What follows is a revised and updated version of an essay first posted on Priceton nearly two decades ago. I justify this act of self-plagiarism by the fact that the progressive juggernaut has not changed, except in its fanaticism and exponential acceleration towards the totalitarian abyss.
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I have often been asked by my most admiring students, in the most perplexed and plaintive tones, why I am a conservative—a position that evidently makes me an intellectual leper. I have tried to explain to them that modern-day conservatism is really the heir to classical liberalism, modern-day liberalism having shifted inexorably leftward toward supine statism since the 1960s, and, after the turn of the millennium, embarking on its long march toward the fanatical post-modernist progressive theocracy under which we now groan. (As Robert Kennedy Jr. has repeatedly observed, it was not he who left the Democrat Party, but the Party that left him—a Party that his father and uncle would scarcely recognize today.)
I have pointed out that my political views are in line with those of De Tocqueville, Burke, and Jefferson, who appreciated the tyrannical velleities of all forms of government, and recognized that the principal threat to individual rights and liberties comes from the revolutionary utopianism of the omnipotent State, and not from organized religion, traditional moral norms and social arrangements, “white supremacy,” or personal “greed.” Perhaps because absolute monarchy, feudalism, Nazism, and communism are episodes in human history remote from their historical memory, I have failed to persuade them. So let me put the argument in terms that today’s heroically free-thinking and perennially anti-traditional students should find sympathetic. Conservatives, these days, are the only radicals. Conservatives want change.
Oh, I know: the parties and voices of change are supposed always to be on the Left, like Barack Obama, whose promise of “Hope and Change” has only recently been surpassed in vapidity by the endlessly repeated mantra of Kamala Harris that “we have to have faith in what can be, unburdened by what has been.” (As I’ve observed elsewhere, Kamala’s deep thoughts and kindergarten explanations of geopolitics, expressed in what she imagines are Chestertonian cadences, call to mind Peter Sellers’ “Chauncey Gardner” character in the movie Being There, whose simpleminded non-sequiturs the beau monde convinced itself were the enigmatic pronouncements of a sage.)
In any case, the changes that such visionaries invariably advocate are merely the steady inertial creep of big government, which for the last fifty years has grown bigger, fatter, more parasitical, intrusive, and despotic with each election cycle—and no less so, alas, under the ersatz conservatism of the parties of the Right—in its steady encroachment on the foundational civil liberties and freedoms it is sworn to protect, even while the progressive State and its tentacular appendages have failed utterly to solve a single problem whose discovery (or invention) was first invoked as the reason for its growth.
Growth in government is not change; it is the closest thing to immutability under Aristotle’s moon. Reduction in the size of government—say, to that of the 1960s under old-fashioned liberals such as JFK—is change. But to the timidly static parties of both the Right and the Left, such talk is truly “scary” (as the late Canadian Prime Minister Paul Martin warned us so often). Boo!
As a radical conservative, I am regularly admonished by my students that one “cannot turn back the clock.” Why not? The Reformation turned back the clock from the early 16th century to ca. 33 A.D. The artists and Christian humanists of the Renaissance turned it back even earlier, to Hellenistic times. In 1948, in establishing the State of Israel, the world community turned the clock back to the tenth century before the New David, when under the Old David the Jewish people last presided over a minor empire in Palestine. Until about three decades ago, Marx, Engels, Lenin, et al. managed to turn back the clock of half the planet to the Stone Age, when tribal chieftains owned all property in the “name” of the tribe. Speaking of the Stone Age, the Rolling Stones are still turning back the clock whenever they perform before sold-out audiences of senescent flower children who, apparently, will never die, having once commingled their stamens and pistils in the mud of Woodstock and therein found the fountain of eternal youth.
Admittedly, not all of these experiments in historical regression have been happy ones. Take note, however, that the very worst of them are always celebrated by modern liberals as “progressive.” Remember Mao’s “Great Leap Forward”? Remember the 1970s, when it was cool to wear Mao jackets and quote from his Little Red Book; when even in the West our otherwise anti-religious priesthood of intellectuals presided happily over the superstitious elevation of this pudgy, simpleminded little mass murderer to the status of a god? Liberalism, of course, is always progressive, even when it thrusts mankind collectively back into the prehistoric slime. (But then liberalism’s definition of progress is any doctrine or ideology with which liberals agree.)
Some time in the 1960s, as I recall, the conservative writer James Burnham identified the unifying credo of liberalism as an irrational hatred of the West. At the time, Burnham had in mind the West’s protracted effort to defeat communism, an effort that struck so many Western liberals as anti-progressive.
In the minds of these anti-anti-communists, the opponents of communism were paranoid Dr. Strangeloves who fantasized that their enemies were lurking under every bed. Incomprehensibly, as they lamented, such lunatics succeeded at last in whipping up the nativist instincts of AmeriKKKa to embark on a great national witch-hunt. Witch-hunts are by definition crusades against an enemy that does not exist, and so indeed liberals evidently thought that communists didn’t exist either (at least, not in AmeriKKKa)—a rather odd belief, since the same leftists were so openly laudatory of “international socialism” and the efforts of the Soviet leadership to “grow” it, as we would say nowadays, worldwide.
Even today, in popular consciousness AmeriKKKa’s darkest age—second only to the dark age of slavery—is the “McCarthy era.” Hollywood can still be relied upon to make three films about the delusional excesses of this anti-communist menace to our constitutional liberties to the one it makes about the depredations of Lenin, Stalin, Mao, or Pol Pot. Somehow, the victims of McCarthyism have entered history as martyrs. It’s an odd development that we have made saints of those who downplayed or exculpated the worst totalitarian atrocities in the history of mankind, even as we censor, ostracize, bring up before human rights tribunals, and criminalize any opposition to the least article of progressive orthodoxy. (McCarthyism, anyone?)
If we concede for argument’s sake that “McCarthyism” as liberals have defined it was a stain on the American body politic, then the “McCarthyism” of the 1950s pales by comparison to its present hysterical iteration. The blacklists of the progressive State’s enemies have expanded vastly beyond the communist moles and sympathizers who had, as a matter of plain empirical fact, infiltrated government institutions during the Cold War. Today, with irenic defenders of pre-born life, parents who decline to “affirm” their own children’s gender dysphoria, students and teachers who contend that gender is binary, doctors and nurses who disagree with official government COVID protocols, peaceful demonstrators in Ottawa against despotic COVID mandates, or non-violent January 6 “insurgents” protesting against election corruption, even traditional Catholics who attend the Latin Mass, being placed on FBI, DHS, and CIA terrorist watch lists, while being black-balled by the their professional governing bodies and fired from their jobs, arrested and facing charges of “hate crimes” in human rights tribunals, or languishing in prison still awaiting their day in court, governments in Canada, the United States, and the “democratic” West are now ruled by a woke surveillance apparatus (appropriately dubbed the Censorship Industrial Complex) that would have turned the McCarthy of legend green with envy.
The New McCarthyites are veritably haunted by a paranoid delusion that there are homophobes, transphobes, misogynists, fascists, and white supremacists lurking under every bed. In any case, what the New McCarthyites assuredly share with the old leftist anti-anti-communists of the 1950s is the conviction that self-evident truths, to the extent that they diverge from progressive dogma, should be denounced and suppressed as “harmful misinformation” or “conspiracy theories.”