Up From Liberalism

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Text originally published in 1959 under the same title.

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UP FROM LIBERALISM

BY

WILLIAM F. BUCKLEY, Jr.

Introduction by SENATOR BARRY GOLDWATER

Foreword by JOHN DOS PASSOS

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Contents

TABLE OF CONTENTS 3

DEDICATION 4

INTRODUCTION 5

FOREWORD 6

PREFACE 9

I—THE FAILURE OF CONTEMPORARY AMERICAN LIBERALISM 11

The Liberal—IN CONTROVERSY 11

The Liberal—AS INDOCTRINATOR 36

The Liberal—IN ACTION 46

The Liberal—AND THE OBLIGING ORDER 54

The Liberal—AND THE SILENT GENERATION 62

The Liberal—HIS ROOT ASSUMPTIONS 68

II—THE CONSERVATIVE ALTERNATIVE 90

The Conservative—THE FAILURE OF THE CONSERVATIVE DEMONSTRATION 90

The Conservative—THE CONSERVATIVE FRAMEWORK AND MODERN REALITIES 106

ABOUT THE AUTHOR 112

REQUEST FROM THE PUBLISHER 113

DEDICATION

To

Brent Bozell

James Burnham

John Chamberlain

Whittaker Chambers

Willmoore Kendall

Frank Meyer

—mentors, colleagues, friends

INTRODUCTION

BY SENATOR BARRY GOLDWATER

THE RECENT RENEWAL OF interest in conservative principles was brought about, as far as I can see, not by the older members of the American community, but the younger. That is unusual: for the young are generally associated with the movements of the left, and it completely reverses the rule to see among the brightest young people in America, men and women who want to redirect the nation’s destiny along conservative lines—individual freedom, local government, national sovereignty, and the religious view of life.

William Buckley has acted as a leader of this movement. He began, fresh out of Yale, challenging some of the basic assumptions of Liberalism in a celebrated book about the educational biases at his alma mater. He turned his attention to the problems of internal security in his second book, also a best-seller. Now in this book, by far his best in my judgment, he delivers a stinging critique not only of the principles of Liberalism—or, perhaps better, the "no-principles" of Liberalism—but of the behavior of some of Liberalism’s principal architects. But however severe his indictment, which is deadly serious in intention, he does not forget to smile. And he doesn’t lose his balance. There is in this book plenty of criticism of right-wing stodginess and short sightedness, from which there is also much to learn.

This book of mind and heart, wit and eloquence, by the chief spokesman for the young conservative revival in this country, must be read and understood, to understand what is going on in America.

We have to thank Mr. Buckley above all for a readable and amusing and incisive account of the kind of people who are generally in positions of power today—in both politics and the academic world; and a penetrating view of the kind of world they seem to want.

The Liberals’ world is not the kind of world I want to live in. If we are saved from it, among those we shall have to thank is the author of this book.

FOREWORD

BY JOHN DOS PASSOS

THE FIRST DUTY OF a man trying to plot a course for clear thinking is to produce words that really apply to the situations he is trying to describe. I don’t mean a fresh set of neologisms devised, like thieves’ cant or doubletalk, to hold the uninitiated at arm’s length. We have seen enough of that in the jargon of the academic sociologists which seems to have been invented to prove that nobody but a Ph.D. can understand human behavior. Plain English will do quite well enough, but the good old words have to be brought back to life by being used in their original sense for a change.

Only through a fresh approach, maybe through a variety of fresh approaches, can the terms through which we try to understand the events that govern our lives be reminted to the point of ringing true again. It is immensely heartening to those of us who would rather establish a true picture of the world we live in than one which is socially acceptable, to know that rash innovators are heartily at work. Thirty years ago the innovators called themselves radicals. Now mostly they call themselves conservatives.

The radicals of the period of the first of the century’s great wars were trying to conserve something too. We were pretty conscious of the fact that we were trying to conserve the independence of the average citizen which we felt the power of organized money was bent to destroy. This was the underlying theme of the Populist agitation, of the Progressive and Socialist and Farmer-Labor parties. Through the referendum and recall and primary elections and labor unions and cooperatives we thought that something like the old townmeeting type of self-government could be revived. The aim of all the diverse radical movements of that politically fertile period was somehow to restore the dignity of the man who did the work. Staid Single-Taxers, direct action IWWs and bomb throwing anarchists had the same eventual goal. They believed that if every man could be assured of the full product of his labor, the Kingdom of Heaven would be installed on earth. Their quarrel was about ways and means.

The history of the twentieth century has been the history of a series of denials of these hopes. We can now see that the radical view was grossly oversimplified. It made no allowance, among other things, for the fact that man is an institution-building animal. In our enthusiasm for the producer we underestimated the importance of the planner and manager in industry. Marx had shrewdly pointed out the class solidarities which were so obvious in nineteenth century England, but he was too nearsighted to apply his theory of classes to human societies in general, instead of restricting it to the particular phase of the industrial revolution he had under his nose.

Though Marx’s proletariat may be somewhat better fed than it was a century ago, its individual members have made little if any progress toward that personal liberty and independence on which the dignity of man is founded. Each new development of industrial society, whether under Communist dictatorship or under the mixed capitalist-socialist systems that have grown up in the western countries, has reduced the stature of the individual man. In the West he has been able to trade his liberties for some increase in material well-being. The American standard of living in particular has become the envy of the world; so much so that even in the Soviet Union the Communist masters have been forced grudgingly to try to match these capitalist allurements.

As the millennial dream of a perfect society recedes into a science fiction future, the slogans of its votaries become the liturgy of a new ruling class. Opinions of the sort that sent Eugene Debs to jail or ruined Thorstein Veblen’s teaching career have become the accepted platitudes of the academic groves.

Forty years ago a young man in college spoke ill of businessmen at some hazard. Profits were a sacred word. Advocates of labor unions were jeeringly asked if they had ever met a payroll. The tenets of the free market economy were as much a divine institution as The Ten Commandments. With the devotion of young Mormons on their missionary year, college graduates took to the road to sell bonds.

How different is the climate in the schools today! An apologist of the profit system often finds it hard to hold his job.

When Business abdicated in 1929 it was not the working class who took over, it was the new bureaucracy. The radical theorists from the colleges crowded into Washington. They were in the driver’s seat and they knew it. Whether their work was good or bad is beside the point. The functions they exercised established them as a managerial class. The First World War had enormously increased the power of the Federal government. Under Roosevelt the labor union bureaucracies took their place beside the bureaucracies of the great corporations as economically dominant forces. Then the Second World War left government towering over both. Class realignments went along with the increasingly hierarchical organization of society. When the old regime businessmen fell from their thrones, the leaders of a new class took their places.

The liberal mentality which Mr. Buckley puts over a barrel in this book is, I am beginning to suspect, the ideological camouflage of the will to power of this new ruling class. I can’t find any other explanation of these fits of hysteria, these fixations which time will prove to have been irrational, some of which are so amusingly documented in this book. The Communists are excellent propagandists who have developed an uncanny skill in putting their words in other people’s mouths, but they are not that good. Only some such phenomenon as the solidarity and esprit de corps of a class recently risen to power can account for the lynching spirit aroused against those who have sought to dislodge any fraternity member, whether bureaucrat or college professor, columnist or commentator, from an entrenched position of power. This disparity between the provocation and the reaction is, as the emotions of the moment cool, what stands out more and more as the characteristic trait of the liberal. Here is perhaps a key to the subconscious springs of liberal behavior.

As the nineteenth century Englishman defended his home as his castle, the modern American bureaucrat will defend the security of his job to the death. For security he will give up fame and fortune. This is certainly true of federal office holders, but why should it apply to white collar workers so generally? Could it be that they too feel a solidarity with the ruling class as against the common run of anonymous citizens they seek to manipulate?

This is not Mr. Buckley’s theory. It is mine. Maybe new developments will prove it to be worthless. In any case, the sort of high-spirited analysis offered in this book should prove useful to anyone who is working towards an independent appraisal of this mid-century phenomenon of militant liberalism.

PREFACE

AMERICA, FASHIONABLE OBSERVERS SAY, is a non-ideological nation; and it is understandable why this is a phenomenon from which one takes pleasure. No one is more tedious than the totally ideologized man, the man who forces every passing phenomenon into his ideological mold to end up, for example, concluding that every friend of Congressional investigating committees is an enemy of civil liberties, or that every enemy of Congressional investigating committees is a friend of civil liberties. American political conflicts are not generally fought on the battleground of ideas. The thoroughly non-ideological Man is usually designated as steward of the American political community. This is partly a good thing, because everyone knows that ideological totalism can bring whole societies down, as it did Hitler’s, and permanently terrorize others, as Communism has done. The danger comes when a distrust of doctrinaire social systems eases over into a dissolute disregard for principle. A disregard for enduring principle delivers a society, eviscerated, over to the ideologists.

America, most historians teach us, has sought to avoid the extremes, to be flexible without resembling Silly Putty; to be principled without being arch. I think our country is not clearly enough avoiding the former extreme. I think she is in danger of losing her identity—not on account of the orthodoxy that we are being told in some quarters threatens to suffocate us; but for failure to nourish any orthodoxy at all. I think the attenuation of the early principles of this country has made America vulnerable to the most opportunistic ideology of the day, the strange and complex ideology of modern Liberalism.{1} I think, moreover, that disordered and confused though it concededly is these days, conservatism is the only apparent rallying point.

To put forward such a thesis is to take on many obligations. Very well. But bear in mind the logical maxim that one man’s failure to prove a thesis does not render it invalid. I am by no means the ideal person to take on the job at hand, which is to discredit doctrinaire Liberalism and plead the viability of enlightened conservatism. I have many disqualifications, among them that of having personally experienced the tenacious ill will of some of the men about whom I shall be writing; and I see some of them, day after day, berating people who stand for the things I love. I herewith hoist high a flag of truce, respectfully inviting their attention to what I have to say; but I will not feign surprise if the flag comes hurtling down, felled by a withering burst of fire from a hot-blooded evangelist in the Liberal camp—who was brought up to assume that the differences between us, Liberals and conservatives, are not negotiable. It is not as though the Communists had hoisted the flag.

Who are the Liberals? Numerically they are very few; for, as it is said, America is a non-ideological land. The average American is not "a Liberal nor is he a conservative." He may have Liberal leanings, or conservative leanings; but it is a mistake to think of him as a conscious agent, vocationally or avocationally, of any set of ideas. But Liberals there are in the land, men and women who seek consciously and consistently to advance a particular and identifiable view of man and society. They exercise great power (I cannot imagine a day’s events free of their influence). I go so far as to say theirs is today the dominant voice in determining the destiny of this country.

Of these men and their ideas I propose to write. I mean to ask several questions about the Liberal movement in this country, and to draw tentative conclusions from the answers that suggest themselves. I mean to ask first how the Liberal thinks, how he argues, how he teaches, and then what are some of the root assumptions of his economic and political policies. I shall describe the behavior of prominent Liberals in a concrete political situation a few years back. I shall describe the atmosphere in which Liberalism thrives.

As to the conservative movement, our troubles are legion. Those who charge that there is no conservative position have an easy time of it rhetorically. There is no commonly-acknowledged conservative position today, and any claim to the contrary is easy to make sport of. Yet there is to be found in contemporary conservative literature both a total critique of Liberalism, and compelling proposals for the reorientation of our thought Conservatism must, however, be wiped clean of the parasitic cant that defaces it, and repels so many of those who approach it inquiringly. Up against the faith of a conservative, the great surrealistic ideologies reduce to dust. But first there must be a confrontation. The elaborate edifice of Marxism-Leninism crumbles before the poet’s eye of Boris Pasternak; but the triumph of man over ideology remains confined to a poetic ballad, and there are those of us who are greedy to externalize the conditions of freedom and grace and faith that have sustained Pasternak in Hell. To do that we must bring down the thing called Liberalism, which is powerful but decadent; and salvage a thing called conservatism, which is weak but viable.

Stamford, Connecticut, May, 1959

I—THE FAILURE OF CONTEMPORARY AMERICAN LIBERALISM

"CONSTRUCTIVE CRITICISM. The demand for constructive rather than destructive criticism (usually with an exaggerated emphasis on the first syllable of each adjective) has become one of the cant phrases of the day. It is true that under the guise of criticism mockery and hatred often vent their spite, and what professes to be a fair and even helpful analysis of a situation or policy is sometimes a malignant attack. But the proper answer to that is to expose the malignance and so point out that it is not criticism at all. Most whining for constructive rather than destructive criticism is a demand for unqualified praise, an insistence that no opinion is to be expressed or course proposed other than the one supported by the speaker. It is a dreary phrase, avoided by all fair-minded men."—From: A Dictionary of Contemporary American Usage by Bergen Evans and Cornelia Evans (RANDOM HOUSE, 1957)

The Liberal—IN CONTROVERSY

The Mania

THIS BOOK IS ABOUT the folklore of American Liberalism. I am very much surprised that so little of an orderly kind has been written about the American Liberal. A good library will direct you to a vast literature on the history of Liberalism, and every year or so a new book is published which presents itself as a hot-off-the-press examination of contemporary