.
* as voluntary associations arose with more secular aims, so the impetus of the spread of office and prestige through activities of a religious kind, or activities sponsored by the Churches, was overtaken by first political and then recreational associations in which similar prestigious roles were to be had. If they lacked the qualities
and connotations of reverence, esteem and often wider community regard which attached to voluntary religious efforts, over time they often came to provide their incumbents with a wider application of power, better apparatus and equipment, until the balance has swung and religious office now appears to be less worthwhile as a way of
disposing of one’s leisure than involvement in an organization whose benefits are largely recreational and more explicitly ‘here and now’. These tend to be interest associations, and their spread reflects the decline of corporate and community allegiances in which religious affiliation was dominantly located.
* Diversity of leisure opportunities meant that for recreational pursuits other possibilities were open, particularly in the sphere of educational and intellectual recreation, which had previously been almost exclusively the province of the Churches. The growth of new techniques for the presentation of information necessarily led to the emergence of new occupations expert in production and in presentation—the development of the film industry illustrates the process most vividly.
* Thus the entertainment industry—and it became an industry in the full sense only with the development of advanced technical means of presentation—was from the outset a challenge to religion, offering diversion, other reinterpretations of daily life, and competing for the time, attention and money of the public. In its actual content it may be seen as more than an alternative way of spending time, but also as an alternative set of
norms and values. It replaced religion’s attempt to awaken public sentiments by offering titillation of private emotions. In this whole development, and it is necessarily a complex one, relating to the expansion of literacy and the development of a secular Press, as well as to the cinema and subsequently to the radio and television, the Church was steadily losing its near-monopoly, and at least its dominance, of the media of communication.
* From being a very powerful voice in the local community, the clergyman became one of several voices with divergent religious messages, and subsequently competed further with the increasingly effective voices using the new technical means of mass communication offering non-religious distractions.
Today, even though the Church is able to use the means of mass communication, it does so only marginally—marginally to its own total communication, which still relies on the nexus of pulpit and pew and on religious literature, and marginally to the total content of the mass media as a whole. Compared to the amount of entertainment, music, news, drama, secular education and all the other types of item carried by television, radio, Press and cinema, religious information has become a very tiny part indeed. Nor are religionists as good at
using the media as those who are instructing or entertaining. They have developed few, if any, new techniques for its use, and they use it by courtesy and on sufferance. They tend to be older and middle-aged men using media increasingly dominated by the young. It might not be untrue to say that they are the deference note of the mass communicators, ‘employed’ to whiten the image of an industry which is frequently charged with subversive, immoral and deleterious presentations.
As long as the Church connives in using the media, the media controllers can use this fact in their own defence, as evidence of their social responsibility. But, given the religionist’s necessary assumption that religious truth is pre-eminent and that it ought to take a dominant place in our minds, the relegation of religious material to a marginal place in the programmes of the mass communications is itself a derogation of the religious message. In using the mass media the Churches permit their own material to be reduced to the level of the medium, to be put forth without much differentiation of presentation from a wide variety of highly heterogeneous and at times incongruous material. This in itself must detract from the high claims to pre-eminence which—of necessity—religion makes for itself. There is indeed some evidence that the use of mass media themselves alters the image of the Church. In the secularized society, religion must accept a marginal position in the communications agencies in
defiance of its own self-assessment of the relative importance of different types of information!
* The expansion of science and the fact that scientific operations ‘proved themselves’ in the eyes of the man in
the street led to a new pragmatic test for all ideological systems. Science not only explained many facets of life and the material environment in a way more satisfactory than alternative religious interpretations, but it
also provided confirmation of its explanations in practical results. The very same factors which might be said to have very significantly affected the early spread of Christianity—its efficacy as a healing agency, and as an agency which could affect material conditions—were those which furthered the development of science, at least in its public acceptability. Even if science were deficient at the level of ‘meanings’, people had the alternative religio-artistic approach to the world which offered emotional rapport and empathic involvement with nature and with other people.
* Once ‘liberated’ from the view of the world as depicted in a particular religion, artistic conceptions of the world may be very much more challenging to religious orientations than science is.
* art deals, as religion deals, in emotional matters, in meaningful communications, in interpreting,
evaluating, evoking responses and inviting the individual’s participation in a complex set of conceptions and feelings.
* There was an imperceptible gradualism in the way in which the arts freed themselves from religious preconceptions, in literature with moral tales which were often intrinsically shocking, as in Defoe; in painting with the gradual romanticization of the landscape and the invocation of other gods; in poetry with the candid expression of other emotions in clearly non-allegorical contexts. But, once the process had begun, the arts still in the service of the Churches were steadily emaciated: they lost spontaneity and lost their earlier deeper sense of values and their sense of intrinsic association. Late-nineteenth-century religious art, poetry and architecture
make evident this emaciation. Outside the service of religion, the arts came—however uncertainly—to represent other values, whether drawn from human predicaments, political ideals, or the theory of art for its own sake.
* That the Churches today are so concerned to assert that there is no conflict between science and religion is perhaps the best indication that the struggle is over, and that religion has conceded wide territories to science. The real conflict reposed in the minds of people, in terms of their proclivity to regard science as more reliable and more valuable than religion.
* Conflict came as society espoused the pragmatic values that were so much more manifest in the scientific enterprise than in religion. At the fringes there developed religious movements which sought to be no less pragmatic than the sciences, which sought to confer distinct benefits on people, and to convince them that religion—rightly understood—could also work. The whole ‘New Thought’ group of movements, of which Christian Science was the most effectively organized and best known, sought to assert in the last years of the nineteenth century that religion too was a set of scientific principles which would enable us to live better. These principles were applied to much the same ends as those of science at that time—the search for bodily health and material well-being. The movements had correspondingly very diminished emphasis on the traditional religious concern with life after death. It is no accident that these new religious movements arose in the USA. Pragmatism was by no means confined to these marginal developments, but even in more orthodox denominations there was some growth of would-be healing cults, spiritualist ‘proofs’ of the afterlife, and the continued emphasis (especially in America) on the value of religion as an agency of mental therapy. The real danger of science to religion, however, was rather in the increased prestige of science and the decline in the intellectual prestige of religion. Since science had answers, and had positive tangible fruits, it came increasingly to command respect and approval. As governments became less concerned with the promotion of religion, so they became increasingly disposed to sponsor science, at first by prizes and awards, and later by ever-increasing endowments to scientific enquiry
and scientific education.
…the ‘wise’ men of society, had necessarily been religionists, since the Church maintained virtually an intellectual stratum whose principal obligations had become the maintenance of cultured, civilized and educational values. But increasingly intellectual concerns passed beyond the knowledge and the ability of clergymen. Even if
from among their numbers many of the early scientists had come, as science became more specialized, and as specifically scientific education developed, so the possibility for the cleric to be a scientist diminished.
Science grew up outside the control of the religious intellectual strata, and a new professional grouping came gradually into being.
Reflected in this process is also the shifting reliance on science for economic advance. Whereas nineteenth-century businessmen in the early period of industrialization relied on religion as an agency of social control, which helped to instil a sense of discipline and order into the workforce, which was still the primary factor of production, in the twentieth century, as industry became more capitalized, so machinery increasingly ‘controlled’ labour, and that control could now be specifically adjusted for the particular task in hand without implications for controlling people in their private lives outside the work situation. The old control, with its ‘letters of testimony’ (‘characters’ as the working class knew them), relied on a worker’s general dispositions to industriousness, punctuality, thrift, sobriety, willingness and reliability; the new control demanded nothing of his or her ‘character’—the conveyor belt could exact all the control that was needed. Industry has thus passed from internalized ‘character’ values to mechanical manipulation. Thus it has turned from religious socialization
to technical devices for the means of regulating the work situation and the productive process.
Eventually, for this imperative need to control workers, industry has turned to new so-called sciences, of ‘management’ and ‘industrial relations’. In economic terms it is wasteful to demand that the whole person, in all his or her facets, should be self-disciplined when a more specific method of manipulation can be evolved of just that part of the person which is needed for the job. Industry has thus rejected the blanket control of religio-moral socialization of workers for methods which control them very much more as if they were mechanical
instruments of production. Thus, whereas once businessmen, if they engaged in philanthropy, gave to religious causes, today they increasingly pass their surpluses to the endowment of science and education—and ‘education’ usually means scientific education.
* The steady development of science meant the gradual emergence of separated disciplines which had earlier been embraced within—embedded within—a general theological interpretation of the world and society. The older sciences had freed themselves over centuries, as Comte had illustrated in his sociological treatise of the Three Stages,
and by the nineteenth century the Church had little claim to provide the basis of cosmology.5 As geology and biology developed, so the authenticity of the Christian interpretation of the world became patently less tenable, and steadily, often with bad grace and sometimes with scant respect for objective procedures for the discovery of the truth, the churches retreated from their earlier assertions concerning geological and biological facts. Psychology and sociology, in which specific propositions capable of testing are more difficult to formulate, have not experienced the same dramatic confrontation with Church teaching, but their attempt to create dispassionate, non-evaluative approaches to people and society are undoubtedly as much, if not more, at variance with the religious orientation per se, as any of the earlier sciences.
Churchmen have, of course, sought to make use of these disciplines, to harness them to their purposes. Science is always easily restricted to the realm of means, and is neutral concerning ends. The very development of the Higher Criticism was a considerable concession to the scientific spirit by theologians. To recognize that sacred books must, despite their sacredness, have been written by men, and must contain human apprehensions of the deity, was in itself a remarkable admission of the spirit of empiricism and reason to the theological sphere. It is true that when the results of such enquiry proved grossly inconvenient, and fell under pontifical disfavour in the Roman Church in the first two decades of this century, then the interest of the clergy shifted from historical to mystical interpretations of the beginnings of Christianity. Steadily, however, a scientific orientation has persisted, not only in textual matters, but in stylistics, archaeology and in the interpretation of the Dead Sea scrolls.† The attempt to offer counterscientific interpretations of the physical world, which religionists
sought to do so urgently in the nineteenth century, have been largely abandoned. More radically, clerics have increasingly recognized religion as itself a subject of psychological and sociological interest.
* not only has knowledge of the material world, and the ability to pronounce upon it, passed from the clergy, but so, too, has systematic knowledge concerning the minds of men and the organization of society. It is not uncommon today to see clerics as students in universities, particularly in the social sciences, where—little more than half a century ago—those who would have been teaching what there was to know on these subjects would themselves have been clerics, and this was not much less true in America than in Britain. Even in their pastoral functions, the clergy may be said to have lost influence, and to have been transformed, by the growth of specialists in social work, into amiable amateurs.
* It is in the organized religious conferences that the most acute and clearly crystallized responses to the events taking place in the wider society are articulated and it is here that religious leaders commonly pronounce on social and moral—and sometimes on economic and political—issues. In the Catholic Church, with its stronger hold on its following (a hold directly associated with the elevated and authoritative conception of the priesthood, and especially of the higher echelons of the clerical profession), pronouncements on birth control, on aspects of medical practice, on divorce, and on education still have important political and sometimes economic significance.
The Protestant Churches have not had this type of control of the laity: indeed, there is a sense in which such authority would inveigh against the rights of conscience and individual responsibility, which have always been stronger elements of Protestant (including Anglican) faith.
* The economic sphere of production has become separated from consumption; the family and its concerns have separated from the productive sphere; education has acquired autonomy. All of these developments, together with the earlier distinction of the political and judicial areas of social life, and the more recent separation of recreational facilities from the community and the family, have tended to leave religious agencies very much less associated with the other social institutions than once was the case. There has been a compartmentalizing of life; religion, which once had a general presidency over people’s concerns, and endowed their activities with a sense of sacredness, has increasingly lost this pre-eminence and influence.
Life activities have been secularized, and the sense of mystery, the religious meaning of objects and acts, has steadily waned. This demystification of the world has meant both that everyday thinking has become more instrumental and matter of fact—that emotional involvement with nature, with the community, and with other people
has been reduced—and that the external world has been ‘drained of meaning’. The process has been twofold, in the loss of the ‘religious sense’ of activity, the disappearance of the religious interpretation of the purpose of life, and the actual loss of influence of the institutions which embodied these sentiments. It is not merely that the churches have lost members, but that people have largely ceased to think of—or respond to—the world with a sense of mystery and awe.
* At levels of social control other than the formal operation of law, there has been an increasing recognition that morals are private matters. People are less prepared to be their brothers’ keepers, and the force of community opinion about what is ‘done’ and ‘not done’ and what is decent diminishes as local community life itself diminishes. Those attitudes of moral regulation of one’s fellows, and of each by all, were of course, in Western nations, entrenched in strong religious attitudes, and underpinned by Christian values. In the twentieth century we have seen a general relaxation of moral and religious demands made on the individual by the community… What is apparent is that the age of economic laissez-faire has introduced an age of moral laissez-faire, and, in Western Europe at least, just at the time that economic laissez-faire is itself under heavy attack and has, in some departments, given way to regional or national planning.
* At one time moral values were held to be derived, if not actually prescribed, by him, from the word and will of God. In such a circumstance, prescribed morality was unchanging and authoritative. But the Churches have increasingly faced the circumstance in which the authoritative will of God has made less and less impact on men in a society where social and legal control have become increasingly separate from religious control, and where men cease in large measure voluntarily to put themselves under the guidance of ecclesiastics.
* From being the arbiters of moral behaviour, the Churches have steadily become more like reflectors of the practice of the times, gradually and hesitatingly endorsing change. In the emphasis on ‘getting up to date’, the Churches tacitly recognize their own increasingly marginal capacity to influence society. The shifts of Church
response on the issue of birth control illustrate the way in which moral theologians have attempted to come to terms with the changing moral practice of societies which they increasingly realize they know very little about.
* what the Church condemns as sinful at one time, it acknowledges as perfectly appropriate at another…
* If modern people demand rather less by way of consolation than they have traditionally demanded, yet it is also evident that they are under greater continuing strain in their daily lives, and have evolved means of handling this situation other than through religious agencies. The welfare services, which once were prompted by Christian motives and a sense of charity, have been almost completely secularized. What was once done from Christian duty is now an accepted state provision as part of the extension of general political, civic and social rights, which have been universalized in many countries…
* If the problems of identity and anxiety have become worse, they have also become susceptible to new methods of treatment. If we are more alienated in the industrial society, the decline of religion and the loss of widely accepted meanings and emotional orientations have been part of the process. The Churches are no longer in a position to undertake their preventative therapy, and special agencies of mental hygiene arise.14 The mental health agencies cannot provide general social reassurance; they operate as essentially private rehabilitation
services for individuals with specific and acute problems. The cost of the affluent industrial society is a high incidence of mental ill health, widely diffused strain, addiction to drugs, high rates of suicide, crime
and delinquency, the disorientation of youth in a social context increasingly bewildering and in which older moral and religious shibboleths no longer seem valid.
Religious orientations are part of what have been surrendered in the development of this type of society, and, since common consensual solutions appear impossible, it is evident that individual priests and ministers of religion contend with a pastoral problem which in the social structural character of its origins exceeds their competence, and in its magnitude exceeds their resources.
* Even where personal counselling is the remedy, it is the specialist techniques of psychiatry, and not religious pastoral care, which society calls for. Mental health and moral behaviour become ‘research problems’ and scientific enquiry moves to ever more elaborate analysis, and to manipulative remedial action, in sharp contrast to the synthetic and socially holistic approach of the Churches.
* We have already seen that the clergy tend to have lost social standing. Scientists have increasingly replaced them as the intellectual stratum of society, and literature and the arts have passed almost completely out of the religious sphere. The scepticism of modern society has affected the clerical profession profoundly. The attempt
to find other levels at which religious propositions are true—that is to say, levels other than the common-sense and literal level—has led to widely diverse clerical interpretations of religion in its contemporary meaning. Clerics have now come to disbelieve in the ultimacy of any answers which they can supply about social questions, as they did earlier about physical questions. As the range of empirical information has increased, acquisition of the knowledge of it and the skills to analyse it and interpret it pass beyond the range of clerical education.
The awareness of the relativity of modern knowledge has made the cleric more guarded and less confident in the intellectual content of religion.
* The professional can afford to play an intellectual game—as a cleric he is bound and committed by vows of
obedience and loyalty, and, no less important, held very often by economic dependence. The layman very often wants only assurance and certainty—of a kind which clerics feel increasingly less able to provide.
That some clergy themselves become sceptical, and cease to believe in many of the things which laymen believe in as essentials of the faith, or believe in them in an entirely different way, can only be a source of confusion and despair to those who want to believe in certain, and usually simple, truths.
* The speculative intellectuals among the clergy resemble in their professional position (and I make no judgement of the warranty of their specific ideas) the charcoal-burners or alchemists in an age when the processes in which they were engaged had been rendered obsolete, technically or intellectually. The clergy become a curiously placed
intelligentsia, many of them uncertain of their own faith, uncertain of the ‘position’ of their Church on many matters, and unsure whether they agree with that position. The more advanced among them sometimes suggest that simpler men believe the right things for the wrong reasons. They themselves are institutionally entrenched but
intellectually footloose. They have no real continuity with the actual beliefs of the past, but only with the forms, the rituals, the involvement in a persisting organization. At the same time, they have no part in the
faster-moving intellectual debate within their own society. Neither the scientists nor the literary intellectuals seek theological opinions, and least of all the social scientists.
* Superficially, then, and in contrast to the evidence from Europe, and particularly from Protestant Europe, the United States manifests a high degree of religious activity. And yet, on this evidence, no one is prepared to suggest that America is other than a secularized country. By all sorts of other indicators it might be argued that the United States was a country in which instrumental values, rational procedures and technical methods have gone furthest, and the country in which the sense of the sacred, the sense of the sanctity of life, and deep religiosity are most conspicuously absent. The travellers of the past who commented on the apparent extensiveness of church membership rarely omitted to say that they found religion in America to be very superficial. Sociologists generally hold that the dominant values of American society are not religious: ‘American culture is marked by a central stress upon personal achievement, especially secular occupational achievement. The “success story” and the respect accorded to the self-made man are distinctly American.
* In a country in which the tenor of life is highly impersonal; in which individuals are often exposed to manipulation; in which the economic organizations of society have reached giant proportions and threaten the very identity of the individual, so there is likely to be a persistent demand for something which provides a less associational and more communal orientation. Since, in many areas, Americans are often on the move—with travel to and from work or for pleasure, and, in the longer time span and for the sake of their careers, frequently moving
house—community values are difficult to establish. There are few spontaneous agencies to support community life, and in this circumstance the Church takes on functions and provides facilities which, even if they do not actually rest in a community structure, give the impression of doing so.
The Church, then, represents the values of the agrarian or communal pre-industrial society: its forms are moulded from that stage of social development, and it participates in the warmth, stability and fundamental mutual involvements of a type of community life. That this community is, in the nature of American society, not so much a
fossil as a reproduction piece is less damaging in the eyes of those who have little experience of community life than in the eyes of visiting Europeans. The synthetic nature of the community orientation of many American Churches is evident to those from more traditional cultures; the personalized gestures of the impersonal society acquire an almost macabre quality for those who have experienced the natural spontaneous operation of rural community life, in which the Church may fit as a part. And yet it seems evident, whether the Church does fulfil genuine functions of this kind or not, people obviously get some, perhaps purely sentimental, satisfactions from pretending that it does.
This circumstance is obviously related to the trauma of the immigrant who, though experiencing better economic conditions, may miss the community values of the (usually) peasant society from which he or she came to America. That many of the early Churches were the repository of immigrant values is evident. In the Church, as nowhere else in the new society, immigrants could continue their language, their customs, their folkways.
* To [Will] Herberg the Churches in America fulfil their function of supporting the nation, however, only by losing their distinctiveness of tradition. Thus he notes that the teaching of the Churches tends to grow more vacuous. Were they to persist in their distinctive theological orientations, they would become new agencies of divisiveness in American life, and, in a nation of many different sorts of immigrant, divisiveness would be intolerable. As the second generation settled into American-ness, so they tended to ignore the Churches which
reminded them of their diversified past. Only as the Churches became similar to each other in function, and indistinct in ideology, could they significantly satisfy the various needs of the third and subsequent generations for community life and reassurance about the past and—simultaneously—their commitment to American nationality. ‘The American way of life’ thus embraced ‘going to church’ as one of its facets, without much concern about which church anyone went to.
Religion became privatized, and different preferences became as significant as different brands of cigarette or different family names—at least in the case of the major denominations. In some ways, the functions of the churches as community centres are facilitated by different brand images for rather similar products. Thus
when President Eisenhower could assert that a man should have a faith, no matter which it was; and when President Johnson (a Disciple) and his wife (an Episcopalian) could assert that their daughter’s conversion to Roman Catholicism did not disturb them, since religion was a private matter, they made evident the American faith that one religion is as good as another. But this, be it noted, is an American value. It is not a Christian value, and has no respectability of pedigree in Christianity.
Belonging to a faith in America thus becomes unconnected with distinctive belief to an extent quite unparalleled in Europe. Precisely because Church adherence still has a content of distinctive teaching, and precisely because commitment to one organization means more than merely ‘preferred religion’ (as American official forms refer to
religious allegiance) and implies the belief that one denominational creed is true in at least some respects in which others are false or less than wholly true, so religious commitment means rather more in Europe.
* Britain, as a traditional society, was ‘naturally’ a religious society. Its Established Church, though one which had experienced change, and at times dramatic change, represented a religious association of the powers and the people which could reasonably be regarded as ‘from time immemorial’. Implicit religious commitment was thus posited in the existence of the society; at any particular time, religion could be assumed to be part of the order of things. A religious view of the world was officially held, and the institutions of religion were established and continuing. People inherited a religious world view which changed only slightly and only gradually over time, at least until the mid-twentieth century. Furthermore, religion was entrenched and privileged, and, although increasingly admitting of challenge, it was deeply involved in all areas of national life.
* The American case is almost directly the contrary. Despite the piety of the early settlers, and their early experiments in near-theocratic government in New England, the state, once independently established, chose to be a secular state. Although God was invoked in the federal constitution, nonetheless religion was to be free, and divergent religious creeds were to be tolerated—hence the secular state. In eliminating by 1833 (in Massachusetts) the last remnants of an Established Church, America also eliminated anything which could be called Nonconformity. The state proceeded as a secular institution, and, just as judicial and legislative and executive functions were
separated from each other, so religion was separated from all—a voluntary affair in which, almost as an extension of strong Protestant sentiments, each person was to wrestle with his or her conscience. Religion was apart; commitment to it, and to a particular branch of it, was a matter of voluntary choice.
* As religious denominations have been reabsorbed into the mainstream of national life, so they have lost their distinctive qualities. Religion has placed its common values at the service of the political and social institutions of the nation, and has become one of the various approved values of American culture.
* as Luther conceded the supremacy of state authority above priestly authority, so the American Churches have, in effect, if less explicitly, subordinated their distinctive religious values to the values of American society. Thus, though religious practice has increased, the vacuousness of popular religious ideas has also increased: the content and meaning of religious commitment have been acculturated.
* Since men had religious rights before they had political rights, religion was, in England, as it has since been in many less-developed societies at certain stages of their history, the agency for general discontent and
disaffection.
* The diversity of Churches offered people a choice (‘religion of your choice’ is an American phrase which amuses
Europeans), but, as with so many other choices of the mass society, the choice was increasingly less real, as the values of the Churches increasingly approximated each other, and as they all came to reflect increasingly the American way of life. That there were many Churches, which appeared different from the outside, was an accident
of the diverse sources of population recruitment in America. None of them could be discriminated against in the interests of keeping tensions down in a society with so many potential sources of division—ethnic, regional, linguistic; all of them were to be identified with the American way of life as an expression of dominant consensus.
* In…Europe…part of the function of religion was to vindicate the ascribed and fixed status of society.
In America, entirely different ideas about mobility necessarily prevailed. It was a society of opportunity, for people to become ‘self-made’, for getting on, and even for assuming the lifestyles and claiming the status limited, in Europe, to a hereditary elect. Religion necessarily had to adjust to this circumstance, to make itself at least compatible with direct and naked goals of competition, self-seeking and social mobility. Thus religion in America necessarily abandoned some of the functions it had fulfilled in Europe. Even in the midnineteenth century, it was already emphasizing love, joy and personal security, rather than the social control functions of hellfire.
* Two distinct processes can be observed in American religious development. One was the gradual acquisition of enhanced status by whole movements, and the other was the tendency for individuals who rose in status more rapidly than the generality of their fellows within a religious movement to shift allegiance to a denomination which more adequately expressed the congruity of religious and social status.
* an individual rising in the world cannot afford to continue in association with religious groups that practise rituals which are strongly associated with lower classes. The man who has been brought up as a Holy Roller is likely, as he advances in the world, to find it less and less attractive for a businessman with a public reputation to roll in the aisles with the least sophisticated members of the locality.
* Whereas in England secularization has been seen in the abandonment of the Churches—as in other European countries—in America it has been seen in the absorption of the Churches by the society, and their loss of distinctive religious content.
* In America, the Churches act as agencies for the expression of community feeling. Such communities are not natural communities, of those who live in face-to-face contact for generations, rarely moving, and rarely receiving strangers. Such was the condition of traditional societies, and from such a context the European sense of community persisted into modern times.
* Churches became the agencies of synthetic community life, drawing people together as ‘neighbours’, even though many of the natural features of neighbourhoods, as they had existed in Europe, were no longer evident.
* This development gave American Churches that distinctly ‘welcoming’ characteristic on which Europeans so often (and by no means always favourably) comment. People who did not know each other, whose lives, though temporarily lived in physical propinquity, impinged relatively little on each other, except in secondary relationships,
could go through the fiction of being a community. It was, after all, a pattern of response to which they were accustomed, and about which they had heard a great deal from their parents and grandparents, and from literature, even though it now had a very different relevance for their own lives. The search to retain community; the felt
need for sociability and association with those around; the persisting desire to ‘belong’; the need for a context in which to claim status and display status; the persistence of an affective need to be ‘someone’ in terms of the actual direct responses of others, and not simply in terms of abstract consideration of receipt of wages; acknowledgement of identity with the ‘nation’ or ‘the state’—all of these elements were probably involved in the steady growth of the American Churches. The stability of the organized institutional framework could create the
illusion of a stable community life, even if the gestures of friendliness and involvement necessarily had to be prostituted by their extension to relatively anonymous people.
* The increasingly fictional quality of assumptions of settled community life, of parishes and local government units in which people have a genuine stake, is a feature of modern life in Britain…
* The local community, the home, the school are no longer focal points of allegiance in British society, and the discontinuities of a keenly cultivated mobility make religious traditions difficult to sustain. Thus young people are early bent on ‘getting away from home’, from small towns and villages, to college, to work, ‘and to lead a better life’.
* The Churches in the United States are an expression of status differentiation in some measure, whereas they have had much less importance as a status-confirming agency in Britain. The denominations in Britain expressed rather the basic divisions of social, political and economic orientation, and these divisions in turn had reference to
a class stratification of society which needed no further confirmation in religious terms—it was already evident enough. Only in the uncertainty of an increasingly homogenized society, with few elements of ascriptive status (abolished as all the remnants of the pre-immigrant past had to be eliminated), was it necessary for achievement and the struggle for status to find adequate social expression.
* If social processes have reduced religious differences between major denominations to merely verbal responses, liturgical patterns and organizational arrangements, has religion then no significant social influence in contemporary society? In the late 1950s an American sociologist attempted to assess the extent to which the Protestant ethic—the commitment to work, free enquiry and individual initiative among other values—was still influential in the United States… From a survey of citizens of Detroit, a city of mixed religious composition,
Gerhard Lenski concluded that there was still a significant religious factor at work in affecting the dispositions of Protestants and Catholics. He found that Jews and Protestants had a positive attitude towards work, and Catholics a negative attitude; that Jews and Protestants regarded it as important that a child should learn to
think for him or herself; Catholics that he or she should learn to obey. He found that Catholics attached more importance to kin groups, and he believed that Catholic family life might interfere with the development of motivation towards achievement and mobility.
* The sense of moral rectitude which once extended to almost all social and personal activities even in peasant
societies (to dress, forms of speech, eating, courtship, attitudes to strangers, neighbours, kinsmen, etc.), although they were often highly localized moralities, was a manifestation of local social unity. Many of these moral orientations were entrenched within a religious view of the world, and the influence both of religious morality and of the religious beliefs which supported them have been largely swept away.
* In an age when Christianity has been demythologized, when traditional ideas about God have been radically challenged by bishops of the Church, ecumenism becomes a new faith—something to believe in. There has been something like a mass conversion of the clergy.
* Whereas the low religious practice in England appears to imply considerable commitment on the part of the small minority of regular worshippers, in the United States it appears that much higher church involvement is associated with relatively low commitment to religious values. Whereas in Britain doctrinal positions of denominations still
bear something of the distinctiveness of the past, but denominational organization has grown weak, in the United States denominational doctrinal distinction has little consequence, but organizations, enjoying wide lay support, are relatively strong.
* The history of dissent is largely the history, as Max Weber long ago noted, of an Entzauberung, a process of demystification, in which the functions of the religious specialist were increasingly shorn of mystical or magical attributes. The denial of the doctrine of transubstantiation, the rejection of the idea that priests could forgive sins, the rejection of the immediate efficacy of the confessional were all aspects of emerging Protestantism, and particularly so as expressed in the Presbyterian and Independent movements, which reduced the mystical elements of the priest’s role. The very concept of priest was changed once the priesthood of all believers was asserted, and the religious functionary now became a pastor, a preacher or a minister; his functions became directed to the community and ceased to be those of an intercessor between community and God. In Quakerism the process was even more radical and the element of inspirationalism—although circumscribed in time, as older ‘weighty’ Quakers increasingly dominated proceedings in the nineteenth century—gave a genuine lay character to the movement.
* Thus, the process of advancing Protestantism was in the direction of the diminution of the distinctive status of the priesthood as a professional body, and of increased insistence that all religious functions could be performed by any committed and sincere believer. This development occurred with the growing individuation of people in
modern society, and came to its fullness in a period in which individualism, freedom of contract, the political doctrines of liberalism and liberty of the individual, and the economic doctrines of laissez-faire were all of them in the ascendant. The professional priesthood stood for a basic and almost ascriptive inequality among folk.
* As theology appears to have become bankrupt, so liturgy has burgeoned. The Churches have steadily returned to a stronger liturgical expression, the elaboration of the artistry of worship, even though they have simultaneously grown less certain about the nature, the history and the morality of the deity who is worshipped. This has been essentially a movement among the priesthood rather than among the laity, and it has been a development which has manifested itself in a wide range of denominations, many with traditions of a very contrary kind. The dissenting ministry have found for themselves status-enhancing functions by restoring forms and expressions of worship which are very much more ritualistic and very much ‘higher’ in their assumptions than those of their forebears or their lay followers.
* The sect affords a coherent community organization, a stable pattern of order. It provides norms and values which are indisputable. It usually brings into being an actual fraternity in which these values find expression and social application.
* Work, which ceased to be part of life itself with the passing of agrarian society (that is, for farmers), became a calling, and was recognized as a distinctive activity of life, sanctified in religious terms, and is gradually transformed into being a job, supported strictly by the institutional order and an unmediated interest relationship.
* A movement which is distinctly adventist tends to recruit those who have strong antipathies to the wider society, who exult in the prospect of its overturn. These people are not likely to be those who would welcome the sect’s becoming more adjusted to the wider society.
* One can expect a marked change of personality type in revolutionist movements, especially between those who come in as converts, and those who grow up with these teachings as family and community orthodoxy. They have not so emphatically chosen to be separated from the world (although they must usually make a definite subscription to sect teachings) so much as decided not to join the world.
* Conversionist sects have some difficulty in retaining their second generation, which is often not in need of the (usually) rather emotional orientation of the sect, and the ecstatic exercises in which it engages. The lower mental and emotional stability of many of those it recruits tends to reduce the likelihood of stable family commitment in these movements…
* After the early period of their emergence, all sects which persist experience a process of institutionalization in which customs are hardened, procedures are routinized, practices are stabilized, and an even tenor of life is established. Even in sects which emphasize ecstatic experience, the same process can be observed: the occasions for ecstasy become delimited and regulated, the operation of charisma becomes circumscribed, the extent to which inspiration may legitimately influence people is gradually defined. This development, then, means some change in the life practices of the sect and perhaps in its response to the wider society. It may also mean that over time there is less direct desire on the part of the members to fulfil all their own offices, and there may be that development of a division of religious labour which characterizes denominations and Churches. Thus a group which either assumes or has conferred upon it the responsibilities for ministry, or for organizing meetings, or for publishing a magazine, tends sometimes to emerge. This process is obviously one in the direction of the denomination.
* The influence of an education-conscious society made itself felt on the rapidly expanding sects, and the need for a literate ministry became, as with other movements, one of the early requirements which prompted the denominationalizing process. Much the same story could be told for other conversionist sects at a much later date
in England. The various Pentecostal movements began with local lay evangelists, but in providing them with education for revivalist work brought into being seminaries and steadily—though less swiftly than the Campbellites—came to distrust education less and less.
* The whole significance of the secularization process is that society does not, in the modern world, derive its values from certain religious preconceptions which are then the basis for social organization and social action. It is rather that ecumenical religion will, as Herberg suggests it does in America, merely reflect the values which stem from social organization itself. Even with its votaries in contemporary society, religion does not begin to compare in its influence with the total religious world view which prevailed in simple society…
The Best Hedge Against Inflation (9-15-21)
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The Rise and Fall of Anglo-America: the Decline of Dominant Ethnicity in the United States
Here are some highlights from this 2004 book by Eric Kaufman:
* Even as late as the 1960s, 90 percent of white Protestants, Catholics, and Jews married members of their own faith.
* I single out cultural and ideological changes originating from within the Anglo-Protestant community as the primary engine of dominant ethnic decline.
* Wilbur Zelinsky describes this phenomenon, as it pertains to cultural geography, as the doctrine of First Effective Settlement, whereby “in terms of lasting impact, the activities of a few hundred, or even a few score, initial colonizers can mean much more . . . than the contributions of tens of thousands of new immigrants a few generations later”. David Hackett Fischer’s writings outline a similar theme. He notes that the United States began as a collection of cultural regions based around core English settler ethnies. The Puritans dominated in New England, the Quakers in the Middle Atlantic states, southern English Cavaliers in the coastal South, and Anglo-Scottish Presbyterians in the Appalachian hinterland…
Since most of this “colonial stock” had arrived in the seventeenth century from Britain, it is not surprising that on the eve of revolution the American white population was over 60 percent English, nearly 80 percent British, and 98 percent Protestant.
Jews and the Conservative Rift
Historian Edward Shapiro, Marc B. Shapiro’s father, writes in 1999: American conservatism was enveloped in a mood of doubt and angst during the 1980s and 1990s precisely at the time when its message had seemingly never resonated more strongly. These two decades saw a worldwide movement liberating markets from governmental restrictions, even among countries identifying themselves as socialist; the dissolution of the Soviet empire and the end of the Cold War; and widespread disillusionment with the Great Society reforms of the 1960s. During these years, however, conservative thinkers were increasingly somber rather than exultant. Part of the reason for this gloom was a long, bitter, and multifaceted struggle within the conservative camp over the meaning of conservatism and the identity of the rightful heirs of the conservative legacy. At times it seemed that conservatives believed their most notable enemies to be fellow conservatives. Despite the widely held perception that Jews, and particularly Jewish intellectuals, were people of the Left, Jews played an important role in this conflict.
One of the most important of the recent intraconservative rumbles has been between two small but influential groups of conservative intellectuals–the traditionalists, or “paleoconservatives” as they frequently were called, and the “neoconservatives.” While there were few Jews among the paleos, Jews comprised a majority of the most significant neoconservative thinkers, and Jews edited Commentary and Public Interest, the two most important neoconservative magazines. No group of conservative thinkers “had ever come close to carrying as sizable a Jewish imprint as the neoconservatives,” wrote Seth Forman, a young historian. For the first time in American history, “an identifiable group of well placed and influential Jewish thinkers had exhibited a willingness to reorder the priorities of American Jews and to suggest in the strongest terms that Jewish well-being might not necessarily be tied to … progressive social and political forces of any kind.” The rift between the paleoconservatives and the neoconservatives cannot be fully explained without considering the Jewish dimension of neoconservatism. Although it appeared to outsiders to be a tempest in a teapot, this rift is an important chapter in the history of recent American conservatism in general and the American Jewish conservative intelligentsia in particular.(1)
The hostility between the paleocons and neocons, which went back as far as the 1970s, was intensified in 1980 when the election of Ronald Reagan raised the stakes in the struggle over the conservative patrimony. A conservative government was now in power in Washington, headed by a man who thought of himself as a conservative and was interested in conservative ideas; conservative think-tanks were anxious to provide employment for right-thinking intellectuals; and conservative foundations, awash in cash, were eager to assist in this new era of conservative governance. The neoconservative and traditionalist rivalry, which had largely involved policy differences, now also became a struggle over political and academic appointments, grants from the major conservative foundations, and other emoluments. In this more hospitable environment for conservatives, the question as to what conservatism was all about and who were the true keepers of the conservative flame became more important.
Another factor in intensifying the paleocon-neocon rivalry was the collapse of communism in Europe. The fear of communism had been the single most important element unifying the notoriously fractious conservative movement. With the lifting of the Iron Curtain in Europe in 1989 and with the end of communism in Russia in 1991, conservative ideologues now had the luxury of focusing their attention on the supposed heretics within conservative ranks. And as foreign policy became less prominent on the conservative agenda, the social and cultural issues which had divided the neconservatives and the traditionalists became more important. For some paleoconservatives, their union with the neoconservatives had always been a marriage of convenience. Now it was time for a divorce.
In 1966 Jeffrey Hart, a traditionalist conservative, had anticipated and welcomed the emergence of neoconservatism. Hart, a professor of literature at Dartmouth College, predicted in The American Dissent, published during the heyday of the New Left and the counterculture, that “liberalism most certainly will undergo fragmentation. Many liberals will move to the Left, jettisoning their remaining Western cultural attachments. Others, just as inevitably, will move to the Right, becoming more conservative.” Hart was prescient. Within a few years the move to the right by a group of erstwhile and primarily Jewish intellectuals was being frequently noted in scholarly and popular magazines, and in 1979 Peter Steinfels published his critical examination of neoconservatism, The Neoconservatives: The Men Who Are Changing America’s Politics.
Conservatives were of two minds regarding the neoconservatives. William F. Buckley, Jr.’s National Review, the closest thing the conservative movement had to an official journal, welcomed the neoconservatives in general and Commentary magazine in particular to the conservative ranks in an editorial in its March 9, 1971 issue, titled “C’mon In, the Water’s Fine.” By then the monthly Commentary, sponsored by the American Jewish Committee, had become the major journal of neoconservative thinking and the leading advocate for a move to the right by the American Jewish community. Other conservative thinkers, however, were not so open to the neoconservatives. Russell Kirk, the leading traditionalist intellectual and author of the influential The Conservative Mind (1954), described the neoconservatives as a “little sect, distrusted and reproached by many leaders of what we may call mainline conservatives, who now and again declare that most of the Neoconservatives are seeking place and preferment chiefly.” The neocons, Kirk claimed, were painfully deficient “in the understanding of the human condition and in the apprehension of the accumulated wisdom of our civilization,” preferring instead “to engage in ideological sloganizing, the death of political imagination.”(2)
Many of the leading neoconservative intellectuals were Jewish academicians who moved to the right in the 1960s in response to campus unrest, the New Left, the counterculture, the Black Power movement, the excesses of the Great Society, the hostility of the Left to Israel, and the Left’s weakening opposition to Communism and the Soviet Union. They became convinced, Mark Gerson, a perceptive student of the neoconservatives, has written, that the Left was “distinctively bad for the Jews.” Jewish professors were particularly sensitive to the campus disruptions and the attacks on academic freedom emanating from the Left. These reminded them of the 1930s, when German universities were transformed from intellectual oases dedicated to the search for truth into auxiliaries of the Nazi regime. For the neoconservatives, the academy’s role was scholarship, not the dissemination of whatever political ideology was then in fancy.(3)
Jews were also sensitive to the demands of the Left that preferential policies be instituted in academia to attract more minority and female students and professors. Jewish academicians attributed their success in academia to the merit principle, and they remembered the pre-World War II quotas for Jewish students and faculty in European and American universities. By the 1960s, however, the ideal of merit was being challenged by spokesmen for women and racial and ethnic minorities, who claimed that it was a ploy used by the academic establishment to prevent opening up the university to the hitherto excluded. Jews made up a significant percentage of academia by this time, and many Jewish professors and administrators argued that the advancement of women and members of racial and ethnic minorities should be in the same manner that the progress of Jews had taken place–by conforming to widely accepted standards of scholarship and teaching.
Jews had a deep affection for the university. Not only did it employ many Jews, but it was also believed to be the major reason why Jews had moved so rapidly up the occupational and social ladders. The university was also an oasis of rationality and freedom of thought in a world of endemic irrational and retrogressive impulses. Little wonder, then, that Jews had an almost paternalistic attitude toward higher education. In 1969 Nathan Glazer noted that he was more committed to defending the university from the assaults of the counterculture and the New Left than in rectifying its deficiencies. The problems of American society, Glazer said, “do not require–indeed, would in no way by advanced by–the destruction of those fragile institutions which have been developed over centuries to transmit and expand knowledge. These are strongly held commitments, so strong that my first reaction to student disruption … is to consider how the disrupters can be isolated and weakened … and how they can finally be removed from a community they wish to destroy.”(4)
The opposition of Jewish neoconservatives to affirmative action was not restricted to the academic world. Coming from poor and lower-middle class families, they had prospered by dint of hard work, and they assumed that blacks and other minorities could succeed in the same manner. The neoconservatives were strong proponents of the early civil rights movement, which sought to eliminate racial barriers in voting, employment, and social life. But they were equally opposed to affirmative action, which, they believed, was un-American because it assumed the most important thing about people was not their individual qualities but their ethnic or racial group, because it Balkanized the country by dividing the population into hostile groups competing for the favors doled out by government, and because it led inevitably to quotas in education and employment. There were few specific public issues which gave an unambiguous answer to the classic question “Is it good for the Jews?,” but affirmative action seemed to be an exception.
The Jewish neoconservatives also claimed that the Left was a threat to Jewish interests even when Jews were not singled out. “All the roles that Jews play are roles that the New Left disapproves of, and wishes to reduce,” Nathan Glazer wrote in 1971. The Left is critical “of all private business, and of its whole associated institutional complex–lawyers, stockbrokers, accountants, etc.–in which Jews are prominent. The kinds of society it admires have no place for occupations in which Jews have tended to cluster in recent history.” Nor was the New Left and its fellow travelers in the counterculture sympathetic to those middle-class values which Jews respected and handed down to their children. Finally, the New Left was hostile to that most important of all Jewish interests–the state of Israel.(5)
The Six Day War of 1967 was a watershed in the attitudes of American Jews toward Israel, even among those Jewish intellectuals who prided themselves on their acculturation and assimilation. It was difficult, if not impossible, to be unaffected by the prospect during late May and early June 1967 that a second Jewish Holocaust within a quarter of a century was a real possibility. Leftists sympathetic to Third World liberation movements and critical of Zionism and the creation of Israel as manifestations of Western imperialism and colonialism were among Israel’s enemies in 1967. Among Israel’s leading defenders, by contrast, were conservatives, for whom the Jewish state was an outpost of Western civilization and a bulwark against Communism and radical Arab nationalism. The fact that in 1967 Israel used arms manufactured in the West to defend herself and that America supported Israel caused many Jews hitherto on the Left to rethink their knee-jerk opposition to American military and diplomatic policy. The Six Day War was particularly influential in the evolution of Commentary, edited by Norman Podhoretz, from a magazine supportive of the New Left to America’s leading conservative monthly.
The final factor in the emergence of neoconservatism was Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society program to alleviate the economic and social ills of urban America. The Jewish intellectuals who were to become leading neoconservative thinkers had been raised in the metropolis, most notably in New York City. They had a deep affection for the cosmopolitanism, diversity, and sophistication of city life, and they welcomed policies which would improve urban life. But the Great Society, they believed, was exacerbating rather than relieving urban problems. They blamed the Great Society and its municipal counterparts for decreasing the urban housing stock, exacerbating ethnic and racial tensions in the cities, and undermining urban schools. The problem, neoconservatives believed, ran deeper than mistaken policies. The ultimate source was the reformist mentality, which underestimated the intractability of human nature and failed to take into consideration the tendency of even the best-intended programs to run amuck. Liberal policies also threatened the interests of Jews, whether by introducing high-rise public housing into a Jewish neighborhood in Queens, decentralizing the New York City school system, which lead to the teachers’ strike of 1968-9, or ignoring examination scores and seniority rules in municipal hiring and promotions.
Irving Kristol founded the quarterly Public Interest in the mid-1960s to give voice to the increasing number of people who saw themselves as liberals but were disturbed by the leftward turn of what then purported to be liberalism. The term “conservative” had too many negative connotations for the future Jewish neoconservatives, and at first they shied away from applying it to themselves. Conservatives, they believed, belonged to country clubs, disliked blacks and immigrants, and came from the Protestant hinterland. They were not likely to be found on the Lower East Side, in the East Bronx, or on the west side of Chicago. In fact, the first use of the word “neoconservative” was not by any neoconservative but by the socialist Michael Harrington, and he used it an invidious manner. It would take several years before Jewish neconservatives would be comfortable being grouped under the conservative rubric, and some would continue to deny that they were ever conservatives, neo or any other variety. Thus, in 1979 Irving Kristol could publish an article titled “Confessions of a True, Self-Confessed–Perhaps, the Only–`Neoconservative.'”(6)
The historian Richard H. King described neoconservatism as “less a new ideological departure than a hardening of mood within the liberal consensus.” Initially, at least, the neoconservatives saw themselves not as conservatives but as liberals disenchanted with the radical poisons which had been infecting liberalism beginning in the 1960s. As Kristol noted, the neoconservatives merely wished “to return to the original sources of liberal vision and liberal energy so as to correct the warped version of liberalism that is today’s orthodoxy.” His famous description of a neoconservative as “a liberal who had been mugged by reality” accurately captured the mood of the neoconservative pioneers. The neoconservatives praised the liberalism of Franklin D. Roosevelt and Harry Truman for providing a modicum of economic security for the poor and lower middle class, for opening up American society to racial and ethnic minorities, including Jews, for aiding England prior to America’s entry into World War II, and for supporting the establishment of the state of Israel in 1948. By contrast, they identified the later-day liberalism of George McGovern and Jesse Jackson with ethnic and racial quotas, radical economic and social planning, and isolationism. The liberalism that brought Jews “into modernity, that gave us our freedom as individuals and tolerated us as Jews,” the historian Gertrude Himmelfarb wrote in 1980, “has been replaced by a new liberalism that is inhospitable to us both as individuals and as Jews. We may conclude that a quite different philosophy is required if we are to survive in the modern world, survive as individuals and survive as Jews.” But even she was unwilling at this time to describe herself as a conservative.(7)
It was this liberal provenance of neoconservatism which was responsible, more than anything else, for the doubts of traditionalist conservatives regarding their new allies. Neoconservatism appeared to the traditionalists to be a schism of the Left, not an authentic variety of conservatism, and they suspected that the neoconservatives remained unreconstructed social democrats. The embittered paleo historian Paul Gottfried, for example, claimed that the hearts of the neoconservatives “are with the Left even if their expense accounts come from the Right.” They “have never made a secret of their fear and loathing of that part of the Right which they cannot reshape or convert to their views.” Thomas Fleming, the editor of the paleo magazine Chronicles: A Magazine of American Culture, called the neoconservatives “well- groomed lap dogs who bark but never bite.” The conservative historian George H. Nash put it more delicately. He described neoconservatism as “rightwing liberalism.”(8)
The traditionalists had a point. As former liberals, the neoconservatives lacked that reverence for the past and the contempt for “progress” which had characterized conservatism for two centuries. Kristol noted that neoconservatism, in contrast to other variants of conservatism, was “resolutely free of nostalgia.” The neocons did not distrust modernity, but welcomed it. They did not share the traditionalists’ misgivings regarding capitalism, democracy, and the bourgeois social order. Nor did they long for that premodern social order revered by Edmund Burke and the other pioneers of conservative thought, a world which had ostracized Jews to the fringes of society.(9)
The modernity which Kristol and the other neoconservatives praised was abhorred by the traditionalists. Modernity meant secularism, materialism, individualism, and faith in technological progress, and it was hardly something which conservatives should celebrate. George A. Panichas, editor of the traditionalist journal Modern Age, noted that the crisis brought on by modernity “is an inclusive one. Its power and scourge are such that even those movements that seek to defend the sanctities of tradition and the values of order find themselves increasingly beleaguered.” The theology of conservatism, Panichas avowed, was being sacrificed “to the new morality of modernity” under the assault of neoconservatism, a “tinsel, opportunistic, and hedonistic conservatism.” This spurious conservatism was “unable to affirm the standards and certitudes that must be resolutely affirmed if an authentic ethos-centered conservatism is to survive.” The neoconservatives, with their policy reviews and policy studies, Panichas asserted, “lack a basic apprehension of the `permanent things’ and are responsive to the empirical ambitions that reflect the tastes and power-drives of a technologico-Benthamite world.” Their brand of conservatism “belongs almost exclusively to the world and is impervious to the primacy of God as the measure of the soul.” To confront the curse of modernity, Panichas said, there was “need of an unconditional conservatism, lean, ascetical, disciplined, prophetic, unswerving in its censorial task, strenuous in its mission, strong in its faith, faithful in its dogma, pure in its metaphysic.”(10)
Panichas’s statement reveals the deep religious strain within traditionalist conservatism. Traditionalists believed that conservatism was a product of Christianity, particularly Roman Catholicism and Anglo-Catholicism. While not all of the traditionalists were personally religious, they were invariably
deeply respectful of orthodox Christianity. In attacking liberalism, they frequently referred to it as “secular liberalism.” Jewish neoconservatives, by contrast, praised secularism, pragmatism, and the experimental method, and they were unsympathetic to the traditionalists’ enthusiasm for religion in general and for Christianity in particular. The neoconservatives were familiar with the church’s history of anti-Semitism, and they realized that Jewish emancipation would never have taken place without the secularization of European society.
While the Jewish neconservatives were interested in the phenomenon of religion and recognized its social utility, they were generally not religiously observant themselves, and they wondered what role Jews would have in a country in which Christianity played a larger role or in a conservative movement redolent of Christianity. They feared that the traditionalist talk abut religion could be an entering wedge for the Christianization of America and of the conservative movement. Nor, by and large, were neconservatives initially concerned with the moral issues which disturbed traditionalists, such as abortion and homosexuality. They were troubled by Pat Buchanan’s call in his speech at the 1992 Republican convention for a cultural war to retake American culture from feminists, homosexuals, and secularists, and by the proposal of the conservative religious magazine First Things in 1996 that the Supreme Court’s sanctioning of abortion must be ignored. For the neoconservatives, this was too suggestive of the intolerant religious impulses which had brought so much grief to Jews in the past.
The traditionalists, in turn, believed that the neoconservatives, as modernists and utilitarians, had little sense of a transcendent moral and religious order. While the traditionalists talked about right and wrong, the neoconservatives talked about good and bad. If the traditionalists provided conservatism with its philosophic and religious core, the neoconservatives provided it with answers to contemporary social and economic problems. Public Interest published articles by sociologists and economists pointing out the failures of liberal social planning and refuting liberal social and economic nostrums, but it did not publish essays demonstrating the erroneous philosophical and theological premises of liberalism itself. Contemporary liberalism was wrong not because it was philosophically flawed but because its proposals did not work and harmed their supposed beneficiaries. Thus the neoconservatives showed how welfare increased dependency, rent control laws diminished the housing stock, and sex education in the schools increased promiscuity. But, in contrast to the traditionalists, they did not consider whether the scope of government should extend to welfare and housing in the first place, or whether education should be freed from government control and left to private institutions such as the family and religious bodies.
Nathan Glazer claimed that the differences between neoconservatives and liberals “do not have anything to do with deep underlying philosophical positions. They have to do with fact and common sense. Very often the people we disagree with, or who disagree with us, don’t seem to have the facts.” The same could not be said regarding neoconservatives and their traditionalist foes. The traditionalists’ objection to neoconservatism was, in fact, over “deep underlying philosophical positions,” and not over whose facts were correct.(11)
The neoconservatives, by and large, were economists and sociologists immersed in the latest findings of the social scientists, and the factual orientation mentioned by Glazer came naturally to them. Alan Wolfe, a leftist observer of the conservative scene, shared the traditionalists’ distrust of the social science orientation of the neocons, and for the same reason. He claimed that while the neconservatives “have had enormous impact on economics and law, in which technical agility tends to be favored over speculative thought,” they have been less successful in dealing with the more speculative and important questions of morality and society or in explaining the moral and policy implications of their work. “Abstract microtheorizing … has limits as a public philosophy.” While some conservative academics will be attracted to the rigor and logic of hard, tough-minded, empirical conservatism, Wolfe predicted, others will be turned off. “Since conservatism has historically been a moral philosophy, opposed to the pragmatism of empirical analysis, the inability of right-wing model-builders to transcend their own methods is both a paradox and a serious handicap.”(12)
The traditionalists were less indebted to the social sciences than the neoconservatives, and had been more influenced by philosophy, history, theology, and literature. As a result, they tended to talk abut principles, eternal verities, moral certitudes, and the ultimate ends of life and to disdain the neoconservatives as tinkerers and utilitarians. “Deficient in historical understanding and familiarity with humane letters,” Russell Kirk wrote, “most of the Neoconservatives lack those long views and that apprehension of the human condition which form a footing for successful statecraft. Often clever these Neoconservatives; seldom wise.” Melvin E. Bradford, a professor of English at the University of Dallas and a disciple of Donald Davidson and Richard Weaver, agreed. Conservatism, he said, was “more than opportunism, pop sociology, and a series of position papers.”(13)
Even if liberalism “worked” and increased the gross national product and raised people out of poverty, the traditionalists argued, it was still wrong because it undermined moral principles and debased American society. From their perspective, the goal of the neoconservatives was to purge liberalism of its excesses and to dominate the conservative movement by pushing it to the left. Clyde Wilson, a paleoconservative historian at the University of South Carolina and an authority on John C. Calhoun, complained in 1986 that traditionalists were being pushed aside to make room for neoconservative Johnnies-come-lately. “The offensives of radicalism have driven vast herds of liberals across the border into our territories. These refugees now speak in our name, but the language they speak is the same one they always spoke. We have grown familiar with it, have learned to tolerate it, but it is tolerable only by contrast to the harsh syllables of the barbarians over the border. It contains no words for the things that we value. Our estate has been taken over by an impostor, just as we were about to inherit.” Conservatives, Wilson concluded, must “not to be taken in by any interloper, no matter how plausible, finely turned out, and full of seductive promises.” Mel Bradford agreed. “Our first priority is to refuse firmly and vigorously to surrender our hard-won identity to those who would use it as a cloak for policies contrary to what we intend. Lines of demarcation must be drawn, and swiftly.” Pat Buchanan also urged fellow conservatives to defend their movement from this invasion of neoconservatives, “the ex-liberals, socialists, and Trotskyists who signed on in the name of anti-communism and now control our foundations and set the limits of permissible dissent.”(14)
In the eyes of traditionalists such as Wilson, Bradford, and Buchanan, the neoconservatives were the catbirds of the conservative movement, hatching the conservative eggs which had been laid by the traditionalists during their many years in the political wilderness. Now that the conservative time had come, the neoconservatives were seeking to seize the center stage. For Russell Kirk the neoconservatives were overly ambitious and impatient to push aside the conservative elders. They were eager for “power, skillful at intrigue, ready to exclude from office any persons who might not be counted upon as faithful to the Neoconservative ideology. Often, backstairs, they have seemed more eager to frustrate their allies than to confute those presumptive adversaries, the liberals and radicals.”(15)
Paul Gottfried was the most indignant of all the traditionalists over this supposed neoconservative seizure of the conservative legacy. He blamed a neoconservative conspiracy headed by Irving Kristol for his failure to receive an appointment in Catholic University’s history department after he resigned as a senior editor of the magazine The World and I. In his book The Conservative Movement, Gottfried vented his rage at the neoconservatives. They were, he charged, “ideologically motivated pursuers of power. The neoconservative accomplishment was an exercise not in Platonic meditation, but in the accumulation of power through the use of money and intimidation.” Gottfried was particularly bitter that the neoconservatives now controlled the great conservative foundations and only dispensed funds to their ideological compatriots, ignoring the paleos who were left with crumbs. “The concentration of power and money within its neoconservative wing, together with savage reprisals against suspected heretics,” Gottfried warned, “has not brought a conservative peace.”(16)
The traditionalists also accused the neoconservatives of being social democrats who posed as conservatives. The neoconservatives did not disguise the fact that they did not share the paleos’ ideological abhorrence of the welfare state, labor unions, and the government in Washington. If the traditionalists believed the welfare state was philosophically wrong, the neoconservatives believed its modern incarnation in Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society was too bureaucratic and unworkable. Instead of stressing the welfare state’s threat to liberty, they emphasized the perverse unintended consequences of welfare programs. Kristol noted that the neoconservatives did not wish to dismantle the welfare state but merely to make it less statist and paternalistic, to provide “the social and economic security a modern citizenry demands while minimizing governmental intrusion into individual liberties.” Kristol and other neoconservatives favored what traditionalists believed to be a contradiction in terms–a conservative welfare state. Such talk was anathema to the traditionalists. They were convinced that, despite their obeisance toward conservatism, the neoconservatives were leftists who had no serious quarrel with income redistribution, egalitarian social legislation, and centralized government. Gottfried called them “welfare state ideologues,” while Kirk noted that their creed “is no better than a latter-day Utilitarianism.(17)
For the paleo columnist Samuel Francis, the neoconservatives were worse than utilitarians. They were, rather, proponents of the modern managerial state and were being used by the American political and economic elite to consolidate its power. Influenced by twentieth-century European social theorists such as Mosca and Pareto, Francis argued that the historic role of the neoconservatives had been to disarm potential critics of the elite by co-opting the militant activists of the Right and by convincing intellectuals of the Left of the soundness of the managerial system. “Moderation, gradualism, empiricism, pragmatism, centrism became the watchwords of neoconservatism,” Francis contended, “whereby confrontation with the fundamental mechanisms and tendencies of the managerial system and fundamental changes suggested by either the Right or the Left were avoided.” This neoconservative ideological thrust was not disinterested. The managerial regime which the neoconservatives legitimized and rationalized provided them with “the social force to which they belong with its social functions and power.” Thanks to the neoconservatives, hegemonic liberalism was stronger than ever. The neoconservative goal had never been to challenge liberalism “but simply to make it work more efficiently than it did in the 1960s and 1970s.” From Francis’ perspective, the neoconservatives were the quislings of American conservatism.(18)
Traditionalist conservatives also objected to the neoconservative espousal of an activist foreign policy designed to spread American principles around the world. They were particularly opposed to the National Endowment for Democracy, a pet neoconservative project. The neocons were hardline anti-Communists, and some believed the United States should encourage a global democratic revolution in opposition to Communism. This anti-Communism had been shaped by the intense struggle within the American Left between Communists and their fellow travelers and democratic socialists. While the traditionalists believed the major conflict in the modern world was between naturalism and religion, the neoconservatives believed it to be between tyranny and freedom. For the traditionalists, Communism was the enemy of religion and tradition; for the neoconservatives it was the foe of liberty and democracy.
To the paleos, this neoconservative clamor for a global democratic revolution was reminiscent of Leon Trotsky’s call for a worldwide Communist revolution. Paul Gottfried accused the neoconservatives of seeking “a worldwide, secular, politically egalitarian society with a mixed economy” accompanied by land reform, democratic elections, unionization, and economic modernization. The neoconservatives, the paleos charged, wished to make the world over in the American image. William Kauffman, a conservative sympathetic to libertarianism, was equally opposed to this neoconservative foreign agenda. “Today, under neoconservative sway,” he said, “the American Right is the bastion of Rooseveltian globalism; of moralistic-militaristic crusades, a la Woodrow Wilson, to bring state capitalism to the Third World; of Kennedyesque eagerness to `pay any price, bear any burden’ in the defense of regional powers like Japan and West Germany.” The conservative historian John Lukacs agreed. “Our conservatives,” he wrote, “are not conservatives but global ideologues. What is Good for America is Good for the World. Indeed, America Must Rule the Heavens, no matter what the cost.”(19)
This traditionalist skepticism regarding international involvements included American Middle East policy. In contrast to the neoconservatives, the paleos did not have an instinctive empathy for Zionism and Israel. They viewed the Jewish state simply as another foreign country with its own distinctive interests, interests which frequently conflicted with those of the United States. Nor did they believe American Middle East policy should be based on such a flimsy ideological consideration as the fact that Israel was a western democratic state. The paleos criticized the reflexive support of Norman Podhoretz and other neoconservatives for Israel, and they believed it exemplified the neoconservative tendency to encourage a fanciful democratic globalism rather than true national interests. In a frequently quoted statement, Russell Kirk complained that frequently “it has seemed as if some eminent Neoconservatives mistook Tel Aviv for the capital of the United States.” Midge Decter, the wife of Podhoretz, was furious at this charge, claiming that it echoed the old anti-Semitic canard of dual loyalty.(20)
The paleo critique of interventionist foreign policy came to a head in 1999 with the publication of Patrick J. Buchanan’s A Republic, Not an Empire: Reclaiming America’s Destiny. This book was published by Regnery, a conservative publisher which had brought out many books by prominent paleos, including the American edition of Russell Kirk’s The Conservative Mind. Buchanan’s volume defended the noninterventionist “fortress America,” America First type of thinking popular prior to World War II. (In a previous book he had made the case for a protectionist economic policy.) There was little in A Republic, Not an Empire that surprised those familiar with Buchanan’s view of foreign policy. Since the 1980s he had attacked the global democracy and Pax Americana espoused by some neoconservatives. It is folly, Buchanan wrote, “to think that we can convert all nations to U.S.-style democracy or should squander the public treasury in so witless an enterprise.” Such thinking was a “prescription for endless wars and eventual disaster … and great wars are the death of republics.” Buchanan here was echoing what students of diplomacy and military affairs, including the Yale historian Paul Kennedy, and paleo intellectuals such as Paul Gottfried had been warning against for decades.(21)
The most controversial part of Buchanan’s volume concerned his critique of American foreign policy prior to December 7, 1941. He claimed that American national interests would have been better served had the country remained neutral rather than forging an entente with England to defeat Nazi Germany. Buchanan was not the first person to broach such a seemingly heretical idea. Indeed, the eminent historian Charles A. Beard had made precisely this point in two polemical books analyzing Franklin Roosevelt’s foreign policy, and after the war a small group of conservative and radical historians had continued to make the case for a noninterventionist foreign policy. These historians, however, were unknown to most Americans and had little impact on public opinion. Buchanan’s critique of Roosevelt’s diplomacy was different. Buchanan, a seemingly perennial candidate for president, had been a controversial figure in American politics for two decades, and A Republic, Not an Empire laid out the foreign policy rationale for his latest run for the presidency. In questioning the wisdom of American diplomacy of the 1930s, Buchanan unwisely challenged one of the most deeply held beliefs of the American public–the rightness and necessity of American involvement in World War II. Movies, novels, histories, and personal memories of the conflict had argued that the war was, in the title of Studs Terkel’s book, “the good war.” The growing impact of the Holocaust on the thinking of Americans in general and Jews in particular was particularly influential in this definition of the war as a righteous struggle against a totalitarian and genocidal Nazi ideology.(22)
This argument over foreign policy was part of a broader debate between the paleos and the neocons over the nature of America. The traditionalists argued that American culture was already in place prior to the great social and economic transformations brought on by the immigration, industrialization, and urbanization of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. “So long as this was fundamentally an Anglo-American country with Anglo-American culture, language, and heroes,” Thomas Fleming said, “we knew who we were as a nation, whatever our individual backgrounds were.” The paleos denied that America was an experiment, the results of which were still up in the air. Their view toward immigration was reflected in the title of a collection of essays, Immigration and the American Identity, which originally appeared in Chronicles. The use of “the” rather than “an” reflected the traditionalists’ essentialist view of America. America, Fleming asserted, has “its own history, its own particular set of virtues and vices, its own special institutions.” Samuel Francis agreed. “Americans who wish to preserve the historic America will have to insist “on the greatness of who they are, where they come from, and what they have achieved.”(23)
For the Jewish neoconservatives, children and grandchildren of immigrants from Eastern Europe, this was far too narrow a view of American culture. They emphasized the pluralism and openness of America and claimed that Americanness was less a matter of biological descent and European culture than of civic values and political ideology. Just as the neoconservatives stressed the ideological content of American diplomacy and asserted that American political ideology had well-nigh universal applicability, so they underscored the plastic character of American identity. Anyone was potentially a good American just as long as he or she affirmed the fundamental American political precepts of the Declaration of Independence, the Bill of Rights, and the Gettysburg Address. The neoconservatives, the traditionalists responded, exaggerated the appeal of American political principles to the rest of the world, and they underestimated the powerful hold which culture has, or should have, on its citizens.
This disagreement over American nationality was reflected in the quarrel between the neoconservatives and the traditionalists over immigration from Asia, Latin America, and the Caribbean. The neoconservatives welcomed this immigration, believing that the immigrants were ambitious, socially conservative, and freedom loving. Commentary published several articles which argued that the danger from large-scale Third World immigration to the United States came not from the immigrants themselves or from the culture they brought with them but from the impact on the immigrants of an ideology of victimization and ethnic favoritism emanating from a native liberal elite. The paleos, by contrast, did not oppose immigration from Europe, particularly from Western Europe. But they were dubious about immigrants from Asia, Africa, and Latin America, claiming they were cultural aliens. The experience of Los Angeles and South Florida suggested that the immigrants would not assimilate, and parts of America would come to resemble the Third World. For the paleos, the important consideration was not whether immigration from the Third World would result in a higher gross national product but how it would impact the nation’s culture, language, religion, literature, art, and politics. Clyde Wilson feared that traditional American culture was being overwhelmed by this immigration. “We have not lost control of our borders,” he argued. “Rather in a sense we have lost control of our land.” The neconservatives failed to grasp the effect that this immigration had on “traditional and consensual values.” We were bequeathing to our descendants “a society intolerably lacking in moral, religious, political and cultural cohesion.” It was not important that these immigrants could quote the Declaration of Independence. Their values were not our values, and their culture was not our culture.(24)
In a perceptive 1988 essay in Commentary, Dan Himmelfarb, the managing editor of Public Interest, stressed that the traditionalists and the neoconservatives were heirs to two different intellectual legacies. The paleos were in the tradition of European conservatism, which emphasized religious belief and social hierarchy. The leading figures of this strain of conservatism included St. Thomas Aquinas, Edmund Burke, and Thomas Carlyle. The neocons, by contrast, were in the classic liberal tradition, and favored free markets, democracy, individual rights, cultural and religious pluralism, and equality of opportunity. Himmelfarb questioned whether the neoconservatives were conservatives at all. They were viewed as conservative only because liberalism had moved so far to the left. A better name for them would be “paleoliberals.” Himmelfarb was also skeptical that the traditionalists were truly conservatives because they had so little affection for historic American institutions and so little connection with traditional American values and principles. Himmelfarb concluded that the true conservatives were, in fact, the neocons since they, and not the paleos, wished to preserve that which is authentically American, its heritage of liberal democracy. “Indeed,” Himmelfarb said, “it might with some justification be argued that it is neoconservatism, and not paleoconservatism, that is both genuinely America and genuinely conservative.”(25)
Himmelfarb’s conclusion was typical of the widespread belief during the 1980s, both within and outside the conservative movement, that the gulf between the neoconservatives and the traditionalists was virtually unbridgeable. And yet despite the animadversions of paleos such as Paul Gottfried, the things which divided the neocons and paleos were far less important than that which united them. Midge Decter, a pioneering neconservative, was an early and eloquent critic of the feminist and gay movements, while Commentary and the Public Interest during the past three decades have published articles defending traditional conservative verities. Despite his claim that the essence of neoconservatism is the defense of bourgeois democracy, Irving Kristol, the so-called Godfather of Neoconservatism, has always sounded like a traditionalist. It has become increasingly difficult to distinguish between neoconservatives and traditionalists since erstwhile neoconservatives now sprinkle their language with words such as “civil order,” “authority,” and “tradition.”
Two leading neoconservative intellectuals have acknowledged recently that there are no longer any significant differences between the neoconservatives who write for Commentary and the more traditionalist conservatives who publish in National Review. Beginning in the 1970s, Irving Kristol wrote in 1995, “there was a gradual convergence of conservative activist and neoconservative critics so that, though the accents differ even to this day, there is more comity than friction.” The next year Norman Podhoretz argued in a Commentary essay that neoconservatism no longer existed as a distinctive phenomenon. Titled “Neoconservatism: A Eulogy,” Podhoretz’s piece claimed that neoconservatism was now part and parcel of the conservative movement, and it had no need for any prefix. With the former neoconservatives having given up on the welfare state, and with other conservatives having adopted much of neoconservative thinking, Podhoretz said, there was little now to distinguish the neocons from their former traditionalist adversaries. The conservative work which remained “will be marked and guided and shaped by the legacy neoconservatism has left behind. That legacy has wrought a profound change in the scope and the character and the ethos of American conservatism.” Neoconservatives could take satisfaction in “a just war well fought, and a time for rejoicing in a series of victories that cleared the way and set the stage for other victories in the years to come.”(26)
If some neocons and paleos still quarrel, this attests to the phenomenon frequently noted by sociologists that as differences between people narrow, the remaining differences assume much more importance. There was always something artificial about the neoconservative-paleo rift since both groups agreed on the most fundamental of conservative principles. As Robert Nisbet, the eminent conservative sociologist, noted, “If there is one identifying element of the conservatism that began with Burke in the late eighteenth century, it is opposition to the extension of political power into the social order.” The origins of conservatism date from the protests of Edmund Burke and the French opponents of the French Revolution against this aggrandizement of public power at the expense of the private sector, and this defense of the family, private associations, and local social and political institutions has remained the distinguishing feature of conservatism. Whether the contemporary resistance to the intrusive modern state was derived from philosophical-historical sources (paleos) or from the social sciences (neocons) was less important than the common opposition to the intrusive state.(27)
Strife within the conservative movement is nothing new. During the 1960s there was an often contentious debate between traditionalists and libertarians. This never got out of hand because both groups had a common enemy, the collectivists on the Left. An emphasis on fusionism, espoused particularly by Frank S. Meyer, one of the founding senior editors of National Review, enabled conservatives to mute their programmatic differences. As John P. East, the political scientist and future United States Senator, noted at that time, “If traditionalists and libertarians agree on the crucial matters of individualism and anti-collectivism … then optimism concerning a viable and effective conservative movement is warranted. Of course, there will remain areas of troublesome conflict triggered by extreme posturings from various quarters, yet the petulance of a few need not be allowed to abort the task of forging a conservative vital center.”(28)
A new version of conservative fusionism occurred in the 1990s, only in this case the participants were the neoconservatives and the traditionalists. An excellent example of this new fusionism was David Frum’s 1994 book, Dead Right. Frum, a neocon, argued that there was no inherent conflict between the neoconservative emphasis on free markets and the traditionalist emphasis on traditional virtues. He also argued that the internal conservative dissension over issues such as immigration, feminism, and race diverted attention away from what should be the major conservative target–big government. Big government was the common enemy of all conservatives, whether they be libertarians, neoconservatives, or traditionalists. Big government’s interventionist policies undermined economic growth, and its welfare programs threatened economic freedom and weakened self-reliance, thrift, prudence, and orderliness. The expansion of government beginning in the 1960s, Frum avowed, was accompanied by ethnic conflict, higher rates of drug usage, crime, family dissolution, illegitimacy, and lower educational standards, particularly among the poor. This was because the modern welfare state has emancipated “the individual appetite from the restrictions imposed on it by limited resources, or religious dread, or community disapproval, or the risk of disease or personal catastrophe.”(29)
All true conservatives have supported political decentralization, the ownership of property, and the prerogatives of religion, the family, the private corporation, and the neighborhood. In defending society against the encroachments of the modern leviathan state, neoconservatives and traditionalists have followed in the footsteps of the greatest of all conservative commentators on American culture. In Democracy in America, published over a century and a half ago, Alexis de Tocqueville expressed both fear and admiration for American democracy. He worried that democracy resulted in standardization and egalitarianism. In a democracy, he wrote, the passion for equality “is ardent, insatiable, eternal, and invincible … [Democracies] will put up with poverty, servitude, and barbarism, but they will not endure aristocracy.” But Tocqueville also believed that America could escape these democratic vices which had quickly spread throughout his native France. He noted the barriers in America to excessive political centralization–the nation’s numerous churches, powerful local governments, vigorous private economic life, an influential legal establishment, and, above all, the private organizations he called “associations.” As conservatives, neoconservatives and traditionalists alike are heirs to Tocqueville’s ambivalence regarding American democracy.
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