Why I too am not a neoconservative

National Review, June 20, 1986 by Stephen J. Tonsor

WHY I TOO AM NOT A NEOCONSERVATIVE*

IFEEL somewhat like Mr. Creedy in the Midas Muffler television ad. The engine of the old model of Conservatism that I drive is still running well, and, as I believe that "if it ain't broke don't fix it,' I have come to view Conservatism as a perennial political philosophy which does not admit of neos or "Saturn' models.

* This is a slightly condensed version of Professor Tonsor's address to the Philadelphia Society, reported on by Jeffrey Hart in the June 6 NR.

I became a Conservative in 1954. Rather, I should say that I discovered that I was a Conservative in 1954. The event was not a conversion experience, but a moment of self-revelation. My experience was not unlike that of a Catholic acquaintance of mine who, one day, as he entered a Catholic church, dipped his hand in the holy-water fount and said with sudden clarity, "My God! What am I doing here?' He left the church, never to return. I dipped my hand in the holy-water fount of Russell Kirk and said, "Home at last!'

Whether or not one is a neoconservative is not simply a generational matter. It is not that I am an "old party comrade' and knew the Twelve Apostles, while those "neos' who came after us belong to a new and different age. After all, Irving Kristol must be nearly as old as I am. No, there are still young big-C Conservatives who enter the movement every day and are as far from neo-dom as I am.

Nor is the great divide the consequence of changing times and altered political and economic circumstances. It is not that most neoconservatives think that Barry Goldwater is "cute' and ought to be honored and revered and humored now and then, but that he belongs to the paleolithic age of the Conservative movement. If that indeed is the case, then I too am a paleo-conservative.

It can't simply be that neoconservatives read and often write for Commentary magazine. I read Commentary and have done so for years. I find myself often in agreement, always stimulated, and now and then put off by Commentary. However, I don't think Commentary is a reliable test. It often publishes writers I consider big-C Conservatives.

Age, changed circumstances, and an identifiable literary connection have little or nothing to do with the ideological identity of those on the Right. (There, I have uttered that awful word, usually prefaced by "far,' as in farsighted.) These differences that separate neoconservatives from Conservatives are differences that have for nearly a hundred years divided the Right.

I have made these personal references because I believe that the way in which I became a Conservative, and my starting point, were very different from the way in which one becomes a neoconservative, and the neoconservatives' starting point. One's starting point and the way in which one achieves an identity have very important implications for what one becomes.

These differences among Conservatives are grounded in the relationship of Conservatism to modernity. Increasingly, our culture is becoming aware that it is no longer "modern,' though it is totally uncertain just what it is. This cultural break with "modernity' presents us with the preconditions for an accurate assessment of our relationship to it.

By "modernity' I mean that revolutionary movement in culture which derived from a belief in man's radical alienation, in God's unknowability or non-existence, and in man's capacity to transform or remake the conditions of his existence. The thoroughgoing secularism, the attack upon the past, religious and social, aristocratic or bourgeois, the utopian dream of alienation overcome and innocence restored are all linked together in the modernist sensibility. To be "up-to-date' was, for a hundred years, to be an alienated person. The world was viewed as anarchic chaos upon which man-become-God imposed his own particular dream of order. Often as not, that order was an inverted order, against the grain, against nature. Prometheanism and Satanism were one and the same order of man's invention. The Romantic Satanic hero is the same man as the Prometheus of Shelley and Marx, the Zarathustra of Nietzsche.

To pretend that the Right, that Conservatives, have been immune to modernity is self-delusion. On the whole, the Right has been much more modernist than the Left because the Right has dared to think consequentially, because the Right knows that he who says A must also say B. It is for this reason that the modernists of the Right have been, almost without exception, fascists and totalitarians, for they know that when things fall apart and the center does not hold, the only recourse is to an invented and imposed order.

Now that we are able to gain some perspective on this past century, we recognize that the social and political consequence of modernity is totalitarianism. We can see that the denial of the existence of order as the ground of being, and the rejection of the transcendent, are a one-way street to Dachau. If everything is permitted and the will to power the only reality, then the Gulag is as logical as an Euler diagram. Those who do not refuse to think the unthinkable have known this for a long while. Hitler did not need to give a specific command for the "final solution.' Himmler and the members of the SS Einsatzgruppen knew the "final solution' was implicit in their conception of reality. It is on the ground of modernity that Right and Left are merged and the differences between them are only differences of style and slogans. The Right that is born of modernity is a radical, a revolutionary Right, which cannot in any important degree be distinguished from the revolutionary Left.