Henrie '87 Speaks on Conservatism
By Carol Szurkowski | Friday, March 3, 2006
Mark Henrie, valedictorian of the Dartmouth class of 1987, current senior editor at ISI Books and editor of the Intercollegiate Review and Modern Age , spoke on campus last week about the development of conservatism in America since World War II. He opened his talk, entitled “American Conservatism: Before and After Neo-Conservatism,” sponsored by The Dartmouth Review , the Evelyn Waugh Society, and the Intercollegiate Studies Institute, by stressing that our understanding of contemporary politics must be informed by knowledge of preceding events. However, college students, Henrie noted, often have difficulty contextualizing the debate over current issues because they lack knowledge of the period of history that occurred during their adolescence, a time when they were too young to pay attention to such things but one that is too recent to have been featured in their high school textbooks. With this schema and the age of his audience in mind, Henrie proceeded to fill in the gap that exists in current college students’ minds, by addressing immediately post-war events through their development into the 1990s.
During the 1950s, Henrie explained, a cohesive ideology of conservatism did not exist; rather, most conservatives aimed merely to slow the inevitable progress of liberalism. Conservatives seemed destined to be on the losing side of every political battle; indeed, many almost relished their position of heroically fighting a battle they were inevitably doomed to lose. Epitomizing this depressed categorization, according to Henrie, the prevalent view of the academy at this time denied the existence of conservatism in America at all. The Republican Party of the day was not by any stretch of the imagination conservative—rather, according to Henrie, Adlai Stevenson was the quintessential liberal of the 1950s.
Within this framework, that conservatism which did develop in post-war America can be divided into three camps through the 1950s and 1960s: the libertarians, who opposed the collectivism of the New Deal and the planned economy of the 1930s and whose purpose was to promote individualism; the anti-communists, who formed in reaction to the emergence of the Soviet Union and focused their energies on promoting free societies and opposing totalitarianism; and the traditionalists, who opposed any kind of overarching ideology that might lead to extreme measures and believed in the inherent value of a moral society. Henrie noted that the philosophies governing these groups, while all potentially leading to their classification as different conservatisms, p put them at odds with one another, creating a disparate picture that allowed for the academy’s outright dismissal of conservatism as a legitimate philosophy.
The great tensions that persisted among these three groups were eventually fused under one big tent by National Review, founded by William F. Buckley, Jr. in 1955. Henrie stated that all post-war conservative parties could be propitiated by seeking “traditionalist ends by libertarianist means.” National Review , therefore, became the vehicle for conservative cohesion that had been lacking since the end of World War Two.
Henrie also spoke about the shift away from the classical conservative mindset of going down nobly in inevitable defeat. He recalled growing up with the knowledge of communism’s ultimate victory. After all, communism was scientific and inexorable whereas liberal democracy was decadent and strife-torn. No one—liberal or conservative — doubted such an outcome. History, however, was not to cooperate. After the unforeseen downfall of communism, conservatives realized that they did not have to be forever “on the losing side of history,” because, for nearly the first time, one of their chief causes had finally been vindicated. But the Soviet Union’s demise shifted allegiances among the three camps of conservatives that brought conservatism to where it stands today; most notably, the anti-communists shifted their focus from the Soviet Union to China (and their descendants, after September 11, shifted focus from China to Islam0-fascism), while the libertarians broke off completely from the main bloc of conservatives to form an ideological unit unto themselves. As such, the early 1990s brought a renewed disparity in conservatism: while it could now define itself, as communism had once done, as the end of history (what Henrie called new neo-conservatism), other groups could continue to define themselves in terms of their opposition to the liberal establishment.
Henrie also gave a conservative’s perspective on America today. From a traditionalist’s point of view, the view which Henrie admitted to presonally espousing, today’s debate over social issues indicates a dramatic break with a morality and family structure that has endured for thousands of years. However, at the same time, liberalism is losing its credibility as the neutral political philosophy that allows people maximum freedom to do whatever they want. Recent thought has mostly proven that liberalism actually favors certain ways of life, Henrie said, and that the state of traditionalism is improving thanks to this shift.
Henrie went on to describe five types of modern conservatism, each of which take the view that America was good up until a certain disastrous historical turning point. Various conservatives date the demise of America from the 1960s, the New Deal, progressivism, the Civil War, and the victory of Federalism. (For more on this, see TDR ’s interview with Prof. Barry Shain of Colgate University on page eight). Yet another group holds that there was something fundamentally wrong with America at its founding. Henrie also argued that as of now, there is no cohesive conservative political theory, only a conservative political dissent or critique. Before September 11, he said, a great dialogue and critique of America was developing among conservatives, but this discussion, sadly, was halted abruptly, when, after the attacks, America suddenly became in its own view a model to be exported to the world. He also criticized President Bush’s choice to present his foreign policy as a matter of freedom versus tyranny, suggesting that a better characterization might have been civilization versus barbarism.
In concluding his remarks, Henrie was critical of Bush and challenged the authenticity of his conservatism. Bush’s mixture of religious fundamentalism (i.e. the religious right) with the neo-conservatism of the 1980s and 1990s has in the president an advocate of new neo-conservatism, which, according to Henrie, suffers from many of the same faults as communism in its conception of itself. This new brand of neo-cons, Henrie said, will inevitably falter for the same reasons that brought about the end of the Soviet Union: its self-perception as heralding the end of history and the lack of vision that accompanies such erring. Ultimately, Henrie concluded, a conservative must define himself in negative terms. A conservative is necessarily anxious about the trends of his society, and he defines himself through his resistance to society’s tendency to stray from the wisdom of inherited tradition toward utopianism.
|
