Ib
PARTISAN REVIEW
flicting classes and interests which make for sharply defined ideologies,
that liberalism colors, or perhaps the word should be, bleaches all
political tendencies.
It
becomes a loose shelter, a poncho rather than
a program; to call oneself a liberal one doesn't really have to believe
in anything. In such a moment of social slackness, the more extreme
intellectual tendencies have a way, as soon as an effort is made to
put them into practice, of sliding into and becoming barely distin–
guishable from the dominant liberalism. Both conservatism and radi–
calism can retain, at most, an intellectual recalcitrance, but neither
is presently able to engage in a sustained practical politics of its
OWIl;
which does not mean they will never be able to.
The point is enforced by looking at the recent effort to affirm
a conservative ideology. Mr. Russell Kirk, who makes this effort with
some earnestness, can hardly avoid the eccentricity of appealing to
Providence as a putative force in American politics: an appeal that
suggests both the intensity of his conservative desire and the desper–
ation behind the intensity. Mr. Peter Viereck, a friskier sort of
writer, calls himself a conservative, but surely this is nothing more
than a mystifying pleasantry, for aside from the usual distinctions of
temperament and talent it is hard to see how his conservatism differs
from the liberalism of Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. For Viereck conservatism
is a shuffling together of attractive formulas, without any effort to
discover their relationship to deep
actual
clashes of interest: he fails,
for example, even to consider that in America there is today neither
opportunity nor need for conservatism (since the liberals do the neces–
sary themselves) and that if an opportunity were to arise, conserva–
tism could seize upon it only by acquiring a mass, perhaps reactionary
dynamic, that is, by "going into the streets." And that, surely, Mr.
Viereck doesn't want.
If
conservatism is taken to mean, as in some "classical" sense it
should be, a principled rejection of industrial economy and a yearning
for an ordered, hierarchical society that is not centered on the city,
then conservatism in America is best defended by a group of literary
men whose seriousness is proportionate to their recognition that such
a politics is now utterly hopeless and, in any but a utopian sense,
meaningless. Such a conservatism, in America, goes back to Fenimore
Cooper, who anticipates those implicit criticisms of our society which
we honor in Faulkner; and in the hands of serious imaginative writers,
