Conservatism

In the earlier days of the American Republic—and largely until the present day—the cities played the more radical or liberal part, with the countryside the more conservative. Certainly during the push westward in the 19th century, towns and the laws they produced (or that produced them) were a conservative influence against the frontier and farmer or prairie radicalism—or at the very least represented a society rooted in law against the rootlessness of the frontier. (See, for example, some of the early mining laws and town codes in early mining towns, edited by Nolie S. Mumey.) Societies, as J. G. A. Pocock wrote, exist in time and conserve images of themselves as continuously so existing. An essential feature of society is tradition, meaning the handing on of formed ways of acting—tradition being immemorial, prescriptive, and presumptive. What stands outside tradition is charismatic, whether postulating timeless existence or sacred origin (which includes creative origin). All classical (as opposed to romantic) social systems are of this traditionalist sort. Note that cities in the first push westward were formed on classical models—Cincinnati is an example, with (even) a classical name.

Because societies necessarily—in order to be societies—conserve images of themselves as existing [Page 188](and acting in a certain way) nemo meminisse contradicente, there is conservatism in the very idea of a society. Societies conserve tradition and are thus conservative, even if the tradition they conserve is not a conservative tradition. In fact, already existing cities, or parts of cities, may preserve a radical tradition, as against the conservative tradition of the countryside. But new classically planned cities—and perhaps especially new towns, and most especially in the American 19th-century West and Midwest—may be considered as playing a conservative part for the creation of order. The political descendants of the town founders in those areas in that century were the backbone of the Republican Old Right up to the 1920s. In parts of Kansas, for example, the farmers (many of them Populists) were often more radical than the townsmen (many of them Republicans).

In the 1920s and 1930s came the new (and antiCommunist) conservatism of the Southern Agrarians, whose name explains itself. The first Agrarian manifesto was essentially, as one might expect, Agrarian—the second was antiCommunist. But the word conservatism was not the key here. The use of the words conservative and conservatism to represent a certain “individualist” (and antiCommunist, antiliberal) line of thought connected with the name of William F. Buckley Jr. comes in part from the influence of Russell Kirk and his study The Conservative Mind (1953)—even, indeed, before it was published. The archetypical publication for the American (U.S.) Conservative Movement for the years from 1955 to the present has been Buckley's National Review, published from 150 East 35th Street in Manhattan, with its biweekly editorial luncheons at a restaurant at Lexington Avenue and 34th Street. For much of that time Buckley maintained a home on the East Side of Manhattan.

But with the exception of his sister Priscilla—the managing editor, with reporting experience in Paris—and Suzanne LaFollette, who grew up in Washington, D.C., where her father was a congressman (not from Wisconsin!), it is noteworthy that most of the editors were selfexiled to the countryside, sometimes to isolation in the countryside. Frank S. Meyer (1909–1972), former Communist organizer in London and Chicago, lived on a mountaintop (Ohayo Mountain) in Woodstock, New York. James Burnham (1905–1987), a former Trotskyite in New York, was off in the wilds of Connecticut. Russell Kirk fled the “city” (!) of Lansing, Michigan, to be the Sage of Mecosta, Michigan. Whittaker Chambers lived in the remotest parts of Maryland. The Europeans such as Willi Schlamm and Erik von Kuehneltleddihn had not fled the cities, but then European cities were not linked to modernity (or even radicalism), as U.S. cities were. If one founds a magazine dedicated to standing athwart the course of history and shouting “Stop!”—then one is unlikely to be promoting cities or urban life or values.

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