That conservatism is in crisis is widely acknowledged. Some say that the movement has forsaken its principles; others that it has been corrupted by power; still others call for ideological renovation. All share the conviction that the crisis calls for a high-minded conversation as to the meaning of conservatism. To the contrary, in my view, the answer to the crisis—if there is a crisis—lies in ending that conversation altogether.

Until recently, few thought of conservatism as a worthy subject of inquiry. Most simply accepted the lexical understanding of conservatism as resistance to change. Only with the founding of that set of bureaucracies and sources of funding that became known as “conservative” did the debate as to the meaning of conservatism begin. Since then, nearly every treatment of conservatism has aimed at convincing, galvanizing, or scandalizing a movement audience.

Apparent exceptions only prove the rule. Michael Oakeshott, for example, characterized conservatism as a mere disposition—a theory that negates the very possibility of a conservative “movement.” But Oakeshott wrote precisely in reaction to the more ideological understandings of conservatism like those the movement was beginning to develop in America. The conservative movement continues to pay lip service to Oakeshott, but his theory of conservatism, if accepted, would fatally undermine the rationale for having a movement in the first place. The practical, “cash value” of every other theory of conservatism is that the movement should pursue this or that set of goals and not others.

In short, conservatism is not a philosophy or approach to political affairs that inspires the set of institutions known as the conservative movement. Rather, the conservative movement is a set of institutions that inspires the ideology known as conservatism. In the absence of a movement, the felt need to develop a coherent understanding of conservatism would evaporate.

Of course, the movement is not going anywhere and debates as to the meaning of conservatism will continue. Suppose, however, one agrees with this or that position closely associated with the movement. Does it follow that one should engage in movement-building activities? No. Non-movement conservatives have arguably done more to advance conservative ideas and without the burden of fitting them into an ideological system or wondering how they may affect their standing within an ideological movement.

A non-movement conservative by definition has no meaningful affiliation with movement conservative institutions. He may not even care whether others call him a “conservative.” (Indeed, movement conservatives may be quick to denounce him.) But that needn’t limit his influence. On the contrary, consider the impact of these notable non-movement conservatives going back to the era of the movement’s founding.

Joseph Schumpeter. Austrian by birth, Schumpeter wrote his famous Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy while a professor at Harvard. It stands out as the greatest (if also the most elliptical) defense of capitalist, European civilization ever penned. Movement conservatives often take credit for the (partial) triumph of free-market ideas, but Schumpeter did more than anyone to persuade American leaders to preserve the capitalist system (to say nothing of the sort of semi-feudal, mixed constitution that he favored).

Jane Jacobs. When Jacobs wrote Death and Life of Great American Cities, urban planners, flush with federal dollars and enamored of modernist designs, were obliterating old neighborhoods in favor of thruways and high-rise apartment complexes. They never bothered to study how communities actually work. Jacobs did. The unplanned order of old buildings, mixed uses, and formal conventions, Jacobs argued, protects people from danger and makes decent lives for them possible. Urban renewal, by contrast, was immiserating its intended beneficiaries by depriving them of the organic features of real neighborhoods.

Tom Wolfe. Radical Chic, Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers, the Me Decade, the Right Stuff: Wolfe invented the very vocabulary for interpreting the carnival of American culture. He has exposed the degeneration of the civil-rights movement into race hustling, the moral one-upsmanship of wealthy liberals, and the vaporous egotism of contemporary religiosity. For every ballyhooed reform, Wolfe has shown the hypocrisy and cruelty beneath.

Jacques Barzun. The centegenarian polymath is probably the most civilized man alive. You can infer his politics from his magnum opus, From Dawn to Decadence. He admires Montaigne, Montesquieu, Walter Bagehot, William James—each a fox as opposed to a hedgehog and, broadly, a skeptic. No one better embodies the proposition that civilization—the “best that has been thought and said by man”—is worth defending.

Noam Chomsky, E.O. Wilson, Steven Pinker. These men have doomed to oblivion what Pinker calls the “Standard Social Science Model” whereby something called “society” shapes a fictile human nature however it pleases. On the contrary, while human nature may express itself in an infinite variety of cultural forms, the underlying machinery can achieve only a finite set of ends. The Standard Social Science Model has inspired failed policies from the Gulag to No Child Left Behind, at incalculable human cost. Thanks to these scientists, civilization has a hope of finding a way out.

I admit that many will find this list absurd. Chomsky’s anti-American pamphleteering often overshadows his pioneering work in linguistics. Jacobs was arrested protesting the Vietnam War and expatriated to Canada. Wilson is a New Deal liberal, Barzun apolitical, Schumpeter too aloof to be categorized. I have, one might say, composed a roster of worthies and arbitrarily called them conservative.

Great non-movement conservatives have in common only that they have advanced particular conservative positions. None has contributed anything to conservatism as an ideological system. To movement conservatives, this is unsatisfactory. In their minds, conservative positions are only as strong as the underlying principles from which they allegedly derive. But the opposite view is also possible: namely, that conservative principles are only as strong as the underlying positions that they purport to tie together. Hate Noam Chomsky as much as you please. It remains the case that Chomsky’s theory of a universal grammar not only revived the study of human nature but provided a model of how complex features of human society could be explained more generally. It instantly discredited behaviorism and has become part of the bedrock of the critique of social engineering. (Indeed, Chomsky describes his politics as an attack on social engineering as he perceives it.) Without Chomsky’s watershed discovery, conservatives’ belief in human nature would be only a postulate.

Movement conservatives have in fact produced few of the conservative ideas in general circulation. Even the movement’s intellectual founders—men like James Burnham, Richard Weaver, and Whitaker Chambers—did their best work before they decided to pool their energies into a movement. Take any movement conservative position: the original insights usually came from someone with little initial interest in building a conservative movement. Originalism in constitutional law was developed by Raoul Berger, a Harvard liberal; free-market ideas by academic economists working within the mainstream of their profession; anticommunism by disillusioned leftists, only some of whom (from Chambers and Burnham to the later neoconservatives) went on to form or join the conservative movement; foreign-policy realism by émigré academic Hans Morgenthau. The repertoire of conservative cultural criticism is painfully derivative, which may account for the dreary sarcasm that usually accompanies it. Perhaps the only ideas for which the movement can take credit are the those of the “Projectarians,” i.e., the hawks affiliated with the Project for the New American Century. I am happy to concede these as one of the few examples of an intellectual achievement unique to the conservative movement.

Admittedly, the movement may still have helped to advance conservative ideas even if has not produced very many. Yet even this boast rings hollow. Movement institutions have little to gain from winning new recruits. On the contrary, the largest payoff goes to the man who most effectively stimulates the passions of loyalists. When movement conservatives do seek a wider audience, their affiliations discredit their message. The imperturbable Charles Murray may enjoy the equivalent of a tenured position at the American Enterprise Institute, but his ideas have less impact as a result. Alan Wolfe derided him as “little more than a mean-spirited soul spouting quasi-academic language.” However nasty, the charge sticks because Murray is a known conservative. Tom Wolfe in recent years has offered casual support for the movement. Critics now see him less as a chronicler of American culture than as a man of peculiar obsessions.

Only the non-movement conservatives have managed to upset the intellectual consensus, for they speak to the intellectual establishment rather than at it. Consider the major traumas of establishment liberalism: Jane Jacobs’s Death and Life, Daniel Moynihan’s 1965 Report on the Negro Family, E.O. Wilson’s Sociobiology, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s Harvard commencement speech, Allan Bloom’s Closing of the American Mind. At the time, not one of these authors was known as a movement conservative.

That leaves but one rationale for the movement: to preserve conservative ideas in an inhospitable world. No sentiment is more widely shared by movement conservatives than that they are an embattled minority fighting a hateful enemy. Yet none of the elements of movement conservative ideology by itself poses any career hazard. Mickey Kaus opposes open borders; Nicholas Wade of the New York Times and New Republic contributor Steven Pinker believe in the reality of race; Al Gore is a critic of modernity; Jewish atheist Nat Hentoff is pro-life; Bill Cosby excoriates black culture; Camille Paglia lambastes feminists; Gregg Easterbrook is a skeptic of environmentalism. Some movement conservative views, such as support for the free market, are firmly a part of mainstream discourse. Others, such as a fondness for tradition, can be found all over the political spectrum. On close examination, it is difficult to find a movement conservative idea to which mainstream organs of scholarship and opinion are actually closed.

Take a hypothetical young talent with contrarian inclinations. Movement conservatives would counsel him to make his way up their ranks. But suppose he ignores their advice and joins the New York Times—or the Cleveland Plain-Dealer. There, even if he never classifies himself as conservative, he pursues stories that expose the perverse incentives of well-intentioned policies, the human costs of mass immigration, or the reality that, as Steve Sailer puts it, “families matter.” Not only are his eccentric interests not a liability, they may even prove to be an asset. His ability to see the world differently gives him a monopoly on stories that his colleagues cannot or will not spot themselves.

If the climate of opinion ever shifts, it will not be thanks to non-movement conservatives working within mainstream establishment institutions. My advice to young conservatives: avoid the movement, eschew its enticements. Above all, ignore debates as to the true meaning of conservatism. Heed instead the words of Ezra Pound: Make it new! After 60 years, the movement has succumbed to bureaucratic inertia and regression toward the mean. Conservative ideas will flourish only after conservatism is forgotten. 
__________________________________________

Austin W. Bramwell is a lawyer in New York City.

The American Conservative welcomes letters to the editor.
Send letters to: letters@amconmag.com