Page Smith, the author of an eight-volume history of the United States, also published a collection of essays entitled Dissenting Opinions. They were written between 1954 and 1983. Some still reflect our circumstances, some not.
One of the early essays, from 1955, is a review of Russell Kirk’s The Conservative Mind.41 Smith’s critique could be a comment on current American political conservatism. The “new conservatives” inspired by Kirk, he said,
offer us a jugful of miscellaneous ideas labeled "conservative thought" and tell us that we must take the mixture for our own good—it is the only thing that will cure us. But we do not swallow ideas like medicine. Ideas . . . must be judged by their historic effects, not by reference to some archetypal truth. But the new conservatives do not know this. They are idealists, Hegelians, for whom the only realities are those ideas that they have poured into their conservative jar.42
The economic notions of Congressional Republicans certainly are examples of this tendency: abstract principles devoid of context and adhered to despite their actual effects.
Smith described the appeal to some of those theories, a description even more on point today than in the Fifties.
[A]t a time when people are becoming increasingly disillusioned with the inadequacies of the old liberal view of the world, they will turn to a set of ideas that are labeled conservative and hope to find refuge there from the terrible dilemmas of our time. . . . . [W]e are tempted by an attractive new orthodoxy that contains much less than the necessary truth and that at worst may simply bestow a spurious intellectual respectability upon political reaction.43
The uncritical response to Rep. Ryan’s nostrums seems to be an illustration of this despair and desperation; certainly the GOP budget is an exercise in conferring respectability on reactionary policies.
The disillusionment with liberalism is only in part a reflection of the shortcomings or excesses of liberal policies. It is as much the result of the decades-long assault by conservatives, abetted by compliant, commercialized news media and accepted by a public with little understanding of government and an institutional memory limited to about six months.
Although conservatives like to pretend that they are somehow preserving national traditions and preventing the conquest of the American Way by foreign ideology, they are in fact proposing to repeal much that characterizes that way, such as economic opportunity and a reasonable degree of equality and security. Merely calling a program “conservative” does not establish its virtue; as Smith noted, “there is nothing about conservatives or about conservatism that contains any built-in immunity to decadence.”44
Those impressions of conservative philosophy apply as well to 2011 as to 1955. However, some of Smith’s later comments show their age. He seemed to think that such reactionary proposals had been rejected, that the gains of the Thirties had been preserved. Writing in 1983, he saw permanent progress or, as he put it, “[r]edemption from our most deplorable sins. We have a larger, more humane view of our responsibilities toward each other. We have jettisoned a considerable baggage of outmoded and unjust notions about society and our fellows. We have chastened if not tamed capital. . . .”45 No longer; we are returning to the Twenties and beyond.
_____________________________
41. I set out my impressions of that book — at tedious length — in a posting of November 4, 2009.
42. Dissenting Opinions , p. 27
43. Id. at p. 35
44. Ibid.
_____________________________
45. Id. at p. 94
