Up From Liberalism

AMERICA, fashionable observers say, is a non-ideological nation; and it is understandable why this is a phenomenon from which one takes pleasure. No one is more tedious than the totally ideologized man, the man who forces every passing phenomenon into his ideological mold to end up, for example, concluding that every friend of Congressional investigating committees is an enemy of civil liberties, or that every enemy of Congressional investigating committees is a friend of civil liberties. American political conflicts are not generally fought on the battleground of ideas. The thoroughly non-Ideological Man is usually designated as steward of the American political community. This is partly a good thing, because everyone knows that ideological totalism can bring whole societies down, as it did Hitler’s, and permanently terrorize others, as Communism has done. The danger comes when a distrust of doctrinaire social systems eases over into a dissolute disregard for principle. A disregard for enduring principle delivers a society, eviscerated, over to the ideologists. 


America, most historians teach us, has sought to avoid the extremes, to be flexible without resembling Silly Putty; to be principled without being arch. I think our country is not clearly enough avoiding the former extreme. I think she is in danger of losing her identity—not on account of the orthodoxy that we are being told in some quarters threatens to suffocate us; but for failure to nourish any orthodoxy at all. I think the attenuation of the early principles of this country has made America vulnerable to the most opportunistic ideology of the day, the strange and complex ideology of modern Liberalism. I think, moreover, that disordered and confused though it concededly is these days, conservatism is the only apparent rallying point. 


To put forward such a thesis is to take on many obligations. Very well. But bear in mind the logical maxim that one man’s failure to prove a thesis does not render it invalid. I am by no means the ideal person to take on the job at hand, which is to discredit doctrinaire Liberalism and plead the viability of enlightened conservatism. I have many disqualifications, among them that of having personally experienced the tenacious ill will of some of the men about whom I shall be writing; and I see some of them, day after day, berating people who stand for the things I love. I herewith hoist high a flag of truce, respectfully inviting their attention to what I have to say; but I will not feign surprise if the flag comes hurtling down, felled by a withering burst of fire from a hotblooded evangelist in the Liberal camp—who was brought up to assume that the differences between us, Liberals and conservatives, are not negotiable. It is not as though the Communists had hoisted the flag.