The culture war returns.

• Author: Heilbrunn, Jacob
• Position: Response to riots in Baltimore and Ferguson - The Realist

1968 is back. A growing chorus of voices on the right is arguing that the riots in Baltimore and Ferguson are ushering in a new round of the culture wars. On the website Breitbart, for example, Robert W. Patterson, a former George W. Bush administration official, wrote, "The Grand Old Party must decide: Go libertarian, and sympathize with the protesters and rioters? Or does it want to be conservative, and side with the police, the rule of law, and the forces of order? The lessons of the 1960s suggest the latter is the path to victory." William Kristol, editor of the neoconservative Weekly Standard, observed during the recent riots in Ferguson, "It does feel like a Nixon '68 moment. Who will speak for the Silent Majority?"

It was a revealing question. In 1968, Richard Nixon tapped into white working-class antipathy toward student and black radicalism to defeat Flubert Humphrey. The Southern Strategy was born. Two years earlier, Ronald Reagan had won election as governor of California by denouncing the Free Speech Movement at Berkeley and promising to "throw the bums off welfare." Reagan would go on to midwife what became a potent alliance between the emerging neoconservative movement and traditional conservatives. The neocons began to share the traditionalists' belief that, as Burke put it, "Men of intemperate mind can never be free. Their passions forge their fetters."

The maiden neocons had themselves emerged from the intensely partisan milieu of the 1930s to become respected public intellectuals. They viewed the scaturient passions of the New Left that had suddenly emerged in the 1960s as a clear and present danger--what the literary critic Lionel Trilling deemed an "adversary culture."

Irving Kristol, Gertrude Himmelfarb and a number of other neoconservatives were deeply influenced by Trilling's criticism of liberalism from inside the movement. They were also influenced--Kristol and Himmelfarb in particular--by the political philosopher Leo Strauss, who had fled Nazi Germany. Strauss believed that the culprit for much of what had gone wrong in Western civilization could be traced back to Machiavelli, who had lowered man's sights away from a transcendent good. The result was the rise of relativism, in which one view of how humans should behave is as good as another. Strauss, by contrast, promulgated a different message, one that resonated with the new generation of conservatives--a return, after centuries of neglect, to classical virtue.

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