Samuel Francis - Beautiful Losers: Essays on the Failure of American Conservatism

Ideas and No Consequences

Probably the most difficult part of compiling a collection of essays written over a period of some twelve years is not the actual composition of them so much as it is the effort to explain to the reader why you wrote certain things in the first place, what you meant by them, and why you think they should be preserved. Of course, the easy way out is to claim you didnt mean what you said at all, that you wrote it when you were too young to know any better, and that only a ruthless integrity compels you again to push it beneath the readers weary eye. Unfortunately, that dog wont hunt for me, since I wrote the earliest of the pieces collected here when I was well into my third decade. Whatever foolish things I said or wrote by that age can find little defense now as the fruit of juvenile excess.

As far as concerns what I really meant then as opposed to what I would like to mean now, there is actually not much of a problem, since for the most part I continue to subscribe to the perspective from which most of these pieces were written, and I find that I have little to retract or explain. Perhaps this is proof that my juvenile excesses still prevail after all, that I simply never grew up. Nevertheless, some of the events, personalities, and books that served as the predicates of several of these essays have proved evanescent, and the passage of time, if not the maturation of the author, demands a certain amount of explanation and clarification.

The general theme of these articles and review essays is the transformation of American conservatism and, more generally, of American political culture in the 1980s, and even those that are historical in nature, such as the articles on Henry Clay and Joseph McCarthy, were intended in part as commentaries on subjects beyond their immediate topics. They do not offer an explicit exposition or definition of conservatism but rather seek to locate the relationship of the American Right to the social and political forces that prevailed in that decade and seem to be prevailing now. In the later essays inparticular, I make use of James Burnhams theory of the managerial revolution in an adapted form to explain what I believe has been the result of the transformation of American conservatism, namely, its virtual extinction both as a serious body of social and political thought and as a serious vehicle of political expression.

The presuppositions of these pieces are perhaps somewhat different from those of most of the writing produced by conservative intellectuals since World War II. Those writers tended to approach political theory in a way that might be called formalistic and normativethat is, they sought to offer morally right and philosophically true prescriptions for public affairsand they did so in terms of philosophy, theology, and ethics, with a good deal of attention to imaginative literature. Eric Voegelin, Leo Strauss, Richard Weaver, and most of their disciples are examples of this approach to conservative thought at the highest levels of academic theory; Ludwig von Mises and F. A. Hayek are similar examples in economic theory, and, among many others, National Reviews Frank S. Meyer was representative of it in conservative journalism.

My conclusion that conservatism has transformed itself into virtual extinction will surprise and perhaps even anger those who favor the formalistic and normative approach, which does not easily stoop to considerations of social change and historical fluctuation and is reluctant to admit that some things, even ideas, fail. Regarding political events as the earthly manifestations of timeless abstractions, the intellectual mainstream of the Old Right from the end of World War II developed a highly sophisticated body of ideas and a highly articulate body of spokesmen to express them. Perhaps because they were too uxoriously wedded to Weavers principle that Ideas Have Consequences, most of the conservative intellectuals who subscribed to this body of thought always seemed to assume that it was only a matter of time before their own beliefs would creep up on the ideas of the Left, slit their throats in the dark, and stage an intellectual and cultural coup dtat, after which truth would reign. I have never thought so, in part because I have less faith in the power of intellectual abstractions than most of my conservative colleagues. The historian Lewis Namier remarked that new ideas are not nearly as potent as broken habits, and Burnham, describing Vilfredo Paretos view of human rationality, wrote that rational, deliberate, In the tradition of Namier (who briefly studied under Pareto) and Burnham, I place more emphasis on the concrete forces of elites, organization, and psychic and social forces such as class and regional and ethnic identity than on formal intellectual abstractions and their logical extrapolations as the determining forces of history. Ideas do have consequences, but some ideas have more consequences than others, and which consequences ensue from which ideas is settled not simply because the ideas serve human reason through their logical implications but also because some ideas serve human interests and emotions through their attachment to drives for political, economic, and social power, while other ideas do not.