Building Conservatism

“I have never subscribed to the idea, apparently held by some, that conservatism is only a brake on somebody else’s engine. Such persons seem to think that a conservative has done his job when he has issued a warning against going too fast.” — Richard Weaver, In Defense of Tradition (The Prospects of Conservatism).

Recently I’ve began to read a little Richard Weaver on Friday mornings. Take the coffee out on the deck and pick-up a chapter from In Defense of Tradition or The Southern Essays or another collection of Weaver’s material. Like the next generations defender of the old ways, M.E. Bradford, Weaver died too young and at the precipice of when he would be needed most. The above quotation is an obvious reference to another strain of American conservatism which posited that the kind of culture we need to be conserving is whatever is popular in the day. A conservatism of five minutes ago. For men like Weaver living in the post-war consensus of the 1950s they saw the writing on the wall. The fight against global communism was already lost in their mind. Warnings were flaring up of Mao’s China, Khruschev’s Soviet empire, and Kim Il-Sung’s North Korea. Conservatives filling the pages of the magazine emanating from New York City were fighting a war that Southern conservatives had given caution about in the 1930s, though George Fitzhugh was warning about the danger of Europe’s newest German philosophy as early as the 1840s. The existential fever that had made the United States sick in the Gilded Age only served to encourage the better dead than red fears of Eisenhower’s America.

For Weaver the outward focus of National Review, the enigmatic cry of William F. Buckley to stand athwart history and yell stop, was missing the point of what conservatism was to be and to do. It has been said that one of the problems of contemporary conservatism is that it is more a mood than a philosophy. And Weaver would without doubt place that blame on the Regnery brigade’s reactive politics. If your only action is to write books and fill magazines pointing out everyone else’s mistakes then you don’t actually spend anytime building or considering the cost thereof. Though it makes perfect sense that the industrialist North would not understand these things since their twin gods of innovation and entrepreneurship drive their mindset. Those born of precarious small-holder farms and yeoman business seem to understand that the future is built not on attempting to marry worldly affluence and acceptance while attempting to drag tradition along with it. That’s not to say Southern conservatives were somehow anti-wealth or gaining wealth, however one wants to define that. There are plenty of examples of men like Judah Benjamin, poorly born in the West Indies who became a lawyer without peer in antebellum New Orleans and later Secretary of State of the young Confederacy. Benjamin of course was fascinated with inventions that would save labor and capital on his sugar plantation. Yet, in his biography of the Jewish planter Robert Douthat Meade makes note that Benjamin was always weary of how the possibility of supplying half the world with sugar and millions with cotton would open up the South to the temptations of greed and avarice, leading them to fall into the same vices already enveloping the commercial enterprises of the North.

Weaver’s interest in advocating a conservatism which was positive in nature is that the times in which he lived demanded it. If all conservatism was to be was a counter-weight to progressivism, the Washington Generals to the Leftist Harlem Globetrotters, well then the Buckelyites have their reward. Recognizing that politics is as much about persuasion as it is competition if conservatism was to be able to rise above the partisan morass and provide an example of which men would follow then it needed to get away from the visionary strongman positing a feeble imitation of wisdom and back to the quiet, servant-leadership of a culture built on honor, personal respect, and deep knowledge. Weaver is particularly concerned with the way education in the 1950s was moving away from the rote learning of previous generations to encouraging young people to think for themselves. He saw this as a great danger for the simple reason that if there is anyone who is unprepared for decision making of a philosophical type its people who have never experienced life. The beatniks gave birth to the hippies, and all that followed down the line. A conservatism which is merely a bow-tie wearing Wario version of these options is unsurprisingly not interesting nor worthy of much emulation by those seeking truth.

Moving forward from the era in which Weaver was writing to make some applications toward our own time and place Southern conservatives find themselves in a place that would not have surprised Weaver much nor his Northern echo, Russell Kirk. On one side you have the parasitic carcass of Buckley’s fusionistic worldview in men like Bill Kristol and Jonah Goldberg and on the other you have the uncouth anti-intellectual strain of the Trump train. Ironically united in their disdain and ignorance of the importance of social conservatism (which encompasses more than evangelical moralism) those who desire a positive return to the old paths have quite a lot of work ahead of them. Yet it is vital that Weaver’s concern that conservatives not merely be the guy with the bullhorn pointing out the mistakes of those in the arena be the future of the movement. In fact the idea of conservatism being a movement flies in the face of Weaver’s interests. It is true that conservatism is as much a way of life as it is a coherent, organized philosophy. However, that does not mean that it cannot be the latter. In fact, it must be seeking out first principles if it is to have any future at all.  Men like Weaver and Bradford and Wilson and Taylor of Caroline et al wouldn’t have it any other way.

In closing, the question then becomes in the morass of idiocy and boorishness that unfortunately marks out our generation how then do we go about with a positive argument for conservatism, Southern in its ethos, and grounded in its tradition? In some ways the Agrarian ideal of plant/grow is where the solution lies. Not only in the sense of planting these ideas in the hearts and minds of our children so that organically we begin to inculcate the sense of conservatism in their souls, but through rising above the destructive, lowbrow reactionary entertainment which marks out political conversation. Like anything worth doing, it is worth doing well and taking the time to do it. There is an old saying that is attributed to dozens of people, and likely does not originate with anyone, as most faithful truths do. It goes, “The true meaning of life is to plant trees under whose shade you do not expect to sit.” The problem of course in advocating such is that patience is not a virtue of our current cultural moment. Just look at the way the daily story never lasts more than twenty-four hours until the next big thing runs like wildfire through Twitter only to be overtaken as the cycle continues. Conservatives, Southern or otherwise, must need not stand athwart the culture and tell it to stop. We must rebuild our own culture and make it ready to survive and thrive in a positive way as an exemplar so that others might see that there are not two ways, either the donkey or the elephant, or even three ways in the porcupine, but there is one way, which is gentle and lowly of heart, built on an inheritance, as old as the ground itself which stands ready to maintain and continue the right wisdom of the ancients for the generations to come.

The views expressed at AbbevilleInstitute.org are not necessarily the views of the Abbeville Institute.

Rev. Benjamin Glaser

Benjamin Glaser is a father of four and a conservative Presbyterian minister in rural north central South Carolina. He is a native West Virginian and a Marine Corps veteran.

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