The Sound of One Hand Clapping

Hi,

Yesterday, Matt Continetti’s invaluable history of the American conservative movement finally went on sale. For those interested in this topic, I highly recommend it.

I wanted to open with that statement for two reasons. First, because I mean it. Second, because I want to pick up where I left off in my friendly disagreement with Matt at the end of our conversation on The Remnant.

I’m reluctant to call what follows a criticism, because one of the most annoying gripes for any author is to get grief about the book you didn’t write. On its own terms, The Right is very, very good and Matt accomplishes what he set out to do. He wanted to provide a richer political context for the history of the conservative movement. George Nash’s essential The Conservative Intellectual Movement In America Since 1945 is a very academic book (though it’s very well-written for an academic book). According to Matt, what was missing in Nash’s landmark book was a broader consideration of the interplay between the GOP and the conservative movement and he set out to provide it. And whatever my quibbles may be, he succeeds at doing that.

But here’s my problem. By focusing so exclusively on the right, many of the problems, dysfunctions, challenges, and moral failures of the conservative movement are (unintentionally) cast as uniquely right-wing phenomena. The ironic and, again, unintended upshot of this approach is that it actually tends to reinforce rather than rebut the liberal version of conservative history. It’s like being honest about your own shortcomings and misdeeds at an intervention: It’s worth doing, but it doesn’t—or shouldn’t—imply that everybody attending the intervention is without their own baggage.

I wasn’t going to write about any of this today, but then I saw this tweet from my friend Will Saletan. 

I do not dispute what Will says. Nor do I have any major disagreements with what Greg Sargent says about the right in the article Will links to. My problem is what they don’t say.

Picking up on Matt’s argument that much of what we’re seeing today with Trump and right-wing populism has a long history to it, Sargent writes:

… in Continetti’s telling, those events partly represented long-festering tendencies inside the movement and the GOP. When racist, white supremacist and alt-right elements sought to violently overturn democracy, he writes, “all of the unreason and hatred that had been slowly growing in the body of the Right burst into the open.”

To illuminate these tendencies, Continetti tells a story of conservatism that has often been marked by an elite inability or unwillingness to police extremism, and at times an active embrace of it.

For instance: The right’s noninterventionist streak during the lead-up to World War II too easily collapsed into Charles Lindbergh’s antisemitism and flirtation with Nazism. The anti-communism of the 1950s too easily shaded into support for Joe McCarthy’s witch hunts.

So, here’s the thing: It’s fine to point these things out, but it’s sort of the sound of one hand clapping.

Yes, the right had a noninterventionist streak in the lead up to World War II. You know who else did? Almost everyone. World War I was a crummy war, and pretty much everyone in America was like Roy Scheider in Jaws 2 explaining to the town council that they didn’t want to go through that hell again. A 1939 Gallup poll conducted from September 1 to September 6 found that 84 percent of Americans opposed sending troops to fight in the war, which had started on September 1. In January of 1940, another poll found that 88 percent of Americans were opposed to declaring war on the Axis powers in Europe. It wasn’t until Pearl Harbor that this ambivalence was overtaken by events. I get that there were some bad right-wing isolationists, but if opposing war in Europe is all the evidence of bad right-wingery, then almost nine in 10 Americans were bad right-wingers at the time.

And it wasn’t just a supermajority of the general public that opposed war (hardly a trivial data point in a democracy). Much of the cream of the American left was just as isolationist as the cream of the American right (to the extent a clear “right” existed then. That’s a longer conversation.) The head of the American Socialist Party, Norman Thomas, was a truly decent, passionate, though wrong-headed noninterventionist who even opposed the Lend-Lease Act and other efforts to aid Britain in 1940. Other noninterventionists of one stripe or another included Oswald Garrison Villard, Charles Beard, foundational philosopher John Dewey, Joseph Kennedy, Bernard Baruch, labor leader John L. Lewis, Nobel prize winning author Sinclair Lewis, Frank Lloyd Wright, and progressive hero Robert La Follette. Beard, arguably the most important and influential progressive historian in the first half of the 20th century, wasn’t just an isolationist, he turned into a kind of conspiracy theorist, insisting at book length in 1948 that FDR lied us into war (a defensible, albeit highly contestable, claim) and that FDR maneuvered the Japanese into attacking us (less defensible, more contestable).

Heck, you know who else was sounding awfully noninterventionist as late as October  1940? FDR, who vowed on the campaign trail, “I have said this before, but I shall say it again and again and again: your boys are not going to be sent into any foreign wars.”

Liberal historians and journalists have tended to focus on the right-wing isolationists and the antisemitism of Charles Lindbergh in the last moments before the war while utterly erasing the isolationism of the left.

(I have no desire to defend Lindbergh more than he deserves, but, for what it’s worth, the evidence for his antisemitism is based almost entirely on one indefensible quote from one speech and his general Teutonphilia. Lindbergh’s own biographer, Scott Berg, couldn’t find any other evidence of antisemitism in the man’s past.)

Thus, whenever conservatives oppose an intervention or foreign policy liberals support, you’ll invariably find some politician or pundit wringing their hands about the dark history of the right’s isolationist past coming back to haunt us. But when George McGovern runs on the plank of “Come Home America,” or when John Kerry runs on retreating from Iraq and committing to “nation-building at home,” no one sees the ghosts of isolationism coming back. For example, Republicans who opposed NAFTA were routinely dubbed “isolationists” while Democrats weren’t, even though Republicans as a whole were more in favor of NAFTA than Democrats were. Bernie Sanders is every bit as much within the American tradition of isolationism as Robert Taft or Ron Paul.

I can do much the same thing with the anti-communism and witch hunt stuff Sargent alludes to. Yeah, the right struggled with how to deal with Joseph McCarthy and his drunken demagoguery. Who can deny that? But if you’re going to write a story about America’s struggle with the excesses of anti-communism, you have to include all manner of things that complicate the narrative.

(First, I’d lose my anti-Communist decoder ring if I didn’t mention up front that Communist infiltration in America was a legitimate problem, and I don’t just mean the Alger Hiss and Rosenbergs stuff. Still, since this is a bit of a digression, I’ll restrain myself to a single example. The Progressive Party, led by FDR’s one-time Vice President Henry Wallace, was essentially a Communist front. Legendary left-wing journalist I.F. Stone wrote in 1950 that “the Communists have been the dominant influence in the Progressive Party … If it had not been for the Communists, there would have been no Progressive Party.” John Abt, the Progressives’ chief lawyer, was a member of Alger Hiss’ cell. Lee Pressman, who headed the platform committee, was a Communist. Wallace’s speechwriter, Charles Kramer, was exposed by the Venona papers as an active Soviet spy. Even Rexford Tugwell—arguably the most left-wing member of FDR’s brain trust—felt he had to leave because the Communists were ruining everything.)

Second, and more to the point, the Democratic Party largely invented the first Red Scare, which was far more brutal and invidious than the one Joe McCarthy was involved in. In the second, McCarthyite Red Scare, some real and alleged Communists lost their jobs and were treated unfairly. In the first one, Communists, real and accused, were put in camps and deported. Mobs killed people. They tarred and feathered Wobblies. People were put in jail for praising Lenin. Eugene V. Debs and thousands of other non-Bolshevik socialists were thrown in jail, essentially for their beliefs, including mere opposition to the war. The Palmer Raids were far more of an affront to American decency and constitutionalism than anything that took place in the 1950s. As longtime readers know, I can go on at great length about the bad things the Wilson administration did during World War I, often in the name of hunting reds. But I should move on.

Take pretty much any -ism that is supposedly a unique, demonic force on the right and I can make the argument, with countless examples to back it up, that the left has struggled with the same -ism.

Do I have to explain that racism has been a big problem for the Democratic Party? The 1924 Democratic Convention was nicknamed “the Klanbake” for a reason. George Wallace, the populist segregationist demagogue, was a Democrat. The ranks of the founding generation of progressive eggheads—the intellectual authors of the minimum wage and the American welfare state—were shot through with racists and eugenicists. FDR worked hand in glove with the Southern segregationists to pass the New Deal. And contrary to popular mythmaking, a lot of those racist Southern Democrats weren’t “conservatives,” they were simply big-spending progressive who happened to also be racists. The annoying thing is that it was only after—long, long after—the end of slavery and segregation and the decline of racism generally in the U.S. that Southerners joined the GOP in larger numbers. In the liberal telling, the migration of the children, the grandchildren, or the great-grandchildren of virulent racist Southerners into the GOP is proof that the GOP has a racism problem. But when actual racists swelled the ranks of the Democratic Party, racism was an American problem, not a Democratic problem.

By all means, let us condemn racism in the ranks of the right today. I’ve been doing it for a long time and I will continue to. But tell the full story.

Similarly, because I distrust unfettered populism but cherish conservatism, I have no problem exploring—and deploring—the baleful influence populism has had and continues to have on the right. But the threat of populism isn’t a right-wing problem, it’s an American problem. Hell, it’s a problem inherent to all democracies precisely because democracies rightly extol and elevate “the people” and, from time to time, are antagonistic to the vital non-democratic institutions that preserve liberty (another longer conversation). The Democratic Party has struggled for its entire history with the challenges posed by populism. The most famous populist in American history, William Jennings Bryan, was a three-time Democratic nominee for president. The most dangerous and dictatorial elected populist in American history—Huey Long—was a Democrat. Those “people-powered” movements of the 1960s? For good or for ill, that was a whole lotta populism, and the effects of it gave the Republican Party a new lease on life and have continued to haunt the Democratic Party. What is the Bernie Sanders wing of the party if not populist?

Just consider the respective treatment of the Occupy Wall Street movement, Black Lives Matter, and the Tea Parties. All three of these were expressions of populist anger and frustration. Only one was treated by the chroniclers of the mainstream narrative as a scary example of dangerous populism.

For long periods of the 20th century, anti-Americanism was a much bigger problem on the left than it is on today’s right. But now parts of the right want that baton. The “conspiratorial style in American politics”—to use Hofstadter’s phrase—has bounced back and forth between the right and left for a century. I think the problem of racism in America is wildly exaggerated, but if you’re looking for the recrudescent form we associate with the past, it’s much easier to find on the right than the left these days. Although I would argue that the identity politics of the left often carries with it its own bigotries, even if they hide under slogans like “anti-racism,” “anti-colonialism,” and “anti-Zionism.” They may be less crude, but they have far greater influence on our culture and institutions.

It’s worth remembering that nationalism and populism but also classical liberalism were in their origins liberal or left-wing or revolutionary, as they were intended to overthrow the small-c conservatism that defined European politics for more than 1,000 years. Since then, these -isms have bounced around from right to left quite a lot.

None of this is to say that the problems and challenges the two sides face are symmetrical. For instance, economic populism is much more conducive to the goals and aesthetics of the left as we know it. Cultural populism, for want of a better term, is much more at home on the right. But Anglo-American conservatism, as opposed to right-wing nationalism, is simply ill-suited to managing and tempering a perpetual climate of anger. That anger is corrosive and leads to the dissolution of safeguards conservatism is designed to protect and maintain.

Again, none of this is intended as direct criticism of Matt’s impressive book. It’s just that there’s more to the story.