LIBERALISM AND CONSERVATISM
103
Bob Hope, self-service laundries, direct primaries, clover-leaf intersec–
tions, high-school extra-curricular activities, two evening newspapers,
Coca-Cola, and a stylish burial at Memory Grove Cemetery," it is no
wonder that he is forced to admit in a burst of candor that "the con–
servative, in our time, must be prepared for the role of Don Quixote."
It
is a mark of the homelessness of his conservatism that to bring it
into touch with practical politics he is compelled to find a platform
in the angry pages of William Buckley's
National Review,
which in
mingling a fondness for the unbridled demagoguery of Senator Mc–
Carthy with a nostalgia for the Manchester liberalism of Herbert Spencer
produces by some strange alchemy a bitter "conservative" alloy.
Clinton Rossiter, Cornell political scientist and historian, has bravely
tried to clear the air by branding as pseudo-conservative the advocates
of old-fashioned laissez-faire or "100 percent Americanism," while also
rejecting as too exotic a plant for our non-feudal soil the English
conservatism of a Burke, a Disraeli, or a Russell Kirk. What position
remains for the genuine conservative, emancipated from shibboleths and
romanticism, is something of a puzzle. The mystery deepens when Ros–
siter declares that the best conservative thinking on contemporary prob–
lems has been done by liberals and progressives like David Lilienthal,
Senator Paul Douglas, Reinhold Niebuhr, Adlai Stevenson. "When
the one glorious thing to be conservative about was the Liberal tradi–
tion of the world's most liberal society," he says, defining his own
dilemma, "how could a conservative be expected to be Conservative?"
Since Rossiter reveres constitutional democracy, the Bill of Rights, New
Deal welfare measures, and the ideal of equal opportunity for all races,
his
differences with liberals become a matter of the most amiable
splitting of the finest hairs. He thinks most American conservatives
would be proud to accept as their own the title of "tough-minded
Liberal realist" which he applies to Lincoln. Unhappily or not, it is far
more likely that many of them would beg God to protect them from
such friends.
If
the New Conservatives do little to clarify the philosophical scene,
our liberal historians cannot claim to give undivided counsel. A measure
of
their confusion is represented in two recent books,
The Decline of
American Liberalism
by Arthur
A.
Ekirch, Jr. and
The Liberal Tradi–
tion
in America
by Louis Hartz, which come to exactly opposite con–
clusions. Ekirch, in the sober tones of a calm scholar, tells a Spenglerian
story
of the steady waning of liberalism in America ever since the days
of
the Revolution. He offers to liberals only the satisfaction of looking
back
with pleasure "into the distant past, while they do their best to
