Do conservatives need communists?

You probably notice that political movements are at their most coherent when defining what they are against, not what they are for.

They know what they hate and have no trouble identifying their bugbears in concrete terms. By contrast, when outlining things they love, they often begin to talk in slogans and utopian generalities.

In that sense, British conservatives are lucky. While sharing most of our hates with conservatives elsewhere, we have our positive desiderata delivered to us on the platter of history. A British conservative wishes to conserve whatever little of Christendom the Enlightenment has so far neglected to destroy.

The pre-Enlightenment triad of ‘God, king and country’ is thus a slogan, but not, as it were, a very sloganeering one. Unlike most slogans, it’s not general but specific and substantive. British political conservatism is out to preserve what’s left of Christendom, including the country’s constitution built around church, monarch and Parliament.

American political conservatives face a harder task. They can’t possibly advocate conserving pre-Enlightenment virtues because their country is essentially a post-Enlightenment construct. The Founders rejected throne and church as the linchpins of statehood, concentrating instead on such Enlightenment entitlements as liberty, rights and widespread happiness.

Since they couldn’t ground such good things in the traditions of Christendom, they had to create a secular, materialistic republic – this regardless of how many Americans remained pious. That’s partly why Locke became more influential in America than in his native land.

Guided by his hand, American conservatives moved protection of property higher up the pecking order of political virtues than it traditionally was in British conservatism, where it was regarded as a vital derivative of the country’s ethos, not its centrepiece.

There was still plenty of room left for cultural conservatism in America. The country’s state, constituted along secular, materialist lines, had to co-exist with a largely religious population – just as the British state, largely constituted along religious lines, co-exists with an increasingly irreligious population.

But American political conservatism, bereft of positive ideas it didn’t share with libertarianism, found itself in the doldrums of an identity problem. However, it came to life when Roosevelt’s socialist New Deal gave it a target to snipe at. Unable to define itself as anti-Enlightenment, American conservatism now happily defined itself as anti-New Deal.

Once the world began to rush towards a major war, conservative opposition to the New Deal turned isolationist. The America First Committee led the way in attempts to keep the US out of the war, with some of its spokesmen, such as Henry Ford and Charles Lindbergh, openly expressing pro-Nazi and anti-Semitic sympathies – just as many MAGA adherents are today sympathetic to Russian fascism.

(Ford had been financing Hitler’s movement since before the Putsch, which was first reported by the New York Times in December, 1922. In recognition, Hitler had a wall of his private office decorated with a portrait of Ford. In 1938 Henry Ford was awarded the Grand Cross of the German Eagle, the highest Nazi decoration for foreigners.)

Not that the AFC was just conservative. It was a broad coalition including many Republicans, Democrats, progressives and even communists who had all arrived at a common isolationist destination from different starting points. But until 7 December, 1941, conservatives occupied the largest wing in that house.

Three days after Pearl Harbor the US declared war on Japan, and the AFC had no way to go but out. New Deal interventionism laudably won the argument about foreign policy in the 1940s, just as it had regrettably won one about the economy in the 1930s.

In the 1950s, new conservatism began to take shape. The anti-Communist cause championed by Sen. McCarthy and the House Committee on Un-American Activities had a galvanising effect, injecting new energy into the conservative cause.

It was in the 1950s that conservatives like Frank Meyer, Russell Kirk, James Burnham, Whittaker Chambers, Leo Strauss and especially William Buckley became household names. They wrote best-selling books, made speeches attended by thousands, debated liberals in all media, published articles and essays, founded journals and began to command a sizeable share of voice.

That was perhaps the most prosperous decade in American history, and conservatives couldn’t credibly attack the government as insufficiently capitalist. It was however possible to attack it as insufficiently anti-Communist, and even poor old President Eisenhower was accused of being a crypto-commie.

The danger of defining conservatism in largely negative terms was inadvertently highlighted by Strom Thurmond who once said that Eisenhower was a communist. “Not at all,” objected his interlocutor. “Ike is an anti-communist.” “I don’t care,” retorted the indomitable senator, “what kind of communist he is.” He probably didn’t mean that the way it sounded but, as an initiator of political thought, anti-communism is indeed nothing but communism with an opposite sign.

Still, the anti-communist crusade coalesced the conservative movement into a cohesive entity, giving it a sustaining momentum that lasted for four decades. But when communism collapsed, or rather transformed itself into fascisoid imperialism, US conservatism found itself at a loose end.

The time came to ask the perennial Quo vadis? question. The old interventionist mantra had been usurped by neoconservatives, who harmonised it with essentially statist, welfarist strains. The genesis of neoconservatism was described by its founder, Irving Kristol:

“I have been a neo-Marxist, a neo-Trotskyist, a neosocialist, a neoliberal, and finally, a neoconservative.” That is why, “… in 1964, only a few neoconservatives supported Barry Goldwater while the rest of us went along with Hubert Humphrey.”

Kristol evidently saw no contradiction in reconciling what he tried to pass for conservatism with supporting liberal candidates for high political office. He sensed the inner logic of neoconservatism: habitual interventionism to either evangelical or imperial ends cried out for a big, powerful state.

That being anathema for conservatives, they had no way forward. They had to shift into reverse and move back, towards the area that used to be occupied by America First.

This explains the current MAGA takeover of the Republican Party. The idea of America’s greatness as a goal to achieve or, if somehow lost, restore isn’t unique to Trump. It’s the essence of America’s self-deifying creed, first succinctly enunciated by the first settlers.

America was to them a collective apostle called upon to carry out a divine mission. However, even as monasticism eventually split into hermetic and proselytising strains, so did the concept of America’s greatness, as understood by conservatives, acquire aspects of both interventionism and isolationism.

The collapse of communism left conservatively inclined Americans gasping for air. Russia was no longer an enemy threatening the American way of life. Moreover, the noises coming out of Russia were consonant with their own beliefs: traditional values, religiosity, strong family leaving no room for assorted perversions, private enterprise.

That sounded as if new Russia was closer to their heart than their own governments jammed to the gunwales with liberal Ivy Leaguers. And yes, subsequent developments suggested that Russia wasn’t such a close friend of American conservatives after all. But the initial momentum still wouldn’t let them regard Russia as an enemy.

Hence the urge to leave those senile Europeans to their own devices and concentrate on what it was that made America great in the first place: thrift, enterprise and Weberian Protestant work ethic. And America didn’t need any foreign stimulation to practise such virtues. If any country could be a successful autarky, America was it.

The moment any country begins to clamour for grandeur, the door is flung open for demagogues defining greatness in ways that suit them best. For example, an equally persuasive argument could be made that it was Wilsonian and Rooseveltian interventionism that was largely responsible for turning America into a global empire, the world’s greatest superpower.

But that argument was now associated with liberal internationalism, something alien and hostile. America, a conservative, great America, was happy to stay in her own comfy shell for the whole family. That’s what greatness meant.

American political conservatism thus found itself at a crossroads with every arrow pointing backwards, and it’s happy to let Trump do the driving. Getting closer to current issues, this explains MAGA’s widespread reluctance to come to the Ukraine’s aid. But there is also a wider, more general lesson to learn.

Opposed as it is to the Enlightenment view of the world, real Western conservatism is incompatible with the post-Enlightenment world. Everything we see in Britain, Europe and especially the US is a melange of conservative simulacra, be it neoconservatism, liberalism, anarchism or MAGA.

British conservatives are also bereft of self-confidence, but at least we have something to hang on to, a frayed rope we can still use to climb back to a conservative Britain of yore. Alone among Western nations we combine a monarchy with an established church, and our head of state is still anointed, not elected or appointed.

Such are the pitons we can use for a successful ascent before the rope snaps. The likelihood of any such rise is slim, but it’s still better than none. And British conservatism, unlike its American counterpart, doesn’t have to rely on the catalyst of a foreign enemy to come back to life.

In the absence of such a foe, MAGA just may be the best America can hope for. I wish the country the best of luck – when all is said and done, America’s success is to some extent ours as well. But America’s understanding of conservatism isn’t ours. To borrow Mark Twain’s phrase, it’s our second cousin thrice removed.