Turning the tide

National Review, June 2, 2008 by Richard V. Allen

Upstream: The Ascendance

of American Conservatism,

by Alfred S. Regnery

(Threshold, 448 pp., $26)

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IN this quadrennial silly season, the political spectacle can get discouraging. What better moment, then, for the appearance of Alfred Regnery's splendid--and definitive--new history of the triumph of the conservative movement over the past half century?

No one even remotely familiar with the tough but determined "upstream" slog of conservatives since 1950 can fail to appreciate how great their achievement was. The movement started out small and fragmented; conservatives, in Regnery's words, "had no organizations, they had no networks, they had no voice, and they had no power." Liberal intellectuals constituted and defined the dominant culture, and had little or no respect for conservative views and the conservative agenda, to the extent one could be discerned. Access to mainstream media for conservatives was basically nil, their views being considered reactionary; even in the academy, where individual conservative scholars could work unmolested in relative security, liberal faculty members reigned. Indeed, as Regnery notes, "the term 'conservative' was rarely used, and it is probably safe to assume that few people really knew what it meant."

We have been blessed with the fine work of other historians--George Nash and Lee Edwards come readily to mind--who have written eloquently of the emergence of conservatism. Regnery joins their ranks, putting under his microscope the various discrete strands of the movement, each of which developed and operated more or less independently: libertarians/classical liberals; anti-Communists; traditionalists; and a fourth, disparate strand comprising "young conservative journalists, publishers, and activists" ready and willing to take on the establishment.

Without intending to create an actual political movement, libertarian intellectuals Friedrich Hayek (in The Road To Serfdom, 1944) and Ludwig von Mises (in Human Action, 1949) made breakthroughs that could not be disregarded. Their arguments for the freedom of the individual and against the dangers of collectivism and the welfare state were so powerful and important that they opened the door for an array of brilliant thinkers and writers, academics and popularizers alike--Milton Friedman, Henry Hazlitt, Felix Morley, George Stigler, and others.

Working in another compartment were the sophisticated and experienced anti-Communists, whose ranks featured many who had earlier been convinced Communist activists but had seen the light. Perhaps the most influential was James Burnham; he was soon joined by other brilliant critics of Communism, including Frank Meyer, Whittaker Chambers, and Will Herberg.

The third group, the traditionalists, saw as their main tasks the defense of the West and the hard fight to maintain traditional values and standards--as the bedrock not only of the American republic but of civilization itself. The iconic and self-effacing Russell Kirk offered a critically important foundation stone for this branch in its post-war incarnation with his classic 1953 study, The Conservative Mind, which to this day comes as close to defining this group's standards as anything else written in the last half century. Landmark studies such as Kirk's do not, of course, suddenly appear without stimulating reflection on their provenance; Richard Weaver's 1948 Ideas Have Consequences--itself an enduring masterpiece--helped shape Kirk's thought. Operating in the background were other important works, not to be fully "discovered" until years later, including Eric Voegelin's The New Science of Politics (1952) and several of Leo Strauss's studies: On Tyranny (1948), Persecution and the Art of Writing (1952), and Natural Right and History (1953). Oddly, both of these scholars resisted any identification with the conservative movement, yet eventually came to exert a profound influence on its adherents. Others, like Gerhart Niemeyer, unhesitatingly affirmed the conservative cause.

Regnery justly devotes much care to identifying and tracing the intellectual components of the conservative movement because he recognizes that it was precisely this pioneering intellectual work that made possible the movement's later practical achievements. Too many of the conservative commentariat today, especially in the talk-radio and activist sectors, are programmatic and either ignore or are simply unschooled in the foundational thought.

One of the earliest and most important results of the postwar foundation provided by the intellectuals was the sensational appearance on the scene of William F. Buckley Jr., with his call to arms in God and Man at Yale (1951). No one quite knew how to react to the Buckley challenge, possibly because of his youth and certainly because of his singular determination to expose the reigning ideologists of academe--or, as Martin Anderson has dubbed them, the "impostors in the temple."

Human Events, the weekly founded in 1944 by Frank Hanighen, Felix Morley, and Henry Regnery, father of Alfred and a pioneer in the cause of conservative publishing, made a major contribution. Over the years, it became Ronald Reagan's favorite newspaper, giving fits to the less-committed among his presidential entourage.