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Reinhold Neibuhr Was a Subversive Pinko (and Other Conservative Insights)

Posted on | February 15, 2010 | 23 Comments

One of the more amusing tendencies of certain “conservative intellectuals” — the scare-quotes are necessaary, if you know the type of people I have in mind — is their habit of name-checking famous (dead) conservatives in pursuit of arguments about the unworthiness of famous (living) conservatives.

Rush Limbaugh or Ann Coulter will say something that gets the liberals in a tizzy, and next thing you know, some ambitious parvenu will sniff that these allegedly obnoxious expressions by Limbaugh or Coulter are a betrayal of the conservative tradition of, say, William F. Buckley Jr.

What is wrong with these reverential invocations of Glorious Dead Famous Names is that Buckley and other now-respectable icons of conservatism were quite controversial in their own day, denounced as vociferously by their liberal contemporaries as Limbaugh and Coulter (or Mark Levin and Glenn Beck) are today.

Our latter-day “intellectuals” who repudiate Limbaugh et al. as being unworthy of the Buckley legacy are therefore guilty of promoting a superficial understanding of conservative history, where being respectable — or at least, not being obnoxious to liberals — is the name of the game. This tendency has the effect of requiring conservative spokesmen to walk on eggshells, and especially to avoid the sort of hard-edged rhetoric that typifies talk radio, lest they emit some utterance that would expose them to attack. (Note that the critics of Limbaugh are almost exclusively those who specializing in the written word, where the impulsive off-hand-comment is less of a danger.)

What we confront is a demand for mealy-mouth timidity that prevents conservatives from tackling the logical premises of liberalism head-on, in language strong and clear.

Russell Kirk vs. the Imagined Kirk

Other than Buckley, there is no conservative name more frequently invoked by our latter-day “intellectuals” than Russell Kirk. As with Buckley, Kirk is one of those names to conjure with, and the Sage of Mecosta is routinely cited by Rod Dreher as if Kirk has endorsed “Crunchy Conservatism” like a pro-athlete endorsing Wheaties.

Unlike Rod Dreher, however, Kirk despised liberals and liberalism, and never trimmed his sails to the prevailing winds in order to appease the adversary. As a result, the liberals of his era hated Kirk in a way that no liberal could possibly hate Dreher. Here is Reinhold Niebuhr from the New Republic in 1955:

Mr. Russell Kirk in his Conservative Mind seems to assume that there is some authentic conservatism in the mere desire to preserve the status quo of the American paradise; and he rather uncritically seeks to relate this American conservatism with a British conservatism which is rooted in the aristocratic tradition and has none of Kirk’s prejudice against the Welfare State, and with the rather pathetic aristocratic tradition of our own Southland, as expounded by Randolph and Calhoun. This Southern tradition was pathetic because it was but a remnant of an old aristocratic society in a nation which had no conscious relations with the European feudal past, and because it was a form of aristocracy based upon chattel slavery and was naturally destroyed with the institution of slavery.

You see that, in challenging Kirk’s pedigree of American conservatism, Nieburh sought to dismiss Kirk as an apologist for slavery, at a time when (a) the Civil War was less than a century past, and (b) the civil-rights crusade was just beginning. Niebuhr’s choice of put-downs — note how he manages to work in “prejudice” as part of the indictment – was no accident, obviously, but was meant to stigmatize Kirk as a mere bigot, heir to a “pathetic” tradition.

What Niebuhr was in favor of was a distinctively liberal conception of progress, on behalf of which he borrowed a phrase from the poet James Lowell:

[I]t is not reasonable to defend any status quo uncritically; and . . . it is certainly not reasonable to do so in the rapidly changing conditions of a technical society in which “new conditions teach new duties and time makes ancient truth uncouth.” If being for or against change were the only issue involved, any critical person would be bound to be “liberal.”

Oh, really? For modern Americans, the choice between liberalism and conservatism, of course, is not between Change and No Change, but rather between different types of change — conservatives favoring those changes necessary to the preservation of a free society and the constitutional order, and liberals advocating changes that empower government to reorder society, conforming it to egalitarian ideals.

Believe me, sir, those who attempt to level never equalise. In all societies, consisting of various descriptions of citizens, some description must be uppermost. The levellers therefore only change and pervert the natural order of things; they load the edifice of society, by setting up in the air what the solidity of the structure requires to be on the ground.
– Edmund Burke

Liberty and equality are competing ideals. The more free we are, the more the differences in our individual abilities or the circumstances of fortune will render us unequal. A government that seeks to equalize the condition of its citizens will inevitably be required to deprive them of liberty (if not indeed to deprive them of their property and their lives, as the history of communism shows).

We may prefer greater equality than exists at any given time in society, yet if we seek by government policy to make society more equal, it behooves the friends of liberty to be vigilant, lest greater equality be purchased by a diminuition of liberty.

Change, Progress and ‘Reform’

Where liberals like Niebuhr err is in confusing change with progress. All change is not progress. A society that is changing is more likely to be descending toward decadence, anarchy or despotism than it is to be ascending toward perfection. So far as conservatism is a real philosophy of government — rather than a theoretical abstraction – it will therefore always be skeptical of liberal schemes for “reform.”

Over and over, liberals have promised that their “reforms” would offer only benefits, with no harmful consequences. Yet Social Security and Medicare — to cite but two examples — are now massive fiscal burdens tottering toward crisis. Certainly Kirk’s opposition to the Welfare State now seems far wiser than when Nieburh dismissed it as “prejudice.”

Alleviating the poverty and ill health of senior citizens is certainly a laudable aim, but what if the policies enacted in pursuit of that aim have disastrous effects? Did Americans who supported the enactment of Social Security in the 1930s or Medicare in the 1960s do so without considering the potential for long-term fiscal oblivion? Not if they were listening to the conservatives who opposed those policies. But those conservative critics went unheeded. Why?

Liberals like Reinhold Niebuhr were not only dismissive of arguments against the Welfare State, but they sought to discredit those who made such arguments. “Ignore that fellow Kirk — he’s prejudiced.” And so it is to this day, as liberals attack by any means necessary Rush Limbaugh and other critics of liberalism.

The intellectual advocates of respectable conservatism — who use the names of Kirk and Buckley as a pretext to join liberals in attacking Limbaugh & Co. — are therefore not conservative in any useful or practical sense. If we listen to them and throw under the bus the most popular and persuasive voices on the Right (and make no mistake, Rush is infinitely more persuasive than any of his critics), how would that strengthen opposition to liberalism? Obviously, it wouldn’t.

Think about this, the next time some stuffy “intellectual” starts trashing a big-name conservative. Does Glenn Beck occasionally get a little too spooky? Does Ann Coulter sometimes go heavy on the sarcasm? Does Mark Levin get a bit bombastic from time to time? Just remember these famous words of Bill Buckley:

“Now listen, you queer, you stop calling me a crypto-Nazi or I’ll sock you in the goddamn face and you’ll stay plastered.”

That’s the kind of intellectual philosophy we need more of — and Buckley said it live on national TV:

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Category: Culture, Education

Comments

  • Adobe Walls

    I wish our congressmen and senators would take a couple pages from Coulter, Beck and Limbaugh’s playbook.

  • Adobe Walls

    I wish our congressmen and senators would take a couple pages from Coulter, Beck and Limbaugh’s playbook.

  • http://leadandgold.blogspot.com craig henry

    Hey. Pink, no doubt. But subversive is a little far. He became a solid anti-communist by the 1950s.

  • http://leadandgold.blogspot.com craig henry

    Hey. Pink, no doubt. But subversive is a little far. He became a solid anti-communist by the 1950s.

  • http://dixienet.org/rebellion/rebellion.html Old Rebel

    “Liberty and equality are competing ideals.”

    That’s the single line of demarcation between authentic conservatives and today’s “National greatness” Neocons.

    Burke and the Southern tradition are basic to genuine conservatism, which see flattening egalitarianism for what it is: anti-human and anti-freedom.

  • http://dixienet.org/rebellion/rebellion.html Old Rebel

    “Liberty and equality are competing ideals.”

    That’s the single line of demarcation between authentic conservatives and today’s “National greatness” Neocons.

    Burke and the Southern tradition are basic to genuine conservatism, which see flattening egalitarianism for what it is: anti-human and anti-freedom.

  • Chuck Cross

    @ Old Rebel — I completely agree with you.

    Signed,
    New Yorker

  • Chuck Cross

    @ Old Rebel — I completely agree with you.

    Signed,
    New Yorker

  • http://thecampofthesaints.wordpress.com Bob Belvedere

    Wonderful, Stacy [and thank your for defending Mr. Kirk against those who misuse him]. The first word that entered my brain at the end of your mini-essay was WOLVERINES!

  • http://thecampofthesaints.wordpress.com Bob Belvedere

    Wonderful, Stacy [and thank your for defending Mr. Kirk against those who misuse him]. The first word that entered my brain at the end of your mini-essay was WOLVERINES!

  • Joe Marier

    I think Niehbuhr has a point, regardless of your knee-jerk reaction to it. Kirk’s defense of Calhoun is utterly unnecessary to the conservative idea, and besides, the America is a revolutionary country, not a conservative one, is pretty defensible. It would explain why we’ve been on a progressive glidepath for so long; it may well be written into our nature as a country.

    There is a problem with the idea that conservatism has declined far from the days of Buckley, Kirk, and whoever, and that is that they were not necessarily the most visible conservatives in their day. I mean, if you’re talking the mid-1950s, the average person would probably think of McCarthy, MacArthur, and Vice President Nixon as exemplifying conservatism before they thought of Russell Kirk.

  • Joe Marier

    I think Niehbuhr has a point, regardless of your knee-jerk reaction to it. Kirk’s defense of Calhoun is utterly unnecessary to the conservative idea, and besides, the America is a revolutionary country, not a conservative one, is pretty defensible. It would explain why we’ve been on a progressive glidepath for so long; it may well be written into our nature as a country.

    There is a problem with the idea that conservatism has declined far from the days of Buckley, Kirk, and whoever, and that is that they were not necessarily the most visible conservatives in their day. I mean, if you’re talking the mid-1950s, the average person would probably think of McCarthy, MacArthur, and Vice President Nixon as exemplifying conservatism before they thought of Russell Kirk.

  • Joe Marier

    (the idea that America is a revolutionary country, rather…)

  • Joe Marier

    (the idea that America is a revolutionary country, rather…)

  • RES

    IT is a truth universally acknowledged, that nothing so endears a Conservative to Liberals as much as his (or her) demise. Indeed, Liberals eagerly anticipate the death of conservatives primarily for the pleasure of hailing the deceased as vastly superior to living conservatives.

  • RES

    IT is a truth universally acknowledged, that nothing so endears a Conservative to Liberals as much as his (or her) demise. Indeed, Liberals eagerly anticipate the death of conservatives primarily for the pleasure of hailing the deceased as vastly superior to living conservatives.

  • RES

    IT is a truth universally acknowledged, that nothing so endears a Conservative to Liberals as much as his (or her) demise. Indeed, Liberals eagerly anticipate the death of conservatives primarily for the pleasure of hailing the deceased as vastly superior to living conservatives.

  • http://knappster.blogspot.com Thomas L. Knapp

    “What is wrong with these reverential invocations of Glorious Dead Famous Names is that Buckley and other now-respectable icons of conservatism were quite controversial in their own day, denounced as vociferously by their liberal contemporaries as Limbaugh and Coulter (or Mark Levin and Glenn Beck) are today.”

    Very true … and a wonderful demonstration of how far to the right the US has moved over the last 50 years. Usually, conservatives prefer to pretend the opposite, though.

  • http://knappster.blogspot.com Thomas L. Knapp

    “What is wrong with these reverential invocations of Glorious Dead Famous Names is that Buckley and other now-respectable icons of conservatism were quite controversial in their own day, denounced as vociferously by their liberal contemporaries as Limbaugh and Coulter (or Mark Levin and Glenn Beck) are today.”

    Very true … and a wonderful demonstration of how far to the right the US has moved over the last 50 years. Usually, conservatives prefer to pretend the opposite, though.

  • http://www.kdndmoves.com James

    I totally agree with you on this.

  • http://www.kdndmoves.com James

    I totally agree with you on this.

  • Mike

    Calling Neibuhr a liberal is to pigeon hole him. Neibuhr a) went through a transformation from a liberal to a neo conservative b) even after his transfirmation Neibuhr defies easy pigeon holing. He was clearly not a theological liberal and even called McCarthy to soft on communism, although he opposed Vietnam. So abusing Neibhur for your own pursuit is poor taste.

  • Mike

    Calling Neibuhr a liberal is to pigeon hole him. Neibuhr a) went through a transformation from a liberal to a neo conservative b) even after his transfirmation Neibuhr defies easy pigeon holing. He was clearly not a theological liberal and even called McCarthy to soft on communism, although he opposed Vietnam. So abusing Neibhur for your own pursuit is poor taste.

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