Quo Vadis, Conservatism?
By SHAUN KENNEY
David Gelernter in the pages of The Wall Street Journal writes about how a restoration of political conservatism is about as anachronistic as bringing back the values of the 11th century. Times have changed, argues Gelenter. So must we. In his article, Gelernter is referring to conservative intellectuals, particularly Never Trumpers.
Within this indictment of the political right are three items, two of which Gelenter expresses and a third which is left unsaid.
First and foremost, American conservatives who bill themselves “the Resistance” against the modern era have merely sunk into the trap, unaware that their accommodation of the left somehow never merited the full-throated opposition they seem to throw at President Trump. If this be resistance, it should be made of sterner stuff.
Second, such faux resistance against the populist right seems to have, as one commentator put it, all the flaccidity of a Jeb Bush exclamation point. Precisely because the conservative movement remains utterly unable to recapture ground, the populist movement has supplanted conservatives within its own party.
Populism is willing to get dirty, to fight fire with fire, to be uninvited from polite sic liberal society and the cocktail parties. After all, while conservatives pore over left-wing news sites in an effort to seem urbane and cosmopolitan, can we really consider the leftist who treats more conservative or traditional sources similarly, with pipe and scotch in hand reading National Review, the Economist, or dare we say this noble publication?
The real test is this: How many of us really think that the political religions are going to give us back marriage? Consider all of the ground lost over the last five decades as modernism — that mother of all heresies — has crept into society only to be supplanted by her ugly postmodernist kid sister.
The legions of the political left have captured every institution of note in America — the press, education, television media, courthouses, and more are actively infiltrating the Catholic Church both here in America and abroad. Consider the social institutions we have failed to conserve like marriage and life, so that we end up with pornography, the abuse of drugs, transhumanism, and all the other deviancies we today treat as normalized.
Apart from defeating Soviet Communism, where are the victories of the American right? What victory does the modern conservative movement claim? Where is the recaptured ground?
Of course, populism cannot make such claims as of yet. Perhaps here is where the conservative movement smashed itself against the shoals. Rather than serving as a solution, the consultants and marketeers of the political right merely traded in their bona fides for easy victories. Just keep the economy chugging along at 3-4 percent GDP, and we don’t have to be for anything — just against the liberals.
This materialistic turn became self-evident after the fall of the Soviet Union, and it is the very opposite end of dialectical materialism. Instead of the dialectic being turned on society as Marx proposed, the idea that “consumerism saves” is now turned upon the Randian self. He who dies with the most toys still dies, says the postmodern, but at least he had a good time.
It was G.K. Chesterton who suggested that tradition is the democracy of the dead, and if there is one war that modern progressives have waged successfully, it is this idea of tradition — the way things have been done before. What one calls tradition, they call oppression. What we might call manners, progressives call patriarchy. What we call nature and natural law, the progressive proposes a will to power against the illusion of self.
Peter Lawler explained this condition far better in his introductory epistle as the new editor of the conservative quarterly The Modern Age, and within it is the inherent flaw Gelernter identifies in his work.
Conservatism and tradition writ large are by and large qualities of Tolkien’s “long defeat of history” as it were. Progressives of either stripe — left or right — seek to upend these traditions in search of utopia.
It was men such as William F. Buckley Jr. and Patrick J. Buchanan who begged the few lights of the West that still flickered in America to stand athwart history yelling stop. Yet history, so it seems, is a Nietzschean god after all, and when he wrote his now infamous “God is dead” lines in his book The Gay Science, he intended it to be the god of history whom modern culture had indeed killed.
The Christian West has struggled against this “death of God” throughout the 20th century, and we have been rolled under the waves drowning by degrees. The secular West attempted substituting scientific order in the place of Christendom, but it has failed. It tried again with ideologies — secular religions to replace the sacred ones — and though unfulfilling, it seems to have captured the hearts and minds of a few.
Secularism has renewed the fight with marketing, advertising, Big Data, and a raw torrent of mindless entertainment in an effort to prove that Huxley, not Orwell, had the right idea. This too seems rather unfulfilling, and postmodern culture seems ready to offer the last gasp of a solution — transhumanism, the very danger that Romano Guardini and Pope Francis are waving their own hands athwart history as they implore the world to stop and reconsider.
For myself, the definition of conservatism is deeply rooted in tradition and the wisdom of our forefathers. More than this, while every Catholic embraces the “death of God” as part of our faith, we too understand that embedded in this death is the Resurrection — truth is truth because it is true, not because it holds an aggregate amount of facts, but because in both form and essence, appearance and substance, it is true. As the late Dr. Warren Carroll used to say, “Truth exists, the Incarnation happened.”
So here is my third observation, one that Gelernter doesn’t explain but one that practicing Catholics perhaps know intrinsically. The idea of the death of God isn’t the death of anything we would know as a deity at all. Rather it is the irreconcilable death and impotence of power over the souls of men. Our forefathers knew this as they threw our saints to lions, burned us for refusing to offer incense to the Roman emperors, even slaughtered us in persecutions and wars. Catholics have been resisting progress for over 2,000 years because history was perfected in Christ. All else is a sort of waiting.
When one really reflects on this truth, from the time of the prophets to today, modern history becomes a mere footnote — fascinating as footnotes might be, but utterly unimportant in contrast to a God who is so important that time was literally severed in two at the moment of His birth, into B.C. and A.D.
Political conservatism and Catholic Tradition are two very distinct things, to be sure. But as the modernist endgame burns out and every alternative ideology and escape hatch is tested, there will be but one enduring alternative. Our faith tells us it will be the Body of Christ, the Church Militant here on Earth — not a utopia, but a living faith.
If we’re to stand athwart history yelling anything, I’d rather it be the name of Jesus Christ rather than a mere truce.
