The Conservative Crack-Up

National Review, July 20, 1992 by Maurice Cranston

THE TITLE of R. Emmett Tyrrell's new book may puzzle some American readers, as it will surely puzzle readers elsewhere. A conservative crack-up? In Western European elections, conservatives have done better than any other parties, and Eastern Europeans, offered at last an alternative to Communism, have widely preferred the conservative option. However, Tyrrell's subject is America, and it is there, he argues, that conservatism has come to grief and missed its destiny.

Bob Tyrrell is often described as a satirist, a humorist even, and certainly this new book is witty, at times as hilariously funny as anything he has written. But the author emerges as a man of moral seriousness, who sees the prospect of conservative government without conservative philosophy as ruinously flawed. He examines the several strands of conservative thought which compete for the assent of American minds today and finds each for one reason or another inadequate. Above all, he is disturbed by the tendency of so-called conservative politicians to decide policies ad hoc by the crudest pragmatic criteria, and to shun what he calls ideas.

Of course it will be said that practice without theory has a respectable place in the American political tradition, but Tyrrell's protest is directed at something else: practice without thought. Is conservatism really reduced to this? So far as one can tell from the perspective of a foreign shore, the presidential campaign offers little to refute Tyrrell's strictures.

Tyrrell's book is partly autobiographical, and he emerges from the book as a very attractive personality, rather as one imagines Edmund Burke might have been as a young Irish journalist disturbing the slumbers of the Tory grandees in eighteenth-century London. Tyrrell tells us how he found time at college in Indiana, between long hours of training to be a champion swimmer, to set up the political journal that eventually became The American Spectator. It was a gesture of resistance against the domination of campus life in the Sixties by the liberal-Marxist alliance.

His journalistic success enabled Tyrrell to make the acquaintance of eminent conservative thinkers in America and elsewhere. He watched the transformation of liberals such as Irving Kristol into neoconservatives. He visited Malcolm Muggeridge in his English country cottage, and endured the vegetarian nonconformist lifestyle of that charming ex-Communist in order to learn the tenets of Christian pessimism. He saw rather less of Michael Oakeshott, but accepted from him the central message that conservatism is not an ideology but a disposition, not a program for action, but a set of general considerations in terms of which to appraise any such program. To this element of reflection Tyrrell attaches much importance.

Tyrrell is fascinated by the doctrinal differences within conservative thought, but he claims that they are not substantial enough to divide the conservative movement. They are too rarefied, he says, "to become issues of national controversy." What he calls the conservative crack-up cannot, he insists, be ascribed to differences within conservatism, but is to be explained by the fact that by the late 1980s many conservatives simply ditched politics and went home.

Tyrrell wants to defend the life of politics as Aristotle might, as a worthy, manly life. He has a high regard for the true statesman of whatever persuasion, and speaks as respectfully in these pages of Franklin Delano Roosevelt as he does of Ronald Reagan (pointing to similarities between those two Presidents which few others have observed). He only laments that Mr. Reagan did not set up brain trusts in the White House as Roosevelt did.

If Orwell was so effective a scourge of the Left, it is because he was a man of the Left; Tyrrell will disturb the Right because he belongs to the Right. The voice of puritan democracy which Alexis de Tocqueville detected in America in the 1830s can be heard again in this book. "Country-club Republicans," as Tyrrell calls them, will not like it, nor perhaps will any conservative who believes that the world is in order as it is.

When Tyrrell published The Liberal Crack-up several years ago, he did not mean to suggest the liberals were a spent political force. He showed rather how liberalism had lost its coherence and integrity. What conservatism appears to have lost then is its intellectual vitality. This suggests an even worse predicament. Liberalism talking rubbish can still keep talking; an inarticulate conservatism falls silent.

"The Liberal Crack-up," Tyrrell writes, "was caused by acts of extravagance; the Conservative Crack-up was brought on by acts of omission. Even as the liberal was brought down by too much imagination, the conservative was laid low by too little." Tyrrell does not reproach the conservative for cherishing the private, only for neglecting what is public: "The danger is that the conservative will never leap to political action, or... his leap will be amateurish and mediocre and late."