Jonathan Neumann: To Heal the World? How the Jewish Left Corrupts Judaism and Endangers Israel. New York: All Points Books, 2018.

 

‘Social justice’ has become a code word for socialism. Socialism requires the redistribution of wealth, as Neumann puts it, “in order to achieve economic egalitarianism” and, he sees, to achieve social egalitarianism as well. It is a “political ideology”; if not necessarily any one kind of regime, in practice it has inclined toward tyranny and oligarchy. In recent decades, this ideology “has become embedded in all aspects of American Judaism–including education and worship at all ages,” to the point that many congregations discourage the traditional Jewish practice of charity because it deflects attention from the supposed “root causes” of inequality, typically ascribed to ‘capitalism.’ The “bible of Jewish social justice” is a collection of essays titled Righteous Indignation: A Jewish Call for Justice, edited by Rabbi Or N. Rose of Hebrew College, Jo Ellen Kaiser of the Jewish News of Northern California, and Rabbi Margie Klein. The Hebrew term adapted for the purposes of socialist ideology is tikkun olam, held up as “a divine commandment” and indeed “Judaism’s first principle and most fundamental message.” Neumann denies that it has any foundation in Judaism at all. “It was conceived by Jews who had rejected the faith of their fathers and midwifed by radicals who saw it as a pretext to appropriate Jewish texts and corrupt religious rituals…to further political ends.” Neumann intends “to slaughter the sacred cow of tikkun olam.”

In preparation for this, Neumann recounts the history of the efforts of some American Jews to reconfigure Judaism, beginning with the Reform Judaism of the 1880s. The Reform movement had roots in Europe—specifically, in the emancipation of Jews, hitherto confined to ghettos, that commenced in the late eighteenth century. Although Enlightenment philosophes often despised religion, in their political writings they propounded religious toleration, and eventually European politicians followed through on it. Jews responded to their new circumstance in several ways. Orthodox Jews “either rejected modernity and retreated back into the ghettos or began to seek ways to sustain observance of Jewish law while living in gentile society.” Others assimilated into that society, either as secularists (many becoming businessmen) or as Christian converts. Still others became socialists. And some “looked to remake Judaism in order to facilitate easier integration into local society.” To do that, they abandoned the centuries old Jewish aspiration to return to the Land of Israel, to Zion, and embraced the nationalism that prevailed in Europe during and after the Napoleonic Wars. In Germany, where Reform took hold most vigorously, “Berlin was the new Zion, Germany the new Promised Land, and the new role of Jews–their new Torah, as it were–was to serve as a local model of the universalist ethics of the great German philosopher Immanuel Kant.” Kant hardly derived his categorical imperative from the Bible (he called for the “euthanization” of Judaism), but the Protestant theologian Julius Wellhausen, a follower, “argued that the great contribution of ancient Israelite religion was the universal ethical message of its prophets.” A purely ethical Judaism would eschew Jewish ritual and even Jewish law, along with Jewish particularism, becoming a sort of Protestantism without Christ. In the United States of the nineteenth century, “Reform Judaism gradually made inroads and eventually became the dominant denomination, a status it still retains.”

The leading figure of American Reform Judaism was Rabbi Isaac Mayer Wise, who had emigrated to the United States from Bohemia in 1846. Wise and his colleagues were troubled by the traditional claims of Jewish chosenness, which “could not be reconciled with their drive to eliminate differences between themselves and their compatriots.” Accordingly, they rejected the doctrine of chosenness along with “the hope in a messianic restoration of the Jews to the Land of Israel and of the Davidic kingdom there”; they also rejected restoration’s secular, nationalist counterpart, political Zionism. They eschewed the term ‘synagogue’ for Jewish houses of worship, preferring ‘temple.’ “Rather than promote and celebrate Jewish difference, the new messianic aim of the Jewish People was the union of all the children of God.” According to the Reformers’ Pittsburgh Platform of 1885, “We consider ourselves no longer a nation, but a religious community, and therefore expect neither a return to Palestine, nor a sacrificial worship under the sons of Aaron, nor the restoration of any of the laws concerning the Jewish state.” Instead, “we deem it our duty to participate in the great task of modern times, to solve, on the basis of justice and righteousness, the problems presented by the contrasts and evils of the present organization of society.”

Initially, the Reformers partook of the nationalist liberalism popular in the nineteenth century. By the early twentieth century, however, they hearkened to the democratic-socialist precepts Social Gospel Christianity propounded. The Social Gospel demanded not so much church-based charity but “coercive philanthropy,” whereby the modern state took on many of the charitable services churches had traditionally undertaken. That is, the Social Gospel consisted of a superficially Christianized Hegelianism, teaching (in the words of its proponent, Richard T. Ely, that “if anything on earth is divine, it is the state.” In Hegel, of course, divinity means the Absolute Spirit, not the Holy Spirit, a distinction Social Gospelers tended to elide. the claim was that “Christ could only return to rule in the end of days after a millennium of heavenly rule on earth,” a millennium of social justice “to be achieved and sustained by man” using the modern state as his instrument.

“The Social Gospel had an indelible effect on Reform Judaism, rousing it from its utopian dreams to practical action,” in which the Reformers “eventually surpassed the gentiles” in their zeal. Not only the Reformers but another denomination, Reconstructionist Judaism, also followed the demi-Christian lead. Its founder, the theologian Mordechai Kaplan, had emigrated to the United States in 1881, eventually seeking a middle way between Orthodoxy and Reform. He never embraced the de facto assimilationism of the Reformers but did follow their universalist rejection of chosenness and of Zionism. Still another denomination, Conservative Judaism, also occupied the middle way, but retained many traditional Jewish rituals and other particularist Jewish traditions. Conservatives “believed that Judaism needed to be updated for the modern era, but they still wanted it to be recognizably Jewish.” Yet they, too, eventually followed the social justice movement, taking it up after the Second World War and the Holocaust, while expressing its doctrines “in Scriptural and rabbinic terms, rather than purely as a secularist philosophy.” This turned out to be an unintended move toward tikkun olam, a movement no one would call conservative.

A sharper turn to the Left occurred in the 1960s, with the Havurah (“Fellowship”) movement. Taking their cue from the Sixties ‘counterculture,’ the Havurahs founded prayer and study groups asserting “the liberty to adapt Jewish law” by adhering to what Neumann gently calls the “expressive individualism” of the New Left. “Their interest in Judaism was prompted by the general turn toward minority identity in America at this time, particularly in the context of the Civil Rights and Black Power movements, but also by the amazement and ethnic Jewish pride surrounding Israel’s striking victory over the armies of the Arab world in the Six-Day War of 1967.” “Lacking basic knowledge of Judaism or the tools to acquire it,” and lacking the resolve to acquire either, “more familiar with Eastern philosophy, political radicalism, and the American counterculture than they were with Judaism,” men like Arthur Waskow and Michael Lerner simply turned to the politics of the New Left. But while Reform Judaism had indeed been reformist-liberal-progressive, any politics animated by the ideas of the New Left must be revolutionary. One important feature of the New Left was its emphasis on ‘cultural’ Marxism—dialectical struggle no longer centered on class warfare, preferring instead to do battle in the fields of the academy, religious institutions, and the media. The revolution effected within Judaism claimed not to reform Judaism but to ‘revolve’ it back to its alleged core, back to “real Judaism”—namely, tikkun olam. Lerner, who had been Herbert Marcuse’s teaching assistant as Berkeley and had headed the campus chapter of Students for a Democratic Society, founded Tikkun, which quickly became the flagship publication of the movement.

The term ‘tikkun olam’ appears nowhere in the Torah or in the Talmud. But there is a traditional Jewish prayer, “Aleynu,” which calls upon the congregants to “perfect the world under the Kingdom of God.” This prayer had already been appropriated for the purpose of world-perfection by Mordechai Kaplan; his student, Alexander Dushkin (in a move reminiscent of the secular Progressive, John Dewey) then took tikkun olam to Jewish educators after the Second World War. Thus, an opening had occurred, which Lerner and his allies could walk through. “A radical leftist group called New Jewish Agenda was founded in 1980 and adopted tikkun olam to summarize its objectives,” tying it to the tradition of Jewish prophecy. “It was in New Jewish Agenda and its offspring organizations that tikkun olam was properly married to social justice and radical leftist politics.” Although the organization itself disbanded twelve years later, by then its ideology had been embedded in both Reform, Reconstructionist, and Conservative Judaism and “is even making inroads into Orthodoxy.” “One simply cannot understand American Judaism today without understanding tikkun olam.”

How do tikkun olam advocates manage to reinterpret Jewish Scriptures in this manner? They focus their attention on six texts: the Genesis account of Creation, “which establishes universalism as the foundation of Jewish social justice”; Abraham’s appeal to God to show mercy to the inhabitants of Sodom and Gomorrah; Joseph’s ‘economic policies’ as an advisor to the Egyptian pharaoh; the Exodus from Egypt, reconceived as a revolutionary act; the Prophets’ critiques of corrupt practices in Israel; and a variety of rabbinic writings, duly decontextualized, which can be bent to their purposes. Neumann addresses each of these, seriatim, after noting that “Tikkun olam is not about turning Jews into Marxists” but “about rebranding Marxism as Judaism.” 

The Jewish social justice movement makes “three significant theological claims” about God’s creation as revealed in Genesis: first, that “all persons have the same dignity, deserve the same opportunities, and are entitled to similar outcomes” because they are all equally human; second, “since God didn’t create solely humans but all of nature, the environment has a streak of divinity of its own” (pantheism); third, because God shaped man from the dust of the earth, “mankind shares its origins with the rest of nature,” a claim that reinforces the movement’s environmentalist activism. Neumann does not hesitate to call this theology “a contrived religious system, a sort of New Age mysticism that distorts the biblical Creation story and Kabbalistic (Jewish mystical) motifs in order to portray the politics of social justice as an organic Jewish teaching” In order to “facilitate the quiet absorption of liberal politics,” itself redefined in ‘social justice’ terms, “into Judaism.” Under this pretended interpretation, the ‘God’ who ‘created’ the heavens, the earth, and human beings “is obviously not the personal God of the Bible,” a Being that Rabbi Arthur Green dismisses as “a mythical projection” of human consciousness into the heavens. Instead of that God and His creation, Rabbi Green takes creation to be evolution, natural history; evolution is what reveals itself. Ergo, “Creation equals revelation”–a clever way of rewriting the Bible to make it come out the way he wants it. This also abrogates the chosenness of Jews, inasmuch as there is no Person to choose them, a revision of Scripture that fits with Judaism as a form of universalism. 

As to the claim that human equality under God requires social and economic equality, sexual ‘liberation,’ or pacifism, Neumann again dissents. “The fact is that no particular contemporary politics necessarily flows from the Creation story in itself.” In the Torah, God’s commandments form part of God’s covenant with the Israelites. But Rabbi Green “rejects the idea of a distinct Jewish people in toto” as “too narrow and chauvinistic.” At most, what Moses handed down from God at Sinai was “merely ‘awareness’ of the Oneness of Being”—the sort of insight one might glean from the practice of yoga or the ingestion of psychedelic drugs. But, as Neumann insists, “The Torah is essentially a constitution for a single people living in its own land under God, where obligations are designed to benefit the other citizens who have accepted the same laws and can be held to account for any lack of reciprocity.” Jewish social justice universalizes what Scripture clearly intends as particular. This is not to claim that God requires nothing of non-Jews. Quite the contrary: the Noahide laws enunciated at Genesis 9:6 apply to everyone. And, unfortunately, human beings generally do a very poor job of following them. But at any rate, when it comes to the “theology of Jewish social justice,” “there is very little Jewish about it,” and designedly so.

The failure of human beings to obey the Noahide laws led to God’s turn to Abraham and thus to Judaism proper. “The patriarch Abraham truly became the father of the Jewish People when he heeded God’s call to adopt the sacred purpose of spreading righteousness and social justice in the world,” according to Reconstructionist rabbi Sidney Schwarz, the founder of Panim: The Institute for Jewish Leadership and Values—the use of ‘values,’ by the way, being a giveaway of the Institute’s secularist orientation. Panim holds up Abraham as the Jewish exemplar in a way that advances the cause of social justice by citing Abraham’s dialogue with God, in which he protests the destruction of Sodom. This supposedly teaches the importance of protest in Judaism, of ‘speaking truth to power,’ even to the ultimate Power. Joshua Stanton, a Reform rabbi, goes so far as to call “a testament to the sacred nature of protest.”

To which Neumann replies, some protest. “I am but dust and ashes,” Abraham says to God, meekly. If that is a protest, it is more reverential than indignant, more “hopeful entreaty than protest.” In fact, “the entire conversation is a pedagogical exercise initiated by Abraham himself, who is curious to learn ‘the way of God,'” not to correct Him or bring Him to the bar of some standard of justice independent of God. And even if Abraham cannot understand God’s suspension of His law prohibiting the destruction of the innocent, this has nothing to do with calls for socioeconomic equality.

For this, however, social justice warriors turn to the Bible’s account of Joseph’s economic policy as advisor to Pharaoh. According to Sandra M. Fox, a clinical social worker, and Martin I. Seltman, a member of Physicians for Social Responsibility, Joseph’s hard-earned “compassion and wisdom” animate his “responsible planning” with respect to Egypt’s food supply, which “save[d] the lives of countless Egyptians and his own estranged Israelite family during a grave famine.” Conservative social justice rabbi Jill Jacobs concurs: Joseph, she writes, “us[es] political authority to protect the lives of all members of society.” Not so fast, Neumann cautions. “If you read the text more attentively, you realize that this isn’t what happened.” What Joseph actually does is to take “the opportunity of the famine to enslave the Egyptian people to Pharaoh”; having expropriated and stored surplus grain during times of good harvest, Joseph doesn’t return it to the people during the famine. “He sells it to them,” saying, for good measure, “Behold, I have bought you this day and your land for Pharaoh,” inducing them in turn to proclaim, gratefully, that they are now “slaves to Pharaoh.” “Not only is the ‘lesson’ of the Joseph story not what these activists wish it were, but, remarkably, its real lesson seems to be the very opposite: reliance on government leads to dependency, and dependency can lead to much worse.” While “Joseph does indeed save Egypt from famine,” the consequent augmentation of ruling authority “had grave consequences” for Egyptians. And for Israelites, who eventually chose to escape.

Ah, but Jewish social justice proponents have Exodus covered, too. According to them, Exodus demonstrates the need for revolution. That is the point of the “Freedom Seder” invented by Institute for Policy Studies co-founder Arthur Waskow. In keeping with tikkun olam univeralism, the Seder “wasn’t just for Jews” but “for everyone.” And indeed, as Naumann observes, it is “barely Jewish at all.” The rhetorical gimmick is that, in Waskow’s words, “we all live under Pharaohs” now. “In Waskow’s telling, Moses is a militant trade unionist and God plays practically no role at all,” being “nothing more than a figure of speech.” As Waskow puts it, “the profound conversation” between God and the people of Israel amounted to “the conversation between the Promise and the Work, the Vision and the Creation; freedom, justice, sustenance, and law were all made real by [the Israelites’] own hands.” In his Exodus and Revolution, Michael Walzer makes similar moves, pretending that Exodus amounts to “a how-to guide for political revolution” by turning “Egypt” and the “Promised Land” into metaphors and God into a nonentity. Naumann perceptively remarks that it was Christians who first treated the Promised Land and Jerusalem as metaphors for “a spiritual condition,” but it must be said that Augustine and those who came after him did not forget God while doing so. After all, in Exodus God says, “Let my people go, so that they may serve Me.” Not themselves. Not humanity. Naumann concludes his refutation of the tikkun olam rhetoric by recalling that the Promised Land in the Bible is “no metaphor” but “a real territory that has been known as the Land of Israel for millennia.” When God punishes the Israelites, He exiles them from that real territory, and when they repent and He relents, He allows them to return “to the same actual land.“

With the abrogation of ritual, the prophetic character of Judaism comes to the fore. Rituals are conventions; prophecy challenges convention in the name of God. Michael Lerner deplores what he calls “the ritualization of Judaism” at the expense of justice, which is not only unconventional but universal, according to social justice proponents. Ritual may be readmitted after prophecy has been heeded and new, reformed, or redirected rituals conforming to the prophetic message have been introduced. But as Neumann sees, the prophet Isaiah (for example) does not oppose ritual; he opposes ritualism, ritual without grounding in prophecy and covenant. “The prophets rebelled against hollow ritual.” Ethics or moral law require right behavior toward other human beings; ritual entails right behavior toward God. Ritual rightly understood must be anything but “hollow.” As to the universality of ethics, Jews are commanded to respect it without homogenizing it; they have moral obligations towards non-Jews but they owe additional, stricter moral obligations toward one another. Isaiah himself lambastes not all of mankind but Israel for its moral failings. That is because “Israelites have a sacred responsibility to one another as they are bound together in covenant. That covenant does not extend to other peoples,” at least not immediately. As Isaiah puts it, “out of Zion shall come forth the law” whereby swords shall be beaten into ploughshares.” There is a sequence. Israel comes first; it must obey its own covenant with God before God will permit it to be extended to ‘the nations.’

“As it happens, God also warns the people not to believe false prophets in their midst.” In fact, rabbis have traditionally “insisted that, following the prophetic epoch, prophecy is suspended” because “prophetic pretensions ae conceited and can easily become hazardous.” Social justice ‘prophets’ might well take note.

Neumann returns to a consideration of tikkun olam itself. As he mentioned before, it “isn’t mentioned in the Bible anywhere.” It has “no connection to tax rate, the labor movement, abortion, immigration reform, healthcare provision, education concerns, environmentalism, or any of the many other political issues in which social justice is concerning,” having no relation to social justice at all. In the Aleynu, the line “to perfect the world under the Kingdom of God” refers to Jewish monotheism, to having no God before the God of Israel, to “the elimination of all other forms of religious practice” among Jews “in favor of the exclusive and universal worship of the God of Israel.” There is some question whether the original phrase meant not to “repair” or to “perfect” the world under the Kingdom of God but to establish it. If so, then it is only God Who can do so: “Therefore we put our hope in You,” the prayer goes on to say. Not in ourselves, as secularists must claim.

And would the perfection, repair, or establishment of “the world” under God’s Kingdom mean social justice as defined by social justice proponents? The Aleynu makes no such claim. The Torah makes no such claim. What about the Talmud?

The Mishnah, the older section, uses the phrase “for the sake of tikkun ha’olam” on several occasions, but only with reference to existing laws, with no calls for revolution or even reform. “Perfection” there entails “mostly minor legal adjustments to safeguard the existing system,” to perfect it, not “systemic change.” Further, the authority of the rabbis who wrote the Talmud “did not extend beyond the Jews.” As for the Gemara, it consists of homiletic teachings, “commentaries that build on nuances, ambiguities, discrepancies, and other textual anomalies in the Bible to make more general theological, mystical, or normative claims that often depart radically from the plain meaning of the words in the biblical text.” This might appear to offer a more promising field for social justice proponents.

Except that it doesn’t. The Midrash does not anticipate, much less express, social justice ideology. Overall, “the Talmudic tikkun olam…seek[s] to protect the existing system” of Jewish law “through minor adjustments.” Nor has it ever been treated as a set of commands or “religious imperatives.” Its spirit is explanatory and exploratory, not revisionist or revolutionary.

“These activists care about social justice independently of Jewish texts, from which they have no interest in actually learning.” Accordingly, they practice not exegesis but eisegesis, the imposition of “preconceived views and biases onto the Bible.” Two of the most prominent eisegesists are the aforementioned Michael Lerner and Judith Butler. Lerner deplores “the violence of the Bible,” the way that God at times rewards or commands violence. Lerner denies that the books of Joshua, Judges, Samuel, and Kings, which assert “Jewish sovereignty over the Land of Israel,” backed by the sword, really record the voice of God, in this echoing the claim of Martin Buber, who claimed that Samuel misunderstood God’s will in taking Him to have commanded the destruction of the Amalekites. Lerner associates what he calls the “voice of cruelty and fanaticism and intolerance and oppression” with the modern political Right, whereas the “voice of love, justice, and transcendence” belongs to the modern political Left. In this, he evidently overlooks his contemporary tyrants on the Left, while leaving Rightist critics of military intervention conveniently unnoticed. For her part, Butler tends a bit more toward the sanguinary, denying Israel’s right to exist and lauding Hamas and Hezbollah. Jews belong in the Diaspora, not in any one land. “Her argument is that exilic Judaism is about imbibing the idea of living with others and not being exclusively Jewish.” This is necessary, as she explains because “the notion that to be a Jew is to be a Zionist [is] a historical equation that is to be countered if Jewishness is to remain linked with the struggle for social justice,’ which is universal, ‘ethical,’ devoid of anything specifically Judaic.

Naumann correctly traces the intensification of contemporary Jewish anti-Zionism on the Left to the aftermath of the 1967 Six-Day War. While the Reformers had already rejected Zionism a century earlier, “anti-Israel activism in the Jewish community emerged less from Classical Reform…than from the milieu of 1960s anti-American radicalism.” Until 1967, the United States had not been Israel’s primary foreign ally. The Soviet Union had favored it (as a socialist state) in the years immediately following the Second World War. Israel then enjoyed the patronage of France from the early 1950s, on. However, President Charles de Gaulle advised the Israeli government against a pre-emptive attack on the Arab forces massing all around it; when the Israelis quite sensibly went ahead and rolled up its enemies, de Gaulle rebuked them. Americans, mindful of their need of a reliable ally in the region (Egypt’s ruler, Gamal Nasser, leaned toward the Soviets), worked out an alliance. All of this infuriated the New Left and those Jewish activists who had adopted its ideology. These included the usual suspects: Waskow, Lerner, and others in that network of organizations and their publications. Many endorsed the Palestine Liberation Organization, backed by the Soviets. Such efforts have knocked against the more established and sane Jewish organizations, which recognize a threat to Israel as a threat to Jewish interests everywhere. More recently, some on the Jewish Left, such as Jewish Voice for Peace (Butler, Noam Chomsky, Tony Kushner, among others), want Israelis to withdraw from Judea and Samaria (the ‘West Bank’) and East Jerusalem while recognizing an Arab ‘right to return’ to those ‘occupied territories.’ They add the removal of Israel’s naval blockade of Gaza, where, up until the late war, Hamas held sway. These moves obviously would spell the end of Israel itself, which Jewish Voice for Peace wouldn’t mind, as its members “have been known to question the historical Jewish connection to the land of Israel.” 

In sum, in the eyes of the Jewish Left, neither Israel nor Judaism itself should survive. “The triumph of ethics over Judaism is ultimately the triumph of philosophical morality”—once Kantian, now neo-Marxist—over “religious law out of the sources of Revelation.” But if rationalist ethics “were sufficient, then there’d be no need for a religious legal code,” as human thought would suffice to guide human action. “Most liberal Jews involved in general social justice activism are either indifferent to pursuing their agenda within a Jewish context or positively opposed to doing so,” preferring “to do their work without any Jewish connection.” That makes sense, from their standpoint, since “social justice and Judaism are fundamentally at odds with one another,” beginning with the underlying question of the reality of the God of the Bible. Or, to put it more comprehensively, “unlike Judaism, which is built upon a personal God, Revelation, the particularistic covenant, and the commandment, Jewish social justice holds a preference for man, Creation, universalistic morality, and reason”—not reason as such, but reason unassisted by divine Revelation. Meanwhile, it is “inconceivable that advocates of Jewish social justice would tell African-Americans or Muslims that ultimately they should abandon their particular cultures, practices, or beliefs”; “the Jewish people alone must become obsolete.”

But, according to the Bible (Genesis 22:18), “through Abraham’s progeny all the peoples of the earth will be blessed.” That being so, “Jews and non-Jews alike should be alarmed by the prospect of tikkun olam succeeding in assimilating the Jewish People into all of humanity, for then that blessing will be no more.”

 

 

Jill Eicher: Mellon vs. Churchill: The Untold Story of Treasury Titans at War. New York: Penguin Books, 2025.

This review was first published in Civitas Outlook, May 19, 2025.

 

The story Jill Eicher expertly tells is less “untold” than forgotten, as she herself demonstrates. The controversy over repayment of America’s wartime loans to the United Kingdom and the linkage of those loans to German reparations for the catastrophic damage the Kaiser’s troops inflicted during the First World War spurred newspaper headlines in both countries, from the immediate aftermath of the war until the Great Depression and Adolf Hitler combined to change the subject. Esteem for Churchill during and after the Second World War, along with the Anglo-American ‘Special Relationship’ during the old War, ensured that the dead past stayed dead. By now, the fact that Life magazine’s “Man of the Century” was for a while perhaps the most detested Englishman among Americans will come as a bit of a surprise.

Wartime loans by the United States to the U.K. began in April 1917, after President Wilson had requested a declaration of war against Germany. Until that time, America had maintained neutrality, hoping to sell merchandise to both sides. But since the powerful British navy blockaded German ports and the German navy could not reciprocate in kind, German strategists adopted a policy of “unrestricted” submarine warfare—not blockading but sinking American merchant ships headed for the British Isles. Although this proved a serious miscalculation—Germans didn’t expect America to be able to do anything effective soon enough to save their trading partners—it very nearly won the war. While the rival armies were stalemated in France, cutting the supplies of food and munitions from the U.S. to the Allies would have won the war for the Central Powers. However, since the Barbary Wars of the early 1800s, the American commercial republic had regarded interruption of its shipping on the high seas—the “great highway of the nations,” as Jefferson called it—a just casus belli.

With these loans, America became “a creditor nation for the first time in its history.” Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania’s Andrew Mellon knew all about being a creditor, having been brought into the banking business by his father at the age of nineteen. He “believed in the guiding principles [Alexander] Hamilton established as the financial policy of the American government—balanced budgets and disciplined debt reduction.” But for the most part he didn’t involve himself in politics before or during the war, confining himself to deploring the antitrust legislation advanced by Progressives in both major political parties. His 1921 appointment as Treasury Secretary by President Harding was his first venture in government.

By the 1920s, in contrast, Churchill was of course a prominent figure in British politics, like his father before him. But by the time American declared war and rescued British finances, he was on the outs, having been sacked as First Lord of the Admiralty after his plan to attack the Central Powers through the Dardanelles Straits ended in catastrophe.

American businessman, British aristocrat. Two commercial republics, but one democratic, with an influential oligarchic class, the other only lately democratic (the last of the Reform Acts had only been made law a generation before) and with an influential aristocratic class to go along with its oligarchs. In many ways, the intensely private Mellon and the intensely public Churchill exemplified their countries, once enemies and until then scarcely friends.

Congress authorized the loans to the United Kingdom and the other allies, stipulating that the money would be repaid with interest. To fund $200 million in loans and the costly military effort, Treasury Secretary William McAdoo proposed a tax increase and what he called “Liberty Bonds,” purchased by American citizens. Mellon himself purchased $1 million of these, and his banks purchased another $60 million. By the end of the war, the Allies had bought $7 billion of war materials, mostly from the United States, all on credit provided by the American government, which ended the war with a $20 billion national debt, half of it caused by the loans. The policy worked, militarily; American troops, money, and materiel tipped the scales of the war. The price was economic and recession and inflation, postwar.

Churchill foresaw the dilemma. In a 1919 article, “Will America Fail Us?” he argued that Americans should forgive their wartime Allies’ debt in whole or very substantially, on two grounds. First, the victorious countries were simply unable to repay, given the war’s devastation and the tariffs imposed in all countries, whose rulers hoped to protect the remnants of national industry. If angry workers turned to socialism, the ‘capitalist’ interest in repayment would ruin the commercial dimension, and perhaps the republican dimension, of commercial republicanism itself. Second, the debts were incurred “in the common cause of the war,” not (as in the case of an ordinary bank loan) in the hopes of turning a profit in business. Churchill proposed a campaign to change public opinion on the basis of an appeal to Americans’ sense of fairness. he continued to insist on this policy during his years as Chancellor of the Exchequer, beginning with his appointment in November 1924 by his future rival, Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin and ending, fortuitously for himself, a few months before the collapse of American stock prices in 1929.

The Americans throughout the Harding and Coolidge administrations had their own moral argument, also an appeal to what Adam Smith called the moral sense. A debt is itself a moral obligation. In Coolidge’s laconic formulation, “They hired the money, didn’t they?” This resonated not only with Congress but with the American people, who had invested in good faith in the Liberty Bonds. Mellon and his assistant Treasury Secretary, Russell Leffingwell soon thought differently, although not daring to say so publicly. In Leffingwell’s words, “A good customer is better than an insolvent debtor.” Debt relief of some sort would be necessary to bring Europe back, in the interests of Americans as well as Europeans.

A London editorial writer quoted Hegel: “Tragedy is the conflict not of right and wrong but of right and right.” (One pinches oneself to think that a century back, not only could an editorial writer quote Hegel but that he could assume that his readers knew who that was.). And so the tragicomic game of debt and reparation collection began, complete with taunts, as the English called Uncle Sam “Uncle Shylock” and the somewhat less literary Americans called John Bull “Sponger.”

Practically speaking, the weakness of the American position was the public refusal, through two administrations, to admit that debt repayment depended in substantial measure on German reparations. Arguably, Mellon’s one serious gaffe during his tenure was his public pronouncement in 1926 that “all of our principal debtors are already receiving from Germany more than enough to pay their debts to the United States.” He knew this to be untrue, having told a closed-door session of the Senate Finance Committee, “those who insist on impossible terms are, in the final analysis, working for an entire repudiation of the debt.” And he had in fact quietly begun preparing for loan default at that time by running the budget surpluses needed to pay down the national debt owed to American citizens who had purchased Liberty Bonds. In the end, he also managed to collect most of the monies owed, even from the understandably recalcitrant French, on whose territory the Western Front had held at agonizing cost. Churchill didn’t do quite as well, but as one of his friends said, “Winston had too generous a heart to be a hard debt collector.”

In its feeble attempt to pay at least some of the reparations, the Weimar Republic borrowed from American banks; in effect, American corporations were subsidizing the European Allies’ debt repayments to, well, Americans. The stock crash “revealed that the American payment system for reparations and war debts…amounted to little more than a house of cards,” although it had worked so long as the American economy roared along with the Twenties.

The Depression saw the Hoover Administration, with Mellon still at his post, announce a moratorium on debt repayment. He retired from Treasury in February 1932, accepting an appointment as Ambassador to the United Kingdom in April. The new Roosevelt Administration tried to revive the debt collection policy, only to see Hitler cancel reparations payments, dismiss the terms of the Versailles Treaty, drop out of the League of Nations, and remilitarize Germany with malign intent. In their turn, the United Kingdom, France, Belgium, and Italy defaulted on the remainder of the loans. FDR countered these events decisively—by charging Mellon with tax evasion. (“The jury found otherwise and exonerated him.”) When cornered, distract: FDR may not have known much about economics, but politics—yes.

“By the time Andrew Mellon resigned as ambassador to Great Britain in March 1933, as was the custom upon the inauguration of a new president, Alexander Hamilton’s founding principles of American government finance…had been supplanted by habitual deficit financing.” As for Churchill, we know the rest of that story, too.

Daniel J. Flynn: The Man Who Invented Conservatism: The Unlikely Life of Frank S. Meyer. New York: Encounter Books, 2025.

 

Born a few years prior to the First World War, Frank S. Meyer began his political life as a member of the Communist Party, which seized control of Russia a few years after his birth. After nearly two decades as a successful Party organizer, he rejected both the Party and the Marxism-Leninism that animated it, becoming one of the most important post-World War II American conservatives, both as a theoretician and a practitioner of the politics of liberty. The thing he intended to conserve was, in the words of his biographer, “the ordered freedom inherent in the American Founding.” To do so, he worked to form an alliance between the two main groups who esteemed the Founding and opposed Communism, democratic socialism, and Progressivism: the “traditionalists” and the “libertarians.” He succeeded, and although he didn’t live to see it, his efforts helped to bring about the election of Ronald Reagan and, as a consequence of that, the defeat of Russian Communism in the Cold War.

A New Jersey boy, Meyer was the son of a wealthy German-Jewish manufacturer in Newark, a man whose political hero was Woodrow Wilson. The boy was a rebel from the start, admiring Satan in Paradise Lost and, in a Nietzschean stroke, writing a poem hailing Dionysus. As a young man in the 1920s, he despised “the Judeo-Christian moral code” that upheld sexual abstinence as a conspicuous virtue, calling it “disgusting, dangerous and indecent.” He lasted for three semesters at then-conservative, monied Princeton before leaving for England and Balliol College, Oxford. There, he became a Marxist and founded the October Club—named after the Soviet revolution, of course—and guided it into the Communist Party of Great Britain, “an instrument of the Soviet Union,” then ruled by Stalin. Thus, “an American ran this youth wing of Great Britain’s Russian-directed Communist Party,” giving much needed life to a small and moribund organization, one long characterized by British dottiness. In that capacity, and quite possibly thanks to his rich-kid connections, he met any number of luminaries: Albert Einstein, Bertrand Russell, David Loyd George, Harold Laski, T. S. Eliot, George Bernard Shaw. He earned the attentions of the British security service, too.

Laski became his teacher when he enrolled in the London School of Economics in 1932, as did the eminent ethnographer Bronislaw Malinowski. Meyer’s doctoral dissertation in the anthropology department was a study of Mexican and Pueblo Indian culture, but his academic career failed to interest him so much as Communist Party activism. By the mid-1930s, the Party was organizing mass rallies of the Popular Front, events with such titles as the “World Congress Against War” and the “European Anti-Fascist Workers’ Congress.” Continuing his work as a youth organizer, he won the approval of the Comintern hierarchy in Europe. No wonder: he had taken Communism at Oxford “from nothing to three hundred members” and prepared the favorable reception of the “King-and-Country” pledge (“This House will in no circumstances fight for King and Country but will do all in its power to prevent transfer of arms to belligerent countries”), which originated at Oxford but carried the day at the London School by a vote of ten to one, “illustrat[ing] the seizure of campus politics by his Marxist clique.” As is well known, the pledge unintentionally served to buoy Hitler’s hopes that the Brits wouldn’t fight.

LSE administrators wearied of his activism. “The student leader’s conspicuous presence as an activist and a playboy, and his conspicuous absence from the classroom” along with his “scoffing at the edicts of the school’s director,” earned him expulsion from the university. The government soon followed, expelling him from the country in the spring of 1934. He left for—where else?—Paris, working for Walter Ulbrich, the future Communist Party leader of East Germany, his fellow dedicated (to use the current term of praise) Stalinist. But he soon returned to the United States, landing at the University of Chicago, where he “looked forward to again using the cover of academia to recruit party members, promote Marxism, and capture institutions for Stalinism.” Edward Shils, who eventually became an eminence among American sociologists, described his contemporary as “a demonic figure with flashing black eyes, a mop of black hair before mops on the head became the fashion, shabby in dress, eloquent, voluble, excitable,” and a born “mischief maker.” Meyer quickly established connection with the burgeoning “peace movement” in the American Popular Front, which combined Communists with Quakers and other fauna of the non-Communist American Left. “Communists found the campus liberals useful,” and Meyer did use them. That didn’t prevent him from criticizing the very liberal University of Chicago president Robert Hutchins for promoting his “Great Books” curriculum, a project that gave scant encouragement to Marxist ideologues. He was expelled from the Ph.D. program in 1938.

No worries. He became the director of the Chicago Writers’ School, which “attracted non-Communists as it imparted undiluted Marxist theory to the initiated.” Meyer taught the latter, using as his text The History of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, a tome written by some of Stalin’s close colleagues “and revised by them whenever a line changed or a Communist fell from favor.” Flynn adds, “Both occurred often when Meyer served as director from 1938 to 1941,” the years of the Nazi-Soviet Pact, a treaty that signaled the end of the Popular Front, too many non-Communist members of which couldn’t quite stomach the alliance of fascism and communism. Following orders, Meyer relinquished his role as a teacher and went into Party organizing as an assistant of Morris Childs, a veteran Communist, close associate of CPUSA chairman Earl Browder, who did espionage work for the Soviets for many years before turning his coat and working for the U.S. government as a double agent after the Second World War. In the wake of the controversial Pact, Party discipline and fundraising were more important than ever; Meyers’ “history of catalyzing the student movement in England and transforming campus activism at the University of Chicago provided the ideal background” for that work.

This didn’t mean he abandoned his ideological efforts. In the sort of implausible ‘synthesis’ that made the CPUSA ‘line’ increasingly notorious, “the budding party theorist attempted to meld the American Founding with Marxism,” arguing that the ‘capitalist’ and ‘treasonous’ Federalist Party had opposed the Democratic Party’s “progressive war” against the British in 1812, just as today, in 1941, “the forces of reaction are dragging our country” into a war, but “a very different kind of war, a war of imperialist conquest” on the side of Great Britain against those laudable allies, the Soviet Union and National-Socialist Germany. Flynn remarks that “this propaganda piece bore an unfortunate publication date of July 1941,” a couple of weeks after Hitler’s attack on the Soviet Union. Recovering quickly, a year later Meyer cranked out another piece, averring that just as we “must fight shoulder to shoulder with all who will carry the struggle against the Axis tyranny” today, “so in Jefferson’s day, the United States had to make its alliances, to bind itself closely with the forces which were fighting against the enemies of progress, and especially with the militant democracy of revolutionary France.” Inasmuch as militant, democratic, revolutionary France had arisen after the American alliance in the 1770s and early 1780s, and had disappeared into Bonapartist despotism by 1812, Meyer might be described as suggesting a chronological marvel, although it is conceivable that he identified yesterday’s Napoleon with today’s Stalin, the latter the leader of the only genuine democracy, according to contemporary Communists. “He reached,” Flynn suggests. Reached for the bleach, your rhyming reviewer adds.

Having gone “from vehemently denouncing Nazi Germany to opposing any war effort against it as imperialism to urging the taking up of arms against the Third Reich,” Meyer asked his Party bosses permission to enlist, overcoming their initial refusal and joining the U.S. Army in the summer of 1942. This gave him his first experience with real proletarians, and it proved enlightening. From their own point of view, the Communists were right because, “like a cult member separated from the group,” Meyer “developed independence of mind.” 

He did not initially break from the Party, instead “wonder[ing] if he could reform it.” Fat chance of that, to employ a proletarian expression of the time, but his initial efforts actually enhanced his standing with Browder and Company, who had begun to wonder the same thing. Was class warfare really “the best road to socialism,” given real proletarians’ preference for beer and bowling, and given Americans’ aversion generally to “democratic centralism,” as Stalinist dictatorship of the worldwide Communist movement was so ringingly called. Meyer doubled down on his proposed synthesis of Communism and Americanism as a way of fashioning “a Marxism that appealed to his countrymen. “This will only come about,” he wrote, “when our leaders from top to bottom are as familiar with the struggles of Jefferson and Jackson and Lincoln, and what we have inherited from those struggles, as they are with 1848, 1902, 1917, and fuse these understandings into one tool.” American Communists should, as Flynn puts it, present Marxism as a doctrine “growing organically out of the Declaration of Independence, Federalist Papers, and Constitution”. Sure enough, Comrade Browder, “whether coincidentally or consequentially, pursued almost all” of Meyers’ recommendations, “particularly fusionism.” 

The 1943 Tehran Conference, with its seeming thaw in U.S.-Soviet relations, made the Browder-Meyer line plausible. “It all recalled the Popular Front period of the mid-1930” and its slogan, “Communism Is Twentieth Century Americanism.” Now, with President Roosevelt commuting Browder’s prison sentence for passport fraud, Browder could predict “postwar unity” between the two countries. This was too much, even for such ardent American Communists as William Z. Foster and Sam Darcy, who denounced such meliorism as a betrayal of Marxism, a move that earned Foster a reprimand and Darcy expulsion from the Party. Communist fusionism ruled the day, to the extent that the Party itself was dissolved and replaced by “a political association” carrying forward “the traditions of Washington, Jefferson, Paine, Jackson, and Lincoln, under the changed conditions of modern industrial society.” Browder went so far as to begin his speeches with “Ladies and Gentlemen” instead of “Comrades.” 

This softening of the previous hard line had an unintended consequence in the mind of Frank Meyer. The publication of F. A. Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom in 1944, with its powerful challenge to policies of centralized economic planning, came at a hitherto unaccustomed moment of intellectual openness. Hayek, he wrote in a review for the Communist publication, New Masses, argues that the necessity to implement plans ‘from above’ “will in the end amount to the choice being arbitrarily made by those who exercise the power,” which obviates the possibility that they will be made democratically, even in a republic. The rulers “will then have continually to increase their use of sheer power to enforce those decisions,” resulting in “a completely regimented society in which the individual would have no freedom and no real voice.” Understandably, that was Meyer’s last article for New Masses. Moscow itself clinched the matter, changing its policy of detente and rehabilitating the hard-liners. Meyer denounced this move as warmongering. This, and Meyer’s refusal to turn away from The Daily Worker‘s editor Leo Budenz when he converted to Catholicism, spurred the Party to order Meyer’s wife and fellow Communist, Elsie to file for divorce. She refused and, with the collapse of Browderism, Meyer was adrift. “In what did he believe?” He also considered himself and his family to be in physical danger; in the years immediately following the war, not only were many American Communists expelled from the Party but some 500 to 1,000 were murdered by Stalin’s political police. 

By 1947, as the danger eased, he was earning money as a lecturer, simultaneously studying the thought of Henry Adams, Thomas Aquinas, Arnold Toynbee, and André Malraux—the latter a former ‘fellow traveler’ from the Popular Front days, by then a firm anti-Communist and political ally of Charles de Gaulle. And in 1948 he joined with his childhood friend, Eugene O’Neill, Jr., himself a former Party member, in backing Harry Truman for president against Henry Wallace, the muddle-headed former vice president, now the candidate backed by the reconstituted CPUSA. He also read Richard Weaver’s seminal Ideas Have Consequences, “a book that so profoundly influenced him that he later called it the fons et origo of the conservative movement” in the United States. He agonized over an invitation to testify against former comrades accused of violating the Alienation Registration Act, a 1940 law making it a crime to “knowingly or willfully advocate, abet, advise, or teach the duty, necessity, desirability, or propriety of overthrowing or destroying any government in the Unted States by force or violence, or by the assassination of any officer of any such government.” The Act, colloquially known as the Smith Act for its sponsor, Congressman Howard W. Smith of Virginia, was aimed at Nazis and therefore initially backed by the CPUSA. “Whether the law violated the Constitution became the subject of a fierce debate, but not until the government began using it on Stalinists.” In the end, Meyer did testify, earning denunciation from the editorialists at The Daily Worker, who tagged him, in their typically colorful manner, as “an unscholarly scholar, fished from the cesspools of intellectual decay.”

In testimony before the Senate Internal Security Subcommittee in 1957, Meyer concurred with Josephine Truslow Adams, who had previously testified that she had acted as a link between President Roosevelt and Comrade Brower. As Meyer remembered his conversations with Adams, FDR was “convinced that the Soviet Union would move from its lack of civil liberties toward civil liberties while the United States moved from it constitutional and free enterprise situation to socialism, and both would end at the same point”—what would later be called the ‘convergence theory’ of U.S-U.S.S.R. relations. Years later, questions arose regarding Adams’s mental stability and hence the validity of her claims; it is unlikely that she actually visited the White House, although she did send numerous letters to the president, receiving mostly perfunctory replies. “Meyer forever believed Adams,” as did Robert Morris, the chief aide to the Subcommittee, but the preponderance of the evidence is against the charge. On ‘convergence theory,’ however, there is no doubt that many liberals of the FDR stripe believed it, and there is also no doubt that it was mistaken, at least on the Soviet side of the ledger. Before Stalin, during Stalin’s rule, and until the Soviet Union finally collapsed, there was no plan to ‘converge’ with liberalism within the walls of the Kremlin.

It was in a book review for The American Mercury in 1953 that Meyer first used the term “fusionism” to refer not to the Popular Front-type strategy he had advanced when a Communist but to a possible alliance between traditionalist conservatism and “individualism” or liberalism. Meyer published “a respectful if mixed review” of Russell Kirk’s The Conservative Mind, which to this day finds many readers among American conservatives; Kirk pointedly excludes Thomas Jefferson and Herbert Spencer from his pantheon of intellectual heroes, and that was the rub. Kirk rejected natural right as a dangerous abstraction, the source of Jacobin fanaticism, holding up Edmund Burke and English traditionalism as the antidote to both. A decade later, Meyer would reply with a book of his own, In Defense of Freedom: A Conservative Credo. [1] In the meantime, and on the level of practice, “fusionism slowly morphed from Browderism to an alternative to the popular conception of conservatism to, ultimately, conservative itself.”

Rose Wilder Lane, daughter of Laura Ingalls Wilder, hurried Meyer along in his intellectual struggle. Lane pushed him to answer the question, “What do you believe?” Meyer answered: “The West was the first civilization to break through [the] worship of Necessity and to give a charter to the individual. Freedom is not for Western man ‘freedom to do right,’ but freedom to choose right or wrong—the only kind of freedom that has meaning in individual terms. That, from another point of view, is original sin, a fearful burden and a gift of freedom.” Lane, a libertarian, identified such individualism not as a charter written by “the West”—she “regarded Europe as cultivating collectivism” in the form of nationalism, monarchy established religion, and aristocracy—from which the early Americans aimed to escape. Meyer persisted, noticing that such thinkers as Locke and Montesquieu were, after all, Europeans.

The founding of National Review by William F. Buckley, Jr. in 1955 gave Meyer a new platform on which to enunciate his thoughts. Buckley described the conservative literary magazine as “out of place” in contemporary America, in the sense that “literate America” had “rejected conservativism in favor of radical social experimentation.” Russell Kirk was among the magazine’s editors and columnists; to his displeasure, Meyer signed on as a “contributor,” with his own column. Buckley soon brought in Robert Morris’s former assistant on the Internal Security Subcommittee, William Rusher, as the magazine’s publisher; Rusher’s political activism proved congenial to a man of Meyer’s background and predilections, although some of the editors and contributors dismissed him as “a rigid ideologue.” Buckley eventually appointed him as the editor of the “Books, Arts, and Manners” section, in which he published such academic literary luminaries as Hugh Kenner and Guy Davenport, the young Garry Wills, and Whittaker Chambers, who wrote a devastating review of Ayn Rand’s novel, Atlas Shrugged.

Meyer’s main rival on the editorial staff was James Burnham, author of The Managerial Revolution, an early account of the administrative state reviewed memorably by George Orwell, and Containment or Liberation? An Inquiry into the Aims of United States Foreign Policy, published in 1953 and very likely the source of the President Reagan’s complementary policy aims vis-à-vis the Soviets in the 1980s (“We win; they lose.”) Burnham wanted to turn National Review in a more popular, somewhat less conservative magazine, befitting his deprecation of ideas and his attitude of ‘realism’ or Machiavellianism in politics. In Meyer’s words, Burnham, as a “positivist and relativist” of the “Machiavellian-Paretan” stripe, “both in metaphysical and political-philosophical terms, stands outside of conservatism.” Flynn puts the matter in more biographical terms: “Meyer converted to conservatism” from Marxism; Burnham, also a lapsed Marxist, “turned to [conservativism] as a last available option after not just the left but liberals regarded him as persona non grata.”

Meyer had a rather different sense of the real. In 1960, he argued that conservatism was gaining political ground but that President Eisenhower and Vice President Nixon, his heir apparent, were moving the Republican Party leftward, making it more and more like a moderate form of New Dealism. Meyer judged that to be a mistake. In fifteen to twenty years, he predicted, conservative “intellectual leadership” will translate into “political reality.” The American people may well lose confidence in the Establishment, including ‘liberal’ Democrats and ‘moderate’ Republicans, turning toward conservatism. Therefore, in the run-up to the Republican Party nomination, National Review should endorse neither Nixon nor his liberal-Republican rival, Governor Nelson Rockefeller, but conservative Arizona Senator Barry Goldwater. Goldwater won’t win the nomination, Meyer readily conceded, but the important think was to hammer a stake into the ground, for future reference.

The year 1960 also saw the publication of Meyer’s important book, The Moulding of Communists, which remains an excellent account of how Party members are instructed and disciplined, shaping them into men and women who think and act entirely within the parameters of Marxism-Leninism. [2] As Flynn correctly observes, the Communist Party, in Meyer’s description “demands a total-politics mindset,” compelling members “to shut out people, including relatives,” who do not follow them into the Party, which becomes the Communist’s new family. “Meyer experienced in the 1930s what others had not yet experienced by the early 1960s”; as a result, most Americans simply did not conceive of the radicalism of Communism as the secular equivalent of a maximally demanding religion or cult. The book remains relevant today, as it is impossible to understand the actions of the Chinese Communist Party without understanding the mindset of the Soviet-centered Party of Meyer’s day. And although Flynn thinks that Meyer’s analysis, drawing heavily from his anthropological training under Malinowski, precluded its wide acceptance, the book was quite successful commercially as well as critically, to the extent that Meyer was interviewed on television by Mike Wallace.

Editor, author, and pundit, Meyer nonetheless made time for his longtime practical métier, political activism. He advised Young Americans for Freedom and the New York Conservative Party, the latter becoming Buckley’s vehicle for his brio-filled 1965 mayoral campaign against liberal Republican John Lindsey and Democrat war-horse Abe Beame. (Buckley came in a distant third, of course, but not before charming a lot of New Yorkers, who had hitherto supposed conservatives to be crude and rather stupid.) In the background, Meyer, a master of ‘networking,’ brought in much-needed campaign donations and also spoke effectively to local groups around the city. On another front, he joined the Buckley-National Review campaign against the conspiracy-theory conservatism of the John Birch Society, which boasted some 100,000 members and an extensive publishing arm in the 1960s. Canceled subscriptions resulted, but in the end the Birchers declined, and the fusionist conservatives gained.

Meyer began to concentrate more and more on activism, less on editing NR‘s book review section. The balance of editorial power at National Review shifted in the mid-1960s. Willmoore Kendall and L. Brent Bozell both departed, Kendall for the University of Dallas and Bozell for Francoist Spain, for which regime he had developed a some esteem. Both had shared Meyer’s interest in political theory, against Burnham’s deprecation of ‘mere theory.’ Crucially, both could speak to Buckley as equals, Kendall having been Buckley’s teacher at Yale, Bozell being Buckley’s brother-in-law. Without these allies, and without Meyer’s physical presence at the Manhattan office of the magazine—he and his wife had two sons to homeschool—Burnham came to dominate the publication, second only to the editor-in-chief.

With NR increasingly “resembl[ing] Burnham’s vision for it,” Meyer’s “most effective work increasingly took place outside” its pages. While the sales of In Defense of Freedom were modest, its influence on conservatism as a movement was outsized. It did indeed become a “conservative credo” for the core activists of fusionist conservatism. The crushing defeat of Goldwater in the 1964 presidential election disappointed Meyer without daunting him. “When we consider that the campaign represented but a few months of the first opportunity on a road national cale to confute thirty years of Liberal indoctrination,” Meyer wrote, “can the gaining of two-fifths of the vote be considered a practical disaster of momentous consequence”? On the contrary: “You can build a pretty good political movement with a base of twenty-seven million people.”

That is what he set out to do, forming the American Conservative Union as a counterpart to the liberals’ Americans for Democratic Action. The ACU published a study on the Vietnam, criticizing the Kennedy and Johnson administrations for undermining President Ngo Dinh Diem and generally lacking “the will to win” the war, a will that was none too strong among those who set the overall American strategy of containing Communism, worldwide. [3] Meyer also helped to organize the Philadelphia Society, still an organization that brings American conservatives together for semi-annual meetings. It was there that Meyer got into arguments with Harry V. Jaffa over the status of Lincoln and the Confederacy in the American regime, with Meyer denying that Lincoln upheld the principles of the Founding and Jaffa affirming that he did. (Jaffa was right, inasmuch as slavery and liberty don’t mix very well. Moreover, as Jaffa wrote at the time, “If states can declare their right to enslave human person within their borders, what principle is that they appeal to in denouncing arbitrary power in the Federal Government?” Meyer, who saw that any successful conservative political movement would need the support of Southerners, could not afford to answer that.)

It was precisely as an advocate of liberty that Meyer firmly opposed the so-called ‘drug culture’ of the 1960s. LSD destroys “the intellectual ordering of experience, which is the fruit of millennia of civilization.” As for marijuana, he regarded it as an “Eastern, introspective substance” that killed conversation, unlike “the real Western drug,” alcohol which, if properly consumed, promotes conversation. 

He became highly critical of what the civil rights movement had become. Likely tracking the statements of the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., who had moved from arguing from the principles of the Declaration of Independence and American constitutionalism to advocacy of socialism, and also observing the urban riots that contradicted Dr. King’s continued advocacy of non-violence, Meyer demurred. “The movement’s insistence that individuals must cede to government—and to the government most distant,” the federal government—the “novel and great powers” that socialism requires in order “to achieve equality offended his libertarianism”—and, one might add, his commitment to the principle of non-contradiction. He also denounced what he called “the egalitarian myths that anyone who is in any way worse off than anyone else can be so only because of oppression or distortion arising from evil men or evil circumstances.”

The events of the late 1960s jarred him. “The more authorities rewarded disobedience, disorder, and disregard for law, the more disobedience, disorder, and disregard for law proliferated. The damage from nihilism and a West alienated from itself, he concluded, bore this biter fruit of attempted civilizational suicide”—on that, he concurred with Burnham, who had published Suicide of the West in 1964. He continued to disagree with Burnham about what to do about it, politically. Burnham backed Nixon in 1968, Meyer Reagan. Burnham simply couldn’t take the retired actor seriously. Meyer’s main reservation was that in a way Reagan was a bit too serious—serious, that is, about being a Republican, pledging to support whomever the party nominated in 1968, including Nelson Rockefeller. When Nixon’s nomination put an end to the matter, Meyer offered (solicited) advice to his National Security Advisor, Henry Kissinger. He went part of the way toward endorsing the ‘foreign policy realism’ shared by Kissinger and Burnham: U.S. foreign policy should be “concerned with our national interest”; “the social systems of other nations are no concern of our policy.” But he added, “except insofar as they represent armed power ideologically directed toward our destruction.” That is, our foreign policy should be conducted “within broad moral limits.” “The existence of a dynamic and messianic ideology (with much of the fore of a fanatic religion)” which animates “the long-term policies of the second most powerful state in the world” should induce American policymakers not only to contain the Soviet Union but to aim at it “eventual dissolution” precisely because it is “the only major threat to our fundamental national interest.” Judging from the Nixon Administration’s trademark policy of detente with the Soviets, Kissinger evidently took that advice with a grain of salt, as it were. Reagan didn’t, but that didn’t matter, yet.

Frank S. Meyer died in 1972, a few months before Nixon’s landslide re-election over the anti-anti-Communist, George McGovern, the Henry Wallace of his day. The rest of the decade was so dreary that America’s first genuinely conservative president (in Meyer’s sense of ‘conservative’) finally won the presidency in 1980. He won, in part, thanks to the coalition of traditionalists and libertarians that Meyer had assembled, as Reagan himself acknowledged. Flynn concludes, “In the 1940s, Frank Meyer changed his mind. By the end of the 1980s, he had changed the world.” That is the final parallel between Meyer and Reagan, who did both of those things.

 

 

Notes

1. See “The Conservative Credo of Frank S. Meyer,” on this website under the category, “American Politics.”
2. See “Communism as a Regime of the Mind,” on this website under the category, “Manners and Morals.” Flynn dismisses it as “inferior” to In Defense of Freedom, claiming that Moulding is “read only as a curio if at all decades later,” which may well be true and quite telling—about contemporary readers, not the book. Much naivete about the phenomenon of the People’s Republic of China and indeed much of the radical-Left political organizing that goes on in Western commercial republics would be dispelled, had it a larger readership today.
3. The political situation in the Republic of Vietnam was complex and difficult to assess. Diem, a Catholic and an implacable enemy of both Communism and corruption, was accused of persecuting Buddhists, although his policies towards them had been generous for most of his career. However, his favoritism toward public displays of Catholic symbols and concomitant suppression of Buddhist symbols grated, escalating to acts of self-immolation of Buddhist monks in 1963. This outraged public opinion in the United States and elsewhere. At the same time, Diem’s willingness to negotiate with the Communists alarmed the Kennedy Administration, which ordered the C.I.A. to back a coup d’état.