Reason Magazine - Staff

Goldwater Unfiltered

mccarthydp@gmail.com (Daniel McCarthy) — Tue, 27 May 2008 15:00:00 EDT

Pure Goldwater, edited by Barry M. Goldwater Jr. and John W. Dean, New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 416 pages, $27.95

Even though the names on the cover of Pure Goldwater are those of Barry Goldwater Jr. (son of the senator) and John W. Dean (military academy friend of Barry Jr. and later a key Watergate figure), this book is not written by either of them. In fact, it’s that rarest of artifacts within the vast body of literature by and about the 1964 presidential candidate—a book that, unlike more famous works such as The Conscience of a Conservative, was actually written by Sen. Barry Goldwater himself. Well, sort of.

Starting in 1939, when Barry Jr. was born, Goldwater pere intermittently kept a private journal. At first the idea was that the stray thoughts he recorded might be of some use to his son: a guide to business matters in case Goldwater died before his offspring could learn the family trade of managing a chain of Arizona department stores. From the beginning, though, Goldwater included much more than just business advice. He filled the journal with his observations and feelings about the land and people of Arizona. He recorded his experiences as a pilot in World War II. Most important for history, he put down his inner thoughts about his political career: 28 years in the U.S. Senate, interrupted by the most influential failed presidential bid in American history.

Goldwater’s 1964 campaign transformed America more profoundly than many a successful White House run. It propelled the conservative movement into national politics (putting to rout the GOP’s big-government Rockefeller wing) and won the senator a place second only to Ronald Reagan in conservatives’ hearts. Not a few libertarians got their start in the 1964 campaign as well. If they sometimes blanched at Goldwater’s saber-rattling Cold War stances, they nonetheless admired his anti-socialist, small-government rhetoric, which was backed up—not always, but often enough—by his Senate votes.

Goldwater was for liberty, as he conceived of it. “Our country, of course, was born on the very simple idea that freedom is our only cause,” he wrote in his journal, “and that freedom was not given to us by government.” In another entry, he declared, “The American economic system could only work well, and at its best, when it was unhampered by government and was allowed to be controlled only by the marketplace.… Thus, the core of my economic philosophy is the free market system—when it is working as it should.”

John Dean and Barry Goldwater Jr. have excerpted the journal and packaged their selections with a smattering of Goldwater’s letters, speeches, and other literary remains. Pure Goldwater is so called because it presents Goldwater’s own words, unscripted and (mostly) unpolished. The book also includes lengthy passages from Goldwater’s testimony in the 1968 libel suit he brought against the journalist Ralph Ginzburg, who in 1964 had published a psychiatric survey that purported to find the senator paranoid, sexually insecure, suicidal, and “grossly psychotic.” (Goldwater won the suit, although the jury awarded damages that covered only his legal fees.) In their introduction, Dean and Goldwater Jr. describe Pure Goldwater as “a scrap book of important thoughts; it is more nuggets than narrative.”

That’s all too true. Goldwater’s journal doesn’t cover every key period of his life; there is virtually nothing in it about the 1964 campaign, for example. Dean and Goldwater Jr. do not plug this astonishing gap with much supplemental material: There are just two items here from 1964, a letter and a press statement, both of them complaining about the media’s biased reporting. For the rest of the story, the editors suggest books like What Happened to Goldwater?, by Goldwater adviser Stephen Shadegg, and A Glorious Disaster, by campaign treasurer J. William Middendorf II. As abundant as the literature about the ’64 race may be, that campaign is a hell of a thing to omit from any book about Barry Goldwater.

Despite the fragmentary nature of the journals, a bare-bones narrative does emerge. Pure Goldwater opens with a 1923 letter the 14-year-old Goldwater wrote to Thomas Edison telling the inventor about his interests in radios and electricity—interests that would prove to be lifelong. Selections from later recollections fill in the picture of Goldwater’s youth: his work in the family department store as a boy; his father’s death in 1929, which led the 20-year-old Goldwater to abandon his studies at the University of Arizona and return to work; his marriage in 1934 to Peggy Johnson, a young woman he met in the department store. The journal itself begins in 1938, when Goldwater was 29. Around the same time, he began writing guest editorials for the Phoenix Gazette, which reveal a confident young businessman adamantly opposed to the New Deal. “The worst thing about your labor plan,” Goldwater wrote in an op-ed addressed directly to Franklin Roosevelt, “has been that you have turned over to the racketeering practices of ill-organized unions the future of the working man. Witness the chaos they are creating in the eastern cities. Witness the men thrown out of work, the riots, the bloodshed, and the ill feeling between labor and capital.” That’s pure Goldwater all right.

The early journal entries are less polemical, more personal. In 1939 Goldwater was glad when he could get away from business and politics, escaping into a weeks-long tour of the Arizona desert. Several sources (not just Ralph Ginzburg) have suggested that Goldwater suffered a nervous breakdown before embarking on this desert odyssey. Maybe it was nothing as dramatic as that, but in his journal Goldwater writes of getting himself “into such a stew that this trip became a necessity.” In 1941 Goldwater, who had been an Army reservist since 1930, enlisted in the Army Air Corps, and a dozen journal entries from 1943 tell of his flight across the Atlantic from Delaware to Scotland by way of Greenland and Iceland in a single-engine P-47, part of an operation to fly fighters to Britain. Goldwater didn’t see combat, but his trans-Atlantic jaunt and later Air Corps service in Asia had risks enough of their own.

After the war, Goldwater launched his career in politics, getting elected to the Phoenix City Council in 1949, managing the successful gubernatorial campaign of John Pyle the following year, and defeating Democratic Sen. Ernest McFarland, the Senate majority leader, in 1952. A 1949 journal entry expresses Goldwater’s belief that campaigning and governing could be, and should be, “clean”: “I think…that politics can be governed by the same set of laws or rules that govern our actions towards each other. I believe that things can be done outright and not on the sly cloak and dagger treatment politics have always carried. I think that people who work under [city] politicians, the clerks, the police, the engineers and all the others, they will work for men and women that they admire and trust much better than for those they fear and distrust.”

“Clean politics” meant, among other things, that in 1964 Goldwater would not make a campaign issue out of Lyndon Johnson aide Walter Jenkins, who was arrested for homosexual activity in a YMCA bathroom. In the 1980s, the cause of clean politics led Goldwater to call for strict campaign spending limits; he even went so far as to propose a constitutional amendment to get around the Supreme Court’s 1976 Buckley v. Valeo decision, which held that Congress could not place limits on federal campaign spending. “The Court held that such a campaign lid is an invasion of the opportunity of individuals and organizations to exercise free speech,” he said in a 1983 Senate floor speech included in Pure Goldwater. “My answer is that we should try again.… The success of our national experiment in self-rule is on the line.” That’s not to say Goldwater would have seen eye to eye with his Senate successor, John McCain, on campaign finance. For one thing, Goldwater opposed public financing of elections, warning “it could lead to a loss of all freedom, with the government gaining power to manipulate elections.”

Clean politics is not a theme anyone would associate with Richard Nixon, but Nixon had campaigned loyally for Goldwater in 1964, and Goldwater returned the favor in 1968 and 1972. But the senator brooded extensively on the 37th president, well before Watergate. “Nixon was the most prevalent subject in his private journal,” Dean and Goldwater Jr. note, “suggest[ing] that Richard Nixon was something of a puzzle to Goldwater, which he continued to work on until he gave up in disgust.”

Goldwater was frustrated by President Nixon’s reluctance to consult him for advice. Whenever the two did meet, Goldwater always told Nixon the same thing: The president had to rid the State Department and other government agencies of Kennedy and Johnson holdovers who were preventing Nixon from implementing conservative policies. Nixon, in turn, would always tell Goldwater that he wanted to meet with him more regularly, but he never did.

By the time the Watergate scandal erupted, Goldwater’s patience with Nixon had frayed. At first he blamed the press and Nixon’s staff for the affair, but he soon came to suspect Nixon as well. He wondered in his journal whether Nixon had engineered the downfall of his vice president, Spiro Agnew, who resigned after being accused of taking bribes. “Many of us in Washington have felt for some time that someone was out to get the vice president,” he wrote. “That someone could well be the president of the United States wanting to get rid of Agnew so he could replace him with either [Texas Sen. John] Connally or [former New York Gov. Nelson] Rockefeller…as the person to succeed him.”

Still, as late as the summer of 1974, Goldwater did not believe Nixon should step down over Watergate. But on August 7, Goldwater and the Republican leaders in the House and Senate, Rep. John Rhodes of Arizona and Sen. Hugh Scott of Tennessee, told the president what he could expect from impeachment proceedings. “I told him I doubted if he would get as many as fifteen votes” in the Senate, Goldwater recorded in his journal, noting that he was unsure how he himself would vote. Shortly after their meeting, Nixon resigned.

Prior to Watergate, Goldwater had planned to retire from the Senate in 1974, and Nixon had offered to make him ambassador to Mexico—one of a few minor revelations contained in Pure Goldwater. Another nugget is that when Gerald Ford became president, he asked Goldwater whether he should appoint an African American or a woman as vice president—or even Goldwater himself. A black V.P. might work, Goldwater replied, if Ford “could find a competent black Republican,” but the country wasn’t ready for a female vice president, even though “women are excellent in politics.” Goldwater, who elected to stay in the Senate post-Watergate to be a force of stability, didn’t want the job himself. According to his journal, his desire to ensure stability was why he supported Ford over the more conservative Ronald Reagan in the 1976 Republican primaries.

Regrettably, Pure Goldwater tells us little about the senator’s relationship with Reagan. The book’s historical sequence breaks off after the Ford administration, and the last three chapters survey, in scattershot fashion, Goldwater’s views on a handful of controversial issues: foreign policy, abortion, homosexuality, immigration, and campaign finance. The policy thought on display here and throughout the book will by turns delight and infuriate every part of the political spectrum. When he first came to the Senate, Goldwater abhorred France’s colonial meddling in Indochina. “It seemed rather inconsistent to me, inconsistent certainly with the principles of this Republic,” he wrote in his journal, “that we, who have fought so hard for freedom against Britain, would now be supporting openly a country like France with colonizing ambitions.” Later he ardently supported the U.S. war in Vietnam—in the name of anticommunism rather than colonialism—urging Nixon to mine the harbors and bomb the dikes of North Vietnam.

His business experience and military service taught Goldwater to be skeptical of government spending, especially military spending. In his first Senate run, his statement of principles included a plank declaring, “The military is the greatest waster of money and manpower we have. They must be made to conduct their affairs in a businesslike manner.” But during the Nixon years, Goldwater became a fierce advocate for a civilian aeronautical boondoggle: federal aid for the development of an American supersonic transport to rival the British-French Concorde and (believe it or not) a Soviet commercial SST. Goldwater’s reaction upon seeing the instrumentation in the Russian prototype is a vintage slice of Cold War paranoia: “What I saw in the Russian 144 appeared to be very old and extremely unsophisticated but, frankly, no one knows what they had hiding under the floor.”

Today’s conservatives will balk at Goldwater’s social views. He initially welcomed the Roe v. Wade decision that legalized abortion. “I think that abortion should be legalized,” he wrote to a constituent in 1973, “because whether it is legal or not, women are going to have it done.” He quickly adopted a vaguer stance, dropping his talk about legalization and telling constituents “the issue [is] squarely up to each state legislature.” After leaving the Senate in 1986, however, he came out explicitly in favor of abortion rights. He also became an outspoken advocate of gay rights, not only calling for an end to the ban on homosexuals in the military but endorsing anti-discrimination legislation as well.

Decades earlier, Goldwater had voted against the 1964 Civil Rights Act precisely on the grounds that its anti-discrimination clauses would infringe on states’ rights and individual property rights. His turnaround on anti-discrimination legislation has never been fully explained, though a 1994 statement included in Pure Goldwater supports the idea that his reasons were more personal than philosophical. “My grandchildren and great-grandchildren are growing up in Arizona,” he said. “Some of them are gay, some of them aren’t. But because Arizona doesn’t have a law barring discrimination based on sexual orientation, they may not all get a fair shake.”

From any vantage point, Barry Goldwater was far from perfect and far from perfectly consistent. Yet he still finds admirers among conservatives, libertarians, and even liberals. If everyone can find something to object to in his record, nearly everyone also can find something to like. And imperfect though he was, Goldwater at least tried to live up to his ideal of clean politics. He wasn’t always candid, but he shot from the hip often enough that voters could tell themselves they were hearing something like the truth.

No Goldwater fan can do without a copy of Pure Goldwater; but no one who isn’t already a fan will get much out of it. This book is a stopgap at best, until the journal itself is published—assuming there’s any more substance to it than what’s on display here, which may or may not be the case. An edition of collected letters is much needed as well. But until those come along, readers can get their fix of the unscripted, unghosted conscience of a conservative from Pure Goldwater.

Daniel McCarthy is associate editor of The American Conservative.

The Pomo Mind

mccarthydp@gmail.com (Daniel McCarthy) — Fri, 29 Feb 2008 10:30:00 EST

The Postmodern Imagination of Russell Kirk, by Gerald J. Russello, Columbia, Mo.: University of Missouri Press, 248 pages, $44.95

Toward the end of The Postmodern Imagination of Russell Kirk, the conservative scholar Gerald Russello insists, “The possible connections between…Kirk’s conservatism and postmodernism are more than a simple enemy-of-my-enemy stance toward liberalism.” His book makes a surprisingly strong case for that unlikely claim. But it also reinforces what is likely to be the reader’s first impression: that the lowest and surest common denominator between Russell Kirk, author of The Conservative Mind, and pomo theorists such as Jean-Francois Lyotard and Jean Baudrillard lies in their shared antagonism toward the Enlightenment and liberalism in all its forms.

Kirk, a 34-year-old professor of history at Michigan State when The Conservative Mind was published in 1953, is an icon to traditionalist conservatives, an eminence so holy that he “often has been the subject of undue adulation and hagiography,” as Russello admits. Even conservatives who don’t think of themselves as traditionalists often pay lip service to Kirk’s authority. Russello notes the irony in this: Kirk, who hated the first Gulf War in 1991 and was at most a lukewarm defender of capitalism, would find little in common with today’s hawkish, pro-growth right-wingers. But even before his death in 1994, Kirk the symbol had become uncoupled from Kirk the man—a very postmodern turn of events.

Still, Kirk doesn’t seem at first blush like a postmodern figure. Premodern would be more like it. Kirk assumed a “carefully crafted eighteenth-century persona,” says Russello, along with an “antiquated style of writing.” Even more than his style, his ideas echoed various dead white Anglo-Saxon males who defended established institutions of church and state. Postmodernists, by contrast, tend to embrace the marginal, the “Other,” and the genuinely or putatively oppressed, while condemning the “cultural hegemony” of men and institutions that Kirk admired. Moreover, whatever similarities there might be between postmodernism and Kirk’s attitudes toward liberalism, a more obvious benchmark for Kirk might be the sentimentally conservative side of the 19th-century Romantic movement. Kirk is in many ways a chip off the Walter Scott block, not only in his criticisms of progress and industrialism but in his predilection for things Gothic and medieval.

Certainly Kirk lacks many traits characteristic of postmodernists. Unlike them, he never evinced an obsession with theory, a keen interest in power relationships, a yen for the transgressive. But he did believe that America had entered a postmodern age, defined by the decay of classical liberalism, and Kirk was confident, as he wrote in National Review in 1982, that “the Post-Modern imagination stands ready to be captured. And the seemingly novel ideas and sentiments and modes may turn out, after all, to be received truths and institutions, well known to surviving conservatives.”

Defining postmodernism is a dodgy business, but Lyotard provides perhaps the best short encapsulation: “incredulity toward metanarratives,” or skepticism toward grand stories like the Enlightenment account of scientific and moral progress. Traditionalist conservatives in the vein of Russell Kirk may or may not share that incredulity—depending on whether Kirk’s belief that “society is a spiritual reality, possessing an eternal life” counts as a metanarrative—but they find rationalistic system building equally distasteful, fearing that it strips the mystery and feeling from life.

Following the classical liberal economist F.A. Hayek, libertarians might make common cause with Kirk and the postmodernists against what Hayek called “scientism,” the misapplication of the methods of the physical sciences to the ordering of human society. But postmodern and traditionalist critiques of objective reason and philosophical liberalism can easily be taken too far; after all, the pomo sociologist Michel Foucault’s rejection of the Enlightenment led him to endorse, for a time, Ayatollah Khomeini’s Islamic Revolution (though by the time of his death in 1984, Foucault had come to a more temperate perspective on the Enlightenment and commended Hayek to his students).

Postmodernists and traditionalists alike run the risk of putting their loathing of the Enlightenment ahead of their love for liberty or justice. Luckily, even at his most anti-modern, and despite the evidence Russello marshals, Kirk was no postmodern radical, and he never went as far as the most extreme postmodernists and anti-modern reactionaries—though his attacks on libertarians and classical liberals certainly do not help the cause of liberty, a cause to which Kirk professed some allegiance himself.

Russello is a lawyer by trade, but his credentials as a Kirkian are 24 carat. He is the editor of The University Bookman, a quarterly founded by Kirk and now published by the Russell Kirk Center. Russello’s book is outstanding in its insights into Kirk but often leaves something to be desired in its discussion of postmodernism. At times The Postmodern Imagination of Russell Kirk seems scattershot. It is drawn heavily from work that appeared earlier in conservative and legal journals—Modern Age, The American Journal of Jurisprudence, and The New Criterion, among others.

Instead of constructing a master narrative of Kirk as postmodernist, Russello makes discrete arguments in each of his chapters, which tackle by turns Kirk’s ideas about history, politics, and jurisprudence, and the general relationship between “Conservatism, Modernity, and the Postmodern.” The fragmentary nature of the book might seem appropriate for a text about postmodernism. But Kirk put a high premium on narrative integrity, and the intermittently persuasive case Russello builds for Kirk as a postmodern thinker would have been more forceful if he had approached it systematically.

Indeed, the book’s title notwithstanding, Russello’s best sections are those that have the least to do with postmodernism. The introduction and the first chapter, on Kirk’s “Life and Thought,” are a case in point. Russello usefully shows that Kirk’s conservatism was sui generis. Not only did it differ from the National Review conservatism that took root in the 1950s—which was shaped by the Cold War much more than Kirk’s own thinking was, and which at times savored too much of classical liberalism for Kirk’s taste—but Kirk’s conservatism was distinct from the Southern agrarianism of many of his friends and followers as well. Kirk admired Abraham Lincoln, for example, unlike those in the latter group, who see Lincoln as a tyrannical centralizer.

If Kirk had his differences with Cold War conservatives and agrarian traditionalists, he actively disliked neoconservatives and libertarians. Kirk called neocons an “endangered species” and famously declared, “not seldom has it seemed as if some eminent Neoconservatives mistook Tel Aviv for the capital of the United States.” He denounced libertarians in equally vehement terms. The “representative libertarian,” he claimed in a piece titled “A Dispassionate Assessment of Libertarians,” is “humorless, intolerant, self-righteous, badly schooled, and dull” and didn’t know “which sex he belonged to.” Kirk disdained classical liberalism in part because he believed it undermined its own religious and moral foundations. “The contract theory of society rested upon religious assumptions,” he asserted in The Conservative Mind, “and as religious faith decayed among the liberals…the economic competition and the spiritual isolation which resulted from the triumph of their ideals provoked among them a reaction in favor of powerful benevolent governments exercising compulsions.”

Yet Kirk admitted to a few areas of agreement with antistatists: “they do not believe that the United States should station garrisons throughout the world; no more do I,” he wrote in the same essay, and he found libertarian resistance to collectivism and centralization laudable. Russello looks only briefly at Kirk’s relationship to libertarianism. That’s a pity, since the question of why Kirk felt such animosity toward a group with which he had a good deal in common (in practice, if not in theory) is an interesting one, and his attitude could be fruitfully compared with the disdain many postmodernists feel for capitalism and classical liberalism.

Russello’s overview of Kirk’s politics is insightful, and his take on Kirk’s spiritual background is even more revealing. “Kirk did not have a particularly religious upbringing,” Russello notes, and indeed “his Mecosta relations had a reputation for being ‘spiritualists’ and for hosting séances and other ghostly summonings at their house.” Those formative experiences inspired in Kirk an early and lasting love for the Gothic and occult, which came through in his second career as a writer of horror stories. (Kirk’s top-selling book was not The Conservative Mind but his 1961 “Gothick tale” The Old House of Fear.) When he married in 1964, Kirk converted to Catholicism, but before that he described himself as a “Gothic Jew,” proclaiming “heterodoxy is my doxy, not orthodoxy.” Postmodernism at its best has a sense of the playful, and Kirk had a lifelong playfulness about spooks and hidden powers.

Still, all that sounds more like an old Romantic than a contemporary postmodernist. Russello begins laying his claim for a pomo Kirk in his second chapter, “Participant Knowledge and History.” There are three lines to Russello’s argument. First, Kirk “was in accord with the postmodern reluctance to propose grand statements about the ‘meaning of history.’ ” Second, “like the postmodernists, Kirk displayed a certain ‘presentism’ when speaking about the past”: He believed that living traditions in the present change the past, or at least transform how we conceptualize the past. Third, Kirk rejected the idea of entirely factual, objective history in favor of a belief in historians—and their readers—as participants in the construction of history. There’s some merit to all these threads, particularly the second one. Kirk, like the postmodernists, did see history as unfinished and imaginative, something that could not be understood by piling up facts in chronological order. But this understanding of history is not peculiar to postmodernists or to Russell Kirk, and few contemporary historians would find much to argue with in Russello’s other points. Who doesn’t recognize perfect objectivity as a chimera? And among today’s historians, who really believes history has an overarching “meaning”?

Elsewhere in the same chapter, Russello relates the dubious idea that Werner Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle in quantum physics, which Russello says “struck a terminal blow to the idea of scientific objectivity,” tells us something about historical knowledge. What does our inability to observe simultaneously the velocity and position of a subatomic particle have to do with our ability—or lack thereof—to understand what happened at, say, the Battle of Hastings? Even if there is uncertainty about both kinds of events, we are not talking about the same kind of uncertainty. We may not know whether King Harold was really killed by an arrow to the eye, but if he was, we can say with certainty that both the position and velocity of the arrow could have been observed simultaneously, if anyone had been in a position to do so.

There is indeed common ground here between Kirkian traditionalists and postmodernists. Both camps try to conscript the uncertainty principle, mathematician Kurt Gödel’s incompleteness theorems, and Einstein’s relativity into attacks on objectivity in other fields. The Kirkians and postmodernists share a fallacy, and ironically it is a species of scientism: They wrongly apply the ideas of advanced physics and mathematics to history. It turns out that when “science” casts doubt on objectivity, the otherwise science-skeptical Kirkians and postmodernists are all for it.

Missing from the chapter on knowledge and history, however, is any sustained discussion of the two very different elements that postmodernists and traditionalists find at the heart of historical interpretation. For the postmodernists, that element is power. For traditionalists, it is truth. Kirk was a realist: Objectivity may be elusive, he believed, but the truth is out there, whether we can grasp it fully or not. Postmodern theorists have tended to see the matter differently. Foucault, for example, was more interested in how knowledge, including historical knowledge, could be an instrument of power—not just state power but cultural hegemony. Russello cannot be faulted too much for not getting into this, since Kirk himself did not look very deeply at the nature of power and the ties between convention and the state, in part because that would have been a more theoretical discussion than Kirk, who abjured most abstraction as the sin of “ideology,” would have wanted to undertake. Kirk was not a painstaking, analytic historian; he was more of a chronicler, a literary writer with an interest in political history and philosophy.

The chapters on Kirk’s political thought and jurisprudence are on firmer ground than the chapter on history. Russello brings his talents as a legal thinker to bear in discussing Kirk’s views on natural law, common law, and positive law. He clarifies a contentious issue among Kirkians: whether, and to what extent, Kirk was a natural-law thinker. Russello argues convincingly that for Kirk, the common law—built up over centuries upon the ad hoc decisions of judges and juries—should be preferred over consciously constructed legislative law or abstract natural law. He feared the revolutionary potential in natural law and disliked its absolute and rational qualities; he wanted it tamed and codified by common law or, failing that, legislation. There is a plausible pomo dimension to Kirk’s thought here. The bottom-up and participatory common law does have qualities congruent with postmodernism—certainly relative to the rationalistic, top-down approach of legal positivism and the universalism of natural law.

In his final chapter, Russello deals most explicitly with the relationship of conservatism to postmodernism, particularly to Lyotard’s “crisis of narratives”—the splintering of metanarratives into discrete, incommensurable stories. It is here that Russello insists that Kirkian conservatism and postmodernism do not simply have the same enemies but have common interests as well. Cultural decentralization and localism are two of the overlapping concerns Russello finds, and he notes parallel themes in several traditionalist and postmodern thinkers. In 1926 Bernard Iddings Bell, an Episcopal clergyman and friend of Kirk’s, was “among the first ever to use the term postmodernism as a description of an age emerging from the collapse of Enlightenment rationality,” Russello notes. Meanwhile, the postmodern theorist Hans Georg Gadamer came to a rather Kirkian understanding of, and respect for, tradition, arguing that it could not be understood by an objective, outside observer. “To stand within a tradition,” Gadamer wrote, “does not limit the freedom of knowledge but makes it possible.”

Yet even this final chapter leaves too much merely summarized and too much left unsaid. Gadamer, the postmodern figure whose approach to tradition seems most sympathetic to Kirk’s worldview, is discussed only fleetingly, and the book never rigorously compares Kirk with any postmodernist intellectuals. At a little over 200 pages, The Postmodern Imagination of Russell Kirk only skims the surface of what might link Kirk to a figure such as Gadamer. As a prologue to a future, wider study of conservatism and postmodernism, it’s valuable; there might be inspiration for a half-dozen doctoral dissertations within its pages. And as a book showing Kirk to be a more eccentric, unorthodox figure than most conservatives imagine him to be, the book is delightful. But for all the connections Russello finds between Kirk and postmodernism, the strongest impression it leaves is that Kirk and the pomos are at best allies of convenience against liberalism. And that may be the least attractive element in either camp’s thought.

Daniel McCarthy is a contributing editor to The American Conservative.

Revising Ronald Reagan

mccarthydp@gmail.com (Daniel McCarthy) — Wed, 09 May 2007 12:10:00 EDT

Ronald Reagan: Fate, Freedom, and the Making of History, by John Patrick Diggins, New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 493 pages, $27.95

By the time of Ronald Reagan’s death in June 2004, even Saddam Hussein felt a little nostalgic for the former leader. “I wish things were like when Ronald Reagan was still president,” the jailed dictator reportedly told one of his American guards. When word of the president’s death reached the British pop star Morrissey, performing on stage in Dublin, the man who’d once sung the anti-Thatcher tune “Margaret on the Guillotine” delivered backhanded condolences of his own, telling the audience that George W. Bush, not Reagan, should have died.

Something more than revulsion toward Bush has been at work in other quarters, however, as a number of journalists and academics have begun to re-evaluate the Reagan record. The Atlantic Monthly last year provided a measure of the strange new respect Reagan commands with the chattering classes when it ranked him as the 17th most influential American who ever lived. Not bad for a man once dismissed by respectable opinion as (in the words of the Democratic éminence grise Clark Clifford) “an amiable dunce.”

Reagan was no dunce, and contrary to what many liberals thought in the 1980s—and what many conservatives seem to think now—he was no super-hawk either. Recent volumes of Reagan’s speeches and correspondence, edited by Kiron Skinner and Annelise and Martin Anderson, have gone a long way toward dispelling the myth of his stupidity. Reagan’s radio commentaries, written in his own hand, demonstrate his familiarity with the work of the Austrian economists F.A. Hayek and Ludwig von Mises. Meanwhile, Paul Lettow’s 2005 book Ronald Reagan and His Quest to Abolish Nuclear Weapons makes a convincing case for a surprisingly dovish Reagan. John Patrick Diggins’ new book goes a step further, arguing that Reagan was virtually a libertarian, a political romantic who stood for “freedom, peace, disarmament, self-reliance, earthly happiness, the dreams of the imagination and the desires of the heart.”

With language like that, Diggins, a professor of history at the City University of New York, might sound like a right-wing Reagan hagiographer. He’s not. Twenty years ago, when the term had more pragmatic connotations, Diggins might have been called a neoconservative; his heroes are center-left turned center-right figures like Daniel Patrick Moynihan and Sidney Hook. Diggins was no fan of Gov. Reagan in the ’60s or President Reagan in the ’80s, and his newfound respect for Reagan does not come without reservations. But he writes that “my respect for the man grew from appreciating his boldness in dealing with the three miseries of the modern era,” namely “a suicidal nuclear arms race…an expanding welfare state that had made the poor helplessly dependent [and] a joyless religious inheritance that told people their kingdom was not of this world and they needed to be careful about pursuing happiness in case they came to enjoy it.”

Diggins sets out to write an intellectual biography not just of Reagan but of his times, with special attention to the neocons who always urged the president to take a firmer line against the Soviet Union. The hawks in Reagan’s administration assured him he couldn’t reason with communists. One adviser, the historian Richard Pipes, told Reagan the Russian mind worked in ways fundamentally different from our own. The peasant mentality of the Russian muzhik, Pipes had written in 1977, held “that cunning and coercion alone ensured survival: one employed cunning when weak, and cunning coupled with coercion when strong. Not to use force when one had it indicated weakness.” Reagan disagreed. Ignoring the advice of hard-liners like Pipes and the neoconservative strategist Richard Perle, Reagan preferred jaw-jaw to war-war. “We must and will engage the Soviets in a dialogue as serious and constructive as possible,” he insisted in a 1984 address.

A nuclear close call in 1983, when Soviet early-warning systems wrongly reported American missiles on the horizon and nearly triggered a Russian retaliatory strike, reinforced for Reagan the imperative of building trust with the enemy. After that incident, “I was even more anxious to get a top Soviet leader in a room alone and try to convince him we had no designs on the Soviet Union and Russians had nothing to fear from us,” Reagan later wrote in his memoirs. Negotiation was possible, regardless of what the hard-line “experts” said.

To an extent that no one really appreciated at the time, Diggins argues, the “dunce” Reagan actually inaugurated an era of highly intellectual politics in Washington: The Reagan years “so overflowed with think tanks and ideas it seemed there could be no policy without a set of beliefs or doctrines, no politics without a political theory.” Reagan’s own political philosophy matured long before he arrived in Washington; it was shaped by reading the classical liberal economists Frederic Bastiat and F.A. Hayek and the morose anti-communist Whittaker Chambers, as well as Reagan’s clashes with Hollywood Reds as president of the Screen Actors Guild and campus radicals as governor of California. Perhaps the deepest influence came from his mother, whose relaxed Protestant religious views looked away from outside authority and to the inner self for guidance. Diggins argues that this inheritance infused Reagan with an Emersonian faith in humanity.

Not all those influences pulled in the same direction. Between the Transcendentalist Ralph Waldo Emerson and the Communist-turned-Quaker Whittaker Chambers lies a world of difference. Chambers, as Diggins reminds us, thought that in leaving the Communist Party he was joining the losing side of history. Reagan’s neoconservative advisers in the 1980s had similar feelings, insisting right up until the Berlin Wall came down that America was losing the Cold War. Before Reagan’s election, Commentary editor Norman Podhoretz set the tone for the administration’s hawks by warning of the “Finlandization of America,” the collapse of American will to resist Soviet aggression.

Reagan didn’t buy it. “A salient point” about Reagan’s advisers, Diggins writes, “was their lack of faith in the American character. They believed that a native Protestant religion fed a flabby culture of consumption” that would be no match for the Soviets’ will to power. But Reagan saw America’s hedonistic ways as a virtue, not a vice—and not just in the struggle against communism. According to Diggins, “the genius of Ronald Reagan was, like that of Emerson, to persuade us that we please God by pleasing ourselves and that to believe in the self is to live within the divine soul.” As Exhibit A in his argument, Diggins quotes a letter Reagan wrote to a friend in 1951, telling her “my personal belief is that God couldn’t have created evil so the desires he planted in us are good.” This thoroughly unconservative belief in mankind’s innate goodness led him to trust both the American consumer and the Russian people—and ultimately Mikhail Gorbachev, leading to a dramatic de-escalation of the nuclear arms race.

Diggins has more faith in government than Reagan ever did. He’s also a biographer of John Adams, and it’s clear enough just from his Reagan book that he admires the strong-government Federalists much more than the anti-statist Jeffersonians. Like a good Federalist, Diggins also believes that the people, be they American or Russian, are an unruly mob whose liberties can only be guaranteed by sound government. This unabashedly elitist perspective distorts his account of the end of the Cold War. Gorbachev becomes a heroic figure, even though Diggins acknowledges (several times, in fact) that the Soviet premier wanted to save communism, not to bring the whole system crashing down. Yet Diggins insists that the fall of communism in Russia “offers no example of ‘history from below’ ”—of ordinary people rather than national leaders making history.

He’s wrong. The Soviet Politburo didn’t just decide to call it quits in the summer of 1991; instead, the USSR’s own strong-government types seized power from Gorbachev in a coup, only to find mass protests in the streets of Moscow and Leningrad opposing them and calling for an end to communism. Certainly Gorbachev’s reformist policies within Russia and his willingness to negotiate with Reagan on nuclear weapons contributed to the Cold War’s end. But it’s less than half the story.

The biographer is notably at odds with his subject on the role of popular discontent in the end of communism. But Diggins is right to credit Reagan—and, yes, Gorbachev—with scaling down the tensions of the Cold War, which seemed to be heating up in the early ’80s with the Soviet war in Afghanistan and various proxy wars in the Third World. (Diggins mentions the Reagan-era “nuclear freeze” movement in the U.S. and Europe, but in keeping with his skepticism about history from below he believes Reagan’s quest for disarmament sprang from sources peculiar to Reagan himself.) Diggins notes a paradox here: While Reagan reached out to Gorbachev in defiance of his neocon advisers, he gave the hawks what they wanted in Latin America and (to a lesser extent) places like Angola and the Philippines. Although he shines no new light on Reagan’s involvement in the Iran-Contra scandal, Diggins gives a convincing overall explanation for Reagan’s seemingly contradictory behavior: However willing Reagan might have been to fight communism by covert means, the elimination of nuclear weapons was his overriding objective—his “dream,” as he said more than once.

Diggins provides good reason to think that Reagan meant it when he said in January 1984, “Reducing the risk of war—especially nuclear war—is priority number one.” The author traces Reagan’s concern over nuclear weapons back as far as his days with the Screen Actors Guild, and he notes the effect the 1983 television movie The Day After had on him. “It’s very effective and left me greatly depressed,” the president wrote in his diary. He came to have little patience for Strangelovian defense intellectuals who argued that a nuclear war could be won and that disarmament was a mirage. As he later wrote in his memoirs, Reagan was appalled by those advisers who “claimed nuclear war was ‘inevitable’ and we had to prepare for this reality. They tossed around macabre jargon about ‘throw weights’ and ‘kill ratios’ as if they were talking about baseball scores.”

On the domestic side, Diggins corrects both the left’s and the right’s exaggerations about the Reagan economy. Did the rich get richer while the poor got poorer? No; everyone got richer, with the poor gaining more in percentage terms. Diggins cites Urban Institute figures showing that from 1977 to 1986, the bottom quintile of earners saw their incomes rise 28 percent, compared to 11 percent for the top quintile. On the other hand, there was no Reagan economic miracle. “In terms of productivity and national income, the Reagan eighties performed reasonably well,” writes Diggins, “but no more so than the Kennedy-Johnson sixties had or the Clinton nineties would.”

Yet Reagan did bring about a revolution in the nation’s attitude toward wealth. His “spiritualization of capitalism,” Diggins writes, “has had an enduring effect on America’s political culture, having lasted longer than Roosevelt’s New Deal, Kennedy’s New Frontier, or Johnson’s Great Society. Reagan allowed Americans to indulge the acquisitive instinct fully, to pursue avarice without angst.” Diggins is ambivalent about this: He thinks consumerism is closely tied to middle-class entitlements and the Reagan-era deficit explosion, the common denominator being a belief that the American really can have it all. The public “would gladly accept lower taxes, but whether they would accept cutbacks in their benefits and entitlements was another matter entirely,” he writes. “How to make good citizens out of grasping consumers?”

There’s a good deal of irony in the contrast between the free-spending “conservative” Reagan and the frugal “liberal” Jimmy Carter, who as Diggins rightly notes “was as antistatist as Reagan” and accomplished much of the federal deregulation—removing entry barriers in air travel, trucking, and other fields—for which Reagan would sometimes receive credit. While both the left and the right have made Reagan out to be a great scourge of government power, Diggins demonstrates that the president’s rhetoric was more anti-statist than his actions. Reagan’s conservatism, too, was not what his admirers and detractors often claimed that it was; the religious right flourished in the 1980s, but Reagan—a divorced, socially tolerant movie star—hardly embodied it. Both Carter and Reagan’s successor as governor of California, the former seminarian Jerry Brown, were much more traditionally Christian (and more fiscally parsimonious) than Reagan, who “opened the American mind to optimism and innocence, leaving it closed to sin and experience.” Reagan, a believer but not much of a churchgoer, “seemed to offer a Christianity without Christ and the crucifixion, a religion without reference to sin, evil, suffering, or sacrifice.”

Was this Emersonian Reagan a libertarian? Diggins connects Reagan with Tom Paine (whom the president was fond of quoting) and contends that “Reagan, like Paine, could neither bring himself to believe in the fall nor convince himself of any need for meaningful government.” But he also argues that Reagan’s unchecked spending planted the seeds of “big-government conservatism.” As Diggins tells it, Reagan’s failure to restrain the state arose from his unwillingness to rebuke the public for its addiction to entitlements, subsidies, and pork. Reagan had more of an anti-government vision than an anti-government program—something that might be said of contemporary conservatism as well.

Other areas that Diggins doesn’t discuss, such as Reagan’s escalation of the drug war, also complicate the picture of the president as a semi-libertarian or a “liberal romantic.” And unfortunately, while he’s very interested in the influence of Emerson and Paine on Reagan, Diggins slights the impact of Hayek, Mises, and other economists. He even confuses Hayek with Milton Friedman, telling us that “in the mid-1970s, Hayek won a Noble [sic] Prize in economics for his theory of monetarism.”

It’s a shame. Diggins has developed a compelling take on his subject, and Ronald Reagan is an engaging, thought-provoking, at times even lyrical assessment of the 40th president. But he can also be lazy and slipshod, given to overgeneralizations and unexamined assertions. Toward the end of his book, he makes the remarkable claim that communism could reform itself out of existence because it was a scientific doctrine and thus, unlike a religion, subject to “verification and revision.” Was communism really more subject to verification than a religion? The Soviet biologist Trofim Lysenko’s Marxist genetics, which rejected the principle of heredity for doctrinal reasons, would seem to falsify that notion. For 70 years, Soviet communism was as resistant to innovation as any faith.

Ronald Reagan has some glaring faults. Yet the core of the book’s argument rings true: Emerson proves to be an invaluable touchstone for understanding Reagan, and Diggins ably shows that the president was neither the idiot his enemies made him out to be nor the hard-bitten Cold Warrior of conservative myth. Reagan is a figure well deserving of re-evaluation from all sides of the political spectrum, and Diggins’ book, despite its flaws, contributes usefully to that effort.

Daniel McCarthy is a contributing editor of The American Conservative.

Discuss this article online.

Wonder-Working Power

mccarthydp@gmail.com (Daniel McCarthy) — Mon, 20 Nov 2006 06:20:00 EST

In Defense of the Religious Right: Why Conservative Christians Are the Lifeblood of the Republican Party and Why That Terrifies the Democrats, by Patrick Hynes, Nashville: Nelson Current, 288 pages, $24.99

The Theocons: Secular America Under Siege, by Damon Linker, New York: Doubleday, 304 pages, $26

The Christian Coalition was instrumental in the Republican takeover of Congress in 1994, but before long its power seemed to be waning. In 1996 Bill Clinton—the draft-dodging, pot-smoking, abortion-rights-supporting womanizer who embodied everything Christian conservatives abhorred—handily won re-election against Sen. Bob Dole (R-Kan.). Two years later, Republicans lost ground in Congress as they prepared to impeach Clinton, and Paul Weyrich, the man who had first suggested to Jerry Falwell the name “Moral Majority,” adapted a phrase from Timothy Leary: It was time, he told Christian conservatives, to “turn off,” “tune out,” and “drop out.”

Weyrich wasn’t the only influential Christian conservative driven to rethink his movement’s prospects in the late ’90s. In the year of Clinton’s re-election, a federal district court ruling to permit physician-assisted suicide shook the editors of the Catholic journal First Things so violently that they began to ask whether judicial tyranny had destroyed democracy itself. This led to the magazine’s November 1996 symposium, “The End of Democracy?,” in which contributors concluded that civil disobedience, even revolution, might soon be justified. “America is not and, please God, will never become Nazi Germany,” editor Richard John Neuhaus wrote, “but it is only blind hubris that denies it can happen here and, in peculiarly American ways, may be happening here.”

Times have changed. You won’t find much sympathy at First Things for those who today use such language in the context of President Bush’s war on civil liberties. And Christian conservatives no longer feel so despondent about democracy. The president has assiduously cultivated their support, an effort rewarded in 2004 when nearly 80 percent of evangelical Protestant voters and 52 percent of Catholics voters cast their ballots for Bush.

In the wake of that election we’ve seen an avalanche of literature purporting to explain the revival of the religious right and its implications for the country. Patrick Hynes’ In Defense of the Religious Right celebrates Christian conservatives’ power, even while claiming Christian conservatives are harried and besieged, ever on the defensive against an encroaching liberalism. Damon Linker, on the other hand, argues in The Theocons that it’s the religious right, and the First Things coterie in particular, that’s doing the encroaching. Each gets only half the story right. Hynes fails to prove that Christian conservatives are the persecuted majority he thinks they are, while Linker is persuasive about the aggressive agenda of the religious right. But Hynes better explains where Christian conservatives’ real power lies—not with a Catholic elite, as Linker would have it, but with the mass of evangelical voters loyal to the party of Lincoln.

Hynes is a campaign consultant—in the words of his dust jacket, “a hack with an impressive record of electing Republicans.” According to his book, “the GOP is, perhaps, God’s Own Party,” not only because religious voters today prefer Republicans but because the party originally arose from the Second Great Awakening and the abolitionist movement. Abolition itself, he writes, “was the result of Christians imposing their moral values on their fellow Americans.” Republican Christians, that is: Hynes emphasizes the typically Democratic affiliation of those Southern Christians who supported the peculiar institution, though he doesn’t note that some of the denominations that once defended slavery have since become stalwarts of the GOP. To hear Hynes tell it, the modern religious right doesn’t want to impose its values on anyone so much as it wants to defend those values against “a liberal Washington-Hollywood nexus that bookends American civilization.” (He doesn’t explain how Washington can remain part of that nexus when the party preferred by the Christian conservatives controls every branch of the federal government.)

Hynes is at his best discussing the demographics of the religious right and explaining its place in the Republican Party’s base. By his calculations, churchgoing voters are as important to the Republicans as African-Americans and labor voters combined are to the Democrats. In 2004 Bush received “something close to 28 million conservative Christian” votes, almost half his total pull, while by Hynes’ estimates approximately 11.8 million African-Americans and 16.7 million union members voted straight-ticket Democratic. (The “straight-ticket” qualification, of course, means Hynes isn’t exactly comparing apples to apples.) “John Kerry destroyed Bush among the 15 percent of Americans who never attend church (62 percent for Kerry to 36 percent for Bush),” he writes, “Conversely, Bush (64 percent) beat Kerry (35 percent) by virtually the same margin among the 16 percent of the electorate who attends church more than once a week.”

Hynes takes pride in this but doesn’t look closely at all it entails. Just as the “gender gap” cuts both ways—men vote disproportionately for Republicans just as women go heavily for Democrats—the growing “God gap” also has two sides. What does it tell us that Americans who attend religious services as infrequently as Barry Goldwater or Ronald Reagan once did now overwhelmingly vote Democratic? And Hynes is evasive about whether today’s Republican leadership is any closer to its followers’ degree of devotion. Outraged by Bill Press’ claim that President Bush doesn’t attend church regularly, the most Hynes can say is, “President Bush reads the Bible and prays every morning at 6:00 AM.”

He has other blind spots. Hynes shows that, contrary to stereotype, Christian conservatives are not overwhelmingly poor or Southern, and a majority of them are women. But while he professes surprise that the religious right is typecast as mostly male, his own book offers evidence of why that is: Almost every spokesman and leader Hynes talks to is indeed a spokesman or male leader. In this book, the women of the religious right are a silent majority.

The distaff side gets short shrift in his historical discussion, too. While claiming a common pedigree with abolitionists and even, to a lesser extent, the civil rights movement, Hynes neglects to mention another prominent example of religious involvement in American politics: the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union and its prohibitionist progeny. Which if any of these groups is the true forerunner of the modern religious right? A clue might be found in the persistence of “dry counties” in such bastions of the Christian conservative movement as Mississippi, Kansas, and Alabama—though Puritan-era blue laws keep many a heathen municipality in Massachusetts dry as well. As for abolitionism, readers might wonder whether doing away with the coercive institution of slavery is really “imposing values” in the same sense as most of the modern religious right’s agenda.

“The Christian Right has done nothing to force its value on a helpless and unwitting public,” Hynes insists. “The exact opposite is true.” In support of his contention that “secular leftists are determined to remake American culture and society in their own warped image, to tear down traditional pillars of America’s moral strength,” Hynes cites a litany of court cases, legislative acts, and instances of civil disobedience: Griswold v. Connecticut (which effectively legalized contraception nationwide), the Stonewall riots (which launched the modern gay rights movement), 1960s New York and California laws legalizing abortion (the California law was signed by Gov. Reagan), and more.

Notably, Hynes is not making a states’ rights or federalist argument. He sees Culture War aggression both when states pass laws he dislikes and when federal courts strike down laws he does support. He also blurs the difference between persuasion and coercion: Most of his examples of secular leftist aggression involve loosening legal restraints. When he writes of “the radical Left’s assault on longstanding and long-accepted cultural norms,” what he means is that too much moral legislation is being repealed, overturned, or voided. Presumably Hynes and company would like to bring those laws back. If that isn’t “imposing values” on people, what is?

A few of his examples strike home. It indeed is ridiculous to, say, ban a schoolgirl from singing “The First Noel” at a Christmas pageant. But even if the left is as bad as he says, that doesn’t mean the religious right is any better. It would be interesting to see a forthright defense of the religious right’s views on everything from regulating gambling to kicking competent people out of the armed forces for being homosexual. It would be interesting, too, to see a defense of the religious right’s foreign-policy enthusiasms, from evangelical Christian support for the Iraq War (“evangelicals are among the only voter subgroups left in the country to still support the president’s foreign policy,” Hynes notes) to the drive by such Christian conservatives as Rep. Frank Wolf (R-Va.) and Sen. Sam Brownback (R-Kan.) to intervene in Darfur. But little of this is in Hynes’ book.

For Damon Linker, a former editor of First Things turned critic of that journal’s political project, the danger of the religious right does not lie primarily with the evangelical Protestants Hynes describes but with a select group of Roman Catholic intellectuals whom Linker calls “theoconservatives.” What these men lack in numbers they make up for in influence: “the overtly religious policies and rhetoric of the Bush administration have been inspired by an ideology derived from Roman Catholicism,” Linker contends.

Who are these theocons? Three receive close scrutiny in Linker’s first chapter—George Weigel, biographer of Pope John Paul II and expositor of a take on Catholic “just war” theory tailored to support Bush’s foreign policy; Michael Novak, the Catholic radical turned outspoken champion of “democratic capitalism”; and Linker’s bête noire and former boss (for whom he insists he has no ill will), Fr. Richard John Neuhaus. If Neuhaus commands more of Linker’s attention than the other two, it isn’t just because he knows him better. Even Novak’s transformation from advocate of a “revolution in consciousness” and “religionless Christianity” to thoroughly bourgeois democratic capitalist can hardly compare with Neuhaus’ political odyssey.

Early in the 1960s, Neuhaus, then a Lutheran minister, was pastor at Brooklyn’s inner city St. John the Evangelist church, which under his leadership was a center for civil rights and antiwar activism. In 1965, he founded Clergy Concerned About Vietnam with Catholic Fr. Daniel Berrigan and Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel. Neuhaus grew more radical with the times, in one sermon describing the Vietnamese as “God’s instruments for bringing the American empire to its knees.”

He also, Linker writes, “began to reflect on whether he should advocate an armed insurrection to overthrow the government of the United States,” reluctantly concluding that the time was not yet ripe. Thirty years later, he would again entertain the idea of revolution—only by then, he had become a Roman Catholic priest, and the causes stirring his passions were not Vietnam and segregation but abortion, euthanasia, and a lack of religiosity in public life—what Neuhaus terms “the naked public square.”

Because of their left-wing backgrounds, Neuhaus and Novak, the latter now ensconced at the American Enterprise Institute and serving as the War Party’s semi-official envoy to the Vatican, are often designated Catholic neocons. But Linker points out an important difference between his subjects and neoconservatives like Irving Kristol and Norman Podhoretz: “In the late 1960s, the men who went on to become the first neocons were moderate liberals who opposed the revolutionary ambitions of the counterculture. The proto-theocons, on the other hand, were leftist revolutionaries who proposed (in the title of one of their books) ‘a theology for radical politics.’ ” Linker understates the radicalism of some of the original neoconservatives—some started their careers as Trotskyists—but he has a point. The theocons were the sort of people the neocons had fled the left to get away from.

In any event, as the theocons tacked right they soon found common interests with the neocons, who indeed became Neuhaus and Novak’s patrons. “The theocons piggybacked on [the] neocon network; they also used neocon connections to begin the long and arduous process of building their own independent infrastructure of influence,” Linker writes. His second chapter traces the history of this neo-theo alliance, which paved the way for the creation of First Things—the journal in part grew out of an earlier publication, This World, that Irving Kristol turned over to Neuhaus in the 1980s.

Relations with the neoconservatives soured temporarily over First Things’ “End of Democracy?” symposium of 1996. Neuhaus’ old revolutionary rhetoric and his invocation of the Nazis led neocon eminentos Midge Decter, Gertrude Himmelfarb, and Walter Berns to sever ties with the magazine. Yet “political expediency eventually led that rift to be healed,” and whatever strain the “End of Democracy?” placed on Neuhaus’ relations with neoconservatives, the brouhaha only boosted his and First Things’ standing with the Protestants of the religious right. Focus on the Family’s James Dobson lauded the symposium in all its zeal.

But Neuhaus has had his differences with evangelicals as well. Indeed, Linker finds the genesis of Neuhaus’ theoconservative project in his belief, formed while still a Lutheran, “that Falwell and his followers were being unrealistic in supposing that their idiosyncratic faith, based on highly subjective ‘born again’ experiences, could serve as the religiously based public philosophy the country so desperately needed.” Catholicism, on the other hand, had the natural law tradition, with its claims to objectivity and rationality. As well, in Linker’s words, “there was the Church’s long history of theological and political reflection, which made Catholics far more competent than evangelicals and other Protestants to take the lead in pressing religiously based moral arguments in the nation’s life.”

For Linker, these qualities make the theocon ideology more potent than that of the rest of the religious right. He points to the current or recent presence of several theocons on the President’s Council on Bioethics as evidence of how respectable theocon arguments—against human cloning and embryonic stem-cell research, for example—are becoming. But Linker may be overestimating Neuhaus’ success at shaping policy by shaping the world of ideas. The President’s Council on Bioethics has had so little influence on the stem-cell debate, for example, that theocon arguments failed even to keep the Senate majority leader from the president’s own party (Bill Frist, a bona fide religious rightist himself) from approving federal funding of stem-cell research. And Bush’s use of vaguely Catholic rhetoric did not stop him from approving the “morning after” contraceptive pill (and potential abortifacient) Plan B for over-the-counter sale in the face of theocon objections. On the electoral level: Rick Santorum, the theocons’ poster child on Capitol Hill, is the Senate’s most endangered incumbent this year. Linker’s book is an engaging and invaluably informative account of the roots of theoconservatism, but its author could stand to borrow some of Patrick Hynes’ political acumen.

All that is not to say the theocons have had no effect on the nation’s politics. Perhaps ironically, considering Neuhaus’ background, where they have been most successful is in shoring up conservative Catholic support for President Bush’s foreign policy. Linker devotes a chapter to the “distinctive theocon approach to just war reasoning—ridiculing antiwar clerics for having forgotten the Catholic tradition and praising Republican administrations for keeping it alive.” After the initial success of the Iraq invasion, Neuhaus wondered in print whether in the future it might be possible to consider “military action in terms not of the last resort but of the best resort.” There’s a curiously Jacobin streak in this now-conservative priest. In the ’60s, in the ’90s, and in Iraq today, Neuhaus has called for uprooting the established order in the name of justice and democracy. The results, as far as the rest of us can see, have not been encouraging.

So long as Catholics and Protestants were at odds, Linker concludes, both sides had a vested interest in minimizing the mixture of doctrine and state power. But now, “to the extent that they come to consider each other allies and to recognize their potential combined political clout, they will be tempted to view the separation of church and state as something less than a bargain—as an unacceptable sacrifice of their freedom to do everything they can to bring the country’s public life into conformity with what they believe to be the truth proclaimed by Jesus Christ.”

The religious right’s ecumenical unity might not be as great as Linker, or Hynes, imagines. Bush lost the Catholic vote in 2000, and while much has been made of the fact that he won it in 2004—against a Catholic opponent—he did little better among Catholics than among the population at large. Churchgoing evangelicals are an overwhelmingly Republican bloc, but Catholics are only gradually being co-opted, beginning with those who attend services most often.

By themselves, the theocons may not be much of a threat to Americans’ liberties. But together with the organized power of evangelical Protestants, they’re a mighty force for the Republican Party, even if what they get in policy terms is not more morality in public life but merely more war.

In Praise of John Wilkes

mccarthydp@gmail.com (Daniel McCarthy) — Sat, 01 Jul 2006 14:24:00 EDT

John Wilkes: The Scandalous Father of Civil Liberty, by Arthur H. Cash, New Haven: Yale University Press, 482 pages, $37.50

The libertarian journalist Albert Jay Nock once told the story of a friend who visited St. Petersburg in early 1917, when the Kerensky republic was in power and liberalization rather than Bolshevism still seemed possible for Russia. The proletariat was eager to hear any speaker who climbed a soapbox—even agents of the German government, with whom Russia was at war. Nock's friend asked one group of workers whether this was their idea of free speech, and whether they understood the difference between "liberty" and "license."

The workers didn't know these English words, so Nock's friend explained: Liberty is "when some perfectly respectable person gets up and says something everybody agrees to," while "license is when some infernal scoundrel, who ought to be hanged anyway, gets up and says something that is true." After conferring for a moment, the Russians decided they were not for liberty. They were for license.

So was John Wilkes—radical journalist, member of Parliament, outlaw, prisoner, lord mayor of London, and self-described libertine—some 150 years earlier. His life and career go a long way toward dispelling the superstition that liberty must advance hand in glove with order, guided by men of sterling moral character. Probably born in 1726 (the exact year is uncertain), Wilkes was a near contemporary of our Founding Fathers, and his clashes with George III and his ministers set an example for the rebellious colonists. But Wilkes, rake that he was, is in no danger of becoming an object of veneration for Americans today. In John Wilkes, his new biography, Arthur H. Cash shows us why that's so—and why lovers of liberty, at least, should celebrate this colorful Englishman. Cash tells his readers from the outset, "If you think the police have the right to arrest forty-nine people when they are looking for three, shut [this book] now."

Cash, a professor emeritus of English at SUNY New Paltz, argues convincingly that Wilkes helped lay the foundation for some of the most basic rights taken for granted in the United States and Great Britain: freedom of the press, the right to privacy, religious liberty. Most often Wilkes did this—at considerable risk to himself—by goading the government into overreaction and then suing the king's ministers and agents. Along the way, he conducted innumerable adulterous affairs, dabbled in dueling, accumulated debts he had no intention of paying—"I take the liberty to inform you that at present it is not my interest to pay the principal, neither is it my principle to pay the interest," he told one creditor—and published what some have considered the filthiest poem in the English language. (One sample couplet: "...life can little more supply/than just a few good Fucks and then we die.")

Cross-eyed and with a prognathous jaw that would put Jay Leno to shame, Wilkes entered Parliament in 1757 at the age of 31. He was the protégé of Thomas Potter, wealthy son of the late archbishop of Canterbury, who introduced the younger man to politics while encouraging him in his already pronounced womanizing. The two occasionally traded mistresses, and Potter brought Wilkes into "the Order of the Knights of St. Francis of Wycombe," also known as the "Hellfire Club" because of its supposed black masses, though on Cash's account it seems more like a cross between a bawdy dinner club and a by-the-hour hotel. Wilkes was married but had separated from his wife—their union was loveless, though it produced a daughter, Polly, whom Wilkes cherished above all else.

Once elected to Parliament from Aylesbury—his only opponent in the race withdrew after Wilkes bribed uncommitted voters, a common practice at the time—Wilkes aligned with the Whig faction of Pitt the Elder and Lord Temple, which soon found itself in opposition to the ministry (that is, government) of Lord Bute, a Whig of a very different sort. With the Whig Party ascendant, its internal divisions were as significant as its differences with the other great party, the Tories. Pitt's wing, sometimes called "Patriots," was nationalistic and (relatively) populist; Bute, on the other hand, sued for peace with England's enemies and was perceived as a staunch royalist.

Wilkes served his faction as one of its ablest propagandists, anonymously publishing a newspaper, the North Briton, that lampooned Bute as a friend of royal absolutism and enemy of English liberty. Wilkes especially damned the ministry's excise tax—not simply because it was a tax but because, as Cash argues, collecting it "would legitimate forced entries and searches of houses and barns, putting into the hands of politicians the means to harass and even destroy their opponents." This, says Cash, "was Wilkes" first expression of the right to privacy that he would later champion in the courts."

With the publication of North Briton No. 45 in 1763, the ministry—even with Bute himself now fallen from power—could tolerate no more and issued a "general warrant" for the arrest of anyone connected with the paper. Wilkes' authorship was an open secret, but the ministry needed firm proof to prosecute him for "seditious libel." The general warrant named a crime but no suspect, empowering the king's messengers, as the royal police were called, to round up anyone they pleased and seize anything that might be useful as evidence. Wilkes was arrested, along with 48 printers and other people involved with publishing issue 45, and his papers were confiscated.

The ministry's scheme backfired. The North Briton had won Wilkes a popular following. His arrest made him a martyr for civil liberties—an image he burnished by speaking out for the rights of all English subjects while defending himself in court. The Court of Common Appeals freed Wilkes on grounds of parliamentary privilege, but that would not satisfy him. He wanted a precedent that would shore up the liberties of ordinary Englishmen. So Wilkes sued the officials who had authorized the general warrant and seized his papers for trespass and property damage, and sued the king's messengers for false arrest.

He also encouraged the working-class printers who had been arrested to do likewise. "With his keen sense of public desires," Cash argues, "Wilkes understood that his power lay ultimately in offering purpose to the unorganized masses of people." But he was no mere opportunist; as Cash demonstrates at length, Wilkes came to see himself as fighting for a cause that was "transcendent."

Though it would take years, Wilkes' side won most of its legal battles. By the time he was through, the courts had declared general warrants illegal and limited the power of government to search and seize papers and other effects, establishing in law the principle that a man's home is his castle. Through all this, George III and his ministers feared Wilkes even more than they despised him; to retaliate against him would risk a popular uprising. Every setback Wilkes encountered, and almost every victory, was cause for his supporters to riot. (Just how integral rioting was to English and colonial American politics in this era is all too easily forgotten now, when street violence is commonly taken to be a feature only of backward Middle Eastern countries and immigrant communities in Western Europe.)

Before long, though, Wilkes handed his enemies an opportunity they could not pass up. This involved a ribald poem written by Potter—Wilkes' mentor, now deceased—and left in Wilkes' possession. Wilkes had added to and annotated Potter's Essay on Woman, an X-rated satire of Pope?s Essay on Man, which at first he had no intention of publishing. But he thought a small private edition might entertain his fellow Knights of St. Francis, so Wilkes began preparing one on his home press. A few pages of proofs came to the attention of the ministry, which seized on them as a pretext for prosecuting Wilkes anew. The charges of obscenity and libel that came of this, and of Wilkes' republication of the North Briton (this time his authorship could be proven), would see him expelled from Parliament, driven into exile—a fate mitigated by the company of his daughter and an 18-year-old Italian mistress—and imprisoned for two years upon his return to England.

From prison he again stood for Parliament, first in London, where he lost, then in Middlesex, where he won. This led to a farce in the House of Commons, which refused to seat Wilkes and called a special election for his seat—which Wilkes also won. The House called another special election, then another; each time the voters of Middlesex chose Wilkes. After three rounds of this, the House simply seated his opponent. Wilkes and his allies, including Edmund Burke, argued that this move amounted to allowing the legislature to select its own members. When Wilkes finally did return to Parliament after his release from prison, he succeeded in purging from the records of the House all trace of his incapacitation, overturning this baleful precedent. According to Cash, the Wilkes controversy informed James Madison's desire to set uniform requirements for holding office in the U.S. Constitution. Later still, in 1969, Chief Justice Earl Warren would cite the Wilkes case in ruling that the House of Representatives had acted unconstitutionally by excluding Rep. Adam Clayton Powell (D-N.Y.) while he was under investigation for misuse of congressional funds.

Cash ably relates many other contributions Wilkes made to the liberty of Englishmen, and not just Englishmen, in his day and beyond. As an alderman of London, Wilkes barred press gangs—naval recruiters who filled their quotas by kidnapping men and forcing them to enlist—from the city and protected journalists who reported on Parliament's proceedings, a crime at the time. He was so successful in the second regard that before long Parliament changed the law. As London's lord mayor, Wilkes intrigued with rebellious Americans and French diplomats to supply arms to the colonists. And in Parliament, though a sincere Anglican himself, he fought for the religious liberties of Catholics and of Protestants outside of the Church of England.

Endorsing one bill for religious tolerance, he declared, "I wish to see rising in the neighborhood of a Christian cathedral, near its Gothic towers, the minaret of a Turkish mosque, a Chinese pagoda, and a Jewish synagogue, with a temple of the sun, if any Persians could be found to inhabit this island and worship in this gloomy climate the God of their idolatry." At the time, as Cash writes, "Jews had no religious rights at all" and "it was specifically against the law to hold a Roman Catholic mass, and a Catholic who took in pupils or opened a school could be imprisoned for life."

Wilkes' stand for religious liberty led to an interesting role reversal: When anti-Catholic riots erupted in London and throughout the country, Wilkes was on the side of the militia called out to quell the unrest. As a city official, he even led some of them against the rioters. To the disappointment of some of his followers, he also decried the French Revolution late in his life: He thought monarchy a more humane form of government than republicanism.

Benjamin Franklin, who disliked Wilkes, believed that "had the King had a bad character and Wilkes a good one, the latter might have turned the former out of his kingdom." Wilkes, with his squinty eyes and protruding jaw, was hardly a pleasing sight, and the whiff of blasphemy and scandal that always accompanied him did not sit well with all of his supporters. But his commitment to liberty, especially for the lower classes, earned him a place of honor in the hearts of many of his countrymen. Even George III came to appreciate Wilkes, if not exactly to approve of his politics. Arthur Cash's appealing prose and mordant humor—along with his painstaking scholarship—do justice to his subject, which is about as high a commendation as anyone might ask.