The difference between traditionalist conservatives and libertarian conservatives in America today is not simply analogous to the difference between eighteenth-century British Tories and Whigs. It may be identical.
I have excavated the old piece of literary-political journalism below, from The American Spectator, as a curiosity. One sees therein a young American conservative, during the Age of Reagan, criticizing the ideological fetish of "limited government" and citing Samuel Johnson as an authority on sovereignty.
Samuel Johnson (1709-1784), known as "Dr. Johnson," because of his honorary degrees from Oxford and Trinity College Dublin, was the author of the English Dictionary, an important early editor of Shakespeare's plays, a biographer of English poets, and a neoclassical poet himself. The fact that today I must explain who he was is further evidence of the decline of literary culture. In another age, Anglophones regularly read the long, almost novelistic biography of him by James Boswell; and people who learned to love Johnson from that biography often went on to read his "moral essays" from The Rambler, The Idler, and The Adventurer.
Johnson was the friend of politicians, a parliamentary reporter and also a ghost-writer for the law lectures of Sir Robert Chambers, Blackstone's immediate successor as Vinerian Professor of Common Law at Oxford. In sum, Johnson possessed all the intellectual preparation as well as practical observation to make him a political thinker of some stature. Unfortunately, he only wrote a few political pamphlets and did not compile a treatise against Hobbes and Locke. A good dissertation could be written on Johnson's Toryism as an outgrowth of his understanding of the English civil wars and the emergence of the Whig and Tory factions. In the early 1980's I wanted to write such a dissertation but received no meaningful encouragement. The standard work in those days on Johnson's politics was a book by Donald Greene, a liberal who wanted Johnson also to appear a liberal. Sentimentality is not a sound basis for critical study.
For most of the eighteenth century, Britain had virtual one-party rule. The Tories were disorganized and politically irrelevant minor country squires. The Whigs were factionalized but in force. In America the people persecuted as "Tories" were for the most part Whigs loyal to the Crown. The American rebels were anti-monarchical British Whigs in spirit, and in attitude they ran the gamut of British Whig mentalities, from classical republicans to proto-Jacobins to millenialist sectarians. The unfair treatment that was dished out to the Whig colonist by the Whig imperialist thus had a Whig at either end. And Johnson's defense of empire against the colonists was thus less than comforting to the imperial regime.
Johnson's few political writings are entertaining to read. In the pamphlet on America, "Taxation No Tyranny," he charges the colonial rebels with hypocrisy on a number of points: they are slave-owners who cry for liberty, and they are advocates of religious freedom whose paranoia is aroused by the British emancipation of Catholics in Quebec via the Quebec Act of 1774. He suggests that the rebels seek to seduce the Québécois into a rebel alliance with the ultimate aim of suppressing their religion when independence has been achieved. Though he has defended the empire against the American colonists, he is critical of the cost of empire in his perennially relevant "Thoughts on the Late Transactions Respecting Falkland's Islands." In "The False Alarm," he mocks the absurdity of British country elections where the semi-literate who, knowing nothing of the issues, participate because it gratifies their vanity to show that they are able to write their own names.
In my youth I maintained that there was enough substance in Johnson's political utterances from which to know his Toryism as a coherent worldview, and to know it as an alternative or corrective to the Whiggism of Burke. Famously, Russell Kirk had used Burke as a means of defining an American conservatism that was a coherent worldview and not merely a rear-guard movement for the protection of private interest against American liberalism. Of course Kirk loved both writers; their "conservatisms" are highly compatible; and Kirk liked calling himself an American Tory. There were indeed different modes of Whiggism in Burke's time, and Burke was a "right-wing" Whig. The fact is that Burke's critique of the French revolution led ultimately to the refounding of the Tory Party. While the American Whigs who fomented the colonial revolt of 1776 varied so widely in attitude, most tended to be less Burkean and more Lockean, albeit that the conservatism of the conservative founding fathers has been under-reported. Reaganite conservatism was likewise less Burkean and more Lockean. It was my little literary-journalistic project to use Johnson as an authority and a symbol to promote a swing in the other direction. It was a strategy for dealing with people who resisted theory but could at least think in terms of a mythical history.
The occasion for this literary sally was a hatchet job by a minor conservative journalist named Sobran on a major one named Will. Who they were ultimately does not matter. The book under review, called Statecraft as Soulcraft, whatever its true merit, ultimately does not matter. One of the issues at stake was the Reaganite project of downsizing the welfare state. Today, with the onset of socialized medicine, the question of what to do about the welfare state has never been more crucial. Most memorably, Johnson said that " A decent provision for the poor is the true test of civilization." This is a proposition worth qualifying and defining until it makes sense and leaves the realm of pure sentiment behind. The first thing to do is to juxtapose it with that line from Ralph Waldo Emerson, "Are they my poor?" While the radical Whiggism which is called libertarianism today merely says, "that if any would not work, neither should he eat." Johnson thought he knew who the poor were, as an English class; and indeed he had been among the poor as well as the rich. Today the question of the "decent provision" is a question of who is entitled to that provision—in an immigrant nation where any number of the world's poor could decide to cross the borders in order to take the share being offered. The question for a politician is never a question of truth but rather how do I win the next election? And can I turn the poor into the basis of a permanent electoral majority?
Would it be worth the trouble to investigate the basis of Will's affection for the welfare state in the 1980's? Probably not.
My attack on American conservatives for being oblivious to the natural principle of sovereignty was and is an attack on the concept of a "propositional" republic that exempts itself from the laws of nature (despite the lip-service to "nature and nature's God" in the famous founding document). Locke was a very poor spokesman for nature in any form. Whatever care the poor are owed by decency, whatever care it is prudent to accord them for the sake of political stability, American conservatives wanted to use the proposition as an escape clause to evade all responsibility for them. But people do not like having their founding myths questioned.
I shall not reread Statecraft As Soulcraft in order to rediscover what I liked so much about it in those days. From my piece, I can tell that Will was replicating one side of an inter-Straussian debate between Thomas Pangle and the disciples of Harry Jaffa. The Pangle side argued that the American founders fell short of the standards of Plato and Aristotle for a regime that promoted excellence—hence the reference to James Madison and the reliance upon factionalism to weaken government. The Jaffites (such as Charles Kesler) would rise in high dudgeon to defend the American founding myth and to decry the Pangle critique for characterizing the founders' mentality or motivations as "base." It would, in fact, be a waste of time to reread anything by Will when one could be investing the time in the works of Leo Strauss himself. Or of Plato. Or Clarendon's History of the Rebellion.
Whether George Will should be called a "philosopher" or not, he did possess a PhD in political philosophy and he did present himself in Statecraft as Soulcraft as a lover of wisdom and virtue.
Will got his start with Buckley at National Review and found his way from there to a prosperous career in national network punditry. Many of the Buckley school found it difficult to cheer his success. For one thing, it was clear that he was tailoring his conservatism in order to patch himself into the great tapestry of the liberal media: for example, demurring from the Republican attempt to downsize both the budget and the welfare state, he declared that "America is undertaxed." For another thing, it might be that he broke promises on the way to his success. I do not know. I only remember National Review's publisher, the schismatic Anglican attorney William Rusher declaring that Will "stepped on our face."
Will's self-definition as an American "Tory" was not original. It had already been done (with conviction) by Russell Kirk. In Will's case, however, it was part of a complex of imagery erected as a hedge against a "hard right" identity, including baseball and stained glass windows. The result, one might say, was a sentimental version of conservatism for someone who wanted to be loved by liberals. I have generally thought of Will not as a "Reagan conservative" but as a "Nancy Reagan conservative." The conservatism of Will, Nancy, and George H. W. Bush was a conservatism averse to political risks. One could take Statecraft As Soulcraft as Will's attempt to give some philosophical substance to his position.
The mild controversy over Will's self-definition gave me an opportunity to bring my critique of American conservatism into the open. Little was accomplished, however, beyond isolating myself by making clear that I was not interested in petty quarrels. At the time of this article, Will was especially hated for having intervened against the appointment of the pro-Confederate history professor Melvin E. Bradford as head of the National Endowment for the Humanities. Anything favorable said about Will was construed as another slap in Bradford's face.
Sobran thought he knew something about Dr. Johnson. It does not matter in the end who Joseph Sobran was—merely someone raised up in Buckley's stable of writers to perpetuate the "cool conservatism" of National Review beyond the first generation. Sobran departed from the program as he fell in with a political sect that has defined itself as "paleoconservative" in contradistinction to the Irving Kristol neo-conservatives. The mental mischief at work in this sect manifested itself as an irritation with the Jewishness of the neo-conservatives and a resentment of their success in taking over Republican policy and journalism. Like the perennial professional presidential candidate Patrick Buchanan, Sobran questioned the legitimacy of America's support for the state of Israel and spiced the question with a flavor of conspiracy theory. Over time the spice became intolerably heavy, and Buckley had to fire Sobran in 1993. Then he fell in completely with the people who seek loop-holes in the American constitution that would allow for state secession or nullification, as well as those who deny the Nazi intention to exterminate the Jews by questioning the effectiveness of the extermination and the authenticity of the numbers. A sentimental regard for the Confederacy does not always coincide with a soft spot for the Third Reich, but the coincidence happens frequently in the sect to which I refer. Contrary to what liberal propagandists say, not all conservatism is based on paranoia, but the mentality of this political sect is. There is no speaking to its members. It would be a mistake to perpetuate their memory by mentioning their names or the names of their cranky little journals.
I think that people should find this an amusing piece of satirical writing. I did not understand yet the level of Sobran's degeneration, something not amusing at all.
Samuel Johnson LLD (1709-1784), political journalist and pamphleteer, critic of the American rebels.
