Sam Tanenhaus of The New York Times Book Review delivered the third of the 2007-2008 Bradley Lectures on November 5. Edited excerpts follow. A video of the lecture is available at www.aei.org/event1550/.
The difference between liberalism and conservatism in America is there is no such thing as a liberal movement. There is a conservative movement, and there are two strains of conservatism. One strikes me as recuperative, and it says, "If we can adjust to the prevailing liberalism of the moment, we can make it serve our purposes." The other seems to me revanchist, and it essentially says, "Something has been taken from us, and we have to get it back." That is the harder-edged conservatism that seems almost constantly at war with the more adaptive conservatism. And it is complicated, because it is not as if they are two different camps that war with one another, although I think sometimes that happens. Often what you see is a mix of the two, sometimes within a single figure.
When we come to the question of what conservatism will look like after George W. Bush, my sense is conservatism now is actually stronger than liberalism was in Lyndon Johnson's last years. Not necessarily more popular ideologically--one of the curiosities of modern politics is that much of conservative ideology is not widely popular. It is supported on the strength of the president's own appeal. This was true for Ronald Reagan. It was true, while it lasted, for George Bush.
I am trying to figure out if in this next phase we will have a kind of adaptive, recuperative conservatism, which I think is possible if you look at the three leading Republican contenders now--Rudy Giuliani, Mitt Romney, and Fred Thompson--none of whom really springs from the movement the way Bush did. Of course, Reagan helped create the movement, but Bush really was the first major political figure raised within it.
A moderate Republican president might actually roll back some of what might seem the executive excesses of the Bush administration. That's one possible scenario. But I think the bigger question is whether we will see a conservatism that follows the prescriptions of writers like Irving Kristol and George Will. Bush did, to some extent, say that we need a conservative welfare state--a conservative analogy to the welfare state. Or will we have the harder revanchist conservatism, which actually tries to roll back the politics of the welfare state?
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I wanted to find a moment when conservatism was at its peak. There are different ways to read this. In movement terms, there was of course Barry Goldwater's campaign in 1964; for a later generation, Reagan's campaign in 1976, when he challenged Gerald Ford; or, of course, the Reagan years themselves. I am more interested in the tonalities and atmosphere of politics--the ideas in politics that filter out into the culture at large. So I found myself thinking, oddly enough, of the year 1970. Here are some of the books that were published that year: Tom Wolfe's Radical Chic; Garry Wills's Nixon Agonistes; Whittaker Chambers's Odyssey of a Friend, his letters to William F. Buckley; Saul Bellow's Mr. Sammler's Planet, which I think is the one great neoconservative novel we've seen--and there was a fascinating issue of The Public Interest with a brilliant essay by Daniel Bell called "The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism," which he later published as a book in 1976, and a very lyrical introductory essay by Irving Kristol.
In his essay, Kristol looks at the state of the culture, the political and social moment. He is fascinated by the student left, the student radicals. And he does not understand, as so many didn't, why they should be so fiercely anti-American and claim that the United States does not offer freedom, protection, liberties, and opportunities, and yet be enchanted by Castro's Cuba. The normal explanation of this, he says, is that these students are ignorant or hypocritical. But that's not good enough. He said we have to look beyond that, and he said maybe what lurks beneath the surface of all these protests is actually the yearning for a kind of authority, for higher spiritual values which the politics of the moment are not providing: "If our private and public worlds are ever again in our lifetimes to have a congenial relationship--if virtue is to regain her lost loveliness--then some such combination of the reforming spirit with the conservative ideal seems to me what is most desperately needed."
So what I would suggest is that in this very fraught moment, with this election approaching, that is what we want in the next person we elect: not a revanchist who actually believes that the massive social structures we have built can be undone, but someone who will bring a kind of reform to them. And one of the interesting things about these various books I mentioned is that each of them is grappling with this question of the disillusionment among those who once invested their hopes and ideals in a great society.
If it recovers that sense of social, moral poise--not the language of accusation, not the language of "friends" and "enemies," not the language of "leftists who share the same values as Osama bin Laden" and all the rest--if it is actually a kind of culturally textured, sophisticated critique of where the culture is, one that grows out of the optimistic values of this country, then I think there is a conservatism that can last another generation.
