The forthcoming issue of TAC includes my review of one of my favorite books of the past year — Peter Richardson’s A Bomb in Every Issue: How the Short, Unruly Life of Ramparts Magazine Changed America. Get it by subscribing to TAC here (or give a friend a gift subscription).

Meanwhile, my review of Gregory Schneider’s The Conservative Century is online at First Principles. Here’s a bite:

Gregory Schneider’s new book puts recent discussions about “the death of conservatism” in perspective, for many of the disputes that rage on the Right today have antecedents in the controversies of a century ago. Indeed, The Conservative Century (just released in paperback) begins at the turn of the twentieth century with two distinct strains of conservatism contending with one another—what Schneider calls the “laissez-faire conservatism” of such nineteenth-century thinkers as William Graham Sumner and Herbert Spencer against the “nationalist conservatism” of Theodore Roosevelt. The one side wanted smaller government, a noninterventionist foreign policy, and almost unfettered capitalism. The other believed that the federal government should exercise a strong regulatory role at home and had a mission to spread American values abroad. All this may seem disconcertingly familiar in 2009.

Neither the nationalists nor the proponents of laissez-faire typically called themselves “conservatives.” The former often styled themselves as “progressives,” the latter were classical liberals or radical individualists. But Schneider is not making a normative judgment by classing them all together as conservatives—however paradoxical it may seem, progressive nationalists and laissez-faire liberals alike strongly influenced later, self-described conservatives. The Cold War conservatism and popular Right of the mid-twentieth century drew upon national-security and free-market rhetoric (in different proportions at different times, to be sure), while throughout the postwar era noninterventionism and “Red Tory” economics have informed conservative critiques of conservatism. They represent paths not taken that nonetheless have roots on the Right as deep as those of the dominant traditions of nationalism and capitalism.

Schneider, an associate professor of history at Emporia State University, has demonstrated his understanding of the nuances of modern American conservatism before. His sourcebook Conservatism in America since 1930 was arguably the best and most diverse anthology of twentieth-century traditionalist and libertarian writing since William F. Buckley Jr.’s Have You Ever Seen a Dream Walking? Before that, Schneider’s Cadres for Conservatism, a short but comprehensive history of Young Americans for Freedom, illustrated his knack for integrating political, institutional, and intellectual histories into a coherent narrative. The Conservative Century is a successor to both earlier works: a narrative companion to Conservatism in America Since 1930 that weaves political history together with the development of conservative thought over the last century—all in a mere two hundred pages.

Lastly, a not-so-recent review of mine is now online for the first time here at TAC: my take on Robert Higgs’s Against Leviathan: Government Power and a Free Society.

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Noel O’Sullivan puts it well:

In the Vindication of the English Constitution he had indeed professed allegiance to the ideal of a balanced constitution, and consequently insisted that the House of Commons alone could not be regarded as the representative of the nation; it was, on the contrary, merely the representative of one estate of the nation, even though that estate might be the most numerous. The ‘people,’ or the ‘nation’ as a whole, was represented only in the three mutually counterbalanced parts of the constitution — the throne, the peers, and the Commons — when taken in conjunction with one another. Disraeli could accordingly proceed to justify extension of the suffrage by maintaining that no increase in the number of voters could ever entitle the House of Commons to regard itself as the true representative of the will of the people. A number of his contemporaries, however, were not slow to point out how unrealistic unrealistic was the assumption that an elected chamber would prove to be as modest as Disraeli hoped it would be about its position in the constitution. Claiming the support of the electorate, it would hardly be likely to accept opposition to its will from the monarch or an hereditary House of Lords as entitled to the same respect as its own wishes. And that, of course, is what subsequently happened: the likelihood of a royal veto on legislative measure supported by the Commons was a remote eventuality by the time Victoria died, and the House of Lords was already on the defensive long before the Liberal onslaught upon it in the first decade of the [20th] century. It was to the idea of a strong popularly-based leadership, then, rather than to the old Burkean ideal of a balanced constitution, that Disraeli’s deeper sentiments and policies actually seemed to point.

That’s from O’Sullivan’s Conservatism, which is pretty good. In a later chapter, he describes the three-way crossroads at which traditionalists and paleos are liable to find themselves:

Let us suppose with Eliot and Dawson that the modern psyche is really rotten to the core, whether because of the decline of religion or culture, or both. In that case, only three responses are possible at the political level. One is despair, which means in practice doing nothing; the second is the advocacy of a spiritual revolution so profound that it is incompatible with a stable version of conservative ideology; whilst the third is a resort to more modest reforms which are bound, however, to appear totally inadequate remedies for the disease they are intended to cure. It is the third solution to which both Eliot and Dawson resort. Eliot writes nostalgically of the parish as an example of what he means by organic community, whilst Dawson suggests that the kind of institution which would satisfy the need for spiritual harmony, supra-political leadership and cultural unity would be one modelled upon the English public school system.

… The real challenge to the imagination of the conservative statesman is to spot those parts of a rickety structure which, when strengthened by modest reforms, will give greater stability to the whole. To attempt more than that — by reforming religion, culture, or men’s beliefs about society and the universe at large, for example — may of course be possible; but the price of success is likely to be the destruction of liberty and legality.

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Jay Cost of RealClearPolitics thinks that the gold medal for faulty analysis this election cycle should go to pundits who say NY-23 shows the Republican Party deeply divided, since, Cost says, “the GOP’s divisions - whatever they may be - are utterly, totally dwarfed by the continuing divisions in the Democratic Party. Not only in scale, but in significance. Republicans might be divided over the symbolic role of Sarah Palin in the party, but Democrats are divided over what to do about health care.”

Well, I agree that the tale of irreconcilable differences within the GOP is exaggerated, but Cost is dead wrong. The Democrats’ divisions are a source of their strength — that is, they realize that some districts require blue dog candidates, while others will accept staunch liberals — while the GOP’s differences are a source of continued fumbling. Of course you’re going to get a complicated and perhaps immobile legislative performance if you’re bringing into the party all kinds of different interests. But legislating should never be easy (it’s not meant to be), and in partisan politics winning in the first place is the prerequisite to any kind of policy.

The bigger weakness that I see in the GOP isn’t the fractiousness of their primaries or the intractability of their ideological base — the Dems have a lot of that, too — but the demands of the base and the party establishment alike for programmatic conformity. The GOP Congress never gave Bush the trouble that the Democratic Congress is giving Obama. Thus when voters looked at the wreck of the Bush administration, they rightly blamed Republicans everywhere for what Bush had done. Back in their glory days before 1994, congressional Democrats were experts at doing whatever they needed to do to create at least the appearance of putting loyalty to their districts above loyalty to party and president. In practice it was a shame, but they understood what worked. The Republicans, by contrast, have a one-boot-fits-all mentality, both in the primaries and in the legislatures. Republicans who do stick to their own consciences and their districts’ interests, like Ron Paul and Walter Jones, are targets for establishment-backed primary opposition. And of course, Bush strong-armed a great many reluctant Republican congressmen into voting for the prescription drug add-on to Medicare. The GOP demands much more conformity than the Democrats, for whom nonconformity — division — is less of a problem. (Though they certainly do have their sources of bitterness as well, as we saw in the Obama-Clinton contest. But they managed to prevent those tensions from exploding.)

The Republicans could do with a lot more productive dissension within Congress, and less tripping over their own feet in primaries. (For what it’s worth, I have a lot more respect for the Club for Growth model than Daniel Larison does. Conservatives should be content with clobbering liberal Republicans and pushing the party to the Right, even if it takes a longer time to win back power. But they should also be smart enough to reconcile a right-wing program with the diversity of regional cultures. And of course, they ought to wise up about the monstrous foreign policy they’ve been supporting, and the insincerity of movement conservatism’s professions of small-government principle. Antiwar Republicans like Hostettler got clobbered just like pro-war Republicans did in 2006 and 2008, but I suspect that was in part because there were so few antiwar Republicans that the public couldn’t believe such a thing really existed.)

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I have a review of the new book by George H. Nash, dean of conservative historians, up at History News Network here.

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The GOP might do reasonably well next week, with Republican Bob McDonnell set to coast to victory in Virginia’s gubernatorial contest, though I suspect New Jersey might again (as always) dash the party’s hopes. I suspect Democratic incumbent John Corzine will pull through in the Garden State. I have no idea what will happen in NY-23, the Scozzaffava/Hoffman/Owens race — can polls showing Conservative Party candidate Doug Hoffman in the lead be believed? Jim Antle has a good piece on the race and its implications here.

Between being competitive in these races and a rather favorable climate developing for the 2010 midterms, the GOP might seem to have floated out of its doldrums without liquidating its leadership or examining at all seriously what went wrong during the Bush years. But there’s something in the offing that should worry the Republican establishment a bit: the party still looks to have little in the way of a future, with younger Americans leaning heavily Democratic and “liberal.” Where there does seem to be activist energy and passion on the young Right, it’s in the Ron Paul camp, which the GOP still prefers to ignore. A few months ago I took a look at this subject in the mag put out by Young Americans for Liberty. That piece, “The Battle for America’s Youth,” is now online here. The youth vote won’t be a big problem for the GOP in 2010 because chances are very few young people will bother going to the polls. But in the decades to come, the cohort that voted strongly for Obama in 2008 is likely to continue to vote Democratic, which will have larger consequences once they start going to the polls more regularly as they age. The GOP won’t be able to offset that trend by rallying around the dead-end politics of George W. Bush, even repackaged in the shape of Sarah Palin. Any success the party enjoys in the near term only postpones the reckoning that must come.

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