Plan B Forum

When Was The Golden Age Of Conservative Intellectuals?
July 9, 2017 3:00 pm July 9, 2017 3:00 pm

A few days late, but a few thoughts on Bret Stephens’s column about the intellectual decline of conservatism. As you might guess, I agree completely with his take on the modern degeneracy of the movement. But Stephens harks back to a golden age of deep thought; and my question is, when was this age, exactly?

William F. Buckley is a problematic icon. Surely one needs to mention his spirited defense of white supremacy in the South, and National Review’s weird infatuation with Generalissimo Francisco Franco. I’d also note that while God and Man at Yale castigated my alma mater for its downgrading of religion, he seemed equally dismayed by the fact that it was teaching Keynesian economics — you know, the stuff that has been so thoroughly vindicated these past few years.

But leave that aside. When did conservatives have good ideas, and when did they stop? Let’s talk about four areas I know pretty well: macroeconomics, environment, health care, and inequality.

In macroeconomics, there’s no question that Milton Friedman and, initially, Robert Lucas performed a useful service by challenging the case for policy activism, especially fiscal activism. Circa 1976 the track record of Chicago macroeconomics was impressive indeed.

But then it all fell apart. Lucas-type models failed the test of events in the 1980s, while updated Keynesianism held up. Rather than admitting that they had overreached, however, conservative macroeconomists just dug themselves deeper into the rabbit hole — effectively turning their back on Friedman-style monetarism as well as Keynesianism. Vigorous monetary expansion to fight a deep slump, originally a conservative idea, became anathema on the right even as it was welcomed on the left. What was once a good conservative idea was incorporated by liberals while rejected by the right.

On environment, a similar turn took place a bit later. The use of markets and price incentives to fight pollution was, initially, a conservative idea condemned by some on the left. But liberals eventually took it on board — while cap-and-trade became a dirty word on the right. Crude slogans –Government bad! — plus subservience to corporate interests trumped analysis.

On health care, ObamaRomneycare — relying on mandates, regulation, and subsidies rather than a single-payer system — was, famously, a conservative idea developed at the Heritage Foundation. But liberals took it on board — pretty quickly, actually — while conservatives began denouncing their own side’s clever idea as evil incarnate.

Finally, on inequality, conservative intellectuals were terrible from the very beginning. I wrote a long piece in 1992 detailing their evasions and distortions, many of which remain unchanged to this day. It wasn’t just that they were wrong; as I wrote at the time,

the combination of mendacity and sheer incompetence displayed by the Wall Street Journal, the U.S. Treasury Department, and a number of supposed economic experts demonstrates something else: the extent of the moral and intellectual decline of American conservatism.

Remember, this was a quarter-century ago.

So when was the golden age of conservative intellectuals? Actually, there never was one. Certainly, the supposed era in which only conservatives had all the interesting ideas while liberals rehashed tired dogma never happened in any field I know well. That said, there was a period when conservatives contributed some useful stuff to the discourse. But that era ended a long, long time ago.

Sean Hannity Is No William F. Buckley
[Bret Stephens]

Bret Stephens JULY 6, 2017


On the subject of cycles, Warren Buffett likes to talk about “the natural progression, the three I’s.” As he put it to Charlie Rose in 2008, those I’s are “the innovators, the imitators and the idiots.” One creates, one enhances — and one screws it all up. Then, presumably, the cycle starts afresh.

Buffett was describing the process that led to the 2008 housing and financial crises. But he might as well have been talking about the decline of the conservative movement in America.

I was reminded of this again last week, on news that the Fox News host Sean Hannity will receive the William F. Buckley Jr. Award for Media Excellence later this year at a gala dinner in Washington, D.C. As honors go, neither the award nor the organization bestowing it — the Media Research Center — is particularly noteworthy.

But sometimes symbolism is more potent than fact. If we have reached the point where rank-and-file conservatives see nothing amiss with giving Hannity an award named for Buckley, then surely there’s a Milton Friedman Prize awaiting Steve Bannon for his insights on free trade. And maybe Sean Spicer can receive the Vaclav Havel International Prize for Creative Dissent for his role in exposing “fake news.” The floor’s the limit.

Or, in Hannity’s case, the crawl space beneath it.

In 1950, Lionel Trilling wrote that there were no conservative ideas “in general circulation,” only “irritable mental gestures which seek to resemble ideas.” By the time Trilling died 25 years later the opposite was true: The only consequential ideas at the time were conservative, while it was liberalism that had been reduced to an irritable mental gesture.

This was largely Buckley’s doing. Through National Review, his magazine, he gave a hidden American intelligentsia a platform to develop conservative ideas. Through “Firing Line,” his TV show, he gave an unsuspecting American public a chance to sample conservative wit. Not all of the ideas were right, but they were usually smart. And as they evolved, they went in the right direction.

Buckley “learned to free himself of views that had come to him by the circumstances of his background that he concluded ran counter to values he cherished,” notes Alvin Felzenberg in his superb new biography, “A Man and His Presidents.” Buckley shed isolationism, segregationism and anti-Semitism, and insisted the conservative movement do likewise. Over 50 years as the gatekeeper of conservative ideas, he denounced the inverted Marxism of Ayn Rand, the conspiracy theories of Robert Welch (founder of the John Birch Society) and the white populism of George Wallace and Pat Buchanan.

In March 2000, he trained his sights on “the narcissist” and “demagogue” Donald Trump. “When he looks at a glass, he is mesmerized by its reflection,” he wrote in a prophetic short essay in Cigar Aficionado. “The resistance to a corrupting demagogy,” he warned, “should take first priority” for Americans.

Buckley died in 2008. The conservatism he nourished was fundamentally literary: To play a significant part in it you had to know how to write, and in order to write well you had to read widely, and in order to do that you had to, well, enjoy reading. In hindsight, 2008, the year of Sarah Palin, was also the year when literary conservatism went into eclipse.

Suddenly, you didn’t need to devote a month to researching and writing a 7,000-word critique of Obama administration’s policy on, say, Syria to be taken seriously as a conservative foreign-policy expert. You just needed to mouth off about it for five minutes on “The O’Reilly Factor.” For books there were always ghostwriters; publicity on Fox ensured they would always top The Times’s best-seller lists.

Influence ceased to be measured by respectability — op-eds published in The Wall Street Journal; keynotes delivered to the American Enterprise Institute — and came to be measured by ratings. The quality of an idea could be tested not by its ability to withstand scrutiny from experts, but by the willingness of people to swallow it.

It shouldn’t be a surprise that a post-literate conservative world should have been so quick to embrace a semi-literate presidential candidate. Nor, in hindsight, is it strange that, with the role Buckley once played in maintaining conservative ideological hygiene retired, the ideas he expunged should have made such a quick and pestilential comeback.

Thus, when Hannity peddles conspiracy theories about Seth Rich, the young Democratic National Committee staffer murdered in Washington last year, that’s an echo of John Birch. When fellow Fox host Tucker Carlson — who once aspired to be the next Buckley and now aims to be the next Ann Coulter — tries to reinvent himself as the tribune of the working class, he’s speaking for the modern-day George Wallace voter. Isolationism is already back, thanks to Trump. Anti-Semitism can’t be far behind, either, and not just on the alt-right.

And so we reach the Idiot stage of the conservative cycle, in which a Buckley Award for Sean Hannity suggests nothing ironic, much less Orwellian, to those bestowing it, applauding it, or even shrugging it off. The award itself is trivial, but it’s a fresh reminder of who now holds the commanding heights of conservative life, and what it is that they think.

In the financial world, we know how this stage ended for investors, not to mention the rest of the country. The political right might consider that a similar destiny awaits.