The Conservative Intellectual Movement in America Since 1945 by Nash George H

Author:Nash, George H.
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Basic Books.

Were it not for the wounds that Lincoln inflicted on the Constitution, it would have been infinitely more difficult for Franklin Roosevelt to carry through his revolution, for the coercive welfare state to come into being and bring about the conditions against which we are fighting today.138

Yet even Meyer admitted that Lincoln had only “opened the way to centralized government. . . .”139 As conservatives saw it, post-Civil War America had displayed remarkable resiliency.140 Still, in retrospect, ominous developments had occurred. Like Frank Chodorov before him,141 Felix Morley denounced the Sixteenth Amendment as a “frontal attack on the American system” and as a subversion of state sovereignty. For this and other forms of democratization he particularly blamed William Jennings Bryan. The 1896 campaign “marked the first irreversible turn toward democracy in American political thinking.”142 Dietze pointed to the increasingly popular relativistic theories of “sociological jurisprudence,” which served to undermine judicial review, an indispensable antidemocratic bulwark in a property-respecting, limited democracy.143 On a variety of fronts, in fact, private property—so essential to liberty—was coming under intellectual siege.144 Much conservative fire was aimed at Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes. While no “Jacobin” or reformer, he was nevertheless, said L. Brent Bozell, a liberal saint and one of the “chief villains” the West ever produced. Why? “The answer is that he emancipated the law from metaphysics. . . . Holmes was an atheist, skeptic, relativist—and so: a thoroughgoing positivist. He waged unrelentingly his war against the Natural Law—the idea that objective standards of right and wrong exist independently of human preferences. . . .”145

The culmination of these trends, conservatives believed, occurred in the years after 1933. Indeed, with rare unanimity the Right believed that the administration of Franklin Roosevelt inaugurated a revolution both in the agenda and structure of American politics. It was the second great crisis in the decline of the Republic. In substance this upheaval sought, as Meyer put it, a form of democratic socialism.146 In structure the political system was profoundly altered: enormous aggrandizement of the president and federal bureaucracy, the steady weakening of Congress, capitulation of the Supreme Court under pressure in 1937,147 and, of course, the shackling of the individual and sapping of the states. It is not surprising that some right-wingers, like Meyer, believed that measures of virtually counterrevolutionary proportions were now required. As James Burnham observed, we were living in “the cold civil war of the post-1933 epoch.”148

What measures? Interposition, perhaps; Morley and Kilpatrick approved of it. Far more practical, however, was the growing conservative tendency to rely on the one branch of government which had proved most immune to radical assault: the Congress. Russell Kirk, for example, coauthored a highly laudatory study of Senator Robert Taft as a sober, prudent defender of America's still valid heritage—the Great Tradition, the “permanent things": a mature party system, liberty under law, restraint on arbitrary power, a free yet humane economy, responsibility among interest groups, a congressional voice in foreign policy.149

Yet however much Kirk revered Taft, it must have been obvious to him, as it was to Meyer,150 that Congress was weakening.

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