Conservatism's Hollow Defeat

The intellectual right, now in the wilderness, keeps deluding itself about supposed past glories.

Brian Doherty from the March 2009 issue

(Page 2 of 3)

Phillips-Fein’s focus is more specialized and fresh. Rather than the standard Old Right/BuckleyGoldwater/New Right/Reagan progression, Invisible Hands focuses on the businessmen and financiers who either bankrolled or pursued right-wing ideas in the worlds of advocacy and commerce.

The book starts with entertaining summations of some figures and organizations that have been ignored by most histories. They include Leonard Read, founder of the Foundation for Economic Education; his mentor, W.C. Mullendore of Southern California Edison; and their associates, the curious crew who ran the Christian libertarian advocacy group Spiritual Mobilization. (These and other figures are treated at length in my own Radicals for Capitalism: A Freewheeling History of the Modern American Libertarian Movement.) Spiritual Mobilization fell apart, among other reasons, because of some of its leaders’ fascination with Eastern mysticism and psychedelics. (This was in the hung-up 1950s, mind you.) Phillips-Fein also does a good job of relating some of the entertaining conflicts between American businessmen and European academics in the firstdecade of the libertarian Mont Pelerin Society.

There’s a reason most books about the right don’t recount these tales, or at least not in great detail: The intellectual and political tradition they represented was modern libertarianism, not modern conservatism. Phillips-Fein elides this point by telling a story about conservatism that pretty much ignores what became its constitutive aspect: foreign policy and the Cold War, which is the battleground on which the nascent libertarian and conservative movements fought and eventually separated.

Even in purely economic terms, all the people and organizations Phillips-Fein discusses after moving past Read, Mullendore, and the Spiritual Mobilization crew—General Electric’s anti-union wizard Lemuel Boulware (one of the linchpins of this book, and of Ronald Reagan’s intellectual development), the American Enterprise Institute, the Business Roundtable, the Chamber of Commerce, Amway—were far milder in their dedication to untrammeled free markets than those first proto-libertarians. Phillips-Fein’s mixing of the two traditions makes her book more interesting and colorful, but it also makes her intellectual history more muddled and confused.

Invisible Hands doesn’t evince a great deal of respect for its characters. Phillips-Fein, a contributor to such left-wing journals as The Nation and In These Times, dismisses the thinking of the businessmen she chronicles, from the DuPont family to Sterling Morton of the Morton Salt Company, as “little more than the desperate attempt of a few rich men to shore up their declining position in society.”

She derisively quotes their opinions about Social Security without noting that they were absolutely right about its budget-busting improvidence. She quotes modern GE CEO Jack Welch praising early GE bigwig Boulware by quoting his epigram, “companies don’t provide job security—customers do,” clearly intending to mock it, especially after her many detailed scene reports from bygone labor unrest. But the maxim is undeniably true.

While Phillips-Fein isn’t 100 percent solid on all the nuances of the ideas of the Austrian libertarian economists Ludwig von Mises and F.A. Hayek, she is far more savvy than most nonlibertarians who grapple with them in noting that their thinking was not conservative—that is, they were not defenders of any existing plutocratic privilege. Instead, they stood for the notion that “the market created a space of freedom, a world in which individual action could revolutionize society.”

What Phillips-Fein doesn’t stress enough, though one can deduce it from her story, is that far from being consistent class-based defenders of privilege, the business supporters of free markets were always eccentric outliers. She does note the Goldwater campaign’s distress that since “we’re not in the lead, the fat cats are holding back” on financial support, and explains that the business community was very wary of Reagan in the 1980 election, desiring not laissez faire but “reindustrialization policy” and thinking that tax cuts might be dangerously inflationary.

Truly radical free market policies, of the sort Read and Mullendore supported, have always been and remain a niche concern, not the focus of a major political party or movement. Businessmen in politics mostly have supported what they think they need to support to get by in a world of omnipresent government. That sometimes entails loosening a particular regulation or trimming a particular tax, but it almost never entails general advocacy of laissez faire.

Despite some blind spots, Phillips-Fein is an honest historian, and from her storytelling you can see that figures such as Richard Nixon—and even Goldwater in the desperate later days of his campaign—turned away from free markets to focus on law and order, the culture wars, and what she calls a “diffuse sense of alienation.”

These things had little to do with intellectual conservatism and even less to do with free markets. But they are what dominates the electoral right to this day. Their current embodiment, with the war on terror now subbing for law and order, is the controversial Gov. Palin.

Sarah Palin is not mentioned in either of these books, which were doubtless finished many months before the Alaska governor was plucked from obscurity to become a national phenomenon. But as we move toward 2012, Palin is a synecdoche for everything the right has become in American politics. She continues to be held up as a serious and admirable force by nearly all varieties of the intellectual and activist right that want to remain members in good standing of the coalition.

Ronald Reagan was a great populist communicator, to be sure. But he was no Sarah Palin. He had decades of immersion in a serious set of ideas about markets and how they work, and he had experience communicating them via long speeches and radio presentations, many of which he wrote himself. Palin on the national stage is mostly experienced in stumbling through platitudes about low taxes and government not working, and whipping up resentment against the contemptuous elites out to get her.

In some ways she resembles the New Right populists of the 1970s and ’80s, such as Richard Viguerie and Sam Francis, barreling through in opposition to the East Coast media elites. But Palin represents the worst of both worlds. She buys into the GOP elites’ neoconservative foreign policy and wan verbal obeisance to free markets but yokes those positions to a populist anti-intellectualism that makes her unable to win over anyone who doesn’t love her for reminding them of their kind of person. With U.S. demographics changing, and with an economic crisis turning those elites with whiplash speed away from the supposed victories for free market ideas described by Schneider and Phillips-Fein, that is not ground on which anything approaching serious intellectual conservatism will be able to thrive.

Politicians who call themselves conservative will have future electoral victories. But they probably will devote little energy to advocating the right-wing ideas chronicled in these books. Some will consider themselves culturally traditionalist, for example, but the traditions they defend will drift further and further from the mores of the mid-20th century, when contemporary conservatism was birthed. Palin gets credit for being a Christian traditionalist merely by having a big family and not making her teenage daughter get an abortion. In the 1940s, Christian traditionalists likely would have considered her terribly irresponsible for working an important job with that many kids, and a wild degenerate for allowing her daughter to be publicly disgraced by an unwed pregnancy.

Comments

nfl jerseys|11.5.10 @ 4:04AM|#

jtehye

Scarpe Nike|8.8.11 @ 5:06AM|#

is good