The Failure of American Conservatism and the Road Not Taken
By Claes G. Ryn.
Republic Book Publishers, 2023.
Hardcover, 468 pages, $24.95.
Reviewed by John Grove.
Since at least 2016, conservatism has been undergoing a bit of an intellectual identity crisis. Perhaps it is a response to the rise of a more aggressive and totalizing left; perhaps it is an attempt to provide “Trumpism” with a theoretical backing; perhaps it is a natural result of serious flaws in the regnant brand of conservatism on offer in the early 2000s; it is probably a combination of all three.
This great conservative rethink has called into question much of the political dogma that had been associated with 21st-century conservatism. It has mostly rejected neoconservative foreign policy, and it has discarded the idea that healthy political or social order is based on abstract enlightenment principles. So far, so good, at least in this reviewer’s estimation. But some alternatives being pitched by many factions of this “New Right” are nevertheless troubling, seeming to discard traditional conservative wisdom on decentralization, constitutionalism, civil society, and negotiated politics. Instead, this old wisdom is discarded in favor of a vision of politics as total war between preconceived visions of the good.
If anyone has earned a right to have a voice in this great rethink, it is Claes G. Ryn. The longtime professor at the Catholic University of America has spent a career warning that movement conservatism has lost its way. When neoconservatism was utterly ascendent on the right, he had his finger on its fundamental problems, arguing that there was more to conservatism than the unlimited promotion of an abstract “liberal democracy.” And he paid a price for speaking the truth regarding diminished influence among conservative circles. The publication of The Failure of American Conservatism and the Road Not Taken, a collection of Ryn’s essays from the seventies to today, offers an introduction to his ideas to those unfamiliar with them. Though he does not directly speak to today’s conservative divisions, it is hard to read the essays without seeing the applications.
Post-2016 conservatism now makes critiques similar to those of Ryn when it comes to the neocons, globalization, and “Conservatism, Inc.” But it’s not clear that the new right has learned the lessons he was teaching. Much of the contemporary discussion is focused on recovery—a sense that movement conservatism is simply no longer offering a meaningful alternative to the progressive liberalism that is inflicting deep wounds on the social and political order of western countries. But there is significant disagreement about where and how conservatism went wrong, as well as the proper solution. Is the problem with “zombie Reaganism”—an attachment to limited government and free markets that is no longer useful? A failure to adequately resist the expansionary “civil rights constitution”? Acquiescence to a largely secular state? A disease in the American founding? Is it the entire liberal tradition—even the conservatism or Whiggism of a Burke or a Hayek?
Ryn would likely have sympathy for some (though, I think, not all) of these complaints. But the most important theme of his essays suggests that all the common answers about where conservatism went wrong avoid a more fundamental one: conservatives have been too obsessed with politics.
The starting point is by now familiar: the National Review-style fusionism of the 50s and 60s. Ryn’s criticism of conservative fusionism, though, is different from other prominent ones today. While he has some Ropkean hesitation with unbridled capitalism, his main complaint isn’t that conservatives valued markets or limited government. Rather, it’s that they presented them as a panacea; as the only thing that mattered. Conservatism came to be defined simply as a political doctrine, unconcerned with underlying cultural matters.
This meant that conservatives were not tending to the “imagination” of the people—the “preconceptual, primordial apprehension of the world” shaped by religion, art, philosophy, literature, and other cultural endeavors. The subtitular “road not taken” is a conservatism tuned in to this subtle “background intuition”—a path prescribed by Irving Babbitt, Russell Kirk, and Peter Viereck. The conservative moral imagination is one that recognizes that every man is divided against himself. Political action requires caution, self-reflection, and self-restraint. Whatever evil forces one may fight abroad, the most important moral battle always takes place within oneself.
Since conservatives tended to neglect the institutions of cultural formation, they were susceptible to being overwhelmed by a sentimental, “self-congratulatory,” idealistic, and Rousseauian imagination that saw moral action as a fight against external enemies.
To the extent that conservatives have sought to rectify their neglect of culture in later years, they still find it difficult to do so without maintaining their “politics first” mindset. A 1996 observation could have been written today: Recent conservative interest in “the culture,” Ryn notes, may seem like a positive development.
At the same time it confirms and gives new impetus to the ideologization of American conservatism in that interest in the ‘the culture’ is often heavily slanted by the old fascination with political power. Issues of cultural decline are discussed as if the key to reversing the trend lay in the hands of politicians and their intellectual allies.
Many conservatives today seem to understand in some sense that “culture counts,” yet it often seems that what they mean is that culture counts for politics, and ought to be consciously redirected by politics: If only culture can be made to serve our overarching vision of justice, we will achieve social hegemony! Yet Ryn warns that a real cultural revival “would require not more people who talk all the time about ‘justice,’ ‘the common good,’ and ‘the best regime,’ but people who can shoulder concrete responsibilities so that the reconstruction of society could begin where it matters most: in the personal lives of the citizens.”
The overemphasis on politics, in turn, led to attempts to purify political life—to see political activity as a righteous endeavor akin to a religious crusade. This tendency usually erodes the sense that political limits are important, and thus one saw self-described conservatives preach about “liberal democracy” while also advocating for an unbridled executive, unlimited mandate to wage war around the globe, and for understanding America as a “revolutionary state.” This is what happens when conservative political ideas are run through the Rousseauian idyllic imagination. Unlimited government walks hand-in-hand with a self-assured moralism.
One of the most important contributions in the collection confronts this form of ideological conservatism. His analysis of the relationship between constitutional government and genuine ethical conduct, drawn from his 1978 book Democracy and the Ethical Life, is an excellent antidote to the idea, prominent on the right, that mere “procedural” constitutionalism is relativistic—that one must read transcendent, abstract moral principles into a constitution if one is to engage in politics with a moral basis.
Ethical political participation, Ryn recognizes, is not a matter of applying true, transcendent principles, but a manner of acting that recognizes one’s own limitations. The ethical conscience serves primarily a “negative” function that prevents our behavior from deriving from “morally unexamined impulse” or “arbitrariness”; it is a “principle of censure or self-examination.” One must “be on his guard against the possibility that his own view of how the moral end can be promoted by government is mistaken. In its denial of all arbitrariness ethical conscience is a warning against premature certainty regarding the moral worthiness of concrete political proposals.”
Constitutional government serves this same function on a larger scale. It is “man’s moral will applied to the organization of political activity.” It serves as the ethical check on action that demands self-reflection prior to action, places firm restraints on our impulses, and forces us to sacrifice our false sense of moral purity in favor of compromise and conciliation with others. This understanding of constitutionalism is just one example of how Ryn’s defense of “value-centered historicism” challenges the tendency to see historical practice and universal moral truth as antithetical.
When it comes to a renewal of the constitutional polity and the “constitutional personality,” a vital question emerges in these essays. Ryn remarks multiple times that constitutional government is not possible among people who are not morally formed to recognize their own flaws and the need for limits. He is therefore skeptical of those who focus on “the founders’ intent” for the Constitution rather than the culture that gave rise to it.
There is only one way to revive American constitutionalism, and that is for Americans, from leaders to people in general, to revive or freshly create something like the older type of morality and start living very differently.
In other words, wholesale moral reform of society must come first, and constitutionalism will only follow from that.
Ryn is on solid ground when it comes to the connection between moral and constitutional limits. “Men are qualified for civil liberty,” Burke argued, “in exact proportion to their disposition to put moral chains upon their own appetites.” But I wonder whether this connection is not more complex—whether the two should not be seen as mutually reinforcing, rather than one following the other.
In America in particular, it is easy to conceive of a moral, virtuous people coming together to establish a constitution that reflects that same character. But constitutional settlements often do not come in this way. A look at the development of the Roman Republican or British Constitution reveals countless examples of settlements that emerge from the recognition of crisis, often arising precisely out of the passions of intemperate and self-serving factions.
This sort of “low road” to constitutionalism relies more on enlightened self-interest. But the limits it establishes can, eventually, teach a degree of moderation. Today, it seems even this simulacrum of virtue is in short supply, but a constitutional settlement that places real limits on the exercise of power could dampen some of the forces of mass democracy that exacerbate our cultural decay.
While much of today’s pervasive ideological nonsense is disseminated through cultural hubs rather than the state, it is not unrelated to the centralization of state power. These hubs have been politicized in part because of the formation of cohesive ideological factions and victimization narratives surrounding them that justify the exercise of power. Serious constitutional limits on the ability of an organized national majority to use legislation, administrative edicts, Supreme Court decisions, or the bully pulpit to force its ideological vision on society—the reimposition of serious pluralism (in the conservative sense used by Robert Nisbet)—would lessen the incentives to force every cultural and commercial institution to declare fidelity to an ideological faction.
There are few indications that we are anywhere close to taking even this “low road” to a constitutional culture. But we should hope it’s possible, because the prospect of widespread moral revival that Ryn argues must come first, seems even more unlikely.
There are some aspects of the collection that could have been improved. Since Ryn is not interested in forging a political alliance, he does not have a strong incentive to play nice with others. There are repeated and biting criticisms of those often seen as within the conservative orbit, especially neoconservatives and Straussians. Most of his censure is warranted, though perhaps undiplomatic. Some readers of a “big tent” mentality may find it off-putting. The nature of the collection also leads to quite a bit of repetition. Much as the present reviewer agrees with Ryn’s opinion of Harry Jaffa or Mike Pompeo, coming across the same descriptions and anecdotes in essay after essay becomes a bit tiring and awkward to the reader.
Nevertheless, those interested in rediscovering a more vital conservatism would do well to listen to Ryn over some of the figures who have carved out their circle of political influence lately, especially those who offer merely another idealized vision of the best regime: “Too many self-described conservatives are used to thinking about politics in terms of deviance from or adherence to a preconceived, unchanging ideological conception of what ought to be,” Ryn cautions. Instead, conservatism ought to teach us how to “adapt to [our] historical reality” and “how to make the best of available circumstances.” If the great conservative rethink is going to point the way to genuine cultural and constitutional recovery, this attitude must prevail.
John G. Grove is the managing editor of Law & Liberty.
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