Over at the Plank, Barron Young Smith argues we should be teaching conservatism in schools:
This puts the American left--and indeed, the American public--at a disadvantage, because it leads fair-minded people to assume conservatives are basically just people with bowties or people who like guns (or both)--rather than a serious, rather militant ideological movement to be understood and reckoned with. ...
Yet American conservatism actually has nothing to do with Burke, other than drawing street cred off his deceased personage. The conservative movement began with William F. Buckley, Frank Meyer, and Russell Kirk himself during the 1950s, in a magazine called National Review -- and it was revolutionary, bombastic, and eager to overhaul American society, not Burkean. Unfortunately, whenever anyone does try to read up about the conservative movement, he is inevitably handed Kirk's book--along, perhaps, with a copy of Patrick Buchanan's A Republic, Not An Empire, or something similarly misleading -- and hustled off to learn nothing about his intended subject.
I am largely in agreement with this sentiment but I'm not sure what the canon of conservative literature to be taught is, exactly. I don't think the conservative intelligentsia knows, either. One thing you'd have to think about in designing a "conservatism 101" course would be how to reconcile the different factions that went into "the movement" in those early years. The best book on this subject, by the way, is George Nash's The Conservative Intellectual Movement in America Since 1945, a hefty volume to be sure, but absolutely indispensable for understanding the subject. Nash contends that postwar conservatives came broadly in two flavors -- unrepentant individualist libertarians and aristocratic traditionalists -- who were bound by a loathing of the New Deal welfare state, the destructiveness of the Second World War, and horrified at international communism's march.
National Review brought these disparate figures under one roof, though not without sparks (Frank Meyer and Russell Kirk hated each other) which allowed these ideas to be explored in one place, with an eventual consensus being reached. That consensus, "fusionism," was in reality a victory for Meyer's libertarians but the argument ended, I would argue, because the intellectual movement had begun to influence a rising conservative political movement to the point where such philosophical debates took a back seat to an emergent conservative populism that could be harnessed under anti-communism and the collapse of liberal hegemony in the wake of Vietnam and the excesses of the 60s (and demonstrated brilliantly by Rick Perlstein in Before the Storm). By the time Reagan was elected president, I think few in the movement cared whether Kirk or Meyer was the best expression of conservatism. They had a country to run into the ground, after all.
--Mori Dinauer
