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What’s happening to Sam Tanenhaus? Whether he’s any kind of a conservative or not is moot, but he used to be an interesting thinker. In this interview with Newsweek, the Death of Conservatism author might as well be reading from a script written by Arthur Schlesinger Jr. Let’s have more bipartisanship, he says, and let’s remember that TR, FDR, Truman, and Nixon — great conservatives all, yes? — favored nationalized health care. In short, why can’t Republicans be more like Democrats? Why can’t conservatives just be liberals?
In this interview with Jon Meacham, Tanenhaus makes like Basil Fawlty and doesn’t mention the war — the Iraq War, that is, which “serious conservatives” like David Frum supported. Tanenhaus had no problem criticizing the war until now and tying it to the Republicans’ dwindling electoral fortunes. But now that a Democrat is in office, suddenly health care is the thing that conservatives are supposedly screwing up. Even though attacks on the president’s plan have so far been rather popular.
But let’s go back to the idea that Republicans have somehow drifted away from the “conservatism” of TR. There’s a deep body of literature out there — Gabriel Kolko’s Triumph of Conservatism is perhaps the best known specimen — making the case that trust-busting actually favored big business. So perhaps Teddy and Enron’s recent man in the White House have something in common. And there’s another, more obvious sense in which movement conservatives are very much in the mold of Teddy Roosevelt — they are heirs to his machismo, nationalism, and militarism. Tanenhaus would probably agree that these are qualities which have not served the con movement well over the last four years (at least). But TR embodies them. He was the first to thump the pulpit for 100 percent Americanism, and he was much more eager to intervene in World War I than Woodrow Wilson was. TR is a great inspiration to neocons today: there’ s a reason the summer books issue of the Weekly Standard bears a cover image of Teddy in an inner tube. Yet Tanenhaus, who knows the neocons had something to do with the Iraq War and the Iraq War has something to do with conservatism’s death, praises TR and calls David Frum a “serious conservative.” The conclusion one is lead to is that Tanenhaus is so sympathetic to the social-democratic tilt of the neocons and economic interventionism of TR that he absolves them of the blame he knows they deserve for the Right’s ruin. Conservatives would be ill served to heed him. What’s needed is exactly the opposite of what Tanenhaus prescribes: the Right should sharpen its economic differences with the big-government Left while repudiating the catastrophic foreign policy promulgated by the likes of David Frum.
(And one more note on TR in passing: the megalithic corporate economy promoted by TR defined the American market until the Carter-Reagan era. The New Deal and post-war military-industrial complex continued the cartelization of the U.S. economy. Big was beautiful in the age of General Electric, General Mills, General Foods, and General Motors. Some of today’s scholarly localists look back on that time as a golden age of job security. But that job security was provided by the sheer size of those corporations, whose coziness with government regulatory power allowed for virtually guaranteed profits. Guaranteed profits allow for generous employee benefits. You can’t have everything: big, bureaucratic companies can provide job security that smaller firms cannot. If you want to ensure a pension for every worker, what you really believe is not “small is beautiful,” but big is best.)
Filed under: Books, Conservatism, Politics
Dan, you’re on a roll lately, with that last paragraph, with its serried rank of seriatim Generals of Industry an especial instance of the verbal-image-as-drag-of-killer-read (or so I have read, like WFB, while in international waters). I recall some comic’s line about Dubya wanting to award a medal to General Mills for his contribution to the nation’s defense…
Speaking of size matters, here’s a piece from The Economist, the bulletin board alike of the Davos set and the Ivied and Oxbridge scribes with dreams of breakfast interviews with its principals:
Company size
Big is back
Corporate giants were on the defensive for decades. Now they have the advantage again
Excellent point in your final note. However, today’s Big Business seems to have mutated into something extremely deleterious to the greater society, if not hastening the collapse of America itself in a plethora of ways. Somewhere along the way, these companies went from being proudly American to “Global” companies, who proudly proclaimed their lack of provincialism yet wanted to maintain their same cushy ties to the State while simultaneously cutting ties with their overpaid (relative to the rest of the world) American workers. Perhaps that’s the root of why men like Buchanan, who fondly remembers the American Business-Government edifice of the 1950’s and 60’s, is so passionate in his opposition to the importation of cheap labor and the exporting of jobs.
“verbal-image-as-drag-of-killer-read”
Did I mean: verbal-image-as-drag-of-killer-weed
Yes, thank you, post-Freudian Google autoprompt, I did, that will be all; I’ve been accused of getting high on words, but that hits too close to home even for me…
I’ve been following Tanenhaus with interest for maybe 12 years, with my rightist dad’s disappearing for an entire weekend with his eBay gift copy of his Whittaker Chambers bio in 2000 our Family Circus set-piece. When he was writing his book (Tanenhaus, not Dad – Ed.), neocons were hot to court him as One of Us over his apparent vindication of Chambers over Alger Hiss, though the mainline of anti-Stalinist ADA-style liberals had themselves turned their backs on Hiss early on, leaving largely Nation types still, like Mrs. Hemans’ Casaubon, on the burning deck whence all but they had fled.*
*Hiss’ guilt or innocence “didn’t make much difference, as I planned at first to write relatively little on the case itself. It still doesn’t matter much to me,” Mr. Tanenhaus said. “In one of Updike’s Maples stories, the wife is reading about Nixon and exclaims, ‘Alger Hiss was guilty,’ and the husband says, ‘Of course he is. We’re all guilty.’ This was my view when I began the book and still is today, which may explain some of the subsequent confusions about my politics.”
Then when he wrote anodyne profiles of center-right rising stars for Vanity Fair c. 1999, including a thematic group sketch of late-Clinton honeyed heterodoxies (Wendy Shalit, Danielle Crittenden, &c.), free of talking-points catnip and venue-fit, Corner types drummed their fingers and sniffed an apostate: a Vanity Fair of the Hannities after the honey-tease; whence this onetime presumed stalwart of the nomenklatura among the Commentariat (he had published early in the neocons’ flagship-cum-Titanic), having declined his invites to Kristol balls and smashed beakers in Decter Strangelove’s lab, leaving without paying his tab in the brothel where every Pod-whore, it’s true, must play John and respect the tribal Norms – only to slum with the likes of Graydon Carter and Annie Leibovitz at the 4-color answer to Charlie Rose? Vas ya dere, Sharley?, as radio’s Munchausen liked to say…
So it was no accident, Conrad (Black, not Hilton), when the answer to What Makes Sammy Run? turned out to be the editorship of the Keller-era NYTBR and Week in Review sections, not to omit his finding in the interim the comfiest berth among the “liberal hawks” of the “even-the-New-Republic” stripe who helped provide crucial air cover to the neocon ground divisions in the Iraq War run-up.*
*See the incisive critiques of the effect of this ideological strand upon Tanenhaus’s tenure at the NYTBR by Jim Sleeper, an old-style social-democrat lefty who did yeoman’s work in the 1990s critiquing the multiculturalist/racialist left and identity-politics orbits
In 2004, Terry Teachout pre-saged in thyme Dan’s point on Tanenhaus’s latter-day channelling of the bowtied Camelot courtier with whom Dwight Macdonald had such twitting sport* in the inaugural NYRoB;
*”I wish my friend Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., who is, as they say, “once you get to know him,” a witty, clever, sensible, and decent fellow, had never gotten involved with high politics.
from a New York Observer profile by Rachel Donadio, who went on shortly after to become one of Tanenhaus’s leading profile artists at the NYTBR:
” ‘Sam is neither conservative nor neoconservative,’ summed up his friend Terry Teachout, the critic and blogger, who contributes to The Times Book Review. ‘He is an old-fashioned anti-communist Jewish liberal intellectual who still gets excited about Saul Bellow.’
“…He [Tanenhaus] said the critics he admires include Dwight Macdonald, Lionel Trilling, Alfred Kazin and Edmund Wilson. He’s currently re-reading a collection of Kenneth Tynan’s theater criticism.”
Well, I’ll end with Teachout, before this comment on Tanenhaus become a teach-in…
I think Murray Rothbard put it best:
I, for one, am tired of the liberal strategy, on which they have rung the changes for forty years, of presuming to define “conservatism” as a supposed aid to the conservative movement. Whenever liberals have encountered hard-edged abolitionists who, for example, have wanted to repeal the New Deal or Fair Deal, they say but that’s not genuine conservatism. That’s radicalism.” The genuine conservative, these liberals go on to say, doesn’t want to repeal or abolish anything. He is a kind and gentle soul who wants to conserve what left-liberals have accomplished.
The left-liberal vision, then, of good conservatives is as follows: first, left-liberals, in power, make a Great Leap Forward toward collectivism; then, when, in the course of the political cycle, four or eight years later, conservatives come to power, they of course are horrified at the very idea of repealing anything; they simply slow down the rate of growth of statism, consolidating the previous gains of the left, and providing a bit of R&R for the next liberal Great Leap Forward. And if you think about it, you will see that this is precisely what every Republican administration has done since the New Deal. Conservatives have readily played the desired Santa Claus role in the liberal vision of history. “http://www.lewrockwell.com/rothbard/ir/Ch1.html
Unfortunately some beltway conservatives will fall for this… thinking they’re being high-minded and reasonable. Joe Scarborough is one unfortunate example.
We can play this game too. Hey, you know what, maybe Progressive or Liberal really means embracing a laissez-faire free market. Nothing equals Progress like technological and commercial innovation. Hey unions and cutting off trade with the world isn’t very cosmopolitan and certainly doesn’t jive with keeping the Patriarchy off our backs. Also why would any Progressive Liberal want to export, via war, our Patriarchy and Oppression? Besides the military is Hierarchy. That is not real Progress.
ABRACADABRA! Progressives/Liberals are really conservatives (or Liberaltarians if you like).
Mr. McCarthy, I was wondering if you could give your opinion on Buckley v. Valeo as well as the idea of corporate personhood. Do you believe that much of what is wrong with America could be alleviated to a significant degree by destroying corporate power, by slowing, halting and reversing corporate consolidation and thus decentralizing wealth and power and ownership?
I understand that this would involve gov’t intervention in the economy, which I – for a long time – stood against on principle. But I think the fundamental problem with the current American system is not merely that too much power has been consolidated in Washington at the expense of the States and the people, but that this power and wealth has been accumulated by a tiny cabal who move from the public to the private sectors as though there is no difference, that perhaps there *is* no difference any longer. Many of the most powerful financial elites serve on the boards of massive multinational corporations, resign, take high public office and write legislation that regulates the industry they just left and then return to that industry etc.
I suppose that is a long way of saying that the Libertarian right has long held the federal government the main evil, while opposing restrictions on corporate power, whereas I’ve come to believe you cannot fight one and not the other, as they are no longer separate. Both houses of congress are almost *literally* owned by the same corporations whom they purport to regulate.
It was your line about trust-busting actually helping big business that led me to respond, btw.
I should note the Newsweek interview McCarthy referred to wasn’t linked: http://www.newsweek.com/id/214253
Also here’s an excellent review of the Tanenhaus book: http://www.newcriterion.com/articles.cfm/Is-conservatism-dead–4166
Thanks, Bill. I somehow overlooked the link. I’ll amend the post to include it.
I lost interest reading anything by Tanenhaus after his Chambers biography. It’s was not poorly written, but it didn’t seem to offer anything new. From what I could tell, the book didn’t provide any interesting insights into Chambers that were not available in Witness, so when I finished it I felt that the entire endeavor was redundant.
Tanenhaus recycled the vile old anti-Joe McCarthy
bilge that Chambers had been privately spouting
for years to Buckley & the NR gang. I liked “Witness”
but still thought that Chambers was vastly overrated
by the Right. His venomous anti-review of Atlas
Shrugged opened many eyes. Taylor Caldwell
wrote in 1963 that he did a hatchet job on of her
works in Time.
On corporate power the only evil thing about it
is the bankruptcy clause. No third party, such
as the FedGov, should be able to excuse a debt
owed to a creditor. Otherwise the corporation
is a voluntary joining, see In Defense Of The
Corporation by Robert Hessen (1979.)
In reply to S.L. Toddard, I’m pessimistic about getting wealth out of politics. Even if all of the campaign-finance restrictions in Buckley had been upheld, there would be yet other ways in which wealth could influence elections — through ownership of newspapers, for example. And there are worse things than the influence of money; freeing the political system from financial influence through complete public funding would have the effect of making candidates wholly dependent on the government itself. That would distort the political system at least as much as the influence of money does. For one thing, with the federal government determining who qualifies to receive public funding, there would be no chance for new parties to arise.
I’d have to think carefully about what requirements Congress can place upon candidates for federal office, but putting aside that question, I favor less regulation of elections, not more. Let Ross Perot or Steve Forbes (or George Soros) give a few million dollars to a serious candidate rather than putting themselves forward. Campaign finance reform actually backfired on the post-Watergate Democrats, since the Republicans quickly became a lot better at raising small donations through direct mail and making the most of independent expenditures and soft money. The unalterable political reality is that money can be converted into power, which means the wealthy will always have means to affect things, and power can be converted into money, since the state has power to expropriate and regulate. I have a little more faith in the plurality of interest among the wealthy, however, than within the government.
Take the Ron Paul effort as an example of what the present campaign-finance laws have done. Paul refused to do what most candidates do when they need money — take out loans. He’s against campaign debt on principle. You might think that Paul received as much money as he could have needed from his huge base of small donors. But in fact the money didn’t necessarily come in on the timetable that he needed — the December money bomb was already too late for ad buys in New Hampshire, for example. Hillary Clinton and John McCain had no problem going into debt to finance their campaigns at the critical time, and Romney of course could tap his own money. Without the contribution limits, Ron Paul could have raised a lot more money a lot more quickly. Even though the absence of limits would also have helped other candidates, there’s a diminishing marginal utility to more campaign dollars beyond a certain point — for that reason, another few million for smaller candidates actually means a lot more to them than another few million for the debt-financed and self-financed candidates.
The best conservative and libertarian thinking that I’ve read on the subject of the 14th Amendment and corporate personhood comes down against giving corporations national personhood. Felix Morley has an excellent chapter on this, “Commerce and Nationalization,” in Freedom and Federalism. 14th amendment personhood subverted constitutionally legitimate state regulations of commercial activity, but also established the groundwork for all kinds of other expansions of central power. Both “property rights” and “human rights” were nationalized in the process. The federal executive branch and judicial branch profited, to the detriment of Congress and the state legislatures.
Bill R., and Murray R., are — wow, it’s a “Triple-R” — quite right that we’ve heard this Tanenhaus line before. Yet I could at least respect at mythical “Red Tory” who supported a “conservative” welfare state but at least took civil liberties and a noninterventionist foreign policy seriously. Heck, even Robert Taft supported federal public housing plans and various other not-exactly-small-government measures. But whenever a Tanenhaus-type complains about the Right, the complaint is usually far about conservative opposition to big government than it is about conservative militarism and thuggery. Social democracy always takes priority over peace and personal freedom. The only way in which this “conservatism” is distinguishable from the center-Left is that it might have a bit more rhetorical spin about being “pro-family.” (God knows there are misguided traditionalists who think that a pro-family welfare state would be unproblematic and usher in a reign of Catholic virtue.)
If all a Tanenhaus wants is a Right that is a.) a little abashed about how Iraq turned out, but not really repentant, and b.) in favor of a “pro-family” welfare state, then he already has much of what he wants, since Ramesh Ponnuru, David Frum, Ross Douthat, David Brooks, and a host of neoconservatives already affirm a program exactly like that. Hell, Karl Rove belongs in that category, too. These are the most prominent names in “conservative” print media, and fairly influential voices within the Beltway. They would all complain that the grassroots aren’t on board with their “moderate” military welfarism — the grassroots are too brusque, too bumptious, too worked up about Obama’s birth certificate and illegal immigration. But the grassroots Right is in the state it’s in thanks in no small part to the likes of Ponnuru, Frum, Douthat, and Brooks. Since their program of welfare for families doesn’t inspire anyone, their political allies wind up having to whip up enthusiasm for the military side of the program, and have to throw in some red meat about gays, immigrants, and abortion. But the NY-DC axis have no cause to complain, since that’s the only way to sell the public on their insipid welfare-warfare program. He who wills the end must will the means. The only means toward getting the Right to embrace the welfare state is to get the Right hopped up about real wars or culture wars. But that’s precisely what has cost the Right political power over the last four years.
In short, the moderates created the extremists. And now they’re just proposing more of the same. Mencken may have said that no one ever went bankrupt underestimating the intelligence of the American people, but in this case I think the people have a lot more sense than media mod-cons. If they want welfarism, they’ll get it from the experts — the liberals.
[...] Daniel McCarthy in TAC: In this interview with Jon Meacham, Tanenhaus makes like Basil Fawlty and doesn’t mention the war — the Iraq War, that is, which “serious conservatives” like David Frum supported. Tanenhaus had no problem criticizing the war until now and tying it to the Republicans’ dwindling electoral fortunes. But now that a Democrat is in office, suddenly health care is the thing that conservatives are supposedly screwing up. Even though attacks on the president’s plan have so far been rather popular. [...]
That Weekly Standard cover is of GK Chesterton, not Teddy Roosevelt. It says so on the inside caption.
D’oh
Ah! Thanks, Drudge. I had only seen the thumbnail pic. I stand corrected.
“For one thing, with the federal government determining who qualifies to receive public funding, there would be no chance for new parties to arise.”
Bruce Ackerman gets around this problem with his proposal to give every voting age citizen a yearly voucher which they could donate to any candidate or party of their choice.
http://www.amazon.com/Voting-Dollars-Paradigm-Campaign-Finance/dp/030010149X
Dan,
Great piece, just one teeny tiny point:
“TR is a great inspiration to neocons today: there’ s a reason the summer books issue of the Weekly Standard bears a cover image of Teddy in an inner tube.”
I went to look this up and apparently it’s Chesterton on the cover. Just thought I’d let you know.
Garry Wills reviews Tanenhaus in the NYRoB for September 24.
Ross Douthat reviews Steven Hayward on Ronald Reagan in Sunday’s NYTBR.
Thanks, Scott. I enjoyed the WIlls piece much more than I expected to.