Contemporary Conservatism and the Forgetfulness of the Past

The Great Debate: Edmund Burke, Thomas Paine, and the Birth of Right and Left. Yuval Levin. New York: Basic Books, 2014.

More and more abound reminders of how much contemporary conservatism is built on forgetfulness of the past.  Last December saw National Review memorialize Nelson Mandela as a world leader of “unmatched moral authority,” though 1986 had seen National Review founder William F. Buckley, Jr. decry “overnight political equality” in South Africa and 1990 saw Buckley compare Mandela to Vladimir Lenin.  Perhaps it is providential that Yuval Levin’s book saw publication during the week of Mandela’s death.  Like the elegies for Mandela recited by popular conservatives, Levin’s book comes as a reminder of how hollow and trivial our political arguments have become.

Levin’s biographical blurb identifies him as a fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center, founder and editor of National Affairs, a contributor to the Weekly Standard and (of course) to National Review.  But Levin is not only a pundit and, in fact, holds a Ph.D. from the Committee on Social Thought at the University of Chicago.  Many years ago, he wrote an interesting book (Tyranny of Reason: The Origins and Consequences of the Social Scientific Outlook, University Press of America, 2000) that no doubt would engage visitors to Voegelin View.  Apart from his lapses into popular political journalism and his stint on the second Bush Administration’s domestic policy staff, Levin is a creditable commentator on the deeper questions of political theory whose carefully formed understandings of Burke are evident in The Great Debate.  His book and its promise to describe “the Birth of Right and Left,” however, suffer from their entrapment in the impoverished discourse of American politics.

As I have suggested, Levin understands Burke quite well.  The Great Debate really is a book about Edmund Burke – and, a good one if we isolate its treatment of Burke from Levin’s stated purposes.  Indeed, Levin’s bias toward Burke is quite evident.  To give one example, Levin’s Chapter on “Justice and Order” is preoccupied almost entirely with Burke, devoting thirteen pages to a section on Burke and only nine to Paine.  Lest this reviewer should seem picayune for counting pages and highlighting a perhaps-negligible four-page difference, the first five pages of that section on Paine, in fact, are an apologia against Paine’s criticisms of Burke.  Later, Levin abandons all pretense to quarrel with his own subject.  Where Paine “accuse[s] Burke of ignoring actual circumstances” (170) surrounding the American War for Independence, Levin argues with Paine that, “In fact [emphasis added], Burke’s case against the actions of the British government involved some of his clearest and most adamant defenses of prescription against abstract reason” (171).  Any “Great Debate” deserves a more detached moderator, and it is Thomas Paine’s poor misfortune to be 205 years dead past the point of objecting.

There is not too much surprise in a National Review contributor or a University of Chicago Ph.D. holding Burke in special regard.  That is forgivable, even if it undermines the framework of a “Debate.”  Levin’s book really is at its best in its treatment of Burke, and never better than when he describes the roles of prudence and prescription in Burke’s historicism.  Levin underscores an inevitable givenness in Burke’s account of historical existence and political life, that “each man is in society not by choice but by birth,” and, “the facts of his birth – the family, the station, and the nation he is born into – exert inescapable demands on him” (101).  This is a neat summary of the most politically relevant facts of Burkean conservatism, and Levin’s book perhaps might be characterized best as the most full and deep introduction to Edmund Burke’s political ideas that I ever have encountered for a popular reading audience.  But that work founders where Levin attempts to index the Burke-Paine debate against our contemporary divisions between “Right and Left.”

Levin’s effort to identify today’s conservatives with Burke hinges on a generality, asserting that they share “a great deal of Burke’s basic disposition” (229).  Where we find specificity, it is in Levin’s diagnosis that, “Today’s conservatives are thus too rhetorically strident and are far too open to the siren song of hyperindividualism, and they generally lack a nonradical theory of the liberal society” (229).  To state the point without adornments, today’s conservatives follow Paine who sought “to liberate the individual” (229) and who held to a radical view of liberal society.  Especially among many of today’s conservatives, a Paine-ish individualism lurks in the shadows of calls for smaller government (“Our goal is to shrink government to the size where we can drown it in a bathtub,” said Grover Norquist) and government itself was regarded as “the problem” by the reigning icon in conservative politics.

Seen in this light, Burke vanishes entirely from the stage when we turn our gaze to the present political scene – which may explain why Levin, who is so fond of Burke, gives us not much more than brief generalities.  The reader looking for Levin’s specific treatment of how this “Debate” underlies distinctions between “Right and Left” must wait for the book’s last four pages, and there finds only this scant satisfaction.  This core problem is so unavoidable that not only can Levin not avert it in an NPR interview about his book, but it is his host who identifies the most relevant implication (“Is it strange that we’re in this political moment in which liberals can seem rather conservative because they’re arguing, we’ve built up a pretty good country here over the last few generations and it’s conservatives who seem to want to tear everything down?”) with a clarity that lands like a punch to the nose.

The Great Debate succeeds really only to identify Burke as a figure whose political wisdom is almost perfectly absent from contemporary politics, and whose legacy certainly is undetectable among those we call conservatives.   Arguably, it is on the Left where we find those who appear more aligned to Burke’s ideas.   In part, that is an unavoidable problem built into a study of two eighteenth century writers that is marketed to explain politics in the 2010’s.  Levin acknowledges rightly that, “Anyone exploring the views of Burke and Paine will repeatedly encounter [sic], as we have, the question of context” (219).  What does it mean to be a Burkean conservative born into a post-industrial welfare state shaped by a Progressive Era and the post-war boom?  Levin’s book does not turn to this question at all, yet this is the mountain of context into which his effort to explain “Right and Left” runs headlong.  How bound is today’s Burkean conservative to each word written by a Burke who never imagined circumstances like ours?

More than thirty years ago, another political pundit-cum-conservative intellectual wrote a not dissimilar book – Statecraft as Soulcraft: What Government Does (Simon & Schuster, 1983). George Will’s book engaged these difficult questions that Levin somewhat avoids.  Will had the perceptiveness to write that, “I will not pretend that the careers of, say, Ronald Reagan and Franklin Roosevelt involve serious philosophical differences” (23), and such perceptiveness gets us nearer to seeing clearly the overstated differences between the American “Right and Left” that Levin’s book, despite its own evidence, much overstates.  Where Will succeeded a little better was in his willingness to explore the fuller implications of applying Burkean principles to contemporary politics.  He wrote that we are threatened today “less by ‘big’ government than by an abdication of government,” (22) and championed a notion of “strong government conservatism” entirely at home with an ambitious program of government action that included the welfare state.  For Will, this reflected an embrace of classic virtue politics through the prism of the modern state, a Burkean confidence in the power of government to do good that is as far away as it is possible to get from the conservatives that Levin describes.

Today’s conservatives not only have forgotten Burke, but even have forgotten the still-living George Will.  The result is the deracinated conservatism that Levin presents, what Barry Goldwater might have called ‘an echo’ of Paine, not ‘a choice.’  That, in turn, begets the impoverished discourse of this time in which the only political distinctions we seem able to recognize are between one sort of individualism and another.  In its well-informed and clear presentation of Burke, Levin’s book ultimately comes to the reader only as a reminder of this American political problem, and how deeply entrenched it is.

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