Ben Judge: June 8th, 1998, this is you speaking at the American Enterprise Institute, quote: “What is plaguing conservatism is that its sense of mission, its devotion to a high, clear, and overarching cause, has deserted it, and recognition of this fact has begun to sink in among conservatives and liberals alike.” That was almost 21 years ago. Has anything changed?
Charles Kesler: [Laughs] Well, I'm surprised you didn't congratulate me on my prescience—
Judge: [Laughs]
Kesler: —What kind of an exercise is this going to be? I don't think anything has changed with the conservative movement as such. Thanks to the rise of Donald Trump, and to various other concomitant developments in our politics, I think conservatism now looks different and probably has a different path in front of it than it did in 1998. Ninety ninety-eight, after all, was really just in the wake of the end of the Cold War, and in a way it represented a moment of triumph for conservatism.
The “Reagan Revolution”—both domestically and, you might say, even more important in its foreign policy component—had been largely successful; but the puzzling thing was that the conservative movement didn't feel triumphant. It had won the Cold War, and it certainly did celebrate that fact, but it did not rise to the occasion, in a way, domestically, or even in general; and that's what I was talking about in that address at A.E.I., which I titled “What's Wrong with Conservatism”—not with a question. [Laughs]
Judge: [Laughs]
Kesler: It was declarative or emphatic, rather than a question. Although, I tried to explore it as a question, as well, in the course of those remarks.
Judge: You say conservatism's sense of mission deserted it. That assumes that at one point there was, as you say, “a devotion to a high, clear, and overarching cause.” When was that clearest in American history?
Kesler: The cause I have in mind is the cause of defending the West against Soviet and communist tyranny, but also against the paler domestic reflections of similar movements in the statist enterprises of American liberalism at home; and in its opposition to those things—and to a certain degree in its love of the things it was trying to defend—I think American conservatism was at its best. It had always been a movement that was more confident and clearer about what it was against than what it was for; and this was true, really, from even before the Cold War, in a sense.
I think in the opposition to the New Deal, American conservatives—who were gradually beginning to call themselves that in the 1930s—American conservatives were very sure that they were against Roosevelt and against the statist ambitions of the New Deal, but they were much less agile and much less articulate about what it was exactly they were defending in the old republic. And the fact that Herbert Hoover had been a progressive Republican and had been very proud of being a progressive, that Teddy Roosevelt had been emblematic of a very powerful progressive strand—really probably a majority view in the Republican Party itself that was, in some ways, progressive—meant that what was the opposite of liberal progressivism was a little unclear—certainly to Herbert Hoover and to a lot of other people.
Judge: To that point, since 1998 America has had two Republican presidents and ten Congresses in which one or both chambers were held by Republicans. Between 1952 and 2001, only once did Republicans hold the House, the Senate, and the Presidency at the same time. Since 2001, it's happened four times; and yet, we're still talking about conservatism's drift. Why?
Kesler: Well, I think it's illustrative of the drift, isn't it? [Laughs] Even when the Republican Party had power—I mean commanded all of the elected branches of the government simultaneously—it didn't exactly know what to do. It had succeeded in blocking the bad guys from the holding power—and to that extent, it congratulated itself on that—but what was the power for, or what was it supposed to do to revive American mores and American Republicanism, more broadly considered? For American conservatives, it was always a question whether they wanted to go back to some previous constitutional regime, or whether they thought that impossible and the only thing to do was to accommodate to the place liberalism had brought them at that point and simply to slow down the further progress of liberalism by going forward.
To go back or to go slow was, in a way, a fundamental choice confronting conservatism; and especially in its Republican version, conservatism, I think, decided that question—you know, it's answer was a mixture of those two things—but on the whole, it's view was to go slow. This was an element, which you might say was a kind of low-level triumphalism—the notion that socialism had been defeated, communism had been defeated, and so our politics—this was especially a view in the 1990s—our politics wasn't going to get much more liberal than it was already, that nothing radical was really in the cards going forward. Only gradual incremental change—Clintonism, of the Bill Clinton variety in the 1990s—was really in the cards, and so conservatism didn't have to worry about going back or making any kind of radical moves.
All it had to do was to help to guide the slow conservative process of change as it naturally was going to unfold in the decade of the ‘90s and forever after. And so it was managing the natural rate of change, in a way, that it assumed in a free society was inherent if you could cut the legs out from under radical liberalism, or radicalism. And so the notion was that society was a kind of balance between liberal and conservative forces and that, in a way, those forces were based upon temperamental differences.
A lot of people who were friendlier to change, but a lot of people were more conservative than that and didn't want change to happen so quickly; but if you could balance them against each other, then the natural evolutionary forces of society—neither racing ahead nor falling behind the natural level and pace of change—would do just fine; and you didn't really need politics in the decisive sense. What you needed was simply to follow society's own inward evolutionary urges to keep them from being accelerated in a dangerous way, but also keep them from falling behind the natural rate of evolution, so to speak; and if you could do that, then I think a lot of mainstream Republicans, as well as centrist liberals in those days, thought the political problem would be solved.
Judge: And yet here we are. [Laughs]
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