The challenge confronting conservatives: sustaining a Republic of Hustlers.

• Author: McDougall, Walter A.
• Position: A Walter McDougall Symposium

At our 2009 annual meeting, the Scholars Council of the Library of Congress was exposed to some surreal juxtapositions. First, the Librarian James Billington described the cultural impact of the global financial meltdown. University and public libraries lost a third to a half of their endowments or budgets, forcing them to lay off staff, suspend acquisitions, and eliminate whole collections. The Library of Congress was in better shape since it serves at the pleasure of the only institution empowered to authorize the printing of money. But without budget increases the Library can no longer keep up with the flood of new data and media in the digital age. Hence we were asked: what materials would statesmen and scholars twenty-five years from now rue us for not having collected today?

Next, we were given a briefing on the Library's latest triumph, the World Digital Library. This miraculous project offers on-line, virtual-reality, access to the greatest manuscripts and artifacts from every civilization and historical era. A thousand items were already posted--some of them rare books hundreds of pages long--and tens of thousands of items are already projected. So even as we live in an age when all the music ever recorded will soon fit on a single I-Pod, we will soon live in an age when every artifact from Hammurabi's Laws to a 1906 film of Ellis Island can be downloaded on your Blackberry.

Imagine, therefore, how discordant our next impression seemed. When the council was asked what new missions the Library might perform, a British professor asked sternly why the Library could not do something to uplift America's deplorable popular culture. Dr. Billington always speaks of the Library mission to "bring Athens to Rome," but could it not use its resources and political ties to bring a bit of Rome to the barbarians?

Finally, even as we pondered the co-existence of a bankrupt American economy, a miraculous American technology, and a philistine American public, we were asked what issue we would raise if given access to members of Congress. I had an answer to that one. I would summon the committees responsible for foreign affairs and defense and insist they stage a Great Debate of the sort that occurred in the late 1940s. At that time the question was whether the Truman Doctrine, which rhetorically committed the U.S. to defend all countries on earth, was really in the national interest, and if so, how the government proposed to do it and pay for it. Today the question would be whether the pledge of recent administrations to eliminate terrorism and tyranny everywhere and democratize the Middle East is really in the national interest, and if so, how to do it and pay for it. In short, let's get a grip on our pretentious rhetoric before it carries us over the cliff. Of course, Congressmen--by definition skilled hustlers in America's free market of power--are themselves too dependent on pretense to expose it.

I enjoy those annual meetings, not least because we always get a VIP tour of some part of the Library of Congress: on this occasion the rare book room. But I left convinced we are living in what Arnold Toynbee called the Indian Summer stage of civilization.

The situation in which we find ourselves did not arise overnight. In 1999 the Philadelphia Society asked me to give the luncheon address before a presumably like-minded crowd. Since I had recently published Promised Land, Crusader State, they wanted me to discuss "The Crusader State in the 21st Century." 9/11 still lay in the future, of course, so I puckishly likened the Clinton administration's feckless humanitarian interventions to medieval crusades, and finished as follows:

To preach a crusade is a dangerous thing, for you may just succeed in launching one, in which case you may inspire fanaticism and black-and-white judgments, and so lose the ability to keep the violence proportional and channeled toward realistic ends. Preaching crusades can also risk the opposite outcome. Like the football coach whose pep talks wear thin, a President who turns every cause into a holy one, every enemy into a Hitler, and every conflict into a genocide, may soon find his audience sinking, exhausted and disbelieving, into the very cynicism he hopes to surmount. One of my Lenten disciplines this year was to re-read the works of George Orwell. His description of the political debasement of the English language was chilling in light of the linguistic gymnastics of our present leaders. But what struck me most was that his empire of Oceania ruled by Big Brother in 1984 represented the pure Crusader State. Oceania is always at war, but for no specific reason, and against enemies that are constantly shifting, but always depicted as utterly evil. The wars are low-level affairs fought on distant fronts, but just enough terrorist strikes occur in London itself to stoke the fury and fear of the home front. Nor can the war ever be won, for the permanent Crusade is what justifies Big Brother's rule. When must the United States act, when must it lead--and when not? There is no simple answer, especially when our strategic and moral calculus is complicated by lack of trust in a President's motives. ... As C. S. Lewis wrote, "Lilies that fester smell far worse then weeds. The higher the pretensions of our rulers, the more meddlesome and impertinent their rule is likely to be and the more the thing in whose name they rule will be defiled." That is why American crusaders may someday lament, with the 13th century poet Rinaldo d'Aquino: "Alas, pilgrim cross, why have you thus destroyed me?" (1) The talk received a standing ovation from most of the audience, but on the way out I was almost mugged by Straussian neoconservatives who (we later learned) were already plotting a crusade in Iraq, as well as some Catholics offended by my critique of the medieval crusades! I left confused and dismayed by the evident crack-up of the conservative coalition, and have never returned to the Philadelphia Society. The moral of the story is never take an audience for granted unless the organization's leaders have followed the example of William F. Buckley, Jr., when he began his career by founding a conservative club for Yale undergraduates. Just seven prospective members showed up, but Buckley, undeterred, made it his first priority to purge the ranks. His challenge in the late 1940s was to define a politically and culturally potent brand of American conservatism. Having come full circle, conservatives face the same challenge today, but in much worse circumstances. After World War II--a true unipolar moment if there ever was one--U.S. military, economic, and ideological power were at their peak, and almost all citizens believed in an American heritage worth conserving. In today's faux unipolar moment, American power is spent, its future already mortgaged out two generations, and citizens may be excused for demanding change rather than conservation. Moreover, I would contend that much of what has passed for conservatism over my lifetime has been a masquerade or else an unwitting enabler for public and private pretense and prodigality that have almost reached fatal proportions. Back in the 1960s Illinois Senator Everett Dirksen would drawl, "A billion here, a billion there, and pretty soon we're talking real money." Today we read Charles Morris on The Two Trillion Dollar Meltdown: Easy Money, High Rollers, and the Great Credit Crash (Perseus, 2008), Joseph Stiglitz on The Three Trillion Dollar War: The True Cost of the War in Iraq (Norton, 2008), Andrew Bacevich on The Limits of Power, which foresees the suicide of American Exceptionalism, and Niall Ferguson on The Ascent of Money, which foresees another Great Depression during which "there will be blood." If in fact our Republic of Hustlers has degenerated in our time into a monstrous Ponzi scheme, then what is it that conservatives would want to conserve? If in fact today's festering lilies sprang from bad seeds planted far back in American history, then what is it...