The Candor of a Conservative
A few months ago, the New Yorker published a profile of 88 year-old Peter Viereck, who is considered one of the intellectual forefathers of the modern conservative movement. In April 1940, a time when liberalism was still in the ascendant and Franklin Roosevelt was gearing up for his third term in office, Viereck--a 23 year-old graduate student--published this spirited defense of his politcs in the Atlantic Monthly.

Packaged as an argument for conservatism, Viereck's statement reads today more like a blast against the extremism of both Right (both in its Nazi and America-First incarnations) and Left (Stalin's USSR, and its American apologists). But even more striking is how so many of Viereck's "conservative" points sound like modern mainstream Democratic views.

What do I mean by 'conservative'? Conservatism must include what Thomas Mann calls humanism: the conservation of our cultural, spiritual, and individualist heritage. Common sense is notoriously the oracle of conservatism. But, at its best, common sense means no mere unimaginative shrewdness. It means the common and universal sense of mankind, the common values basic to every civilized society and creed. These human values are the traffic lights which all (even 'mass movements') must obey in order that all may be free.
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Freedom of thought we must never restrict in America. Conduct and action we can and must restrict. Instead of 'progressive education' our democratic school system must instill, from kindergarten on, the necessity of limiting all human conduct and instinct by objective Law. Only so can we learn, the decent rules of the game as an unbreakable habit. By 'Law' I do not mean all existing laws. All are not necessarily good. By 'Law' I mean the legal way as a way to whatever goals we may seek; I mean it as a way of living. This way is necessarily freedom's prerequisite. In this sense, Law must tread pitilessly upon individuals, nations, classes. It must trample with callous and sublime indifference upon their economic interests yes, even their economic interests- and their 'healthy instincts of the race.'
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As menacing as open anarchists are those who discredit traditional institutions, not by attack, but by excess exploitation. The man who uses our institutions and Law as a barrier to, instead of a vehicle for, democratic reform is the real anarchist.

Viereck's perspective perhaps looks strange to us because, aside from barbs thrown at the Soviet Union and its sympathizers, it seems almost denuded of contemporary politics. FDR himself isn't mentioned, nor is any prominent Republican politician, despite the fact that the article was published in an election year. (Two things to remember, though, are that the Republican Party in 1940 was so disorganized, demorallized and internally split that an utter dark horse, Wendell Wilkie, was ultimately able to steal the presidential nomination at the last moment; and that the affiliations of liberalism to the Democrats and conservatism to the Republicans were nowhere near as fixed in the public mind as they are today.)

This unmooring from electoral politics frees Viereck to make some pretty amazing observations, including the insight that capitalism and Marxism share a core conviction about the centrality of economics. At least in a metaphorical sense, his rejection of political Manicheanism is also strikingly relevant to today's American political scene, in which the bases of both parties seem so dominant. He similarly denounces the free-market fundamentalism today championed by the nihilistic Grover Norquist and the myopic, mean-spirited Club for Growth:

With the most passionate intensity, I resent the no-third-way sophistry of forcing American students to choose only from the alternatives of fascists and Marxists. Dynamic fascism, as it is sweeping Europe, is idealism diabolized. Economism, its opposite, whether of capitalist or Marxist brand, is materialism deified. Dynamism is immoral, economic materialism is unmoral; take your choice! Both are present to some degree in all societies. Either in excess explodes the civilization we conservatives would conserve. Our fight as young Americans is twofold: against our established cult of economism and mammon worship, and against all attempts to import fascism in its place.
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What are the immediate political duties today of a common-sense conservative? I think a conservative should patriotically join in our country's cautious groping toward a planned economy. Despite party slogans, this groping will in practice steadily continue, whether under Republicans or New Dealers. Leftists try to discredit the conservative attitude by linking it in the public mind with laissez-faire economics. But how on earth can we conserve what's dead and what probably never existed? Purchasing power must be so distributed that every citizen is himself a free and stable property owner and an economically articulate consumer. Necessities (such as wheat) must no longer be burned or ploughed under, but sold, even without profit and below cost, to all citizens who lack them.

Emphasis mine. Strengthening American consumers--whether by energetic regulation on the Eliot Spitzer model, or the sorts of economic literacy programs now commonplace in anti-poverty strategies--is increasingly a hallmark of Democratic candidates and office-holders. And the notion of "free and stable property owner[s]" arguably goes back as far as Thomas Jefferson's "sturdy yeoman farmers."

Viereck's closing brief against extremism offers a warning for us today--and likely wouldn't sit well with today's self-labeled "conservatives" of the DeLay/Cheney stripe.

Accepting vigilance as the price of liberty, the conservative will be alert equally against all illegalities from all sides, whether from flag-waving Americans or 'aliens' or capitalists or labor unions. He will everywhere answer illegal force with force-in-law, returning words for words and bullets for bullets, until Law is respected again. He will answer fascist attacks, from within the United States or without, with the policeman's club and not the Chamberlain umbrella.

Suppose the Communist Party calls itself the 'Paul Reveres of 1936,' and the Nazi Bund pays lip service to George Washington. No matter how democratic their methods and actions. Anti-fascist lip service is not enough of a criterion. If fascism ever comes to America, it will assuredly be some homespun, native brand, riding into power on militaristic anti-fascist (i.e. anti-'alien') phrases.
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Our conservative will never admit that the state as a whole is greater than the sum of its separate individuals. All power he will distrust and hence limit. He will fight every extension of government authority, no matter in whose hands, whenever it seems more dangerous than the genuine wrong it would remedy. But he will insist equally on forestalling mass discontent with thoroughgoing social legislation, with the proviso that such new governmental power be as decentralized as possible.

He believes in majority rule for America, but never majority dictatorship. Instead, he believes in the absolute constitutional and human rights of minorities, whether share-croppers or millionaires, whether economic, religious, or racial. He will stubbornly insist that corrupt means betray even the worthiest ends.

I'd be very curious how this would sit with today's rank-and-file Republicans. Two possible reactions suggest themselves: they might argue, ahistorically in my opinion, that Viereck is really a Democrat in disguise with his acceptance of activist government and the theoretical validity of economic intervention for the common good. (Indeed, Viereck soon became an outspoken critic of Joe McCarthy, and committed other sins of political deviation.) Or they might realize how far through the looking glass their movement has gone, and how profoundly un-conservative it has really become.