Just Right by Lee Edwards

Author:Lee Edwards
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781504050203
Publisher: Intercollegiate Studies Institute
Published: 2017-10-11T04:00:00+00:00

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THE CHANGING FACE OF CONSERVATISM

At about the same time that the New Right emerged because of what it considered the treachery of moderate Republicans, a series of events forced a small but influential group of old-fashioned liberals to move out of their no-longer-comfortable Democratic digs. The happenings included the 1972 presidential candidacy of George McGovern, the willingness of modern liberals to let South Vietnam and other nations fall into the hands of communists, and the revolution in sexual and social relations that produced what Lionel Trilling called the “adversary culture.”

The neoconservatives were “mugged by reality,” in Irving Kristol’s pointed phrase. They attacked the radicals as despoilers of the liberal tradition. Kristol called for a return to the “republican virtue” of the Founding Fathers and invoked the idea of a good society. Echoing Russell Kirk as well as Adam Smith, he endorsed the notion of a “moral and political order” and conceded that the idea of a “hidden hand” had its uses in the marketplace. Conservatives like American Spectator editor R. Emmett Tyrrell warmly welcomed Kristol. Bill Buckley said that the godfather of neoconservatism was “writing more sense in the Public Interest these days than anybody I can think of.”

The neoconservatives were, as Theodore White put it, “action intellectuals” with close connections to leading universities and the mass media, direct access to officeholders and the political elite, good relations with major elements of organized labor, and strong roots in influential foundations and think tanks. They were uniquely qualified to carry the conservative message to places where no conservative, not even Bill Buckley, had gone before.

Kristol and his colleagues spawned institutions as Viguerie and Weyrich did on the New Right—journals like the Public Interest and the New Criterion, and organizations like the Coalition for a Democratic Majority, founded in the wake of McGovern’s capturing the Democratic nomination.

The New Right and the neoconservatives were not natural allies. The New Right was deeply suspicious of government while the neoconservatives accepted government. The New Right loved the mechanics of politics while the neoconservatives preferred the higher plane of public policy. But both hated communism and despised liberals—the New Right for what liberals had always been and the neoconservatives for what they had become. In the end, it was the neoconservatives’ tough anticommunism and resistance to the counterculture that won the approval of conservatives and led to a marriage of convenience. The minister who presided over the nuptials was Ronald Reagan, who needed the brainpower of the neoconservatives and the manpower of the New Right, especially the Christian Right, to win elections and enact good public policy.

During the 1970s and ’80s, I interviewed most of the leading neoconservatives and befriended Midge Decter, the wife of Norman Podhoretz and a perceptive writer on social issues and foreign policy. She was my kind of anticommunist, with no illusions about the means or the ends of communists. In time (and I think because of her decades as a trustee of the Heritage Foundation), Midge became a conservative without any prefix.

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