Liberalism's Infidelities

Why read or reread William F. Buckley, Jr.’s Up From Liberalism, a book published in 1959 and republished in 1968 and 1984 on its 25th anniversary? On one level, Buckley is widely regarded as the father of postwar American conservatism. In a recent interview with your author, Charles Kesler noted that Buckley was the “progenitor of conservatism.” Kesler stated, “Buckley pulled together the anti-communist movement by presenting a thoughtful and deeply pro-Western, pro-reason, and pro-revelation form of conservatism.” But is Buckley’s ancient reason and faith, built on enduring American constitutional and free market principles, still the moving force in opposing what he called “the liberal mind”? What is evident is that a fighting conservative populism has emerged to oppose and aggressively challenge the progressive hold on the federal government and the culture at large. The terms of the conflict, manifest in the early days of the second Trump administration, are either/or. They oppose the “deep state,” “the uniparty,” rooting out affirmative action and DEI, and purging “globalist” elements from American foreign and trade policy. Defunding USAID, an agency hitherto given little serious focus or criticism by the Right, is now integral to winning the “cold civil war.”

And yet, reading Buckley’s book should remind the careful observer that what is occurring is more of a continuation of conservatism’s long-running confrontation with progressivism. But the business end of that conflict has become incredibly sharp. Up From Liberalism unlocks how liberalism in America in the mid-twentieth century was unbound, open-ended, forever pointing in a scientific materialist and egalitarian direction. Liberalism’s true opponents, Buckley avers, were never communists or socialists but their fellow Americans who disagreed with them, namely the conservatives.

Buckley reports that he once stated on a television program that Eleanor Roosevelt would sooner shake hands with Andrei Vishinsky, the former lead Soviet Union prosecutor during Stalin’s purge in the 1930s (who was the head at the time of the Soviet delegation in New York) than Sen. Joseph McCarthy based on her comments likening “McCarthyism to Hitlerism.” A reporter asked Mrs. Roosevelt to comment on Buckley’s remark, and she stated that she would shake McCarthy’s hand (come to think of it, she had shaken his hand) and that of Vishinsky’s. Later, in Woman’s Home Companion, Mrs. Roosevelt replied that she would not have shaken hands with Adolf Hitler “after he had begun his mass killings, I don’t think I could have borne it.” Unremarked by Mrs. Roosevelt was that she had not only shaken hands with Vishinsky, a stone-cold mass ideological killer, but worked hand in glove with him at the United Nations on The Declaration of Human Rights. And that fact had not shaken her at all. As Buckley judges it, “A comparable activity: chatting with Goebbels about a genocide agreement.”  

Behind this revealing anecdote rests a more profound analysis in the book of liberalism, democracy, and academic freedom. Buckley correctly observes that these are methods or instruments but not substantive ends. Academic freedom understood rightly affords professors and students the opportunity to understand the truth about themselves. But it doesn’t mean that all ideas are held in equal regard in the classroom itself. Buckley skewers the constant refrain for academic freedom in his day because those who voiced it in the academy used it as cover for indoctrination of regnant egalitarianism, collectivism, and indifference towards revelation and reason in the classical sense. He acknowledges the offensive nature of the charge, one that he argued rigorously in his first book God and Man at Yale (1951). The academic freedom argument, Buckley addresses, insists that indoctrination cannot be a part of education because every student is a vessel that can lead themselves to the heights of wisdom.

When done well, Buckley notes, Socratic dialogue is anything but an open-ended invitation to come what may. It presumes reason, logic, and truth, that the human mind is fitted to know reality, and that something capable of being discovered, known, and articulated by the human person. The liberal professor, Buckley observes, believes himself above the standard of an indoctrinator and purely that of a well-meaning guide, opening students to new ideas, questions, and arguments. But, in somewhat bare-knuckle fashion, Buckley declares indoctrination or inculcation is part of education, so content matters. We come to conclusions and desire to share them, teach them, and raise others to our level. As inherently relational, social, and trusting beings, students are open to lessons, and those with pedagogical authority are eager to impart them. Do we believe that human beings are made to know the truth about reality and themselves as human persons? Is liberal arts education even possible if the answer to this question is, no?

What Buckley anticipates is that the insistence on the patina of academic freedom as the telos of learning rather than the precondition of an attempt to know the whole inevitably leads to the recession of real study. Long ago, higher education in America punted on its basic mission and decided to lead with agnosticism and relativism. From the suspension and cessation of mental thought in the thorns of relativism and unreason rose the dialectical slide into a totalitarian taxonomy of repression. American higher education now finds itself consumed by a coterie of demented obsessions about sex, race, disdain of men, America, and the West, and the consequent inability to limn a way forward for humane studies in literature, philosophy, politics, history. Well might we conclude that this approach reached its apogee in Jew-hunting on America’s so-called elite campuses after the October 7, 2023, massacre in Israel.

Buckley was one of the first to see where it would go.

Something similar happened with democracy. American liberalism promised a truer democracy. But we judge democracy by the results it produces, namely the opportunities individuals are afforded within it to flourish, Buckley concludes. The promise was to make mere democracy the moral measuring rod of politics, but this is a fundamental mistake. Democracy cannot alone bear the heavy weight of a free society anchored by moral truth. Democracy depends on a preliberal inheritance of virtues that enables citizens to live well with one another, to respect judgments and results they disagree with, and to confidently govern themselves under standards higher than human will. Such was not the definition of democracy that Buckley confronts, which had to march according to the liberal key.

Buckley’s definition of what the liberal believes is worth quoting in full,

men and women who tend to believe that the human being is perfectible and social progress predictable, and that the instrument for effecting the two is reason; that truths are transitory and empirically determined; that equality is desirable and attainable through the action of state power; that social and individual differences, if they are not rational, are objectionable, and should be scientifically eliminated; that all peoples and societies should strive to organize themselves upon a rationalist and scientific paradigm.

What isn’t consistent with this definition of liberal democracy is how people and their representatives choose to reason, which is frequently community-driven, built on their deepest principles, habits, and traditions, and at times "reactionary" or concerned with maintaining the status quo. Their chief political instrument is the US Congress, the state legislature, or town council and not the presidency, the preferred branch for much of progressivism’s democratic change.

The “rationalist and scientific paradigm” mentioned by Buckley evokes the regulatory apparatus of the federal government that we now call the administrative state. Democracy in the substantive key included the rationalist expert reshaping American life with regulatory interventions. Elections were to become plebiscitary opportunities for Americans to assent to the new benefits, programs, and regulations offered them by the federal administrative state.

The confidence of liberalism expressed in Buckley’s definition, with its rigor and empiricism, is scarcely believed by anyone of good sense now. Adherents of liberalism, Buckley states, have proven incapable of even modest discrimination as to the means and ends of government policy. If there is a need, there needs to be a government program to meet it. It is a line of thought that has continued unabated and emanated outwardly in surprising directions. The federal government’s bureaucracies were, in many cases, captured by industry.  Much of the federal bureaucracy is now viewed as subservient to ideology, sprawling, and an emblem of inefficiency, poor policymaking, and bloat.  Accordingly, the administrative state became a tool of the Democratic party, its members staffing the agencies in an almost completely one-sided manner. Liberal democracy has not succeeded even if it has also not been defeated.

Buckley observes that liberalism’s central problem is how empty it is. Consequently, “the whole of the liberal ideology [is] agglutinated by semantical raids on substantive ideals” to disguise that liberalism in its proper and limited aspect really can’t get you out of bed in the morning. So, it becomes an exercise in egalitarianism, futurism, empirical demonstration, and scientistic policy-making, joined to “democracy.” But this disguises the shallowness and “reciprocal infidelity that liberalism itself invites. Liberalism cannot care deeply, and so cannot be cared about deeply; and so it leans, altogether on those it has infatuated, who cannot see far enough to see how nearby is the end of liberalism’s world.”

But Buckley concludes that liberalism's inability to sustain itself leads to “Liberalism’s choice,” which is no choice at all. Liberalism, seemingly standing for everything “on the maximization of choice at every level” slides into “the pressures of an overarching and highly repressive conformity.” Choice exists so long as you choose rightly. Opinion in a society liberated from its past, from its inheritance, becomes the source of new orthodoxy. The refusal to accept such opinion removes one from polite company.

Liberalism constantly faces the conundrum of developing beyond its insistence that method, not substance, is everything. But how can this development occur? Buckley quotes Russell Kirk, “The will flags when it no longer perceives any end, any object in existence.” Liberalism’s default is the egalitarian or humanitarian ideology which in our day demands the qualitative absence of any differences between persons, even biological sex. The reciprocal infidelities that Buckley pinpoints about liberalism cannot long be abided by the human conscience, which ultimately demands to know and understand human action, to evaluate it on moral criteria. But what happens if our moral orientation to the world proceeds on wrong terms? For example, what happens to a country when its most spirited teachers conclude that their society is built on violence and the elimination of indigenous peoples? Many of our institutions and citizens are finding the dictated answer to this question and others posed by critical theorists isn’t flourishing or confident thought and action but endless grievance and a dimming view. Returning to Buckley’s description of liberalism’s incapacity to make proper discriminating judgments, why do even its modest adherents struggle to rebuke publicly the authoritarian ideologies of race, gender, and anti-American hatreds?

Buckley promises his readers a case that re-imagines, if you will, a politics up from liberalism. A young man when he wrote this book, barely out of his 30s, Buckley cheekily states, that he “was having a wonderful time while, of course, seeking to save your life.” Part of the problem, he argues in 1959, is to convince Americans that their freedoms will be lost in a piecemeal fashion, one program after another. And the same will be true of their traditions as Americans and their rights and principles that mark the founding of the country. The modest welfare state will become an omnicompetent welfare state. Is the trade of rights for security, so-called, worth it? But it’s Buckley’s more lyrical interventions that bear reflection. Buckley remarks that Soviet dissident poet Boris Pasternak “crumbles” the “elaborate edifice of Marxism-Leninism” but such victory remains confined to a “poetic ballad.” Beyond verse, Buckley reports that he is “greedy to externalize the conditions of freedom and grace and faith that have sustained Pasternak in Hell.” How? “We must bring down the thing called liberalism, which is powerful but decadent; and salvage a thing called conservatism, which is weak but viable.”

This struggle goes on in ways beyond Buckley’s imagining, but it proceeds on terms he announces:

I will not willingly cede more power to anyone, not to the state, not to General Motors, not the CIO. I will hoard my power like a miser, resisting every effort to drain it from me. I will then use my power, as I see fit. I mean to live my life an obedient man, but obedient to God, subservient to the wisdom of my ancestors, never to the authority of political truths arrived at yesterday at the voting booth.

God, man, and his ancestors, it’s a viable conservative program capable of turning the tide.

Richard M. Reinsch II is editor-in-chief of Civitas Outlook.