102
PARTISAN REVIEW
Success is often blind, however, and the liberal too easily forgets
that the latitudinarianism of the liberal temper of the 1920's and 1930's
admitted to the fold some very dubious communicants. By their narrow
absorption in the practical issues of New Deal policy at home and
abroad, their frequent indulgence of a technocratic dream of a "ra–
tionally" planned society, or their giddy intoxication with the slogans
of the Popular Front, liberals undermined the philosophical pinions of
their own position. They have no right to be surprised at the fashionable
popularity of the New Conservatism in post-war America. To admit
and lament the rout of liberal philosophy is not, however, to acknowl–
edge and praise the success of the New Conservatism. The scene it pre–
sents
is
at least as confused as any of the clouded vistas of the 1930's.
If
we are dazzled by the new conservatives, it is not by their bril–
liance but by the blinding blaze of all those pin-wheels roaring in so
many different directions. Like burning a Roman candle at both ends,
the effect is startling. No doubt "a revolt against revolt," as Peter
Viereck. has dubbed the movement, is bound to be an affair of para–
doxes. The muddle begins with Viereck himself whose conservatism, for
all
his refurbishing of Metternich, is quite non-political. He is a friend
of the Western European socialist governments and thinks that for
American right-wingers to attack them is "the stupidest and wickedest
thing American conservatives could do." His real quarrel is with ethical
relativism, and his somewhat breezy praise of the aristocratic spirit of
decorum is wholly divorced from any respect for an aristocratic class,
"increasingly anachronistic and functionless" in modem society.
Russell Kirk can make a more authentic claim to being a full–
fledged conservative, though his anguished polemical tone seldom con–
vinces the reader that here is a man serenely enjoying a great tradition
and "the unbought grace of life." Brandishing his Burke with the fervor
of a radical appealing to the holy writ of Marxism, he laments the
loss of a traditional organic society led by cultivated Christian gentle–
men whose inferiors know their place in the divine scheme of things.
Eloquent in his scorn for ideologues, he makes an abstract ideology out
of Burke and in the shrill invective of the iconoclast castigates con–
temporary Americans, "half-strangled in the rank undergrowth of mod–
em passions," for their liberal sins. Yet hungry for established tradi–
tion he claims in the same breath that "our native conservatism extends
to every class and interest in our society" so that "it is quite natural
for us to be, nowadays, the chief conservative power among the na–
tions." This ambivalence is the price he pays for trying to cut America
to English cloth made in the eighteenth century. Repelled
by
"tractors,
