CONSERVATISM IN AMERICA: Making Sense of the American Right.(Critical essay)

• Author: Stove, R.J.
• Position: 173717051
• Pages: 69(4)

CONSERVATISM IN AMERICA: Making Sense of the American Right

By Paul Edward Gottfried

(New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007.)

The trouble with reviewing a tome by Paul Edward Gottfried is that almost the only person possessing the scholarly wherewithal to do so is Paul Edward Gottfried. Given the unfailing erudition of his mostly shortish but always densely researched books, his seemingly effortless allusions to Continental philosophy's more recondite areas, and his complete refusal to provide the equivalent of baby-food for dilettantes, the rest of us are apt to have our own intellectual limitations exposed rather embarrassingly when we attempt to summarise his work. All we can hope to do is to note the more obvious insights that Professor Gottfried (of Pennsylvania's Elizabethtown College) has supplied, to acknowledge his very considerable valour, and to trust that his latest production will win the audience it deserves. (National Observer has already run a number of his articles, while its Autumn 2003 issue discussed an earlier study by him, Multiculturalism and the Politics of Guilt.) A disclosure of personal background on this reviewer's part is necessary, even if it does compel detouring into the lotus-land of first-person singular usage: I know Professor Gottfried quite well.

In American intellectual historiography, the standard line is that American conservatism was an insubstantial, anaemic thing indeed until William F. Buckley founded, in 1955 when aged 30, the magazine National Review, with its rather self-serving proclamation in its very first number: "We stand athwart history, yelling Stop." This interpretation makes strictly limited appeal to Professor Gottfried, as does the current condition of National Review itself.

Quoting with some asperity the admiring attempts by Washington Post contributor E.J. Dionne to rewrite National Review's history--"Buckley was determined to rid the right of the wing nuts"--Professor Gottfried stresses two factors: the sheer inconsistency of Buckley's editorial purges, and the fact that even the purged National Review regularly exhibited during the 1960s various attitudes which would now be universally abominated as "sexist", "racist", and "fascist". Dionne's assertion that "He [Buckley] was, to his everlasting credit, the scourge of an anti-Semitism that once had a hold on significant parts of the right" makes strange reading: because Buckley, while he demonised the John Birch Society and suchlike...