"The First Conservative"

I can't find it online, unfortunately (and I think its from last week's issue), but The New Yorker ran a remarkable profile of Peter Vierek. Vierek came along at a time when there was no conservative movement in the United States. "Conservatism" usually meant fringe groups -- "anti-industrial Southern agrarians and anti-New Deal tycoons" -- even Herbert Hoover insisted on being called "liberal." Vierek changed all that, giving conservatism intellectual underpinnings in the 1940s -- he saw both totalitarianism and communism as basically Utopian movements in which the murder of any person perceived to be "imperfect" was condoned And he saw liberalism's belief in progress and humanity's essential goodness as milder versions of that same flaw.

But Vierek never became a leader of conservatism the way William F. Buckley -- a rival Vierek thought was too soft on McCarthy, whom Vierek detested -- had. Instead, he became one of the movement's sharpest critics.

In 1962, he published an attack on conservatives in The New Republic, titled "The New Conservatism: One of Its Founders Asks What Went Wrong," in which he depicted a movement infiltrated by religious fundamentalists, paranoid patriotic groups, and big business leaders, united in their loathing for the cosmopolitan elites on the nation's coasts. "American history is based on the resemblance between moderate liberalism and moderate conservatism," he wrote, and this tradition, which had saved the United States from Europe's violent fate, conservatives now threatened to destroy."

He even singled out Texan oil money "and their enormous gullible mass-base."

Astonishingly prescient.

The profile's author, Tom Reiss, writes, that Vierek is not only forgotten by contemporary conservatives, "he has practically been erased from the picture, like an early Bolshevik fallen out of favor." It was, in fact, Vierek's assault on McCarthy that led the Right to attack him. That, it would seem to me, and his argument for the "resemblance" of the moderate left and right -- a thought crime no card-carrying conservative would agree with today, at a time when partisanship trumps all other concerns -- would explain why he's been "disappeared."

What struck me especially forcefully was that the 1950s seemed to be a dress rehearsal for our current era, when Democrats find themselves urging foreign policy caution and fiscal prudence, while Republicans quite literally say "Who cares?" in the face of a weakened United States abroad and a future of perpetual indebtedness to the Chinese.

...Vierek had endorsed Adlai Stevenson for President in 1956; Stevenson had made Viereckian pronouncements throughout his campaign, arguing that "the strange alchemy of time has somehow converted the Democrats into the truly conservative party [while] Republicans are behaving like the radical party, reckless, and embittered, dismantling institutions built solidly into our social fabric.

And although they were rivals for decades Buckley and Vierek sound very much of one mind when it comes to today's lunatics in the Executive and Legislative branches.

...I asked Buckley how he felt about conservatism's current course. "I'm not happy about it," he said. "It's probably true that there" -- in the support for the war in Iraq -- "you have a rediscovery of idealism. But if one acknowledged the second inaugural address of the President as marching orders, well, that would keep us busy with something to do for all eternity. It's not, in my judgment, conservatism. Because conservatism is, to a considerable extent, the acknowledgment of realities. And this is surreal."

Viereck might have put it the same way.

[...]

"Where are the roots?" Vierek said, when I asked him what he thought of the [January] elections [in Iraq]. "How can you have a democracy without roots?...My hunch is that Iraq has no deep roots, and therefore the best thing you can hope for is inefficient corruption. Some kind of moderate thug ruler, instead of a mass-murdering thug like Saddam. I don't think in practice more could happen. I think it would take more than a couple of generations."

He went on, "I think McCarthy was a menace not because of the risk that he would take over -- that was never real -- but because he corrupted the ethics of American conservatives, and that corruption leads to the situation we have now. It gave the conservatives the habit of appeasing the forces of the hysterical right and to looking to these forces -- and appeasing them knowingly, expediently. I think that was the original sin of the conservative movement, and we are all suffering from it."

And liberals should start quoting Adlai Stevenson -- a lot -- before the 2006 elections.

UPDATED to finish thought(s).