Getting It Right

One of the strangest things about the American conservative movement is how its leaders and spokesmen are indifferent, if not altogether ignorant, about history. “Tradition is the enemy of Progress,” declared Herbert Hoover’s secretary of Commerce in 1928. “Everything is before us,” proclaimed Ronald Reagan in 1984. “I don’t think we need to waste any more time listening to those who tell us what we can’t do.” (Other speeches of Reagan’s were studded with futuristic references to the movie “Star Wars”: “The Force is with us,” Reagan said.)

House Speaker Newt Gingrich has said about the Internet: “More people will have more opportunities to pursue human happiness in more different ways than at any time in human history.” In the writings and public statements of William F. Buckley Jr., the architect of the conservative intellectual movement, there is hardly any trace of an interest in history and only selective references to traditions--to certain traditions. George Gilder preaches that, because of technology and capitalism, paradise is around the corner. The chief literary hero of the conservatives is Tom Wolfe, whose heroes (“The Right Stuff”) are supersonic airmen. In sum, most of America’s conservatives are extreme Progressives. They have a limitless faith in capitalism, technology, popular wisdom and an almost limitless disdain for the preservation of land. (It remains true that the latter cause is compromised by the hobbling and inaccurate term “environmentalism.”)

There are, of course, notable and honorable exceptions among them. “The past is another country,” wrote the English novelist L.P. Hartley (a phrase that sounds better than it is). At its best, this may be a motto of the Buckleyites. What William Faulkner wrote--”The past is not even past”--seems to be the motto of many of the conservative intellectuals of the South, less known but deserving of more respect than the talkative spokesmen of neoconservatism, now well ensconced in or near the centers of intellectual commerce in the Washington-New York-Boston corridor.

Still there is trouble with Southern conservatism too. In the Southern tradition of the Agrarians, their spokesmen are skeptical of technology and of unlimited immigration and of untrammeled capitalism, which is to their credit, but almost all of them are populists, which is not so good because it suggests a faith in the divine-inspired wisdom of The People. Their problem is the opposite of that of the Buckleyites. These Southerners know the Past--their Past; but they do not know the Present--their Present--well enough. Some of their best minds, like the late M.E. Bradford, not only assailed the legend of Father Abraham but also aimed to discredit the character of Lincoln.

Now a partisan misreading of history may still be better than no reading of history at all. Yet the trouble with most of these Southern conservatives has less to do with their misreading of the past than with their misreading of the present. They do not seem to realize how much of the present South has become the Southland of Elvis, Newt, Trent, (and now) Bush. They do not see that populism and true conservatism are irreconcilable, since the essence of the latter is a healthy (and, yes, religious) skepticism about human nature and of the cult of popularity.

But this is still a big country and there are exceptions, often outside these groups. There is Wendell Berry, the new “Arator,” the defender of America’s land. There is the remarkable exception of Edwin M. Yoder Jr., Southerner, North Carolinian, onetime Rhodes scholar, onetime columnist and at present professor at Washington & Lee University. The title of Yoder’s book, “The Historical Present: Uses and Abuses of the Past,” is as precise as it is honest. It is a collection of essays but, unlike many such collections, they all cohere. It is as if they were chapters of a book that is suffused with history--with a respectable knowledge of and an abiding respect for history. It is written with a kind of admirable modesty, which is not only the mark of good manners (and of a good style) but representative of the quality of Yoder’s historical knowledge. He is concerned not only with the ignorance but with willful misconceptions of history: in short, with those kinds of half-truths that are more dangerous than are outright lies.

The 22 essays in “The Historical Present” are grouped into four sections about presidents, about “Constitutional Divinations,” about nationalism and World War II and about “Games Historians Play” (a telling title). I do not agree with him about everything. I am impressed by his profound concern with and knowledge of the Constitution. (In this, he is in full harmony with other Southern conservatives who insist that the Constitution was, and remains, a far greater achievement than the Declaration of Independence.)

Yoder is not a Catholic and of course not a Puritan, but he has a sense of original sin: His pages resound, on occasion, with a beautiful cello sound of Southern remorse as well as with a whispered regret of how the sense of original sin has evaporated, first of all among the descendants of the Puritans. Yoder is a Burkean and a Tocquevillean, which is what all conservatives ought to be. Tocqueville once wrote of the great, sad music of humanity; Burke of the limitations of human reasoning, which Yoder understands thoroughly. His book ends with a moving essay, an epilogue about his Southern Confederate ancestors.

I refer to the two inchoate--and not always precisely classifiable--groups of American conservatives: the neoconservatives and the populists. There is, however, one present element that the adherents of the two groups somehow have in common. They are nationalists. Indeed, some of them are radical nationalists, something that goes against the very essence of traditional conservatism. (And for some time now, we have fellow travelers not only of the left but of the right: people who, for odd reasons, take pleasure in assertions that they are nationalists too.) But there are profound differences between nationalism and patriotism. Nationalism is aggressive; patriotism is defensive. The Southern Agrarian writers understood this better than some of the present Southern conservatives. Nationalism depends on the myth of The People (Volk); patriotism on the respect for communal traditions, land and ancestors. Nationalism is ideological; patriotism is historical. These are distinctions that few people write about. George Orwell was one of them. None of Yoder’s essays deals with this distinction directly, but his prose breathes with his comprehension of it: “Many forgotten nationalisms, and the linguistic, religious and territorial passions that fuel them, were merely slumbering in unquiet graves, awaiting the disintegration of the Soviet Union to rise again. All this, however, seems to have come as a shock to many Americans.”

Yoder is an intrepid adversary of political correctness as well as of historical incorrectness. Some of my conservative friends may see him as a moderate. No: Yoder is no Vicar of Bray. He is not in the middle of opposites; he is above them. He is liberal in his spirit and conservative in his convictions: a traditionalist patriot, not a radical nationalist.