The Tory Anarchist

Up now at TAC, my article on Ron Paul’s Rally for the Republic — and what the Revolution might look forward to in 2012.

I met Johnson briefly while in Minneapolis for the Rally for the Republic and was impressed by what an unassuming pol he is. I occasionally criticized him back when he was governor of New Mexico, figuring he couldn’t be as libertarian as he seemed. And indeed, he’s not perfect (who is?), but he’s pretty darn good–an antidote for most of what’s rotten about the Bush-McCain party. Here’s the video of his rally appearance.

Part 1:

Part 2:

I’ll have a short article on the Rally for the Republican in the forthcoming issue of The American Conservative, by the way. Keep an eye out.

No, she isn’t. See my LRC article today. Since I wrote it on Saturday, what more I’ve learned about Palin has all been negative. She’s on film telling a church congregation that our war on Iraq is a mission from God, for one thing. I’m sure there’ll be a lot more of that sort of thing to come before too long. McCain was never going to put a crypto-peacenik or Buchananite on his ticket — who are we kidding?

I’m in town for the various Ron Paul events leading up to the great Rally for the Republic on Tuesday.  I’ll be blogging a bit (most @TAC) about the public events.  And I have some Willmoore Kendall stuff I might post here later tonight.  For now, though, just a quick, content-free post while I check my e-mail and grab a sandwich…

Bill Kauffman describes a boorish young conservative (in his novel, Every Man a King, p. 21):

He was only twenty-four when John Huey met him, yet Bertram’s dress suggested a foppish Victorian. He was seldom without a bowler atop his head, cocked a shade to the right because, he avowed, “Albert Jay Nock wore it just so. As Nock’s heir by acclamation, I ought to genuflect to the old boy now and then, don’t you think?”

His vanity was so transparent, so obviously affected, that no one thought him a jerk. And the lilt in Bertram’s voice so entranced his mates that none dared tell him that Nock would regard his descendant as a fat pig whose dandified airs transliterated into lifeless, artless prose. …

Though his girth gave him an asexual, physically amorphous presence, Bertram was a hit at young conservatives’ parties. These affairs were decidedly unfestive, most gatherings fissioning into ten or twelve cells of earnest and dull activists regurgitating the slip that their publicist heroes had written during the past week.

Every Man a King isn’t a roman a clef exactly, but I wonder whether there’s a single model for this greedy Nock-off or if he just stands for the general type, of whom there are plenty in the quondam conservative movement.

My review of Reid Buckley’s history of his clan, An American Family: The Buckleys, is now on-line. I knew that William F. Buckley Sr. was very much a noninterventionist and man of the Old Right, but I didn’t know just how true that was until I read Reid’s book, which I highly recommend.

At some point I’d like to write an essay on three generations of the Buckley family, tracking their involvement with main currents of American conservatism from the Old Right (Will Buckley) to the Cold War (Bill Buckley) to post-movement conservatism (Christopher Buckley).

At Taki’s Magazine, Austin Bramwell asks some questions that the Philadelphia Society will never answer, the best one being the piece’s title, “Is the Conservative Movement Worth Conserving?” Although Austin’s own views are not hard to discern, his questions ought to be approached with an open mind. Take this one:

• The Failure of the Canon: To what extent would anyone read the authors of the movement conservative canon (Russell Kirk, Frank Meyer et al.) if a conservative movement did not exist to promote their works so relentlessly?

This one can be answered definitively: many of these works would not be read at all if the conservative movement were not promoting them. We can say that with some degree of certainty because, in fact, the conservative movement does not promote them, and they aren’t read. Kirk is a partial exception, since ISI (and to a lesser extent some of the other youth-oriented movement organs) keeps him in circulation. But how about Meyer? The Liberty Fund still publishes In Defense of Freedom and Other Essays, but his other works — The Conservative Mainstream, The Moulding of Communists, and the anthology What Is Conservatism? — are all long out of print. Admittedly, the market for books on Communist organizational techniques is pretty thin these days, and The Conservative Mainstream is a compilation of “Principles and Heresies” columns from National Review. Essay collections by living authors usually don’t sell; the economics of selling a collection of Meyer essays would be daunting indeed.

You can find Wilmoore Kendall books fairly easily on-line, but none has been reissued in the last decade. There’s still a cache of Regnery’s 1985 edition of The Conservative Affirmation in ISI’s warehouses, I believe. Kirk has the Kirk Center, but I’m not aware of anyone pushing to get students to read Kendall or Meyer. (Apart from the Liberty Fund, to some extent.) Most or all of James Burnham’s books are out of print — it set me back a few bucks to buy good used copies of The Managerial Revolution and The Machiavellians. And I’ve been surprised to discover just how much of Bill Buckley’s oeuvre is unavailable. His best and most important books (not always identical), such as Up From Liberalism, The Unmaking of a Mayor, and Cruising Speed, are a little hard to get.

Outside of the National Review world, some of the other big names of 20th century conservatism fare better. Strauss, Voegelin, and Oakeshott have dedicated academic followings of various sizes, and whole shelves of Strauss and Voegelin are in print. The Voegelin and Oakeshott scholarly communities seem to survive without orbiting the conservative movement too closely. Richard Weaver’s Ideas Have Consequences is in print from the University of Chicago, and the Liberty Fund still publishes The Southern Essays of Richard M. Weaver and In Defense of Tradition: The Collected Shorter Writings of Richard M. Weaver. The movement probably is responsible for much of Weaver’s enduring status — certainly movement types like to say “ideas have consequences,” even if they’ve never read the book — but he’s worth reading despite that.

The movement doesn’t particularly recommend that anyone read Robert Nisbet, and much of Nisbet is out of print, but his reputation may well improve despite the movement’s neglect. A friend of mine working for a libertarian think-tank tells me he recently heard a lecture by an interesting left-leaning professor who cited Nisbet’s History of the Idea of Progress in his talk — and who cited it as if the author were some little-known genius. Nisbet’s stock should rise over time, in part because he isn’t too closely identified with the movement.

The great libertarian economists would still be read absent a conservative movement, of course: certainly Hayek and Schumpeter would be. Mises might not be as popular as either of them, but if there weren’t an Austrian economics movement to keep his memory alive, I suspect he nonetheless would have made a comeback sooner or later. The Chicago and Public Choice schools would also thrive with or without a conservative movement.

The more I think about it, the less I see a connection between the conservative canon and the conservative movement — though I shouldn’t be surprised. There are worthy parts of the canon (Nisbet, arguably Burnham) that languish despite the movement’s existence. There are others, like Meyer and Kendall, or go unread largely because of the fragmentary and topical nature of what they wrote — which can be said about Buckley, too. Kirk and Weaver do benefit from the movement’s exertions, though I suspect Ideas Have Consequences, like Ortega’s Revolt of the Masses, would find a readership even without the movement (after all, Ideas became a success years before there was a movement). And even Kirk endures more because of a dedicated corps of Kirkians than because National Review or the Heritage Foundation cherishes his memory. Although his following is mostly outside of the academy, Kirk probably belongs in the same category as Strauss, Voegelin, and Oakeshott. He would have less of a following without the movement, it’s safe to say, and figures like Meyer and Kendall would be all but forgotten — just as they’re all but forgotten even with the movement.

Perhaps in answering this question, we have answered several of Austin’s others as well. Including this one: “Setting the Party Line: Who gets to decide what positions constitute ‘conservatism’”? Not people who write books, evidently.

Here’s the audio:

Hat tip to Takimag.

The ex-senator’s bit on the side has been a prominent character in novels by Jay McInerney and Brett Easton Ellis.

DSL also brings to my attention this NY Times column pointing to the parallels between Edwards and Grover Cleveland, the “Boon Companion to Buffalo Harlots,” which sounds likely a really great Garrison Keillor program. If only Edwards’s politics were anything like Cleveland’s…

I haven’t read enough of the New Critics to have a well-formed opinion on them. I’m skeptical of the rote denunciation of more recent trends in literary studies in this Wall Street Journal piece, however — not because the new trends aren’t awful, but because such “conservative” moaning about liberal or radical or leftist literary criticism is usually a cover for philistinism of the right. I don’t know whether that’s the case here. In any event, this article does good by bringing attention to a new anthology of the New Critics, and I like this passage:

The New Critics … thought that the study of literature — especially poetry — was a valuable activity because, as Allen Tate put it, “the full language of the human situation can be the vehicle of truth.” In his lively foreword in “Praising the New,” William Logan notes that the most important objection to contemporary theorizing may be that, in the end, it offers “a very dull way to look at poetry.”