Peter Viereck, a Prophet Dies in the Wilderness

Word today at TNR's the Plank that Peter Viereck (1916-2006) has died. Viereck was a Pulitzer Prize winning poet and a history professor at Mt. Holyoke College, an institution that educated a couple of generations in my mother's family and once expelled my grandmother for excessive partying during Prohibition. But he is best known for having revived the name "conservatism" in 1949, thus giving a name to the budding movement. Although Viereck initially associated himself with that label--indeed, the eminent Clinton Rossiter hails Viereck in Conservatism in America (1955/1962) as second only to Russell Kirk in importance--he quickly became disaffected from the drift of the movement, especially under the leadership of William F. Buckley and Joe McCarthy.

I have been cautiously impressed by Viereck ever since I read E.J. Dionne's account of his role in the conservative movement in Why Americans Hate Politics. Speaking of Kirk, who gave conservatism whatever intellectual heft it had during the 1950s and 60s, Viereck bemoaned his "traditionless worship of tradition," and "ahistorical appeal to history." More than fifty years ago, long before conservatism came to power, Viereck recognized that while American conservatives might claim the traditionalist mantle of Edmund Burke, they had abandoned his pragmatism and historical sense, substituting instead a mythologized past and an insanely ideological conception of political action, one more reminiscent of Stalinism than its professed anti-Stalinism. He also worried that, in radically renouncing the progressive aspects of American tradition, conservatives risked becoming not just "reactionary" but positively "anti-American," a concern echoed by Rossiter in his otherwise sympathetic account of the movement.

John Miller wrote a column for National Review Online last year contending that Viereck was a disloyal sack of crap, not entitled to a prominent place in the history of modern conservatism. But contrary to his intent, Miller actually makes the case that Viereck may have been one of the movement's few true prophets. Two passages from Miller's critique stand out. First:

Although Viereck was a strong critic of Communism, he personally preferred a mixed economy to free markets. He once equated "anti-statism" with "plutocracy," and believed the New Deal was worth preserving. Although the early conservatives were an eclectic bunch, their views on capitalism were broadly libertarian and specifically opposed to the New Deal.

Viereck's instincts certainly seem to have borne out. If repeal of the New Deal is essential to conservative bona fides, it surely renders that movement both radical and un-American. Additionally, in both the Reagan and Bush (II) eras, government expanded more than under Clinton or Carter, but with the caveat that it has expanded to the sole benefit of America's wealthy and corporate interests. Not much real "libertarianism" there, but plenty of plutocracy. Second, after blasting Viereck for his contempt for McCarthyism, Miller offers this (referring to Tom Reiss's piece on Viereck in the New Yorker):

By this, Reiss means that Viereck (in 1962) depicted conservatism as "a movement infiltrated by religious fundamentalists, paranoid patriotic groups, and big business leaders, united in their loathing of the cosmopolitan elites on the nation's coasts." From Manhattan, of course, that's who populates the red states right now: snake-handling evangelists, gun-toting militias, and Halliburton executives.

Well, I ain't in Manhattan, but that's sure as hell what the contemporary GOP leadership looks like out here in Red America. Bizarrely, Miller seems to think that Buckley purged all the crazies from the conservative movement back in the mid-1950s. Excuse me? Has he turned on FOX News, listened to a Dick Cheney speech, or read an Ann Coulter book lately? The inmates are running the asylum. Maybe if Miller stopped romanticizing a conservatism that never existed he'd see what Viereck saw 50 years ago and what the overwhelming majority of Americans see today. Broadening out, the flaw of the "conservative movement" should be pretty obvious. The very idea was a paradox. Intellectually, what distinguished the true "conservatives" (Burke, John Adams, Santayana, Viereck) was that they rejected all modern "movements," precisely because of the radicalism inherent in such an enterprise.

I don't embrace Viereck in his entirety: although I respect his moralist criticisms of liberalism and its relativistic tendencies, he's far too aristocratic and suspicious of democracy for my taste. Still, having given "conservatism" its name, he understood its proclivities better than any of its current defenders. He may have died in the wilderness, but he also didn't get suckered into a phony promised land.