Cold War politics and the evolving role of state capacity. Links on that new William F. Buckley documentary…
My latest for City Journal is a longform revisionist account of Cold War conservatism: rather than being absolute foes of the state in all its forms, Cold War conservatives instead sought to leverage state capacity in order to protect the bigger architecture of freedom and the public good. In writing this piece, I had the good fortune to interview a number of key players in conservative politics, including Washington Post columnist George Will, former National Review editor John O’Sullivan, Modern Age editor Daniel McCarthy, AEI’s Matthew Continetti, and American Compass founder Oren Cass.
Here’s an excerpt from an early part of this essay:
In January 1952, a young dissident journalist named William F. Buckley, Jr. took to the pages of The Commonweal to reflect on the trajectory of the American Right. Buckley had yet to found National Review, but his essay, “The Party and the Deep Blue Sea,” prefigured conservative debates about state power during the Cold War. As Buckley saw it, “ideally, the Republican platform should acknowledge a domestic enemy, the State,” and champion individual liberty. Yet the struggle with the Soviet Union, he cautioned, may require “Big Government for the duration—for neither an offensive nor a defensive war can be waged . . . except through the instrument of a totalitarian bureaucracy within our shores.” Conservatives who took the Soviet menace seriously would need to “support large armies and air forces, atomic energy, central intelligence, war production boards and the attendant centralization of power in Washington,” he contended.
The essay illumined the fateful tension within Cold War conservatism. The concentration camp and the nuclear weapon were the two most horrific modes of state power in the twentieth century; movement conservatives embraced the second to avert the first. Far from demanding a small state, the Cold War Right endorsed the government development—and potential use—of unprecedented force.
In the postwar era, the dark spectacle of the state’s capacity to exterminate, brainwash, and maim—from Auschwitz to the gulag to the killing fields—inspired a broad political emphasis in democratic societies on rights and liberties. Nuclear warfare presented its own terrors. Tens of thousands died when the Enola Gay dropped an atomic bomb on Hiroshima on August 6, 1945, and the hydrogen bomb and nuclear-tipped intercontinental ballistic missiles threatened greater carnage. At the end of Christopher Nolan’s 2023 blockbuster, Oppenheimer, which portrays the dawn of the atomic age, Manhattan Project leader J. Robert Oppenheimer confesses his fear to Albert Einstein that he has unleashed a chain reaction that would ultimately destroy the world. Social traditionalists and religious conservatives were haunted by the idea of nuclear warfare. In the foreword to the second edition of The Lord of the Rings, J. R. R. Tolkien likened the One Ring to the atomic bomb.
Nevertheless, many on the right saw nuclear weapons as essential to American geopolitical strategy. In “The Difference Is Atomic,” a November 1956 cover story for National Review, the academic Medford Evans pilloried Democratic presidential candidate Adlai Stevenson for pledging to suspend tests for the hydrogen bomb. Evans lamented that contemporary politicians lacked the “courage” to use atomic weapons, arguing that “one question we shall be deciding on November 6 is whether we want some buck-feverish egghead to freeze on the controls of our defense when the Soviet Bisons [bombers for nuclear-weapons delivery] come in for the kill.”
As I say in the piece itself, going back to the Cold War can help illuminate contemporary controversies about the “realignment,” “populism,” the “new right,” or whatever else you want to call it.
There’s a temptation to argue that the new populists (etc.) represent some statist politics that is a radical departure from the (purportedly) more libertarian-oriented conservatism of the 20th century. But one of the signature elements of Cold War conservatism was in fact the acceptance of massive state power—through the military-industrial complex and an empowered executive, among other spheres. In order to confront the existential threat of the Soviet Union, Cold War conservatives turned to state capacity.
This taps into a bigger theme—and a bigger quarrel—in American politics. From 1776 onward (and really even before it), the American tradition has shown an impulse toward a statecraft of liberty—that is, the creation of bigger political structures that would promote some of the underlying conditions of freedom. Broadly speaking, this is the project of the Constitution, Henry Clay’s “American system” of industrial policies, and the Union during the Civil War. I think we can also see Cold War conservatism within that frame: Cold War conservatives saw vigorous governmental action as necessary to preserve the American way of life. The victory of the United States in the Cold War was not just about the state. It also required the inherited, life-affirming traditions embedded in American culture (from faith to a robust civil society) as well as the dynamism of the market. But statecraft did play a role.
The challenges we face today are very different from those of the Cold War era, and part of what I’m trying to do in that City Journal piece is to lay out some of the similarities and differences for those two eras. But I think the Cold War does offer a window into the bigger challenges of protecting the underlying conditions for liberties and securing certain essential public goods. Political resilience requires the reimagining of the tools of statecraft.
This pieces comes out an an opportune time because PBS has just released a new documentary on the life of National Review founder William F. Buckley, Jr. I haven’t gotten a chance to see the documentary yet, but here are a few reactions:
The National Review editors think this documentary had a fatal flaw.
Longtime Buckley producer Neal B. Freeman had his own misgivings.
Jay Nordlinger on a range of Buckley memories.
In the Washington Examiner, Jesse Adams puts Buckley’s career in conversation with that of Daniel Patrick Moynihan.
In the Wall Street Journal, John Anderson reflects on Buckley’s wit.
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