Southern Conservatives in Name Only

Southern conservatives have made a vocation of identifying, condemning and punishing the vices and sins of their liberal counterparts. Many of them are the strongest voices calling for the removal of President Bill Clinton from office. Such efforts may be worthy of applause, but they cannot cloak the fact that modern conservatives have no clear and stable program of their own, but ceaselessly revise their agenda and their principles to suit the exigencies, ambitions and yearnings of the moment. Indeed, conservatives today are seemingly united not by a desire to preserve what they love but to eradicate what they despise. How unfortunate that this narrowly partisan, and often mean-spirited, brand of conservatism has infected even those who have proclaimed themselves heirs to the distinguished, if troubled, legacy of the South.

The Southern conservative tradition offers the most imposing native critique of America’s national development and of the more disquieting aspects of life in the modern world. Southern thinkers frequently have lamented the celebration of the free market, questioned the desirability of limitless material progress and challenged the worldwide advance of capitalism and democracy. Antebellum Southern thinkers’ denunciation of what they called “free society” was rooted in a defense of slavery as a social system. Unlikely as it may seem, these conservatives agreed with European socialists that the capitalist world was on the threshold of a protracted crisis from which it would not recover. From the perspective of the Southern slaveholders and their spokesmen, slavery alone could ensure progress without the social dislocation, political upheaval and moral confusion that tormented bourgeois society.

Defeat in the Civil War made their vision of social, political and moral order impossible to sustain. Emancipation destroyed the social relations that had nurtured the Southern conservative critique of free labor and free society. Nevertheless, since 1865, as before, a host of Southern thinkers have continued to associate the deepening crises of the modern world with the steady development of capitalism. Such 20th-century figures as Donald Davidson, Allen Tate, John Crowe Ransom, Andrew Lytle and others associated with the Agrarian movement of the 1930s, and, later, Richard M. Weaver and M. E. Bradford, condemned the rise of the profit motive, the savagery of unrestrained economic competition, the growing obsession with material progress, the separation of ownership from the control of property and the destructive exploitation of nature.

How ironic, then, that the triumph of conservatism, including what now passes for Southern conservatism, in national politics flows from a staunch defense of the free market, the proliferation of consumer goods, the celebration of laissez-faire capitalism and the pursuit of what C. B. McPherson has labeled “possessive individualism.” Southern conservative politicians might support legislation to impede the ravaging of nature as long as environmental issues do not mar profits. They are lyrical in their exaltation of corporations. Those who now identify themselves as Southern conservatives also remain conservative on such cultural and social issues as gay rights, feminism, abortion, crime, immigration, welfare reform and family values. Philosophically, though, they have departed from anything that resembles the traditional conservatism of the South.

Contemporary Southern conservatives, for example, espouse an optimistic view of human nature and emphasize human goodness and benevolence at the expense of the older Christian doctrine of human sinfulness, a cornerstone of the traditional Southern conservative worldview. They continue to believe in the inevitability of progress and in the efficacy of technology. Former Speaker Newt Gingrich (R-Ga.), in fact, is a disciple of the futurist Alvin Toffler and grows vertiginous in the presence of the gadgetry that he contends will not only improve but perfect society and the human race. Traditional Southern conservatives, especially in the 20th century, would be quick to identify and condemn Gingrich’s attitude as one more manifestation of the sinful and ultimately destructive desire to overcome the limitations of the human condition and fashion a heaven on Earth.

Politically, too, today’s Southern politicians are not conservative in the traditional sense. They profess to put America first, to restrict federal authority and to restore states’ rights. In their quest for power, however, they do not recoil from appealing to the worst fears and prejudices of the American people, and for all that, they do not really want to limit national government and return power to the people and the states. It has been, after all, conservatives who have advocated mammoth defense spending, promoted huge political bureaucracies, strengthened the police state, and burdened Americans for generations with progressive tax policies and the financial bailout of various corporations and banks.

In their views on foreign policy, the current contingent of Southern politicians can hardly call themselves conservatives. They are, at best, right-wing liberals, perhaps even revolutionaries of a sort, still intent on realizing Woodrow Wilson’s now outdated internationalist vision to remake the world in the American image. Their brand of conservatism has not bred isolationist sentiments. With few reservations, they are committed to the intervention of the United States everywhere around the world and are devoted to the idea of U.S. domination. It is an empire they seek, not a republic they wish to preserve.

Recent setbacks notwithstanding, the emergence of a host of Southerners as leaders in the U.S. House of Representatives and the Senate, therefore, does not promise a resurgence of the Southern conservative tradition. The defection of Southern politicians from the South’s traditional conservatism both reflects and affects its rejection among ordinary Southerners, who embrace the prevailing conservative agenda almost without question. Neither during the 1930s nor during the 1990s have those who advocated a more traditional Southern conservatism proved able to craft a mass political following among their own people.

Before we breathe a collective sigh of relief, finding chilly comfort in the knowledge that things might well be worse than they are, we may wish to reconsider the traditions of the South that many today misunderstand or would simply like to forget. The inability to exercise much political influence has hampered but not paralyzed Southern conservative thinkers. Their efforts to reexamine and revitalize the Southern tradition have produced astonishingly original contributions to U.S. social, cultural, religious, political and economic discourse. Southern conservative thinkers, such as Davidson, Tate, Ransom, Lytle, Weaver, Bradford and their adherents, defended traditions not merely of the South but of Christian civilization in the West. Failure to uphold that legacy meant, in their eyes, the lurch toward a new, scientific, technological and pagan “dark age.” Those who have assumed the leadership of the Southern conservative movement in our day, at least in the political arena, have ignored, rejected or discredited most of the insights and warnings of their intellectual counterparts. The political conservatives applaud self-indulgence as the reward of success and worship money as the source from which all goodness flows. More perilously, they assume that progress has or will result from the victory of wealth over violence and that the international triumph of democratic capitalism will thus solve most of the world’s problems. They are wrong on both counts.

Southern conservative thinkers, although not congenital pessimists, have consistently taken a contrary and far less sanguine view of our prospects. They anticipated the rejection of Christian pessimism and the acceptance of the idea that human nature is innately good or at least a blank slate on which social scientists and behavioral therapists can inscribe an appropriate personality. At the same time, they predicted the degeneration of freedom into license and knew the calamity the autonomous self could visit on the rest of humanity when liberated from a sense of responsibility to society, to nature and to God. As a consequence, they denounced all schemes to emancipate human beings from history, family, community and self, and to remake them into “new men” and “new women” poised to enter a perfectly engineered Earthly paradise. Southern conservative thinkers instead enjoined modern men and women to acquiesce in the “inherited pattern of imperfection” and set about to expose the treachery, persecution, violence, tyranny and slaughter that have everywhere accompanied millennial ambitions.

In practical terms, of course, the Southern traditionalists failed. They have never organized a Southern conservative political party, initiated a mass political movement in the South or secured control of a faction within either the Democratic or Republican parties. They have, on occasion, come close to making themselves look ridiculous by appearing the enemies of science, technology, reason and progress. Southern conservative thinkers, however, never intended politics to define their undertaking. Their principal concern was always the spiritual condition of humanity in the modern world. Nor did they mindlessly repudiate reason, science, technology, industry, and progress. Rather, they disavowed the messianic cults of rationalism, scientism, and technocracy, along with those of liberalism, capitalism, democracy, socialism, communism and other “progressive” ideologies that promised more than they could deliver. Who knows? In the end, history may yet prove them to have been more right than wrong, for the celebrated achievements of science and technology and the apparent triumph of liberalism, democracy and capitalism will not redeem the enormities of the 20th century.*