Today's conservatives, like Hannity, long for a return to Reaganesque Conservatism; they long for a candidate like Reagan, but know, of course, that he will never come again. Small government, strong defense, personal responsibility: Hannity pleads with Republicans to return to these Reaganesque roots.
Hannity should read George Will. Will knew that Reagan's call for smaller government went against the desires of the diverse groups that constitute the American public. Reagan's legacy, Will knew, could only be failure.
We think it behooves today's liberals/progressives to insist that Reaganism was a failure and was destined to become a failure from the moment Reagan embraced Frank Meyer's "fusionism." We think that today's LPs should stress that conservatism, rightly understood, cannot hold.
POPULIST CONSERVATISM
We define populist conservatism as a political appeal to mass man; generally made in terms of an attack on various elites. Populist politicians identify themselves as supporters of workers and working families.
It has been noted for instance that Ronald Reagan campaigned as a democrat for Harry Truman in 1948 by attacking corporate greed, defending the common man and attacking Republican tax cuts that favored the rich. Running as a republican in 1980 Reagan kept the populism but attacked government, rather than corporations, as the enemy of the common man and working families.
II
Several months before Ronald Reagan’s election in November, 1980 and his subsequent speech before the Conservative Political Action Congress (CPAC) in March, 1981 George F. Will pointed out the difficulty with the Frank Meyer doctrine of "fusion" that Reagan was about to embrace.
"The Republican platform [of 1980] stresses two themes that are not as harmonious as Republicans suppose....One is cultural conservatism. The other is capitalist dynamism. The latter dissolves the former....Karl Marx, who had a Reaganesque respect for capitalism’s transforming power, got one thing right: capitalism undermines traditional social structures and values....Republicans see no connection between the cultural phenomena they deplore and the capitalist culture they promise to intensify...."[Will, Pursuit Of Virtue, Page 36].
III
In his speech before the CPAC dinner in March, 1981, newly elected president Ronald Reagan paid homage to Frank Meyer.
"It was Frank Meyer who reminded us that the robust individualism of the American experience was part of the deeper current of Western learning and culture. He pointed out that a respect for law, an appreciation for tradition, and regard for the social consensus that gives stability to our public and private institutions, these civilized ideas must still motivate us even as we seek a new economic prosperity based on reducing government interference in the marketplace."
But whereas Burke could say that a man’s individual status in life is assigned by a "Divine Tactic," Reagan holds out hope that an individual might be able to affect his status in life through his own efforts in a free market.
IV
We credit Ronald Reagan for ushering in a "populist conservatism" in the United States. But prior to Reagan conservative intellectuals had a persistent disdain for "mass man."
That disdain still persists today among the current crop of populist conservatives but is disguised by the conservative rhetoric about their disdain for big government and liberals. We submit that the disdain is still there and the assumption of conservative superiority is still there.
Here is a sampling of conservatives’ vintage disdain of the common man.
V
Albert Jay Nock, writing in 1937, has a thorough discussion of what he means by "the masses."
"The mass-man is one who has neither the force of intellect to apprehend the principles issuing in what we know as the humane life, nor the force of character to adhere to those principles steadily and strictly as laws of conduct; and because such people make up the great, the overwhelming majority of mankind, they are called collectively the masses.....The picture which Isaiah presents of the Judean masses is most unfavorable....(Mass-man) appears as not only weak-minded and weak-willed, but as by consequence knavish, arrogant, grasping, dissipated, unprincipled, unscrupulous. The mass-woman...(shares) all the mass-man’s untoward qualities...."[Buckley and Kesler, Page 433]
Plato, Nock says, had similar disdain for the Athenian masses, "comparing them to a herd of ravenous wild beasts."
Bernard Iddings Bell writes in 1952 that the "chief threat to America come from within America" - "from the complacent, vulgar, mindless, homogenized, comfort seeking, nouveau riche culture of the common man." [Nash, Page 46]
Jose Ortega Y Gassett wrote a book entitled The Revolt of the Masses, published in 1930, in which he thoroughly explores the opinions of elite intellectuals concerning the masses.
He identifies the masses as the assemblage of persons who have no special qualifications or talents and observes that civilization is created by and depends upon minorities who are specially qualified.
But he believes that the mass man of the 20th century is of a different character than has ever been seen before in history. In the past, he says, life was hard for rich and poor alike. Psychologically the masses assented to their status and never believed they should occupy the places nor enjoy the privileges of the specially qualified. But with the greater affluence of the 20th century the psychology of the masses had changed.
"The characteristic of the hour is that the commonplace mind, knowing itself to be commonplace, has the assurance to proclaim the rights of the commonplace and to impose them wherever it will....The mass crushes beneath it everything that is different, everything that is excellent, individual, qualified and select." [Ortega Y Gassett, Page 18]
Richard Hofstadter, in his book The American Political Tradition, begins by commenting on the Founding Fathers’ less than salutary view of the common man in the colonies.
"Throughout the secret discussions at the Constitutional Convention it was clear that this distrust of man was first and foremost a distrust of the common man and democratic rule." [Hofstadter, Page 4]
Hamilton believed that the masses "seldom judge or determine right." Gouverneur Morris referred to the mob as reptiles. [Hofstadter, Pages 4-5]
Today’s conservatives readily acknowledge the Founding Fathers’ distrust of democracy and the common people. They assert that the Founding Fathers and the Constitution are conservative and believe that the true American tradition is conservative.
Do Today’s Conservatives Have Contempt For The Masses?
Times have changed. People in the United States are relatively affluent, well educated, work in skilled information technology jobs; we have a large educated and affluent middle-class; Americans have faith in economic mobility and believe that any one of us can become rich.
Kesler addresses this sea change in the conservative attitude in his introduction to Keeping The Tablets, commenting on the developing conservative political movement as a result of Goldwater’s candidacy and Nixon’s "protracted humiliation".
"By far the most striking change, as conservatism became a serious political force, was the virtual abandonment of the mass society analysis that, in the beginning, had colored both traditionalism and libertarianism....But today a kind of conservative populism has largely taken the place of the dichotomy between mass and elite; conservatism has to that extent become democratized, a process that began as long ago as the Hiss-Chambers case, the McCarthy crusade - and the struggle against Communism in general. What is new is the thorough domestication of that democratic impulse and its reification in the career of Ronald Reagan."
Kesler goes on to say that the actions of the Supreme Court, especially Roe v. Wade has energized millions of people and made them a constituency of the conservative movement.
Something Had To Change:
A Shift In The Contradictions Of Conservatism
The basic principles of conservatism were [and are, we maintain] simply incompatible. Something had to give.
From Kesler we see the beginning of a realignment in the priorities of conservative principles. The elements to be re-aligned were these:
- What is the cause of man’s fate? This is the element which gave. Burke said that God ordained man’s fate as He ordained orders and classes. Free market theory says that man makes his own fate. The democratization of conservatism was accomplished by downgrading determinism in favor of the free market.
- What are the characteristics of the masses? Up to this point many conservative writers had characterized mass man as unworthy and incapable of governing himself; possessed of appetites that must be restrained by a government that is the province of more elite men.
Roe v. Wade stirred the passions of what would have been unreliable mass man. Conservatives had to decide whether to side with the passions of the mob or with the elite on the Supreme Court. They sided with the passions of the mob and brought them into the political orbit of conservatism.
Mass man (the mob) had to be redefined and redeemed. Conservatives’ anti- majoritarian principle also had to be reversed.
- Subscription to Traditional Christian and American Values was elevated. The characteristics of mass man were elevated and redeemed to the degree that mass man embraced the absolute values of God, family and patriotism.
American history was also re-prioritized. The Founding Fathers’ conservatism was shifted from a scepticism about the masses to a conservatism of liberty and freedom, of individual effort.
- Elite must become a negative thing according to conservative rhetoric. At the same time the distinctions of class because of the inequality of natural abilities must be preserved.
Whereas previous populists, including Ronald Reagan in 1948, had attacked big corporations as an elite that did not share the common man’s economic interests, conservatives now re-defined the enemy of the common man to be liberals, intellectuals, the media and bureaucrats who do not share the common man’s cultural values, primarily religion and family values. Conservative rhetoric positioned these groups as the modern elite.
- Inequality must be habilitated through personal responsibility, which takes the place of "God’s tactical ordination."
God has been downgraded as a direct cause of man’s fate and personal responsibility has been emphasized (it was always a part of conservative rhetoric) because personal responsibility is a characteristic consonant with free market individualism.
- Since the majority of mass men have been rehabilitated in conservative rhetoric this places pressure on conservatives’ traditional rationale for a representative government and its paternalistic relationship to the masses. Heretofore the representative government protected mass men from themselves and made decisions that were best for the country without succumbing to the fluctuating passions of mass man.
Now the wishes of the majority must be rehabilitated to mount a self-proclaimed "culture war" to re-moralize America because of the degeneration of morals in the 20th century.
Again, this is done through the aegis of Traditional Cultural Values. Traditional Values is re-defined as the view of the majority of Americans, rather than a private choice. Politicians are elected on Traditional Values campaigns, with the avowed purpose of reshaping the laws of the land to reflect the majority’s value system.
Thus was mass man, whose character previously had been so despised by earlier conservatives, transformed into morally superior man whose passions and appetites should now become the law of the land.
In Summary: Conservatives redefined and redeemed the common man as one who embraces Traditional Values. By embracing those values the common man becomes worthy and overcomes the problems of his intrinsic human nature of original sin, uncontrolled appetites, and low and base instincts. This change in human nature enables the common man to function successfully in the free market. This is Frank Meyer’s "fusionism."