TO HAVE NO HEART:

-REVIEW: of Letters to a Young Conservative by Dinesh D'Souza (George Packer, The Nation)

Of course, it isn't news that conservatives at least act less ambivalent and more cocksure than liberals. A book could be written on the theme that liberalism's problem is that it always involves complication and uncertainty. In his preface to The Liberal Imagination, Lionel Trilling wanted to "recall liberalism to its first essential imagination of variousness and possibility, which implies the awareness of complexity and difficulty." That was in 1950, when political liberalism had reached its zenith and Trilling was worrying aloud that it had grown crudely deterministic at least in part because it lacked any viable conservative counterforce. At midcentury Trilling pleaded with American conservatives to revive themselves philosophically for the health of liberalism. And so they did. Today one can imagine an intelligent conservative like David Brooks begging liberals to find their voices so that conservatism doesn't stiffen like the liberalism to which D'Souza and his pals at Dartmouth delivered a few swift kicks on the eve of the Reagan revolution.

But to judge by the tone and content of this book, and of so much conservative talk in magazines and on TV and radio, it's already happened. The disease of success has begun to waste the musculature; a new cycle of atrophy has set in. Electoral victory is a nice thing, but it doesn't necessarily signify intellectual health--as the Democrats found out after 1976. It's not just that there are no new conservative ideas; it's that the old ideas sound hollow at the core. Thus, D'Souza has to maintain with a straight face and the flicker of a smile that "more and more people are moving into the ranks of the affluent classes"; that "the power of big business over the average American is quite limited"; that "in their personal conduct, conservatives do not claim to be better than anyone else"; that the solution to crime is more guns; that the key to environmental protection is more growth; that the world's poor have no objections to globalization. Some of it is questionable, some of it is flatly wrong and much of it sooner or later will bump up against the wall of reality. But conservatives of D'Souza's age--which is mine, and I've been watching them since we were in college--are generationally in the same position as liberals of Trilling's or Arthur Schlesinger Jr.'s.

Their adult lives have coincided with an era of political triumphs (D'Souza understands that even Clinton represented a conservative triumph of sorts). The intellectual work done by neoconservatives of a previous generation brought insurgents like D'Souza into a position where they could enjoy power and influence. They tasted it early, and they liked it. Who wouldn't, with all those soft landings? Just as universities, liberal foundations and, ultimately, Democratic administrations were waiting for the likes of Trilling and Schlesinger, an archipelago of business-funded think tanks, foundations, publishing ventures, lecture circuits and, of course, Republican administrations has underwritten careers like D'Souza's. Liberals writing for the omnipotent liberal media can only dream of the rewards that have come the way of a whole generation of conservatives. Ideas Have Consequences was the title of a 1948 manifesto by the conservative writer Richard Weaver, cited in D'Souza's reading list--and millionaires and corporations have taken it very seriously. But by cyclical entropy, or some mental version of Gresham's law, that very seriousness has produced a culture of heavy subsidy and institutionalization that is bound to end up the enemy of thought and to produce books like Letters to a Young Conservative. Dinesh D'Souza is symptomatic of this process today in the same way that writers proclaiming the death of conservatism in 1964 indicated the low fuel level of Kennedy-era liberalism.

A serious book by a conservative today would face the dilemma I mentioned above--that freedom and authority are profoundly at odds.

By some freak circumstance of Nature, I've just finished reading Letters to a Young Conservative and am in the midst of The Liberal Imagination when along comes George Packer to tie them together. Here's what Trilling says of conservatism in that Introduction:

In the United States at this time liberalism is not only the dominant but even the sole intellectual tradition. For it is the plain fact that nowadays there are no conservative or reactionary ideas in general circulation. This does not mean, of course, that there is no impulse to conservatism or to reaction. Such impulses are certainly very strong, perhaps even stronger than most of us know. But the conservative impulse and the reactionary impulse do not, with some isolated and some ecclesiastical exceptions, express themselves in ideas but only in action or in irritable mental gestures which seek to resemble ideas.

Now, the first thing we should note is that Mr. Weaver's book remains in print today while Mr. Trilling's does not. In fact, an entire pile of great conservative texts--that either had been published by the time Mr. Trilling wrote that ill-fated dismissal of conservatism or were in the process of being written--remain in print and continue to yield both pleasurable reading and valuable ideas: I'll Take My Stand (1930 (Twelve Southerners); The Revolt of the Masses (1930) (Jose Otrtega y Gasset); The Abolition of Man (1943) (C.S. Lewis); The Road to Serfdom (1944) (F. A. Hayek); God and Man at Yale: The Superstitions of 'Academic Freedom' (1951) (William F., Jr. Buckley); Witness (1952) (Whittaker Chambers); Natural Right and History (1953) (Leo Strauss); and The Conservative Mind: from Burke to Eliot (1953) (Russell Kirk). Orwell and Nock were recently deceased, Pound was in an asylum, and Mencken had gone silent but Willmoore Kendall, T. S. Eliot, Evelyn Waugh, Ayn Rand, etc., were all still active; and Mickey Spillane was one of the best-selling authors in America. In fact, just two years after Trilling's book came out, Republicans swept the elections of 1952. Who, it seems fair to ask, would Mr. Packer stack up against this list of greats? Who on the Left is writing books and offering ideas that we'll be reading and referring too fifty years from now? After all, the most talked about book on the Left this years was The Emerging Democratic Majority (John B. Judis, Ruy Teixeira), whose premise now seems a bit dubious. And when first the politician Paul Wellstone and then the great philosopher of redistributionism, John Rawls, recently died, it seemed like most folks were ready to bury the failed dreams of the Left with them.
Posted by Orrin Judd at December 15, 2002 1:26 PM