Robert Nisbet's "Conservatism: Dream and Reality"

By Chuck Chalberg

                  Originally published in 1986, Robert Nisbet’s recently reissued study of the history and prospects of both conservative thought and political conservatism from Edmund Burke to Ronald Reagan is as relevant today as it would have been over the course of many yesterdays and as it will be for many tomorrows.  No doubt intended to shore up dispirited conservatives in the dying days of the Reagan years, this short book would have been even shorter had Nisbet not chosen to include and comment on the various manifestations of Reagan-era conservatism.  It should also be noted that his edition includes an introduction by Nisbet biographer Brad Stone, who briefly summarizes what has been called “Nisbetism” before taking the dreams and realities of modern conservatism into the 21^st century.

                  Just what is “Nisbetism?”  It is at once a thesis, a plea, and a lament.  At its heart is Robert Nisbet’s assertion that a decent and healthy society nourishes those intervening institutions of family, church, and voluntary organizations that simultaneously guard against an intrusive state and restrain the urges and excesses of the isolated individual.  One of Robert Nisbet’s great insights (with more than a little help from Tocqueville and others) is the unholy alliance between advocates of a powerful state and those who would be its alleged and even actual beneficiaries.

                  A society that is at once grounded in collectivism and individualism would seem to be a contradiction in terms.  Not so, Tocqueville prophesied.  And not so, Nisbet observed.

                  Not that Robert Nisbet liked what he was observing.  Far from it; hence his insistent plea for the survival, nay the shoring up and flourishing, of those crucial intervening institutions, those “little platoons” of Edmund Burke; and hence his temptation to lament their obvious decline when he wasn’t engaging in his own prophesying about their feared collapse.       

I Had a Dream

By Chuck Chalberg 

 I had a dream the other night, a dream that American had elected a black president.  The year was sometime in the not-too-distant past, maybe even as recently as 2008.  I don’t know about you, but my dreams can be amazingly vivid and curiously vague all at the same time.  This one surely was. 

It might actually have been 2008, for all I know.  In any case, my hazy, post-dream recollection tells me that this election must have been fairly recent.  That’s because I recall wondering why it had taken the country so long to get to this point.  After all, the hard days and the great days, the sorrows and triumphs of the civil rights movement were all in the distant past.  The marches and the speeches, the freedom rides and the fire hoses, the law-breaking and the law-making were nothing more than a distant memory lodged somewhere in the back of the mind of those Americans, white and black, who were alive and awake in the 1950s and 1960s.

I am one of those Americans, one of those white Americans to be precise.  The names and places still trip off my tongue: Medgar Evers and James Meredith, Selma and Birmingham, Roy Wilkins and Fannie Lou Hamer, Greensboro and Philadelphia, James Chaney and John Lewis and, of course, Dr. King.  They are all still there, frozen in time, in my mind’s eye.

A review of "The Death of Conservatism" (Sam Tanenhaus) by Chuck Chalberg

Sam Tanenhaus. The Death of Conservatism. New York: Random House, 2009, 123pp, $17.00 (hb)
        As far as obituaries go, this is a fairly lengthy entry, not to mention premature. And as far as histories go, it’s more than slightly incomplete, not to mention wrong-headed, tendentious and unfair. Beyond these quibbles, there’s a lot more cause for complaint about this recent and yet already amazingly outdated little book.
        The DEATH of conservatism? How about the “state of conservatism.” Or the “decline of conservatism?” Or perhaps even the “defeat of conservatism?” But death? At last report, that’s still a fairly permanent condition.
        “State of,” “decline of,” and even “defeat of” would all have been legitimate phrases to be inserted prior to the word “conservatism” in a book title published virtually any time between the November 2008 elections and mid-2009. This obituary was published in the late summer of 2009—or at a moment when Tanenhaus’s chosen title was already irrelevant. Today it is an embarrassment.
        Of course, like all good eulogists, Sam Tanenhaus claimed to be saddened by the demise of the beloved. In this case, however, the tears that he was shedding were less for the cause that he was trying to bury than for the country that had somehow managed to survive its terrors and excesses. On this score, Tanenhaus seemed to be standing the usual role of the eulogist on its head. Instead of praising the departed and comforting the living, he condemned the deceased as he worried about what was to come. With conservatism dead and buried, it seemed that America was on the verge of becoming a one-party state.
        It must be conceded that Tanenhaus did his best to pretend to be worried about such a possibility. But before long it was apparent that he had crocodile worries to match his crocodile tears.
        To be sure, Sam Tanenhaus proved unable to shed any tears over the demise of what he alternately labeled “movement conservatism” or “ideological conservatism.” And because he very much wanted this brand of conservatism to be dead, he was quick to declare that it in fact was dead.