The Case for Polarized Politics

Why America Needs Social Conservatism

Jeffrey Bell

• Publisher: Encounter Books
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN:
  9781594035784
• eBook ISBN:
  9781594035791
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Political Ideologies
• Index: Politics & International Relations

No movement resembling American social conservatism exists anywhere else in the world of affluent democracy encompassing western Europe and Japan. This simple, undeniable fact has led many commentators to treat social conservatism as a “retro” movement soon to disappear in the U. S. as well, an inevitable (if lagging) casualty of global modernization.

Author and political activist Jeffrey Bell argues that social conservatism is uniquely American because it is in reality an outgrowth of American exceptionalism. It exists here because the founding principles of the United States—centering on the belief that humanity receives its equal rights directly from God rather than from government—retain a mass following among American voters, even in the wake of abandonment of belief in America’s theistic founding by elites and institutions that once espoused it. This allegiance to the founding, rather than some quasi-theocratic project by what is frequently misnamed the “religious right,” accounts for social conservatism’s comparatively recent birth and persistent strength in U. S. politics—and also for its absence in societies whose foundings were not rooted in the universality of God-given human rights.

Bell argues that a worldwide upheaval in the 1960s set the stage for the rise of social conservatism, which had no earlier political existence. The 1960s upheaval resulted in the triumph of the social agenda of the left, particularly the sexual revolution, among elite opinion in the United States as well as in Europe, Japan and elsewhere. In subsequent decades the global left has sidelined its century-long drive for socialism and returned to its late-eighteenth-century roots in the thought of Jean-Jacques Rousseau and the radical French revolutionaries known as the Jacobins, who believed human fulfillment depends on liberation from most civilized institutions, particularly organized religion and the family.

Despite the many predictions of its demise, social conservatism has gained and held popular strength in the U. S. because of its roots in a theistic version of the European enlightenment of the 17th and 18th centuries, which Bell describes and analyzes as the “conservative enlightenment.” It is a rich, optimistic belief system that not only dominated the American founding but transformed society in the English-speaking world and remains an attractive alternative in the eyes of many of the world’s peoples—certainly in comparison to the competing universalisms advocated by the left enlightenment and by the anti-egalitarian Islamic revival. The ability of social conservatism and of its parent, the conservative enlightenment, to revive and spread this natural law-centered democratic vision could reshape the battle of ideas that increasingly defines our post-Cold War world.

II

SOCIAL CONSERVATISM: ORIGIN AND FUTURE

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7

WHERE DOES IT COME FROM?

American Social Conservatism
and the Conservative
Enlightenment

In the Introduction, I argued that both the existence and uniqueness of American social conservatism are driven by the central assertion in the Declaration of Independence: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.” That many Americans take these words literally not only says something important about Americans; it’s also the most plausible explanation for the rise and continued power of social conservatism in American politics.

Our belief in the literal truth of these words also defines the link between America’s social-conservative movement, a comparatively new force in politics, and a much older struggle between two rival political interpretations of the Enlightenment. If there is one word in the above sentence from the Declaration that illuminates this link, it is the word “self-evident.” Social conservatives believe there are things that are self-evident. Many if not most opponents of social conservatism question the existence or possibility of the self-evident, either in general or specifically as applied to politics.

The American Revolution was the culmination of what at first seemed to be the line of political advance most likely to emerge from the European Enlightenment of the 17th and 18th centuries: the path inspired by what is sometimes (not inaccurately) called the Anglo-Saxon enlightenment but what I believe is better described as the conservative enlightenment.

The founders of the United States all saw themselves as men of the Enlightenment. They saw the political implications of the Enlightenment as enormous and contentious, but they were conservative in swearing allegiance to the notion of a universe that rests on self-evident truths, which most of them saw as flowing from a God-centered universe—from “Nature and Nature’s God.” Moreover, they envisioned God not as an archaic holdover deity from unenlightened times, but as the only conceivable authority capable of demolishing humanity’s immemorial rule by blood elites. That is, the only way to justify ending millennia of domination by kings and nobles was by facing the implications of what they saw as a simple, self-evident fact: Humans are innately equal because God created us that way. This view of equality as equal human dignity, they believed, was what mandated republican self-rule, in North America and (eventually) everywhere else.

This set up a paradox. The American founders’ version of enlightenment was undeniably conservative in its retention of Europe’s age-old monotheistic framework, and it’s true that the institutional and social changes generated by the colonists’ defeat of Great Britain took the shape of a conservative revolution, especially compared with the chaotic and destructive French Revolution that followed a few years later. But our founders’ version of equality is far more radical than that of the left enlightenment, and it demanded far more respect for human rights than the kind of equality—elite management toward equality—favored by the secular-leaning left enlightenment. The more God-centered one’s view of equality’s origin, the more respect people’s rights must receive in the present.

The left enlightenment, shaped by Rousseau and put into practice for the first time by the Jacobins and their radical allies in the France of the 1790s, was also committed to the overthrow of blood elites, holding as it did the belief in human equality that united most strands of the Enlightenment. But the left was not at all sure in what sense human equality could be said to exist in the present, and it was therefore much less inclined to believe in the currently existing equal rights of each and every human being. From its beginning, the left attempted to raise up, train, and empower revolutionary vanguards and elites to guide society to its ultimate destination, often at the expense of benighted social groups and individuals tied to the old order. It should come as no surprise that the first political program instituted by the left once it came to power, the Terror, involved the mass arrest, imprisonment, and (often) execution of aristocrats, believers, and others committed to institutions of the old regime.

These institutions proved more durable than the left perhaps expected. Even in France, the ever-boiling cauldron of the left enlightenment, the left experienced a restoration of the Bourbon dynasty and the revival of the Catholic Church within a few years of having decreed the extinction of both. But the left proved at least equally resilient and developed an ability to set more and more of the agenda of global politics, even while (as outlined in Chapter 3) assuming many different shapes and pursuing many different political, cultural, and economic projects.

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How the 1960s Changed the Left

During the more than one hundred years when socialism was the left’s highest-profile project, many assumed that the left’s central goal was equality of economic result. Adherents of the conservative enlightenment argued that this goal of equal results took the enlightenment’s central idea of equality too far or (more accurately) attempted to apply it in the realm of economics, where it did not belong, rather than to politics, where it does. And despite huge losses of prestige as well as intermittent persecution, a number of pre-enlightenment institutions and opinion streams survived and helped contain the socialist left as well.

But the upheavals of the 1960s opened the possibility that socialism would prove for adherents of the global left not the final destination but only one more in its long list of means to an end, easily de-emphasized or discarded when socialism’s political and economic credibility drained away. Though nothing was very clear during the 1960s or even its immediate aftermath, the ultimate result of that decade was to bring the left overtly back to its roots in the liberationist vision first set forth by Rousseau.

For it gradually became clear that the left’s own two-century-old image of itself as a force for comprehensive human liberation was far more authentic and persistent than conservative critics (or disillusioned leftists such as George Orwell) had been willing to admit—that the left’s ultimate aim is perfect, autonomous human freedom rather than some mathematically exact equality of economic or social standing. If socialism or equality of result became attractive to the masses, achieving it could be instrumental in breaking down the human institutions that the left sees as the greatest barriers to human liberation and fulfillment. Many on the left, both before and after the heyday of socialism, believed that universal equality of condition is a necessary precursor to true liberation. But if doctrinaire socialism lost its popular appeal, the left would be happy to shift its emphasis toward other means of deconstructing human institutions.

In fact, the 1960s were about a radical, worldwide assault on social institutions. The decade’s fallout left people all over the world with greatly diminished trust in institutions that they had previously obeyed or at least respected. Some of these institutions, particularly but by no means exclusively in the Communist world, had themselves been fathered by the socialist left. But the institutions that came under the fiercest attack were pre-Enlightenment ones that, often in alliance with adherents of the conservative enlightenment, had kept the left in check for almost two hundred years.

If it is correct that Rousseau was the true founder of the left and that the ultimate aim of the left is to deliver humanity to the “state of nature” liberated from corrupt institutions and free of laws and binding obligations, then the seeming collapse in the 1960s of institutions and moral codes all over the world would surely have heartened Rousseau had he been alive to see it. It also would have opened up a vista of definitive, society-wide victory for the left as had no other event or series of events since the modern left was named and took shape in the 1790s.

Its scope in the end was worldwide, but the assault on institutions began in the United States as a somewhat surprising outgrowth of a landmark institutional success: the victory of the black civil rights movement in the early 1960s, culminating in the civil rights acts of 1964 and 1965.

An institution that should have gained enormous self-confidence from these civil rights gains was the Democratic Party, particularly its predominant liberal wing, which had held a reluctant Congress’s feet to the fire and insisted that the government grant and safeguard the equal social and political status of Southern blacks. With passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, which brought millions of Southern blacks into the electorate, the paramount project of political equality (one person, one vote) had in a tangible sense reached completion in the world’s first and most influential mass democracy.

But instead of heightened self-confidence, American liberalism soon found itself questioning its core premises and enmeshed in racial and generational conflict. Between 1963 and 1968, most American cities experienced rioting in their black ghettos, rioting that was more widespread and violent after enactment of the civil rights bills than before. Between 1964 and 1970, a wave of student unrest, at times violent, swept through America’s college campuses, which had been peaceful in their entire previous history. With the dispatch of American combat troops to South Vietnam in 1965, debate about a limited war in Asia unexpectedly took on the contours of a national moral crisis that seemed to pit entire generations and social classes against each other in a way that bore no resemblance to debate over a comparable limited war in Korea 15 years earlier. And as nearly everyone knows, the decade was pockmarked with three stunning assassinations: President John F. Kennedy in November 1963, civil rights leader Martin Luther King in April 1968, and New York’s Senator Robert F. Kennedy, mortally wounded just minutes after his victory speech in Los Angeles on the night of the California Democratic presidential primary, June 4, 1968.

1968

In that year, 1968, the revolt against institutions, a revolt first felt in the United States, not only peaked but also became global. In reach it far exceeded the year 1848, when monarchies across Europe tottered. Civil unrest attained crisis proportions in countries as varied as Mexico, France, West Germany, Japan, China, and Czechoslovakia, among others. Vehement dissent jolted even the most stable institution in human history, the Roman Catholic Church, after its July publication of Pope Paul VI’s encyclical reaffirming a ban on artificial contraception.

In the short run, as with events following 1848, most of the political elites that came under attack in 1968 remained in power or regained it after a brief period of chaos. In China, the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution ignited by Communist Party chairman Mao Zedong in 1965 concluded its violent phase, while in Czechoslovakia the Soviet Army restored the status quo. Despite President Charles de Gaulle’s resignation in 1969, following his defeat in a referendum, the Gaullists under Georges Pompidou won the subsequent national election and stayed in power in France, as did the Institutional Revolutionary party in Mexico, along with most other long-ruling elites.

But in every instance, the challenge was radical in nature and directed primarily at “the system” and only secondarily at specific local grievances. The eruptions of 1968, coming at the end a decade that had seen the broadest economic growth in history, represented a worldwide explosion of the values politics that had begun with the early-1960s civil rights revolution in the U.S.

The assault on institutions emanated mainly from the left, but regimes where the left already held sway did not escape the storm. In the Marxist-Leninist sphere, which at the time made up about a third of humanity, the challenge came from two very different directions.

In China, party chairman Mao orchestrated a campaign of intimidation and terror against the increasingly bureaucratic party he nominally led. Mao identified the major sin of Communist elites as elite status itself. How could such status be consistent with the Marxist ideal of equal results? Mao and his allies tried to resolve this tension at the heart of Marxism by such measures as abolishing military ranks and herding professors and scientists to the fields during harvest season to purge them of their attachment to elite status.

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Czechoslovakia’s entrenched pro-Soviet elites, by contrast, came under attack not for ideological lassitude but for rigidity. The anti-institutional assault here was comparatively nonviolent, at least until Soviet Army units occupied the country and ended the new reformist government of Alexander Dubcek in June. Yet Dubcek’s efforts to put incentives into economic life and openness into political life proved far more prophetic of future reform efforts in the Communist world than did China’s Cultural Revolution.

In the context of 1968, this outcome would have come as a major surprise. The Dubcek experiment was snuffed out with minimal resistance and appeared to have few imitators, in Eastern Europe or anywhere else. Though the violent phase of the Cultural Revolution peaked in 1968 and ended shortly afterward, Mao and his radical allies remained firmly in power in China and won many admirers among intellectual elites of the Western and Third Worlds.

This was important because in the non-Communist world, intellectual elites—particularly professors and their students—were instrumental in driving the rebellion almost everywhere. And the intensely anti-institutional nature of the New Left meant that much of its fury was directed at institutions the Old Left had brought into being or had taken over, such as university administrations and the national bureaucracies attempting to run Europe’s welfare states. Moreover, many analysts were surprised that stalwart adherents of Old Left politics, such as the Communist politicians who then dominated the Paris suburbs, failed to support the student revolt that paralyzed that city.

As for the New Left’s Maoist sentiments, despite its heavily intellectual demographics, the movement seemed more inspired by the Cultural Revolution’s anti-intellectualism than by Mao’s stated goal of economic equality. In fact, according to James Billington in his seminal study of revolution, Fire in the Minds of Men, the New Left’s ideology bore a striking resemblance to the populist, anti-Marxist socialism preached in the first half of the 19th century by Pierre-Joseph Proudhon: “There was, first of all, the intense moralism and quasi-anarchic rejection of almost all established authority. There was the accompanying Proudhonian desire to put power directly in the hands of ‘the people,’ primarily by the nonviolent strengthening of local communal structures. At the same time there was a deep antagonism to dogma and ‘idea-mania’ as well as an indifference to history, and suspicion of science. They followed Proudhon in protesting against remote central power, and arguing for immediate concrete benefits against the distant, symbolic goals promoted by governments.”⁷ The gulf between the “scientific socialism” of the Old Left and a movement that thrived on such slogans as “Power to the People,” and “Don’t Trust Anyone Over 30” could hardly have been wider.

But in the light of the New Left’s short-term failure to destroy the political institutions it targeted, the more influential wing of the 1960s rebellion went by a revealing name: the “counterculture.” This strain of thought advocated the rejection not only of conventional politics, but of conventional society itself. The rise of the counterculture, with its disdain for middle-class Western society and its norms, was on the surface nonpolitical, but on a deeper level it was the ultimate manifestation of the left’s values politics. Its withdrawal of allegiance from previously respected institutions and moral norms had a profound impact on its predominantly youthful mass base and on the older generation as well. In the United States, the special strength of both the New Left and the counterculture on elite campuses ensured that the 1960s ushered in not only generational revolt but also a crisis of confidence within the world of elite opinion as a whole.

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Around 1967, the powerful, predominantly liberal elites who set the terms of much of the political debate in the two decades after World War II began visibly to tip toward society’s harshest critics, toward the darker view of America these critics held. One milestone was the appointment of the Kerner Commission on urban rioting, which in its 1968 report assigned the blame for the riots to “white racism”—in effect, to American society as a whole. Another milestone was an announcement that same year by Time magazine that it opposed the American war effort in Vietnam. In those days the most influential mass-circulation magazine among American elites of both parties, Time was especially known for its hawkishness on Far Eastern affairs and for proclaiming the 20th century as the “American Century.” Its defection to the dovish side echoed like a thunderclap and was quickly followed by the defection of CBS’s Walter Cronkite, America’s most authoritative face and voice at a time when TV network news was in its historic prime.

In late 1967, Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara, the chief architect of Vietnam war strategy in the Kennedy and Johnson administrations, privately concluded that the doves were right, and he resigned his office, effective early the following year. President Lyndon Johnson, still determined to bring the war to a successful conclusion, chose as McNamara’s successor Clark Clifford, a widely revered pillar of the Washington establishment who, as a young White House aide in the 1940s, had been a pivotal advocate of President Truman’s turn to a hard anti-Soviet stance in the Cold War’s early days.

But Clifford quickly turned against the war as well and began maneuvering to steer Johnson toward a speech (eventually delivered on March 31) in which he announced a partial halt in the bombing campaign against North Vietnam, as well as (it turned out) his own withdrawal from his race for a second full term. Clifford’s initiative was facilitated by an informal advisory group of senior statesmen, a group created several years earlier by Johnson himself and led by former Secretaty of State Dean Acheson. In the wake of the Vietnamese Communists’ spectacular Tet offensive in February 1968, this group of senior advisers, a virtual Who’s Who of the post–World War II moderate-to-liberal foreign policy elite, shifted en masse from hawkish to dovish. Elite support for the Vietnam war had disintegrated in a matter of months. Officials who had been lifelong hawks suddenly became agonized, articulate doves. Those who did not change found themselves marginalized.

This phenomenon of swift, unexpected elite realignment happened in one form or another in other countries deeply affected by the upheavals of the 1960s. During the 1968 unrest in Mexico, the justice minister, Luis Echeverria, responded to Mexico City riots by carrying out a bloody suppression that led to the deaths of hundreds of student protesters. In 1970, he was elevated by the then one-party Mexican state to the presidency, at least in part as a reward for preserving the status quo. After taking office, he stunned most of his backers by shifting government policy sharply to the left at home and abroad. In West Germany, Willy Brandt, known as a Social Democratic hard-liner concerning the Cold War in his years as mayor of West Berlin, ...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Introduction
• I - THE RISE OF SOCIAL CONSERVATISM
• II - SOCIAL CONSERVATISM: ORIGIN AND FUTURE
• INDEX
• Acknowledgments
• Copyright Page