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 Daniel McCarthy.
In the 2020s, “conservatism” sounds passé, and its failure is taken for granted. A new right finds inspiration less in Russell Kirk or Edmund Burke than in Carl Schmitt, and the history of the conservative movement up to 2016 seems largely irrelevant to everything that’s happened since then. Rip van Winkle slept through a revolution and awoke to find himself in a different country. Yet a generation of conservatives who had their eyes wide open the whole time is no less bewildered than Rip was about what’s happened to their country and their movement.
Claes Ryn has an explanation for the perplexed and a lesson for today’s postliberal right. The conservative movement had a cracked foundation almost from the beginning, and its collapse under the weight of its own accumulated mistakes—with Donald Trump serving only as the occasion, not the cause, of its implosion—was foreseeable even at postwar conservatism’s zenith in the 1980s. The New Right, alas, is repeating an old error in a boldly fresh way, and it can expect the same results if it doesn’t learn what yesterday’s conservatives got wrong.
In its first few years, the new conservatism of the age after World War II was pointed toward the correct path by two writers of great literary ability whose philosophical acumen was, in Ryn’s estimation, tragically underestimated. One of these was Russell Kirk, who in 1953 published The Conservative Mind, the book that more than any other led the postwar American right—previously inclined to the label “individualist”—to think of itself as “conservative.” But before even Kirk there was Peter Viereck, author of Conservatism Revisited in 1949 and the subject of Ryn’s longest chapter (nearly 70 pages) in The Failure of American Conservatism.
Viereck and Kirk had their differences, especially where party politics was concerned. Viereck was as well-disposed to Adlai Stevenson, who was twice the Democratic Party’s presidential nominee against Dwight Eisenhower, as he was to Eisenhower himself. If moderate or moderately conservative Democrats and Republicans were equally acceptable to Viereck, however, Kirk was much more critical of the New Deal and the party responsible for it—and critical of Republicans like Eisenhower, who were content to safeguard it as well. Kirk was more conservative in the contemporary political sense of the word, and he and Viereck sparred.
Yet, as Ryn argues, there was a more important connection between Viereck and Kirk, a common ground they shared with one another but not with many of the later movement conservatives who professed to honor Kirk and reviled Viereck. The conservatism of Kirk and Viereck alike was rooted in the ethical historical imagination, as both men had come to know it not only from Edmund Burke—who writes of the “moral imagination”—but from an early 20th-century thinker whose wisdom is too often overlooked: Irving Babbitt.
It is not too much to say that Ryn is dean of the Babbitt school of American conservatism. As a university student in Sweden early in the 1960s, Ryn studied with and befriended Folke Leander, a conservative scholar who took a particular interest in Babbitt. Then as now, the academy did not consider Babbitt a serious philosopher. He had been a professor of Romance Languages at Harvard University before his death in 1933 and was best remembered as a literary critic and the leader, with his friend Paul Elmer More, of a critical movement called the New Humanism. But Leander and Ryn believed Babbitt achieved profound insight into the interrelationship of ethics, aesthetics, and epistemology; his thought was worthy of being called philosophy, and they worked to systematize it (with amendments derived from the work of the Italian idealist philosopher Benedetto Croce), leading to a book that Ryn published in 1986 as Will, Imagination, and Reason.
Like Babbitt, Viereck and Kirk are not seen as philosophers, political or otherwise. When I once took a young libertarian professor of philosophy to hear Ryn lecture, my friend confessed he was disappointed—what he heard was not what he understood as academically respectable philosophy. Folke Leander had earned his Ph.D. under the neo-Kantian philosopher Ernst Cassirer (who was also Leo Strauss’s dissertation adviser, a fact whose ironic significance will be apparent below). But as Ryn relates in Will, Imagination, and Reason, Leander was “denied a well-deserved appointment to a university chair in philosophy because he did not adhere to positivism and formal logic.”
All of this might be discrediting were it not that conservatism itself is characteristically the closest a political philosophy can come to not being a philosophy at all. From Edmund Burke to Michael Oakeshott, conservatives have chosen not to avail themselves of the idioms of other philosophers. What conservatism needs to say cannot always be said in syllogisms and is hardly adequately expressed in the well-defined atomistic language of today’s philosophy departments. Be that as it may, there was a philosophy incipient in Babbitt, Viereck, and Kirk, and Ryn has tried to make it explicit.
Ryn calls this philosophy “value-centered historicism,” and in the works of Viereck and Kirk it offered an auspicious start to postwar conservatism. Yet in his 70-page introduction to The Failure of American Conservatism, Ryn argues that what was right in the beginning was very soon sidelined in favor of a narrow focus on politics.
All along, according to Ryn, the primary emphasis of conservatism should have been on culture. This might sound banal in an age when the claim that “politics is downstream from culture” has become a cliché. Ryn, however, fleshes out the contention. Human beings have only an intuition about the ultimate good, true, and beautiful. They pursue this intuition through imagination, the envisioning of ways of life—myths and stories, in effect—which specify ends to be sought not as mere rational abstractions but as human experiences. Although every person has an individual imagination, the dreams of a whole nation or civilization are influenced by its storytellers. These include poets and artists, of course, but also the creators of ideologies and psychological frameworks in any medium or practical walk of life.
The Western moral imagination was shaped for centuries by a classical and Christian patrimony, a story of stories that presented every person as marked by a propensity toward evil and therefore under an obligation to exercise an inner check upon his or her worse nature, just as society must have laws as an external control upon humanity’s darker side. There were always exceptions, complications, and counter-narratives, but this was the gist of the tradition. Virtue, in large part, meant self-mastery.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau, a genius of sentimental psychology, revolutionized the Western understanding of virtue, according to Babbitt. After Rousseau, virtue increasingly came to be thought of as arising from benevolent sentiments toward humanity as a whole or toward certain abstract components of it: the poor or oppressed as a concept, for example, rather than one’s own suffering neighbors, countrymen, or even family. Understanding the implications of Rousseau led Ryn, being the perceptive student of Babbitt that he was, to foresee the conditions that would give rise to today’s “virtue signaling” decades before that term came into vogue, as one essay in The Failure of American Conservatism, first published in Modern Age early in the 1980s, demonstrates.
Viereck and Kirk—the one a Pulitzer-winning poet, the other a highly regarded author of eerie fiction—understood the nexus of morality, imagination, and politics. But the businessmen, journalists, policy experts, and politicians who came to define the conservative movement just a few years after the appearance of The Conservative Mind did not. Their concerns were for winning the next election, setting up the right tax incentives, and what the New Right today calls “using power.” So conservatives over the next half-century won elections, cut taxes, and built up the military—and by the time of the two presidents Bush, launched a few wars—and even opposed abortion and same-sex marriage with varying degrees of commitment and success. But conservatives did not reawaken the moral imagination and never knew what it would take to do so. They were philosophically blind as well as culturally infertile.
Ryn can be astringent, but he allows that two of America’s advantages contributed to conservatives’ myopia. The pragmatism characteristic of so much of American life has its good side, but it could not prepare its practitioners to recognize the stakes of a cultural and philosophical struggle. And while conservatives’ devotion to religion was admirable, because they were philosophically naive they assumed that religion simply was culture. Ryn observes that in worldly terms, culture is broader than religion, so much so that religion itself can be subsumed and thoroughly transformed by a change in the moral imagination of society. Hence, churches have, in all too many instances, succumbed to Rousseauistic sentimentality.
Beyond its extensive new introduction and the revised monograph on Viereck (which appeared in an earlier form in the 2005 edition of Viereck’s Conservatism Revisited), The Failure of American Conservatism collects essays Ryn has written about the American right over four decades, during which time he served as a professor of politics (now emeritus) at the Catholic University of America in Washington, D.C. Chapters in the book originally appeared in such publications as Modern Age, The American Conservative, Spectator USA (now Spectator World), and Humanitas, a journal founded and long co-edited by Ryn as part of the National Humanities Institute.
Claes is a personal friend, and while I was never his student, he is one of my teachers. I have also been his editor at Modern Age and The American Conservative, although only one or two of the selections in this book were initially shepherded into print by me.
Ryn is a controversial figure, and The Failure of American Conservatism amply illustrates why. He is the most persistent of the American right’s critics of Leo Strauss and Straussianism, largely because Ryn’s value-centered historicism is diametrically opposed to Strauss’s core teaching about the relationship of natural right to history. For Ryn, the truth of things human and divine is embodied by history and cannot be adequately understood in the abstract by reason without the aid of historical imagination. For Strauss, reason and revelation—each in tension with the other—provide criteria for themselves that are, on their own accounts, independent of history. (Though to be sure, by reason’s standards, revelation might appear merely customary, and upon revelation’s authority, reason may seem equally infirm.)
If the philosophical dispute between Ryn and the Straussians is often heated, the political conflict between Ryn and the neoconservatives—whom he dubs “neo-Jacobins”—is incandescent. He sees the neoconservatives, in their zeal for worldwide democratic revolution, as not conservatives at all, but rather heirs to Robespierre. He recognized the danger of their foreign-policy enthusiasms long before most others did: The Failure of American Conservatism includes a National Review essay Ryn published in 1989 on the folly of “the democracy boosters.” He reports that the piece elicited “a lengthy, vituperative reply” from Sidney Hook and a request by Michael Novak for a chance to respond to Ryn without a rejoinder from the author.
Elsewhere in this book, NR is sharply criticized, as are a variety of other conservative institutions with which Ryn has had experience. Several of the first selections in this collection are speeches Ryn delivered to the Philadelphia Society, of which he was president in 2001 but whose philosophical and political drift—especially after the 9/11 attacks—he found disturbing. The Heritage Foundation, the Intercollegiate Studies Institute (full disclosure: my employer), and other bastions of the conservative movement are not spared Ryn’s glare.
Ryn delivers a mixed verdict on libertarians. The tendency of libertarians to prioritize a rational capitalist system over the historical and moral character of America is objectionable to the highest degree. But Ryn acknowledges that not every libertarian or classical liberal is a market absolutist, and he identifies Wilhelm Röpke in particular as a morally conscientious free-market economist with whom he is in accord. Somewhat paradoxically, however, many of the libertarians who are closest to Ryn’s views on foreign policy are anarcho-capitalists who would not meet his test on the limited applicability of reason to political arrangements. Neither Ryn nor his admirers among Murray Rothbard’s radical school of libertarianism are bothered by this, however: Ryn knows there is more to a man than his ideology, and the Rothbardians are often cultural conservatives, however revolutionary their principles in politics and economics.
The Failure of American Conservatism is open to several criticisms. Certain obvious ones are facile yet must still be addressed. For all that Ryn insists upon a culturally serious conservatism as “the road not taken,” this book is overwhelmingly about political subjects, not cultural ones. Indeed, while Ryn is the author of a philosophical novel, A Desperate Man, most of his books, including this one, are categorized in their own jackets as “political science.” Likewise, while Ryn sees abstractions as a source of much mischief in politics and life, “-isms” and other generalities abound in these pages.
Yet Ryn can be acquitted on both these points: he is not allergic to abstraction per se, but to the abuse of abstractions as pretexts for radical projects in culture and politics. And although “culture” is his own term, what is conventionally meant by that word is only a fraction of what Ryn has in mind. His “political” books are indeed cultural, though there are many dimensions to culture that lie outside his purview.
Certain of the book’s strengths are also weaknesses. The Failure of American Conservatism is, among other things, a valuable historical record of conflicts within institutions of the conservative movement, such as the Philadelphia Society. But these discords may not feel very important to readers who have come of age since the George W. Bush administration, not because the deeper questions involved are any less pertinent but simply because the details are now so dated. A more serious problem, of which a historicist must be acutely conscious, is that institutions do change, and continuing to characterize them based on the behavior of long-departed personnel risks alienating later generations that carry on their names. There is no reason why Ryn’s ideas should not be heard at the Heritage Foundation, for example, but this book—compiled as it is from older material—gives the impression that he is still fighting a feud with the Heritage of 20 years ago.
More usefully, the book gives a clear sense of where the battle lines between Ryn and the Straussians are drawn, and Straussians themselves may find value in that. But here, Ryn can be polemical—or casually dismissive—when readers might wish he would engage his opponents’ arguments more charitably and seriously. A civil debate along the lines of the one that has been ongoing between Michael Anton (a Straussian) and Paul Gottfried (a historically minded paleoconservative) across several different publications can dispel a great many misunderstandings and clarify substantial questions. Ryn wants conservatives to take a deeper interest in value-centered historicism; a good training for doing so would be to get them to follow a conversation between value-centered historicism and other well-articulated lines of thought, such as Straussianism at its best.
This volume has something to offend the sensitivities of almost every intellectual school on the right. Eric Voegelin comes in for criticism, as does Strauss. Several passages read as a warning to the “postliberal” right: “Theoretical and historical writings of European inspiration which are ambivalent toward constitutionalism in general and popular self-government in particular can help alert Americans to the dangers of decadent democracy, but they may also create premature and exaggerated pessimism about the American form of constitutional government,” Ryn cautions.
And he gives at least one cheer for liberalism itself: “Modern liberalism in the widest sense is a movement of extraordinary breadth and complexity and with strains and potentialities pointing in very different directions. Awareness of the enormous danger to civilization from an unleashing of the selfish ego should not stifle inquiry in the higher elements in liberalism and ‘modernity’ which may offer opportunities for strengthening the older traditions.”
Yet the starkest lesson The Failure of American Conservatism holds for today’s New Right is that its dreams of victory predicated on “power” and religion are more similar than not to the delusions of the excessively political, faithful but unphilosophical, culturally shortsighted conservatives of old.
Readers who might reject value-centered historicism on religious or divergent philosophical grounds may still find themselves in agreement with many of Ryn’s prudential views, and they might even concur for reasons entirely of their own with his call for a conservatism equipped to meet the enemy on the decisive battlefield of culture. The Babbitt school of American conservatism deserves more attention than it has so far received from critics and prospective admirers alike. And Ryn is a brilliant dean whose cantankerous side should not deter courageous and enterprising students, whatever their philosophy. The Failure of American Conservatism is a book from which conservatives must not be afraid to learn.
Daniel McCarthy is the editor-in-chief of Modern Age. Follow him on X @ToryAnarchist.
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