The Right and the 'Fuhrerprinzip'

0:00Well, let me start with a quotation, and then you guess who said it. Now, no cheating. If you talked to me earlier, you can't participate in this. War and the military are, without question, among the very worst of the Earth's afflictions, responsible for the majority of the torments, oppressions, tyrannies, and suffocations of thought the West has for long been exposed to. In military or war society, anything resembling true freedom of thought, true individual initiative in the intellectual and cultural and economic areas, is made impossible. Not only cut off when they threaten to appear, but worse, extinguished, more or less, at root. Between military and civil values, there is, and always has been, relentless opposition.

0:48Well, who is this American-hating leftist, anyway? It's Robert Nisbet, one of the great conservatives of the post-war period, who went on to say nothing has proved more destructive of kinship, religion and local patriotisms than has war and the accompanying military mind. Well, that was Robert Nisbet in 1975, writing in his book Twilight of Authority, which is in its 30th anniversary year this year. Now, George Nash has a book called The Conservative Intellectual Movement Since 1945, which classifies conservative thinkers into three different groups. And the group that he calls traditional conservatives or traditionalists, he names three people as being the key intellectuals who fall into that category.

1:36And those three are Russell Kirk, Richard Weaver, and Robert Nisbet. Now, needless to say, today Nisbet wouldn't be getting too many invites to various conservative conferences. To the contrary, he would be dismissed again as an America hater, self-hater, whatever. But the fact is that when he wrote Twilight of Authority, if you look at the blurbs on the back, we've got all this stuff talking about what an instant classic it is. So there was a time when you were allowed to say things like this without being smeared or whatever written out of existence. Well, first of all, who is Robert Nisbett? Well, he's an extraordinary figure when you look at his career because he's, first of all, he was born in California around 1913. He died, I think, in 96 or in the 90s. He went to, he was educated at Berkeley, undergraduate and graduate, then joined the faculty there, actually fought in World War II, spent a portion of his career in Arizona and then at Columbia University.

2:36He was even at AEI for a couple of years, American Enterprise Institute from 1978 to 1980 and he's the author of about 17 books and the editor of a number of others and a man of tremendous influence so that even if, as his biographer Brad Lowell Stone points out, even his opponents concede that he's one of the great influential social thinkers of the 20th century. So he is a man of no few credentials. Well, when you look at Twilight of Authority, or in fact, much of his corpus of work, you discover here a neglected tradition of American conservatism, which makes Nisbet worth revisiting. He both represents an alternative to what passes for conservatism today, and by way of contrast highlights really the worst bits of what we are forced to endure when we watch some of these programs or listen to some of these right-wing radio people.

3:35Now, fascism is a difficult word, of course, because there are all kinds of connotations associated with it. And I don't want to say that present-day conservatives are all, without exception, fascists, because that would not be quite accurate. However, there are a couple of characteristic features of fascism that we ought to keep in mind as we proceed in this discussion. For one thing, there is this fascination with the military and martial virtues, and the idea of applying wartime practice to peacetime. The fascists typically were very moved and impressed by their experiences with World War I. What moved them was that during the war, they found that people, there was the subordination of private interests to public ends.

4:24There was the suppression of lesser allegiances in favor of a larger national patriotism. There was a suppression of individual liberty, and in effect this wartime model of how the war was run would now be applied to peacetime governance. There's also this idea, this excessive emphasis on the leader, the leader who at once represents the will of the people, and at the same time transcends the petty private interests of which society is composed. composed. That is, I think, the way in which Hitler might have claimed that he actually is the most democratic figure because unlike in a democracy, typical democracy where people vote and you have influence peddling and lobbyists and interest groups, well Hitler rises above those things because he embodies the will of the people and he can directly do that will without any running into any of those encumbrances. Now Nisbet, as I say, Nisbet was a man of This is an extraordinary output, and so I don't simply want to focus on Twilight of Authority.

5:29I don't want you to leave thinking that's the only thing he did. But given that it is 30 years old, and it's a nice round number, and I want to commemorate it, I am going to make a particular note of this. But he was a guy who is sort of like Stephen King in fiction. You imagine him at the typewriter all the time. In fact, Nisbet said that he hoped he would die over his typewriter. and to use his words he says, and that those close to me will call a taxidermist instead of a funeral undertaker and that my mummified body will be suitably dressed and placed in proper position before the typewriter available for display like the mummied remains of Jeremy Bentham in his room in the University of London. Said, perhaps Berkeley in some room on the fourth floor of Wheeler Hall would be willing to provide permanent quarters.

6:17To my certain knowledge, there are faculty members there at the present time who would prefer me back in that condition in my native grounds than alive and writing.

6:32Well, in any event, his book, The Quest for Community, is, I think, a tremendous book, 1953. One of the points he makes there is that the medieval order was characterized by the dispersal of power and by multiple jurisdictions. Whereas modern political thinkers, not without exception, but the great bulk of them, he says, postulate as the ideal political order a unitary, all-powerful central state ruling over an undifferentiated aggregate of individuals, and which is legally and temporally prior and superior to all subsidiary associations. This became the model of political association throughout the West, particularly since the French Revolution. Every competing center of authority, whether family, local community, church or any number of others, was increasingly subordinated to the central state.

7:21Now Nisbett says that part of the reason that totalitarianism enjoyed such triumphs during the 20th century was that deracinated men, He racinated men, stripped of the traditional social identities that these intermediary associations had once provided them, longed for something to put in their place. That sense of belonging was fulfilled for some in the totalitarian state, which developed upon the ruins of those very associations and which offered the individual membership in something greater than himself. Now, much as Nisbet deplored the centralization of power that continued apace in the United States during his lifetime, Nisbet would never have confused his country with a totalitarian state of the sort with which the last century was riddled, last century being the 20th.

8:07But still, Nisbet certainly noticed analogous trends toward the centralization of power in Washington and in the hands of the President in particular at the expense of smaller and more immediate associations. The conservative movement today, by and large convinced that one of their own is in the White House, has exhibited no discernible concern over the growth in executive power. And, by the way, even if you're going to object, well, wait a minute, I heard one conservative three days ago say that he's slightly concerned about the President. Well, even those conservatives who say something like that, they always rally to him. As soon as Ted Kennedy has an unkind word for the President, well, they'll rally right to him, right on back. The modern-day cult of personality that surrounds the President probably originated with the ebullient and idiosyncratic Theodore Roosevelt, whose great variety of interests, along with his sheer energy, attracted the rapt attention of so many Americans.

8:57I have a chapter on Theodore Roosevelt in the book, Reassessing the Presidency, out here. In addition to these accidents of personality, TR also brought with him a full-fledged philosophy of the Presidency, not entirely dissimilar to that of his supposed arch-enemy, Woodrow Wilson. TR contended that the burden of proof was on those who would restrain presidential power. For him it was enough that a proposed presidential action was not prohibited by the Constitution. He likewise described the executive branch in general and the president in particular as the unique spokesman of a single American people, since he alone occupied an office in whose election all Americans participate. And, parenthetically, I might note that John C. Calhoun, ever the spoiler, many decades earlier, had memorably observed that, strictly speaking, there is no such thing as the American people, since such an aggregate has no place in our decentralized political order.

9:51There's the people of Massachusetts, the people of Vermont, there is no such thing as the American people. But here, in effect, here we see the beginnings of this kind of superstitious reverence toward the President, because he is, what is it, he's the spokesman of the will of the people. These principles, combined with TR's anxiousness to have a hand in everything, led to a dramatic elevation in the vigor and visibility of the Presidency. For instance, TR once convened a conference at the White House to discuss how rough play in college football might be addressed. Now, we would think nothing of this today. The President holds a conference like this. But in 1903, this still seemed odd that we would need the President of the United States to deal with a matter that you would think civil society could manage on its own.

10:37And I've often pointed out that it's no coincidence that the number of executive orders issued by the President exploded under TR's watch, since they comported so well with his philosophy of the Presidency. Presidents Hayes and Garfield had each issued no executive orders. Chester Arthur issued three, Grover Cleveland in his first term six, Benjamin Harrison four, Cleveland in his second term seventy-one, and McKinley fifty-one. In TR's nearly two terms in the office he issued a thousand six presidential executive orders. Now at least some conservatives were heard to complain when the Clinton administration's Paul Begala, Speaking of executive orders, gleefully squawked, stroke of the pen, law of the land, kind of cool. But the number of conservative critiques of executive power run amok that we have heard since the accession of Bush 43 can safely be rounded off to zero.

11:29Now, whatever the explanation for this silence, it is probably not this president's scrupulous restraint and modesty in his exercise of presidential power. Now Nisbet saw and deplored all of this, but what particularly disturbed him was the eerie and almost grotesque mystique that had come to surround the American president. Not only what the president thinks on a given public issue, Nisbet wrote, but also what he wears, whom he dines with, what major ball or banquet he may choose to give, and what his views are on the most trivial or cosmic of questions. All of this has grown exponentially in the regard lavished by press and lesser political figures upon the presidency during the past four decades. And Nisbet went on to point out that he saw monarchical pretensions in all this because the first care of royalty, he said, is that of being constantly visible and naturally in the best and most contrived possible light for the people.

12:25Nisbet likewise spoke of a regard for the monarch that makes him virtually sacred in presence, that thereby gives his person a privileged status in all communications, and that creates inevitably the psychology of constant unremitting protection of the president, not merely from physical harm, but also from unwelcome news, advice, counsel, and even contact with officers of government. Well, apart from the last point, which may be a reference to the special relationship Nixon had with Kissinger when it came to foreign policy decisions, the resemblance of Nisbet's description to the reality of the Bush presidency is rather too great to escape notice. Now, in case comparing the president to the kings of yore seems overwrought, Nisbet invites us to consider the nature of the official iconography, ceremony and architecture that has come to surround the American presidency.

13:14presidency. He quotes an article from the New York Times written by Russell Baker that read as follows, The Rayburn building dwarfs the form of the Caesars. Mussolini would have sobbed in envy. But the Kennedy Center nearly succeeds for bare-faced oppression of the individual spirit. Poor Lincoln down the road a piece in his serene little Greek temple would be crumpled like a candy wrapper if the Kennedy Center could flex an elbow. And he goes on to say, the vast labyrinths bordering the mall would make a minotaur beg for mercy. And he goes on to say, this Russell Baker, my misgivings are not about the wretched architects who must give Washington what it pays for, but about their masters who have chosen to abandon the human scale for the Stalinesque. Man is out of place in these ponderosities.

14:01They are designed to make man feel negligible, to intimidate him, to overwhelm him with the evidence that he is a cipher, a trivial nuisance in the great institutional scheme of things. Well, in 2005, Baker would be dismissed as an incorrigible America hater. But Nisbet, a genuine conservative, replied with sympathy. It has always been thus, he began. Merely compare the public architecture of Greece before and after the rise of Alexander, of Rome before and after Augustus, and before and after the eruption of first Renaissance despots in Italy and then divine right monarchs. The change in American government that has taken place during the past several decades is almost perfectly evidenced by the change in the style and character of its buildings in Washington. Now, writing in the wake of Watergate, Nisbet took note of what he called a good deal of resentment against royalism in the White House.

14:54But he knew it would not be permanent. He said there are too many powerful voices among intellectuals, in press, foundation and elsewhere, that want a royal president provided only that he is the right kind of individual. I'm afraid that the only lessons that have been truly learned in the whole Watergate business are to avoid such idiocies as tapes and illegal unwarranted break-ins. I would be astonished if the real lesson of Watergate, the Actonian principle that all power tends to corrupt, absolute power absolutely, were other than forgotten utterly, once a crowd-pleasing president with the kind of lustre a John F. Kennedy had for Academy, Press and the world of intellectuals generally comes back into the White House. For much of the left, Nisbet explained, a strong, charismatic president as a unifying force was too central to their idea of the American political system to be dispensed with just because a Republican had disappointed them.

15:49There are those, he said, such as Arthur Schlesinger, who argue indeed that only a strong and richly visible president can hold the fabric of democracy intact, that the president is the only vital symbol of unity and consensus. Now stop and think about Schlesinger's description of the presidency as something that holds the fabric of democracy intact, that the president is the only vital symbol of unity and consensus. And think of a single neoconservative who would disagree with that conception. And yet Schlesinger never even tried to portray himself as anything other than the center-left social democrat that he was. But that is what has happened to American conservatism, and Nisbet could see it. Now, it isn't just executive power that conservatives showed little interest in limiting, said Nisbet.

16:34It was federal government power in general. Nisbet said, in 1975, the prospects for conservatism are hardly bright. It became great by virtue of its fight against power, which is now being converted into a fight for capture of power, central power. He saw that even before the election of President Reagan. Now, 11 years later, in 1986, Nisbet's bleak assessment of conservatism had not improved. Now, granting his, I think he's probably misusing the term far right, but let's put that aside and listen to Nisbet. He says, the far right is less interested in Burkian immunities from government power than it is in putting a maximum of governmental power in the hands of those who can be trusted. It is control of power, not diminution of power, that ranks high. Thus, when Reagan was elected, conservatives hoped for the quick abolition of such government monstrosities as the Department of Energy, the Department of Education, and the two national endowments of the arts and humanities, all creations of the political left.

17:33The far right in the Reagan phenomenon saw it differently, however. They saw it as an opportunity for retaining and enjoying the powers, and the far right prevailed. It seeks to prevail also in the establishment of a national industrial strategy, a government and the corporation structure in which the conservative dream of free private enterprise would be extinguished. Well, some people were not prepared to render such a harsh judgment in 1986. But if the experience of five years of George W. Bush and the lukewarm to nonexistent conservative opposition to the greatest budget buster since Lyndon Johnson doesn't begin to vindicate Nisbet, what would? Well, we also see in the work of Robert Nisbet far more caution about the warfare state than we're liable to hear today among self-described conservative organs.

18:20Honorable exceptions accepted. There was first of all, according to Nisbet, a connection between war and the growth in executive power that we've already heard him to deplore. Here's Nisbet again, again considered to be one of the top three most influential and important traditionalists since World War II. says, The day is long past when the phrase national security was restricted to what is required in actual war. As everyone knows, it has been, since World War II under FDR, a constantly widening cloak or umbrella for governmental actions of every conceivable degree of power, stealth and cunning by an ever-expanding core of government officials. As we now know in detail, the utilization of the FBI and other paramilitary agencies by presidents and other high executive department officers for the purposes of eavesdropping, electronic bugging, and similarly intimate penetrations of individual privacy, goes straight back to FDR, and the practice has only intensified and widened, ever since. Naturally all such royalist invasions have been justified right down to Watergate under the name of National Security. The record is clear and detailed that National Security cover-up

19:30has been a practice of each of the presidents since FDR. Well, Nisbet, in another context, noted that of all the misapplications of the word conservative in recent memory, he said that the most amusing in a historical light is surely the application of conservative to great increases in military expenditures. For in America throughout the 20th century and including four substantial wars abroad, Conservatives had been steadfastly the voices of non-inflationary military budgets and of an emphasis on trade in the world instead of American nationalism. In the two world wars, in Korea and in Vietnam, the leaders of American entry into war were such renowned liberal progressives as Woodrow Wilson, Franklin Roosevelt, Harry Truman and John F. Kennedy. In all four episodes, conservatives, both in the national government and in the rank and file, were largely hostile to intervention, were isolationists indeed.

20:23Even in the rhetoric of Reagan, Nisbet could find much to disturb a traditional conservative. Nisbet says this, President Reagan's deepest soul is not Republican conservative, but New Deal's second World War Democrat. Thus his well-noted preference for citing FDR and Kennedy as noble precedents for his actions, rather than Coolidge, Hoover or even Eisenhower. The word revolution springs lightly from his lips for anything from tax reform to narcotics prosecution. Reagan's passion for crusades, moral and military, is scarcely American conservative. Nisbet was also careful to remind conservatives that in fact the practice of war brings into the national consciousness and international practice features that they themselves, allegedly at least, should not like.

21:12In particular, there's a reason, he says, that the left has not exactly been averse to war. I wrote an article, I think it was earlier this year, I wrote some article about how the left in America has not consistently been anti-war. Now there are some exceptions, some hard leftists who have been consistent and good. But typically the left, I mean the left was all in favor of entering World War I, I give all these examples. And this is not, but my original title for that article was, which I liked, they didn't use it, my title was Make War Not Love. Left-wing war mongers. But this is not a coincidence, and Nisbet explains some of this. He says that, you know, don't forget that there's wartime economic planning that takes place during massive wars. And when the Great Depression came, this national experience of wartime economic planning, well, naturally reappeared.

22:01He says that the rallying cry became, we planned in war, so let's plan now. Let's, in fact, take some of the same people who planned during war and bring them back. War symbolism was ubiquitous in the imagery adopted by the New Deal. In fact, as Nisbet says, in terms of frequency of use of such symbols by the national government, not even Hitler's Germany outdid our propagandists. He says that the left likes some of the accompaniments of large-scale war, the opportunities created for central planning of the economy, for preemption of legislative functions and other such pursuits. It is in time of war that many of the reforms first advocated by socialists have been accepted by capitalist governments and made parts of the structures of their societies. Equalization of wealth, progressive taxation, nationalization of industries, and he goes on and gives many, many other examples, were all achieved or advanced under the impress of war.

22:51He also talks about the revolutionary nature of war, and I'll tie this up in two minutes, but I think I started about ten minutes late, so I'll just do about two more minutes. He says that, and I love this quotation, he says there is much in common between the militarist and the revolutionist in the view each takes of traditional civil society, its privileges, immunities and conventional authorities. To both mentalities, the militarist and the revolutionist, this society, especially in its modern capitalist form, can seem egoistic, venal, needlessly competitive, often corrupt and fettered by privilege unearned. And this I love. Careful reading of the memoirs of the great generals in history will, I am sure, reveal as much distaste for all this as one finds in the memoirs of revolutionists.

23:36I have to mention, by the way, another quick military quotation from Nisbet, who also says in Twilight of Authority, and Human Authority, quote, it used to be said that there was a good deal in common psychologically between the kind of soldier who could win a Congressional Medal of Honor or even a silver star and the kind of individual we label psychopath in civil life. Napoleon, he reminds conservatives, was a perfect exemplar of revolution as well as of war, not merely in France but throughout almost all of Europe and even beyond. Marx and Engels were both keen students of war, profoundly appreciative of its properties with respect to large-scale institutional change. From Trotsky and his Red Army down to Mao in China, the uniform of the soldier has been the uniform of the revolutionist.

24:25Well, ultimately, just wrapping things up then, one of the worst aspects of the collapse of the type of conservatism that Robert Nisbet represented, that I represented, that was genuinely suspicious of power, genuinely suspicious of executive power, who was appalled at the disgusting and superstitious reverence shown to the leader and who warned about the warfare state, is that my children have to grow up in a world in which the alternative to leftism that's presented to them is Rush Limbaugh. That's what they have, that's the world they're growing up in, that if you don't favor leftism you have to favor this. That, to me, is why an institution like the Mises Institute is so important because it shows this is a false choice. You don't have to be a Rush Limbaugh right-winger, so-called, and you don't have to be Hillary Clinton either.

25:12You know, there is something else you can be in your life. And so what Robert Nisbett shows us, though, is that beneath the whole right-wing noise machine, that it is not necessary, it has not been necessary for conservatives to be jingoists, Philistines and buffoons, that in fact in the midst of all this there still exists, if somewhat chastened and neglected, a humane and principled conservatism to which civilized men may still repair.