Viereck has the agrarians in mind here, but not just the agrarians: “Their unhistorical appeal to history, their traditonless worship of tradition, characterize the conservatism of writers like Russell Kirk,” he writes.

The tradition that is alive is that of “liberal conservatism.” Viereck, unlike Kirk and most other modern conservatives, does not deny that the United States has fundamentally liberal origins. Our conservatism therefore has to be a species of liberalism, if it’s actually conserving something American. ~Dan McCarthy

I have read Conservatism Revisited and some of Viereck’s shorter works.  No one alive today could appreciate his praise of Metternich more than I do; my main complaint is that he was not enthusiastic enough for the Prince.  I appreciated Prof. Ryn’s introduction to the new Transaction edition and even said some complimentary things about Viereck and the new edition here.  I never did get done writing my critique of Viereck, and then the old fellow passed away and it seemed to be in poor taste to start tearing into his political writings at the time.  But now the gauntlet has been thrown down, as it were.  Viereck’s weird animus against the Agrarians and Kirk is one of the things about his writing I cannot understand, since he had so much more in common with them than with anyone else in the 1940s and 1950s and still would have had a great deal more in common with traditional conservatives than he would have ever had with anyone else. 

Phrases such as ”unhistorical appeal to history” are catchy because they sound really damning (like attacking something as anti-individualist individualism or unscientific science) but don’t actually mean anything.  How can you appeal to history except historically?  How do you venerate and honour a tradition without becoming part of it and thus becoming traditional in the process?  Traditions do not fall out of the sky or grow wild out of the ground–men make them, cultivate them and keep them alive.  Every so often they take seeds from plants that have been long dead and revive the species. 

As for the Agrarians themselves, their purpose in I’ll Take My Stand, as we learned at the TRI Summer School on The American Agrarian Tradition (I really haven’t given up writing entries for this, I promise!) last summer, was not to invoke History and Tradition the way that some buffoons today invoke Freedom, but to tell the story and give a defense of a way of life that existed at the time, to give expression to loyalties to a particular history, particular tradition, and particular place that they called their own.  They had no time for nostalgia or prattling on about tradition-in-the-abstract (is it ever really possible to do this for very long?).  The people who like to appeal to History are the godless gnostics who come to destroy settled traditions and sane societies.  If we appeal to precedent and prescription, that is something all together different.   

When Viereck wrote those things about Kirk, he had taken a dim view of the New Conservatives and the NR crowd generally for their enthusiasm for Republicans, some enthusiasm for capitalism (not among the New Conservatives, though, mind you) and their accommodation with nationalism.  Viereck, for reasons of principle and family history, was as allergic to every kind of nationalism as Kuehnelt-Leddihn was or Lukacs is, and on this score I have no beef with him.  Many of his attacks on ”Manchester liberalism” are excellent reading–and thus all the more bizarre for a “liberal conservative” to be making.  But he takes his disagreements with Kirk over, say, endorsing Goldwater or supporting McCarthy or not supporting Adlai Stevenson (whom Viereck admired way too much) and then translates them into a general view of what Kirkian conservatives get wrong.  In other words, he took a petty political disagreement and made it into the cause of a great theoretical divide–in this he resembles no one so much, I’m sorry to say, as Andrew Sullivan. 

Thus we get the folderol about “traditionless worship of tradition” (which has about as much substance to it as “Christianism”)–which implies that there is a tradition-full worship of tradition that Viereck understands but never seems inclined to tell us about.  Except that nobody worships tradition.  They live it and teach it to their children.  Anything else is pretty much just hot air. 

That brings me to “liberal conservatism.”  David Cameron has revived this phrase.  It is a wonderful phrase.  It can mean whatever you want it to mean, and very often that is all that it is good for.  In Cameronian terms, you are liberal if you support freedom–and who doesn’t support freedom?–and you are conservative if you recognise that man is flawed (and who really doesn’t know this, deep down?).  Well, then, that settles everything, doesn’t it?  Except that it tells you next to nothing.

A few points.  Kirk never denied the liberal origins of the political philosophy that has prevailed in the United States.  The man was too good of a scholar and too sensible of a person to believe that Enlightenment liberalism did not have a significant role in shaping American political thought.  No serious conservative thinker really denies this significant role.  Even Anglo-American conservatives were all basically reconciled to the settlement of 1688–just as Bolingbroke said!  Even those of us who regard this as a problem to be solved acknowledge the reality of it.  But that does not mean that one must concede “fundamentally liberal origins” for the country as a whole.  As Bradford, heir to the Agrarians, wrote in “Is The American Experience Conservative?”: “There is no way of understanding the origins of our fundamental law apart from 18th-century English constitutionalism, than which there is no doctrine more conservative.”  Understood in terms of chartered liberties, constitutional inheritance and legal precedent, our constitutionalist experience made us the antithesis of the “projectors” and terrible simplifiers–our fathers were defending something that they and their fathers had possessed from time out of mind.  In other words, our experience and history as a people with constitutional government rendered our embrace of institutions originally fashioned by liberals into the embrace of an inheritance, a tradition that had grown up with our people and which they held in high esteem because it was prescriptive, customary and traditional and not because it was liberal.  Indeed, they made it work, if you ask me, in spite of its liberal origins.  Except as part of a patrimony, I wouldn’t give you a penny for liberalism; as part of my people’s inheritance, it is worthy of some due consideration, provided that it is transmitted through the right sources (via, say, Bolingbroke and not Locke) and understood in the right way.   

It is a happy coincidence that I have been deluging my readers with my Bolingbroke reading of late, since Bolingbroke, the Country tradition and the Commonwealthmen Trenchard and Gordon all come together to espouse a radical commitment to “the ancient constitution” and mixed government.  It is they, not Walpole’s Whigs, who kept faith with the constitutional tradition, and it is to them that our forefathers looked for guidance in defending their patrimony.  The men of “traditionless tradition” are, if they are anyone, those who honour the 1688 revolution but abide by none of its principles or who talk of “liberal conservatism” while holding FDR’s coat and claiming that the New Deal had become part of the constitutional landscape–as soon as the 1950s!  The beauty of the appeal to the example of Bolingbroke and the Commonwealthmen is that they are part of the American tradition, as they were vital in the formation of the colonial embrace of the Country tradition critique and a whole array of assumptions about checks and balances–Bolingbroke thought about these things before Montesqieu–mixed government, restraining human passions, the evils of faction, the danger of foreign entanglements, and on and on.  We do not have to bow to the idol of Locke any longer (not that I was doing much bowing anyway)–we can be avowedly anti-liberal as Bolingbroke was without abandoning the ancient constitution that he defended against the Whigs.  We do not have to indulge fatuous theories about social contract or the state of nature when Bolingbroke offers some sensible Aristotle-rich social and political theory that is thoroughly in agreement with the Anglo-American experience.  We can tap into our rich and lustrous history without having to taste the bitter fruit of liberalism or the bland porridge of “liberal conservatism.”