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. 

 

 

Frank S. Meyer: In Defense of Freedom: A Conservative Credo. Chicago: Henry Regnery Company, 1962.

 

In considering the egalitarian civil societies that were ruining the landed aristocrats of Europe and which already prevailed in the United States, Tocqueville observed that such societies had a political choice. Without aristocrats to resist central power, the regimes most likely to be founded in the future were republics and despotisms. To found and maintain republics, citizens will need to prize liberty, to resist encroachments upon it. “I believe,” he wrote at the beginning of the final chapter of Democracy in America, “that it is easier to establish an absolute and despotic government in a people where conditions are equal than in any other, and I think that if such a government were once established in a people like this, not only would it oppress men, but in the long term it would rob each of them of several of the principal attributes of humanity. Despotism therefore appears to me to be particularly dreaded in democratic ages. I would, I think, have loved freedom in all times, but I feel myself incline to adore it in the time we are in.”

In the next century, Frank S. Meyer took up Tocqueville’s challenge, putting liberty at the center of his political thought and strategy.

“My intention in writing this book is to vindicate the freedom of the person as the central and primary end of political society.” By the time he wrote, the term ‘liberalism,’ which names liberty as the central purpose of politics, had been taken over by democratic socialists who “denied the validity of moral ends firmly based on the constitution of being”—that is, on natural rights. They justified this by turning to new philosophic foundation for politics which combined utilitarianism and historicist progressivism. “With this denial of an ultimate sanction for the inviolability of the person, liberalism destroyed the very foundations of its defense of the person as primary in political and social matters,” preferring instead to claim that individuals can truly fulfill their being by subordinating themselves to the democratic-socialist state. If, as the slogan goes, it takes a village to raise a child and, further, if the village in question is the modern state, an entity considerably larger than a village, the child as a person will be melded into an impersonal, administrative structure, in the name of self-enhancement. Meier calls this “collectivist liberalism” and considers that a contradiction in terms.

The nineteenth-century liberals who argued against natural rights “failed philosophically, deeply misreading the nature of man.” Human beings by their nature make choices. This being so, “acceptance of the moral authority derived from transcendent criteria of truth and good must be voluntary if it is to have meaning”; to coerce acceptance of those standards denies human nature in the very act of attempting to improve it. This is true not only of the ‘Left,’ of socialists democratic and dictatorial alike, but also of the ‘Right,’ fascist and traditionalist alike. As a liberal in the original sense, Meyer pays particular attention to what was then called the “New Conservatism” of Russell Kirk and Peter Viereck, who held that society resembles a living organism, that the individual is rightly subordinate to that organism, and consequently deny “that the freedom of the person is the decisive criterion of a good polity.”

Meyer takes the Declaration of Independence and the United States Constitution (along with the arguments made in its defense at the Philadelphia Convention) as the central documents that American conservatives should conserve because they form the foundation of the American regime of “limited government,” the “criterion for a good society, a good polity” in the United States. But the mere historical existence of these documents justifies nothing. We need proof that the principles enunciated in them “are grounded both in the nature of men and in the very constitution of being.” He proceeds to offer such proof.

He understands that equality is also central to the American regime. But this is not the “equalitarianism which would forbid men the acquisition of unequal good, influence or honor, and the right to pass these ‘inequalities’ on to their heirs if they can”; it is rather “the equal right of all men to be free from coercion exercised against their life, liberty and property.” Nor does he claim that the American regime of “representative democratic institutions combined with constitutional guarantees of freedom” could be implemented everywhere in the world. He does claim that the modern tyrannies of Nazism and Communism (Nazism’s “older brother”) have proved and will continue to prove ruinous wherever they are instituted. There can be “no common ground for theoretical discussion” with Nazis and Communists; “determination and force will decide the issue.” Against these ideologies and the regimes their advocates found, in dialogue with the traditionalist conservatives, Meyer “propose[s] the claims of reason and the claims of the tradition of reason”—claims the Declaration and the Constitution embody.

He begins with a critique of contemporary political science, which exhibits “a fundamental derangement of our way of thinking about the world” because it attempts to apply the methods of modern empirical and experimental science to human beings and their political societies. Modern political science consists of two parts: “policy science,” animated by the spirit of what the Germans of the nineteenth century called Realpolitik—a stance taken by James Burnham in such books as The Managerial Revolution and The Machiavellians—and “behavioral science”—seen in countless articles and books published by numbers-crunching analysts of polling data, opinion surveys, and other attempts at measuring political action mathematically. Contemporary political science thus “has no relationship to moral or philosophic enquiry,” although it does take “its underlying assumptions from the empirical and naturalistic position of Machiavelli and Hobbes, “reinforced in the past hundred years by the prestige of the natural sciences and their methods.” 

The problem with this approach—shared in various ways by all of the social sciences—is that “the sphere of natural studies contains no element of consciousness with its innate corollary of freedom and moral responsibility.” The two spheres are not analogous. “Men’s knowledge of themselves is first of all direct: that which they know of their own consciousness from their own consciousnesses.” He who would talk me out of that knowledge may mean me some harm. After all, the social scientist who designs the statistical studies, who frames ‘realist’ policies is a human being. “In view of the non-independent character of the questions” the pollster asks, “the answers can reflect little more than the value system and the judgment of those who constructed them.”

And “only when it is assumed, in sycophantic imitation of the natural sciences, that there is no valid knowledge except knowledge of that which can be objectively observed, manipulated, and measured, can the study of behavior be substituted for the study of man and glorified as the only possible form of the study of man.” It is “the power to make choices, this innate freedom,” which “lies at the center of the drama of human existence.” “No objective methodology, however strict, can disprove the existence of the autonomous self and validate determinism, as no intuitive outlook based upon the subjective, can disprove the existence of the external world and validate solipsism.”

Instead of social science, Meyer begins with “man as he exists, a complex whole.” This is not man in the ‘state of nature,’ however conceived. It is man as a choice-making person. That being so, “social and political organization is…a condition, not the end, of the life of the individual person”—not “a determining factor” to “the worthy consummation of each man’s drama,” a drama played out not simply within a political ‘constitution’ or state but within the ‘constitution’ of being itself. “The art of politics at its best is guided by fundamental principle, but operates by judgment, by prudence,” by reasoned choice. “Society and the state were made for individual men, not men for them.” True, human beings are social by nature. But this does not mean they are creatures of humanly constructed social and political institutions. Traditionalist conservatives do not go so far as to make that claim, which they leave to the socialists. But they do claim that “society is an organism” and, if so, “the men who make it up can be no more than cells in the body of society; and society, not they, becomes the criterion by which moral and political matters of judged,” reducing “the moral claims of the person…to nothingness.”

The extreme, and extremely dangerous, manifestations of these claims usually derive from “the most influential schools of contemporary sociology” and of social psychology, in America typically the province of the Left, not of New Conservatives. The behavioralist determinism of B. F. Skinner, for example, leads to “social engineering,” unscientifically placed at the service of “human welfare” but often masking the libido dominandi of the social scientists and rulers trained under their tutelage. “The New Deal itself which was decisive in the triumph of liberal collectivism in the United States, proceeded without any observable over-all theory,” animated by “a sentimental mystique of welfare and a constant insistence upon the virtue of the pragmatic as over against the traditional.” But this marriage of sentiment and pragmatism does have an underlying “body of dogma”: “relativist, pragmatic, positivist, scornful of absolute criteria, of all strictly theoretical though, of all enquiry not amenable to the methods of the natural sciences.” And this body of scientistic dogma comports poorly with sentimentalism of any kind. “Politically, it attributes virtue in strict proportionality to power,” including but not limited to power over economic transactions. While “it preaches ‘the end of ideology'”—the title of a widely-taught book by the sociologist Daniel Bell, published two years before Meyer’s book—it “admires experts and fears prophets, fears above all commitment to value transcending the fact.” Yet the underlying ‘fact’ of modern science, the mastery of fortune commended by Machiavelli, the mastery of nature commended by Bacon and affirmed by the political science of Hobbes, is libido dominandi. The desire to rule, like all other desires, exists in human beings by nature; it coexists, nonetheless, with the human power to make reasoned choices respecting the limit to that and to other desires. Desires are not self-justifying; the choice to gratify one or more of them requires some criterion of judgment beyond the desires themselves because the desires can collide with one another and ruin the human being who allows himself to be driven by them. What is the human being animated by desires but still free to choose the extent to which he pursues them. 

The New Conservatives, of whom Russell Kirk is “the most influential,” point to the traditions of Western civilization not only as the criteria for judging the desires but as a ‘better guide than reason.’ “This attitude toward reason…elevates the historical process, the venerable, the established, the prescriptive, as the touchstone of the good and the true.” In this, New Conservatives share the historicism of the not-really-liberal ‘Left,’ while hearkening not to Marx but to Edmund Burke and to a conservative interpretation of Hegel. Unfortunately, “these men are not statesmen like Burke”; their ‘politics of prudence’ is more literary than political or prudential. Burke could depend upon a reliable tradition, the British constitution being its political framework, whereas American New Conservatives are surrounded by “positivist and liberal-collectivist doctrines which are already far advanced in authority over the minds and hearts of men.” An appeal to tradition in contemporary American circumstances puts them “at the mercy of the very forces they are proposing to combat”: “Either the whole historical and social situation in which they find themselves, including the development of collectivism, statism, and intellectual anarchy, is providential,” or “there is a higher sanction than prescription and tradition,” “in which case reason, operating against the background of tradition, is the faculty upon which they must depend in making that judgment.” And if reason is conceived as Hegel conceives it, as the dialectical unfolding of the Absolute Spirit,” that “all that is real is rational,” then they have conceded the main theoretical point to their opponents, who are fully prepared to deny, on the basis of either Marxist or positivist ‘social science,’ that they are vulnerable to the same charge, in reverse. Mayer adds, not without reason, that “Burke himself was too much the hard-headed Englishman to have sought such a solution, had he faced the sort of problem his soi-disant heirs do,” as “his fundamental belief in natural right and in reason” inoculated him against such niaseries.

To separate one tradition from another, to separate a good element of a tradition from a bad one, “requires recognition of the preeminent role (not, lest I be misunderstood, the sole role) of reason in distinguishing among the possibilities which have been open to men since the serpent tempted Eve, and Adam ate of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil.” By refusing to recognize reason’s preeminence “is a central attribute of New Conservative thought.” “The dread of definition, of distinction, of clear rational principle is characteristic of the New Conservative”; unsurprisingly, Kirk and Viereck were literati, one a novelist (even when presenting himself as a historian) and the other a poet. New Conservatives treat God’s Providence as if it were “immanent,” “operating within the flow of historical experience.” As with Hegel, this claim “is always in tension with the concept of God as transcendent, as the Ground and Standard of truth and good.”

To affirm that preeminence is the central attribute of “the conservatism of principle.” While “it is true that abstract theoretical principles cannot be applied without consideration of circumstances, of the possibilities which in fact exist at a given time,” this “does not mean that prudence can successfully function without the guide of reason”—by which Meyer means theoretical reason, inasmuch as prudence is itself a form of reason, namely, practical reason. Theoretical reason does not foreclose prudential or practical reason. On the contrary, “Only if there exists a real choice between right and wrong, truth and error, a choice which can be made irrespective of the direction in which history and impersonal Fate move, do men possess true freedom.” “Unless [man] can choose his worst, he cannot choose his best”; “no philosophical position that looks to the flow of existence as the sole standard of judgment has any place for true choice.” Hegel’s definition of freedom as “the recognition of necessity” is sophistical, as “this is not freedom” but a claim (quite possibly bogus) about external reality that ignores the ‘internal’ reality of choice; freedom is “the power to choose”. “The human being can say quite simply—and literally: to Hell with it; it is wrong and false, and in my inner being I will have no part of it, whatever may be forced upon me physically.”

New Conservatives attempt to define their way out of the problem by distinguishing freedom from license, by saying that true freedom aims only at good ends, license at bad ends. Against this, Meyer argues that freedom is “an integral aspect of the highest end” and of the lowest end, “not subordinate to moral and spiritual ends” but “concomitant with them, for without freedom no moral end can be achieved by the particular kind of man is.” That is, the truly achieve what is morally and spiritually good, a human person must choose it, exercise his freedom as a person. “Freedom to choose is the very essence of the pursuit of virtue.” Once human beings know what good and evil are, good and evil become matters of choice. A political regime cannot be good unless it “make[s] possible the greatest exercise of freedom by the individual,” since coerced good behavior is not fully good (because it isn’t chosen). “Freedom is essential to the being of man.”

Political life—rule, governance, constraints on freedom in recognition of the human inclination to choose evil—rightly supposes that “men can live as men only in some relationship with other men,” some social and political order. But “the key word is ‘some'”—the question of “what kind of order.” What regime. “The task of political theory is to develop the criteria by which differing political orders can be judged in the light of principle.” Political rule, which includes coercion, necessarily restricts freedom of choice. Of that coercion is sometimes necessary and justifiable, what are those ‘times’? In most political theories, “freedom has been subordinated to the eds designated as good by the theorist.” And although Utilitarians reverse this claim, arguing that the exercise of freedom will result in doing right, this “evades rather than faces the contradiction.” The dilemma is that “freedom is essential to the nature of man and neutral to virtue and vice,” while it is also true that “good ends are good ends, and it is the duty of man to pursue them.”

A dilemma it is, but not a contradiction, an indication of the irrationality of human existence itself. Freedom and the good are rather “axioms true of different though interconnected realms of existence.” Human freedom is embedded in human nature and is indispensable to both the achievement of virtue and the achievement of vice. Good and bad are also embedded in human nature. To incline persons to choose good, to minimize the coercion which denatures virtue, a regime needs “intellectual and moral leaders” who “have the understanding and imagination to maintain the prestige of tradition and reason, and thus to sustain the intellectual and moral order throughout society.” To put it in Aristotelian regime terms, a regime consists not only of its purpose, its telos, which might be good or bad, and of institutional barriers to vice, including laws ‘with teeth in them,’ but more importantly with respect to freedom, in who rules and in the way of life they embody and advocate.

New Conservatives, by contrast, deny that the rights of individuals are unalienable, asserting that rights “must be subordinated to the performance of duties.” Meyer replies that I have a duty to others only insofar as their “moral claims” must be respected, reciprocally loving my neighbor as myself, under God. To subordinate the person to “society or the state” as if an ‘it’ was a person, betokens confusion. “In such a scheme of things, ‘rights’ would obviously be dependent upon duties performed; but they would not be rights, they would be privileges.” “Duties and rights both derive from the same source, the moral ground of man’s nature.” Coercion, then, derives what moral justification it has because “one man’s freedom can be used to inhibit another man’s freedom,” that “the rights of others have no protection from these predators unless they are restrained by force.” To coerce predators in no way denies “the absolute rights of the person”; it is a prudential adjustment “in actual historical existence,” an adjustment “necessary to reach the closes possible approximation to that ideal for each individual person” in the given circumstances. Rights “are obligations upon the state to respect the inherent nature of individual human beings and to guarantee to them conditions in which they can live as human beings, that is, in which they can exercise the freedom which is their innate essence.” “Freedom remains the criterion, principle the guide; but the application of principle to circumstances demands a prudential act.” One can act “intelligently” without protecting freedom, as Machiavellian statists do; one can act “morally in the political sphere” without regard to prudential reasoning, refusing to think politically, as one sort of Kantian does. Neither stance is good, choice-worthy.

Hobbes famously calls the modern state ‘Leviathan.’ It is “a definite group of men, distinct and separate from other men, a group of men possessing the monopoly of legal coercive force.” The state is not genuinely impersonal but a ruling body consisting of persons. In the small ancient polis, the rulers and those ruled were more tightly related, especially when ‘the many’ ruled, as in both democratic and ‘mixed’ regimes. This is why Aristotle thinks that a polis is a community “which is the highest of all and which embraces all the rest, aims at good in a higher degree than any other, and at the highest good.” It is true that Aristotle and some of the other Greek philosophers recognized “an immense chasm between a social order blow and a cosmic order above,” between what is and what ought to be. So did the Israelite prophets. However, both “stopped short of the stark confrontation of the individual person with the ultimate source of his being,” regarding the regimes as “the fundamental moral agents whose actions might be judged by transcendent standards.” Exceptions there were: Socrates in Greece, Abraham in Israel. But Socrates is also the Socrates of the Republic, a regime that denies individual freedom. In this, Meyer is insufficiently alert to Socratic irony. He also does not consider that the criticisms philosophers and prophets aim at human communities and not only at individuals make sense insofar as those individuals have chosen to bind themselves into a community. As he himself has remarks, regimes can be good or bad, and if the community organized by consenting individuals is bad, they have committed a wrong both individually and collectively, as a group. 

This set of claims enables Meyer to distinguish Christianity very sharply not only from ‘Greece,’ including Greek philosophers, but from Israel and most of its prophets. “The Incarnation, and the Christian doctrine of the person that flows from it, breaks finally and forever the unity of cosmos and person” because it instances “the penetration of the Divine into the immanent world” in God’s loving sacrifice, a sacrifice that “made it possible for men to face each his indissoluble identity and accept its responsibilities.” God is not immanent in that world (as Hegel claims); He is transcendent but gracious, lowering Himself to dwell in a human body in order to offer human beings the choice that is the condition of their salvation, the choice to be ruled by Himself. This means that “only the person can be the earthly pole of the discharge between the transcendent and the immanent,” that only persons, not communities, states or associations, “can receive the beatific vision or be redeemed by the divine sacrifice of love.” God’s sacrifice “drained out” the supposed “sanctity of institutions,” and Christians were adjured to render unto Caesar only the things that are Caesar’s and unto God the things that are God’s. To do so is “neither to turn one’s back on the world, nor on the other hand to consider the political institutions that from time to time well or ill serve human needs as in any sense themselves divine.” This argument evidently elides the divine origin of the Mosaic law—which, as Jesus insists, still applies to His Jewish brethren. It also elides the law He gives to the Gentiles: love God and love your neighbor as yourself, which he describes as the summation of the Mosaic law.

At any rate, Meyer comes on safer ground in maintaining that the potential of Biblical revelation has “not been realized.” The Tower of Babel, the Pharaoh Akhenaton, Neo-Platonism, Gnosticism, Anabaptism, Puritanism, Faust, and such modern philosopher as Bacon and Rousseau, such modern ideologies as Communism, Fascism, socialism and collectivist liberalism have all distorted the Biblical teaching. Those “who conceive that the nature of men can be changed to meet the specifications of a design of earthly perfection, need perforce some mechanism through which to act.” That mechanism is of course the state, which they then seek either to make or to capture, extending force “beyond its natural purposes.” “Against [this] classical political theory is helpless, because classical political theory shares with it an apotheosis of the state,” and “it is upon classical political theory that the New Conservative view of the state” is founded. Meyer again paints “classical political theory” with too broad a brush. According to him, “the collectivist liberal and the New Conservative are agreed”—and in agreement with classical political theory—in “refusing to accept the state as an institution which is the expression of the power of a specific group of men, power which can only be justified in terms of a specific function.” While this may be true of collectivist liberals and New Conservatives, it is not true of classical political philosophers, who clearly identify rulers as a specific group of men whose power can only be justified in terms of a specific function, namely, whether or not they act justly. They do in fact distinguish between rulers and ruled.

Even if Meyer does not adequately describe the regime theory of the Greeks or the regime of the Bible, he is nonetheless ‘on to something’ when it comes to utopians, and especially when it comes to the modern utopians who intend to develop the means to transform human nature with or without the consent of the governed. The modern state, as distinguished from the ancient polis, is too large for a tight connection between those who occupy its ruling institutions and those who are ruled in ‘civil society.’ Modern states have regimes just as much as ancient poleis did, but their rulers emit commands less knowingly than the rulers of Greek antiquity did because they rule from a greater distance, a distance that precludes personal knowledge of those they rule. And in terms of regimes, “the development of democracy” under conditions of modern statism “has made the critical recognition of the dichotomy between the state and those whom the state governs particularly difficult.” The institution of representative government lessens but does not eliminate this problem because the power to choose who governs isn’t the same as the power to govern. Anarchists address this problem wrongly, ignoring the dangers posed by those who “use their freedom to interfere with the freedom of others,” initiating a war of all against all; they also ignore the need to adjudicate cases in which a “conflict of rights with rights” occurs; and, finally, they ignore the existence of hostile foreign regimes. That is, they ignore the need for an executive branch of government wielding a police power against domestic violence, the legislative power that establishes law and the judicial power that judges cases under the law, and finally the legislative, executive, and judicial powers that all come into play in what we somewhat tepidly call ‘international relations.’

State power wielded for those purposes can be justified. Any more state power is dangerous. Meyer cites public education, social insurance, and rules on “how men shall live that go beyond the preservation of the essential conditions of a free order” as unjust extensions of state power over persons. Echoing Lord Acton’s famous aphorism, he writes, “There is in power an impulsion to more power, which can only be limited by counter-measures” guided by the theoretical standard he has illuminated. This, he readily warns, is hard to do.

The major impediment to such counter-measures are the theoretical standards now prevalent. “The dominant motif of political though today is the denial of a principled theory of politics based on philosophical consideration of the nature of man.” Whether it is the neo-Hobbesian political science of Harold D. Lasswell, which reduces political life to a matter of “who gets what, when, how,” or more generally a combination of moral relativism and collectivism, “a peculiar mixture of historical determinism with moral and methodological relativism in the philosophical sphere,” it has been “possible to proclaim that God—and with Him the transcendental foundation of value—is dead” while incoherently deriving value from the facts of the modern regime, which consists of the people, “the state which rules in their name, and the bureaucratic elites which in effect control the state.” The elites resent “independent centers of power in society” and work diligently to subordinate them. 

Nor are civil associations, those “independent centers of power,” the only or even primary target. Moral relativism attacks “the image of man as an autonomous center of outgoing will.” Under the collectivist dispensation, whether Marxist or ‘democratic,’ “men are atoms and must be organized in the proper pattern,” a pattern to be determined by the elites. The rulers are not confined to the government. To be sure, government bureaucrats wield substantial power, but so do trade-union and corporate bureaucrats, mass-communications bureaucrats (needed for “the engineering of consent”), and academic bureaucrats (replacing the traditional “collegium of scholars”). Political philosophers from Aristotle to some of the earlier modern liberals regarded “an independent and differentiated middle class” as indispensable for “provid[ing] a stable center to the social order,” but the ‘massification’ of politics, first seen in Rousseau’s notion of the “General Will,” has given philosophic excuse for “eliminat[ing] such a middle class without terror or physical liquidation” by means of inheritance taxes and “a steeply graduated progressive income tax.” These “will in the space of a few decades destroy all independence, except that of a few very wealthy families.” The policy amounts to “destroy[ing] the independent” and “spend[ing] to create the dependent” in order to “maintain the power of the bureaucratic elite” in its several sociopolitical perches.

Meyer emphasizes the role of the academic bureaucracy. The “long history of ideological development…prepared the way for this transformation of the scholar into the bureaucrat,” beginning with Bacon’s dictum, “Knowledge is power.” “If knowledge is no longer conceived as the search for and the acceptance of truth…but as the acquisition of power to control and manipulate nature and man, it logically follows that an attempt will be made to realize that conception in the political sphere.” Well before the New Deal and its “Brains Trust,” American ‘progressives’ “prepar[ed] the way for that revolutionary transformation of the American state”—the new republic, as one of the movement’s flagship publications called itself. Control academia and you will control or at least decisively influence the next generation of persons who involve themselves in government. As of the early 1960s, when Meyer is writing, the scholar has become “the committeeman in a multi-million-dollar, foundation-financed ‘team’ research project, or a cog in a government department,” even as “the artist, the writer, is bound to the feverish pace of the mass-communications industry.” These men and women “have exchanged the independence of thought and action which is the proper activity of a free being for a minute share in the power of an immense machine.” 

The error Rousseau committed in positing the General Will as the core of authority in the modern state inheres in the fact that “the corporate sense of the Greeks, which made it possible for Aristotle to say that man is a political animal—an animal of the polis —no longer existed in a civilization which regards each individual man, not as an animal whose being rests in the state, but as a person whose being takes meaning from free personal choice of good and evil, a choice dictated by no institution.” That is, the moral anthropology of the Bible replaced the moral anthropology of classical antiquity. Against that, modern philosophers retained the Bible’s focus on the individual but subtracted God, leaving “Western man” a being who “regards himself as the center of his own earthly existence.” Under that rubric, “no corporate earthly deity can be recreated form a vast civilization to play for [man] the ego-absorbing function that the polis did for the Greek spirit.” This is why “Rousseau’s attempted re-creation of the polis in the form of the General Will could not recreate the classical principles of political order which had been destroyed by the attack of Machiavelli and Hobbes.” In the modern state, unlike the tight-knit, traditionalist polis, the General Will lacks “specific moral content” and consequently could be appropriated for the use of the scientistic elites, “first to raise themselves to power, then to destroy their enemies, and finally to gain consent from the governed”—thereby affirming that the elites were following the General Will! Whether in the malicious form of Nazi or Communist rule, or in the milder form of social democracy (as Tocqueville famously anticipated), although internecine struggles among rival elites continue, sometimes to the point of worldwide wars, a new oligarchy consisting of a scientistic bureaucracy suppresses liberty. 

Meyer regards the New Conservatives as inadequate to meet this problem because they, too, give society “a moral status superior to persons.” Under modern, statist conditions, this can only be accomplished by “the unlimited Leviathan state”—repurposed, to be sure, for decent morality but nonetheless broadly coercive and therefore dangerous to personal freedom and political liberty. “Therefore, resistance to the growing collectivist tyranny of the century requires a theory of society and of the state that has as its first principle the vindication of the person,” not laments over “alienation” and “loss of community” voiced by such writers as Russell Kirk and Robert Nisbet, a lament they share with ‘the young Marx.’ “Putting the individual person at the center of political thought is to them the greatest of political and social evils.” This stance prevents them from effectively “combat[ting] the essential political error of collectivist liberals: its elevation of corporate society, and the state which stands as the enforcing agency of corporate society, to the level of final political ends.” That is why New Conservatives get nervous about the Declaration of Independence, with its affirmation of unalienable rights inherent in “all men” as individuals first, as “a people” second. “The enforcement of virtue” by a centralized modern state overrides human nature by limiting freedom to choose beyond the protection of those rights; because it is contra naturum, it is a “delusion”; because it is at least a temporarily effective means of seizing and maintaining the power of ‘the few,’ it is a “persistent” delusion. It is an Aristotelianism that ignores one of the main ethical teachings of Aristotle: that founders of regimes and the political men who rule within those regimes must take account of the circumstances that prevail when and where they rule, and the character of those whom they rule. And while it is true that freedom “is not the end of men’s existence,” it is “a condition, a decisive and integral condition” of that end, “which is virtue,” which requires the effort only choice can trigger.

“By recognizing the absolute authority of truth in the intellectual and spiritual realm, while at the same time remaining aware of the contingency of institutions in the social realm and their consequent subordination to the transcendent value of the human person,” the West had, until very recently, flourished, distinguishing “between the fundamental truths that constitute the structure of man’s being as a creature with a supernatural destiny, living in the natural world, and manmade certitudes, where authority can only be tyranny because truth is uncertain.” The West has often if not always distinguished between political rulers and philosophers, scholars, priests, and prophets. The love of truth pursued in the several ways of life led by philosophers, scholars, priests, and prophets requires a substantial degree of freedom from political rule, even as prudently limited political rule serves as an indispensable condition of their pursuits. To be love, love must be free from excessive constraint. 

Aristotle regards the family as an irreplaceable part of the polis. Meyer accords to parents the rightful power to impose upon their children “the values of their tradition and their culture,” while observing that “it is not the institution of the family as such that inculcates virtue” but “the persons who constitute the family, elders who “decide the issue of the moral and intellectual direction that children take.” “The form of institutions has no power to make bad men good or good men bad”; “at their best, they can create favorable conditions—and that is all. “Ominously, “an increasing majority of parents shrug their shoulders of this responsibility and turn their children over to the state and other institutions for ninety percent of their waking hours”—to schools, ‘after-school activities,’ and clubs. Many of these quasi-parental institutions are themselves creatures of the state, the persons ruling them hirelings of the state who stand apart from the traditions espoused by parents. Public schooling today operates as “the direct consequence of the instrumentalist philosophy of John Dewey.” Instrumentalists regard “virtue as an end of human existence” as “a superstition left over from the Middle Ages.” They define the “right and good and true” as “what serves as an instrument for adjustment to the society around one,” a society held to be in a condition of constant change registering social progress. What in fact happens, “what is happening,” is that the teacher teaches “the current prejudices of his environment,” which “are certain to reflect the prevailing value nihilism and political collectivism.” Such education also impedes intellectual and moral excellence alike, given the expansive notion of equality, the egalitarianism that ‘puts the cookies on the lowest shelf’ or, at best, the middle shelf.

Libertarians of course take a position against statist collectivism. They fall into a similar error, however. Instead of attributing the power of inculcating virtue to the state, they attribute it to the free market, supposing “that a free economy is itself a guarantee of a good and virtuous life.” It isn’t. Economic freedom does leave the power to determine “what should be and what should not be produced” to individuals, not statist ‘planners,’ and that is good but not sufficient for the development of moral strength. Like political liberty, economic liberty is a condition of virtue.

At the end of his book, Meyer praises the American regime constituted by the Founders as a regime founded “upon the freedom of the person as its end, and upon firm limitation of the powers of the state as the means to achieve that end.” He deplores the “process of retrogression” that began, first with Andrew Jackson’s “mass democratism,” then “the undermining of the sovereignty of the several states by Abraham Lincoln,” finally by the “collectivist principles and methods [of] Franklin D. Roosevelt.” The inclusion of Lincoln in the list of villains and the exclusion of Woodrow Wilson likely reflects Meyers’ immediate interest in forming a broad-based political coalition of American conservatives, a coalition that would perforce include Southerners, still more than a bit touchy about Lincoln and perhaps a bit ‘defensive’ regarding Wilson, a Virginia boy. Surely the slavery defended by the Confederacy contradicted the unalienable right to liberty the Declaration and the Constitution uphold, the latter admitting it only as a result of a compromise necessary to preserve not the states but their Union. 

This and other errors respecting the history of political thought withstanding, Meyer rightly insists, “Nothing in history is determined. The decision hangs upon our understanding of the tradition of Western civilization and the American republic, our devotion to freedom and to truth, the strength of our will and of our determination to live as free and virtuous men.”

 

 

 

 

 

Sean J. Flynn: Without Reservation: Benjamin Reifel and American Indian Acculturation. Pierre: South Dakota Historical Association Press, 2018.

 

At the end of his fifth and final term as a United States Congressman in 1971, and after a long prior career in the U.S. Bureau of Indian Affairs, Benjamin Reifel had become “arguably the nation’s most influential American Indian”—surely the most prominent of his generation. A member of the Sicangu or Brulé Sioux, he had proved a forceful advocate of policies aimed at assimilating his people, and all Native Americans, into the American regime. He therefore became a rhetorical target of Russell Means, head of the separatist American Indian Movement.

Tocqueville had identified the problem, more than a century earlier:

“There is no Indian so miserable who, in his bark hut, does not entertain a haughty idea of his individual worth; he considers the cares of industry to be demeaning occupations; he compares the farmer to the cow who plows a furrow, and in each of our arts he perceives nothing but the work of slaves. It is not that he has not conceived a very lofty idea of the power of the whites and the greatness of their intellect; but if he admires the results of our efforts, he scorns the means by which we have obtained it, and while submitting to our ascendancy, he still believes himself superior to us. Hunting and war seem to him the only cares worthy of a man. The Indian, in the depth of his misery in his woods, therefore nourishes the same ideas, the same ideas, the same opinions as the noble of the Middle Ages in his fortified castle, and to resemble him completely he needs only to become a conqueror. What a singular thing! It is in the forests of the New World, and not among the Europeans who populate its shores, that the old prejudices of Europe are still found today.” [1] Tocqueville, an aristocrat himself, understood that in the modern, democratizing world, aristocracy would either adapt to the new way of life or perish. Reifel had the same insight.

He was born in 1906, more than a generation after the United States Army defeated Sioux forces and required them to cede the Black Hills of South Dakota, which the Lakota had seized from other Amerindian tribes a century before that. Relocated to the south-central region of the state, the Sicangu were among several reservations that “became the scene of a grand experiment on the part of reformers and federal officials to extinguish tribalism and hasten the individualization of Indians through the introduction of private ownership, farming and husbandry, formal education, and Christianity”—in a word, regime change, including written constitutions modeled on the federal and state American constitutions. The Lakota proved “stubborn experimental subjects,” as the respected Chief Spotted Tail “asserted that his followers were a premodern people that could not be hurried into a self-reliant lifestyle”; he “obstructed the introduction of agriculture, education, and Christianity,” “denouncing Christian schools as unsuitable for Lakota children” while his people “gunned down government-issue steers from the backs of horses while women butchered and dried the meat.” These acts notwithstanding, “their defiance…would not resurrect buffalo culture” and “the bands began breaking up.” Many Lakota “became listless and idle,” reduced to mocking those among them who accepted the changes; others attempted a religious revival founded by a Paiute Indian from Nevada. Wovoka, who claimed that “a new world, one without the presence of whites, awaited the Indian race,” a world where “Indians would enjoy eternal life amid relatives, friends, and great herds of buffalo.” Like so many religious conflicts, this one proved intractable, ending only with “the final armed confrontation between the United States and the Plains Indians” at Wounded Knee Creek in 1890. Twenty-five members of the Seventh Cavalry died, as did 146 Lakota men, women, and children; the confrontation “exposed the futility of resting the Euro-American presence” in Great Plains.

The conflict moved from warfare to civil resistance. “Possessed of a mystical attitude toward the land, perplexed by the concept of private ownership, and averse to tilling the soil, few Lakota men took to farming.” They defined government rations not as “a temporary form of assistance but a just and long-germ compensation for Teton Sioux lands” lost in the 1870s. In response, Congress and the Grover Cleveland administration had enacted the General Allotment Act of 1887, which redistributed land to individuals, not clans. This was followed two years later by the Sioux Act, reducing the Great Sioux Reserve by some nine million acres. All told, between 1887 and 1932, 91 million acres of Amerindian-owned lands would be lost. “Thus it was that in 1906, the year of Ben Reifel’s birth, the Brulé people found themselves struggling to adjust to a new language, new laws, new values, and a new economy,” all intended to integrate Amerindians into the American regime. The son of a white father and a Brulé mother, the boy listened to her mother’s advice: “Assimilate, she told him, if you wish to enjoy the good things made possible by the white people’s culture.” He became an enthusiastic student at the Rosebud Agency Government Day School, later wondering “Why did not the other Indians respond as I did?” Not only did he earn a high school diploma, but he left home for the South Dakota State College School of Agriculture intent on following his father’s advice: “Be on time, work hard, and save money.” Benjamin Franklin would have favored father and son with an approving nod; Flynn remarks that Reifel would become an admirer of both Franklin and Abraham Lincoln. He earned his Bachelor of Science degree in 1932 and, having joined the U.S. Army Reserve Officers Training Corps while in college, was commissioned as a second lieutenant in the Army Reserve. 

In his first job at the Episcopal Hare Vocational School for Indian High School Boys, he watched as the Progressive educational principles of W. Carson Ryan, then director of Indian education at the Bureau of Indian Affairs were put into practice. [2] While Reifel concurred with Director Ryan’s refusal to continue the practice of segregated boarding schools for Indians—as Ryan wrote, “Sooner or later all Indians…will become participating citizens of the state and local community as well as of the United States”—he became skeptical of John Dewey’s educational philosophy, with its experimentalism, its attempt to treat all academic subjects as if they were divisions of empirical science. “There’s nothing wrong with the John Dewey approach,” Reifel later and too kindly observed, “if you have enough teachers well-trained and the equipment to follow the John Dewey method.” Such was not the case at Hare Vocational. Nor did a science-centered education translate into instruction in such foundational matters as learning “to read and to write and to figure.” The Progressives’ educational theory and practice failed to prepare Indian youth for the integration into American society that it aimed to accomplish.

After a year working at the school, Reifel took a job as a U.S. Farm Extension agent for the Oglala District of the Pine Ridge Reservation. The year 1933 inaugurated not only Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal but the “Indian New Deal” implemented by John Collier, the Columbia University-educated sociologist (and socialist) who served as commissioner of Indian Affairs for the next twelve years. Collier “suspended the assimilation policy, reversed the dissolution of Indian lands, provided legal protection for tribes, established tribal self-governance, and initiated an American Indian cultural revival.” None of this relieved poverty on the reservations, but it did make Indians more “politically self-conscious,” better able to navigate the federal bureaucracy the overall New Deal so substantially expanded. The legislative core of the Indian New Deal was the Indian Reorganization Act of 1934; fluent in both English and Lakota, Reifel was tasked with explaining the IRA to his people, with particular attention to the drafting of “Anglo-American-style constitutions in conformity with IRA guidelines.” Unfortunately, in Reifel’s view, those guidelines also included nods to Collier’s “collectivism and tribal traditionalism,” which effectively continued the segregation of Indian populations that wouldn’t be trained to compete with other Americans, off-reservation. “Filled with a lifelong aversion to free enterprise, individualism, and the pursuit of wealth for wealth’s sake, John Collier concluded that tribally centered American Indians ‘possessed the fundamental secret of human life—the secret of building great personality through the instrumentality of social institutions,'” a possession that might “save white America from what he viewed as the isolation and despair of industrial-age individualism” by “establish[ing] cooperative commonwealths that would serve as a model for individualistically oriented non-Indians” while reviving what Collier called the Indians’ “long, grandiose chivalric age” in which “the economic ambition was not to possess wealth but to give it away” in ceremonies embodying man’s “millennial hope of a deeper and lovelier part of the human spirit.” Reifel thought not. He “grew concerned with Collier’s obsession with tribal communalism,” inconsistent with a life lived according to the saying, “Be on time, work hard, and save money.”

Among American Indians, Reifel was not alone in his doubts. He concentrated his efforts on implementing the portion of Collier’s policy he did agree with, Indian self-government on American principles, including the consent of the governed. Among the traditionalists, he won trust by taking on the role of “boss farmer,” the term for the Indian Bureau agents who issued rations, mediated disputes, and performed other needed governmental functions. At Pine Ridge, “he became the district’s unofficial education specialist, financial consultant, and social worker.” In so doing, he aimed not at keeping Indians separated from the way of life of the American regime but at bringing them into it. As to Collier, Reifel judged that his program rested uneasily upon a contradiction. He wanted American Indians “to modernize themselves through the adoption of Anglo-American constitutionalism” while “urg[ing] them to protect themselves from foreign infringements on tribal traditions.” More logical than the bureaucrat-romanticist, Reifel “became increasingly impatient with crusades by Indians and non-Indians to restore premodern lifestyles and worldviews that were incompatible with modern economy, society, and technology.” At the same time, he chafed under Congress’s failure to approve the portion of the Indian Reorganization Act which would have established an independent judiciary among the tribal communities. No such independence existed, since the Indians’ courts were “the creature of the tribal council,” and such an arrangement conduced to abridgements of individuals’ civil liberties. “He had witnessed firsthand how tribal judges ignored individual rights” when his brother was arrested by tribal police, who accused him of fighting; the young man was jailed without a hearing or the opportunity to seek legal counsel. As Reifel later said, “although an Indian who appears before a state court or a Federal court is given full rights of the Constitution, when that same Indian appears before the Indian tribunals, he has no assurance of receiving such protections.”

The tribal councils were ruled by tribal elders, who “feared the bypassing, through secret balloting,” of the councils. Younger Lakotas “saw in the IRA the potential for democratic and progressive forms of local government from which tribes could leverage economic and educational resources.” Reifel thus saw a factional and generational struggle between ‘old regime’ men—in Tocqueville’s language, aristocrats—who vainly attempted to resist modernization and ‘new regime,’ indeed New Deal Indians, who wanted to work the FDR system for federal government benefits. Reifel disagreed with both sides, both regimes. He hoped “that by adopting IRA governments modeled after the United States Constitution, Indian tribes would experience participatory democracy and, in time, learn to appreciate the rewards of full American citizenship,” including (contra Collier) “the rewards of capitalism.” This would require extensive consultations with field agents like Reifel, especially given the elders’ deployment of such universal tactics as filibustering, slandering opponents, and misusing protocol to subvert efforts at political re-founding. On the federal administrative level, Reifel successfully resisted a proposal to elective representatives to the local Sioux tribal councils from kinship networks, which would have made the councils too big and more factionalized. Eventually, the Rosebud Sioux did adopt a new constitution, which was approved by referendum. It became “a source of pride among the Rosebud Sioux that their constitution…became a template for other northern plains tribes.” For the rest of the decade, Reifel worked with tribal officials to learn basic administrative procedures (minutes and other records, budgets) and to set policies in a manner consistent with their new constitutions.

The communalist dimension of Collier’s policy fared less well. It simply didn’t work. The Indians neither assimilated into the American regime nor served as a model for Americans, much less other nations, as Collier had also dreamed. Some of the Indians themselves went so far as to call him an atheist and a communist. The intensified national unity felt in the Second World War worked against “the classification of Indians as special citizens,” especially in view of their significant contributions to the fight. That spirit of unity also worked toward a willingness to integrate among the 25,000 Amerindians who served, as “few encountered the discrimination endured by African-American servicemen” and most “adjusted quickly to military life.” Forty thousand more Amerindians worked stateside; “no longer isolated from mainstream society, they were exposed to other subcultures and introduced to dozens of employment opportunities in a variety of industrial, service, and technical fields,” experiencing a higher standard of living as they did. 

After his own stateside service as a military police officer, Reifel was appointed as district tribal relations officer for the northern Great Plains, then as agency superintendent at the Fort Berthold Indian Reservation in North Dakota, home of the Mandan, Hidatsa, and Arikara Nation or Three Affiliated Tribes, who had formed as a nation in the nineteenth century. He received a three-year leave of absence from Fort Berthold, during which he obtained a Ph.D. in administration from Harvard, but that was the easy part. At the time, the federal government moved to build the Garrison Dam and Reservoir in order to prevent downstream flooding of the Missouri River. This meant moving the Three Affiliated Tribes out of their homeland, “a place where, if they encountered obstacles in the white man’s world, they could return.” They invoked a treaty provision which stipulated that they could not be deprived of any tribal lands without their consent. Eventually, they made the anguished decision to sell, but the crisis set back efforts to educate the children and to provide regular administration. 

Reifel chose the topic of the Fort Berthold relocation as the topic of his Ph.D. dissertation. In it, he identified overpopulation as the main problem on the Reservation. Overpopulation had occurred because MHA norms encouraging high birth rates suited premodern conditions, wherein mortality rates were also high, but not modern conditions of improved sanitation and health care. “Cultural practices that once saved the tribes from extinction now stood ‘in the way of economic adjustment necessary for the profitable use of the land.'” Further, to encourage MHA citizens to move out and integrate into the larger society, they would need education in the necessary skills. “Any opportunity or experience that exposed Indian youth to the white man’s world would benefit them.” To achieve this, Reifel recommended tribal financing of programs to place members who sought employment off the reservation, such as renting apartment properties in cities with strong job markets and a training program “in the ways of municipal living” sponsored by one of the North Dakota universities. 

“The 1950s saw the emergence of Ben Reifel as a leading voice in Indian affairs” as the Truman and Eisenhower administrations returned to assimilationist policies. “Deeply troubled by American Indians’ dependence on government assistance,” which inclined them to economic passivity and to a diminution of civic spirit, he also objected to efforts to place Indian policy into the hands of state governments, inasmuch as the federal government had “forcibly removed Indians to reservations.” His relocation programs did take effect, and he “never tired of telling American Indians about the benefits of the white man’s world.” And “if northern plains Indians resisted the relocation policy while multiplying their populations, their economic livelihoods would remain dependent on the services and support of the federal government” and “their status as independent, self-determining peoples would—and should—be called into question.” As he put it, “The United States is the Indian citizen’s ‘reservation’ today.” And to white audiences, he observed that the Lakota language lacks a word for time. “Time had not been important to nineteenth-century Lakotas, who enjoyed an unlimited supply of bison to meet their needs,” which most emphatically did not include accumulation of possessions or saving, practices that would only slow their movements as they followed the herds. 

In 1957, Reifel returned to South Dakota’s Pine Ridge Reservation. Once again, the reservation lacked the land to support its population; compounding the problem, was “the inflammatory nature of Oglala politics,” which he called “government by personalities rather than government by principles.” He advanced his own principles—time, work, saving— by ordering teachers to install clocks and classrooms and to follow a schedule during the school day, by raising academic standards, thereby putting the children to work, and holding up the examples of immigrants to America who “joined a new and dominant culture” successfully by working hard, economizing, and sending their children to school. “He refused to entertain pessimistic claims by members of his own race that the white man would never accept the red man as his equal.”

To prove it, in 1960 he ran for Congress at invitation of South Dakota Republicans, worried that Democrat George McGovern had won a seat to the U.S. Senate. He refused to be presented to the voters as “the Indian Candidate”: “I’m asking for your vote as Ben Reifel, not as a Native American, not by any other labels.” Instead, he chose to “personify the traditional, middle-class sensibilities of South Dakotans” as a moderate Republican. After winning election and then re-election two years later, he was appointed to the powerful House Appropriations Committee, where he earned a reputation as a budget cutter, skeptical of “what he considered to be the burdensome costs and unrealistic expectations created by the Great Society and War on Poverty” and going so far as to push for the reduction of federal agricultural programs, “despite the potential unpopularity of such cuts in South Dakota.” A strong anti-Communist, he supported American intervention in the Vietnam War. He continued to insist that federal monies supporting Indian education “go toward schools that brought together Indian and non-Indian students under one roof.” Acting on another long-expressed concern, he testified on behalf of the Indian Civil Rights Act, which extended the guarantees of the Bill of Rights to Amerindians. The Supreme Court later overturned this law in Santa Clara Pueblo v. Martinez (1978), holding that Amerindian tribes enjoy sovereignty over their internal affairs.

Appointed by President Gerald Ford as Commissioner of Indian Affairs, only to be fired by President Carter a few months later, Reifel’s main political enemy was Russell Means, who had been born on the Pine Ridge Reservation but spent his childhood and youth in the San Francisco Bay Area. Means had joined the American Indian Movement, participating in a variety of demonstrations in favor of getting rid of the Bureau of Indian Affairs and the restoration of tribal lands and traditions. Against this, Reifel argued that the Sioux themselves had been “woodsmen armed with bows and arrows in the Great Lakes region,” from which “they had been driven from their homelands by Chippewa Indians armed with guns and powder”—i.e., modern firearms. “They relocated to the northern plains, where they were transformed,” adapting to “an entirely different cultural system, an entirely different set of religious symbols.” Had they not done so, “they would have perished.” Such adaptation had served the Sioux well, then, and would serve them well, now. The aspiration for tribal sovereignty animated by traditional customs could not endure under modern conditions. It might be added that the Sioux eventually did adapt to those conditions, having carved out a place in the casino gambling industry. Neither Reifel nor Means (nor Collier) won, in the end.

 

Note

1. Alexis de Tocqueville: Democracy in America. Volume One, Part Two, Chapter Ten. Harvey C. Mansfield and Delba Winthrop translation. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2000.
2. The school was named in honor of Bishop William H. Hare of the Diocese of South Dakota, “the Apostle of the West,” who devoted his ministry to both the white settlers and the Amerindians of that region.