Against the Neo-Manchesterians

A reflection on "Freedom Conservatism," one year later.

The author has a Ph.D. in American history, a juris doctorate, and is familiar with many signers of the “Freedom Conservatism” statement and associated institutions. While The American Postliberal does not typically publish anonymous essays, we believe that the position of the author and their viewpoints are worth sharing.

A year ago, a group led by John Hood of the John Pope Institute and Avik Roy, put forward the “Freedom Conservative Statement of Principles,” meant to be a counter to the National Conservative Statement of Principles. On the one-year anniversary of the statement, that group has released a summary of what has happened since the release of their “Sharon Statement 2.0.” The group now plans to have their own national conference next year, as well as “FreeCon Forums” as they “pivot to a more activist, public-facing role.” At the same time, an up and coming Freedom Conservative and rabid opponent of postliberals, Thomas Howes, has launched the “Reagan Caucus” and claimed the inheritance of the Buckley-Reagan mantle.

In two essays last August and January, I took on many of the most significant problems with the Freedom Conservative Statement of Principles and with their broader vision of what conservative is and should be. A year later, the ambitions of their leadership have only grown and thus the challenge to preserving traditional and Christian conservatism against the rise of right-liberalism remains steadfast. Thus, the need to stake out a serious intellectual history and understanding of American conservatism against the neo-Hartzian flattening of history is starkly needed.

To begin, let us take the primary section of last year’s statement:

We believe in free enterprise, free trade, free speech, strong families, balanced budgets, and the rule of law. We champion equal protection and equal opportunity. We think Washington has too much power and our states, communities, private associations, and households have too little. We believe Americans are safest and freest in a peaceful world that is led by a United States committed to pursuing its just interests.

What the Freedom Conservatives have done is to bring about an ersatz version of the intra-conservative battles of the 1950s and 1960s between Frank Meyer’s fusionists and the traditionalist faction of Russell Kirk, L. Brent Bozell and Frederick Wilhelmsen. To believe in “free enterprise, free trade, free speech, strong families, balanced budgets, and the rule of law” is to be either naively utopian or to purposefully obscure the tension between the old liberal values of individual liberty and meritocracy against custom, tradition, authority, and order represented here by the family.

In his infamous article criticizing Frank Meyer’s “fusionism” in the pages of National Review in September 1962, Bozell, William F. Buckley Jr.’s brother-in-law, former Yale debate partner, and magazine senior editor, published “Freedom or Virtue?” In it, Bozell put starkly the problem with the libertarian emphasis on individual liberty as the first order value: 

Is the reductio ad absurdum unfair? On the contrary: I submit that the inner logic of the dictum that virtue-not-freely-chosen is not virtue at all leads inescapably to the burlesque of reason we have suggested. If freedom is the ‘first principle’ in the search for virtue, if as Meyer writes at another point, it is ‘the precondition of a good society,’ then, by definition, there is no superior principle that can be invoked, at any stage, against the effort to maximize freedom–there is no point at which men are entitled to stop hauling down the ‘props’ which every rational society in history has erected to promote a virtuous citizenry.

Yes, Bozell admitted, the libertarian view permitted measures for preserving the public order because no man had liberty to deny another liberty, but it did not allow for measures to encourage and aid virtue. The relevant point was that if a society follows libertarianism’s first operative command to maximize freedom, the effect would be applied with equal vigor to all social activities and would make virtue as difficult as possible. Thus, Bozell emphasized that “while only a few men, if any, can be expected to meet the challenge successfully, the proliferation of unvirtuous acts in the objective order is one of the prices that must be paid for the fulfillment of heroic man.”

Such a view, Bozell understood, denied the inherent nature of man created by God and posited the existentialist view that man was all potentiality and freedom with no inherent nature or essence — a view both optimistic about the spirit of individual adventure and creativity but which ended in “despair because the burden of autonomy — since it is not ordained by the true constitution of being — is too heavy.”  Against this libertarian view, which the Freedom Conservatives broadly follow, was God’s purpose that we both magnify the Christian Church and establish conditions conducive to human virtue. Once established, the conditions would be such that Christian Civilization or what Willmoore Kendall called “public orthodoxy,” which reflected the divine patterns of order and encouraged a virtuous citizenry. 

Finally, Bozell's critical essay offers off a potent retort to those who suggest the “New Right” ignores the original Constitution's demand for limited government. Bozell reminded his readers that the individual states walked into the Philadelphia Convention in 1787 with “full sovereign powers” and while the governing principle of the framers was indeed that concentration of powers leads to abuse, the American system they created, through its municipal, state, and national offices, and its popular residuary, offered potentially plenary power. Freedom for the framers, Bozell observed, was not the goal of the commonwealth but a highly useful means of achieving the good commonwealth on the basis of prudence and free from ideology. 

In a debate years later with the libertarian scholar Doug Bandow, Bozell’s National Review colleague Frederick D. Wilhelmsen agreed. No polity, he noted, had “ever been constructed around freedom as an end” because that business was “a philosophical and psychological impossibility.” Even though classical liberals and libertarians had raised the banner of absolute liberty as a political goal, this was impossible because love governed liberty and any attempt to pull it off ended in tyranny because like Plato’s “democratic man,” absent any fixed goal or love, man becomes a slave to his passions. Wilhemsen, who also claimed to have coined the term “public orthodoxy,” suggested that all polities historically had been “knit into being, rendered thereby the polity that it is, by some love annealing into unity and society men who would otherwise be isolated into an anarchy.” 

Wilhelmsen concluded that societies must look to the content of love and chose virtue over vice, such that liberty is “properly repressed by an ordained love” and thus laws against pornography, public indecency, abnormal behavior, the glorification of greed and gluttony, and abortion may “cut down a man’s choices but in doing so liberate him, free him from temptation and open him to the good life.” He correctly understood that every society protected its public orthodoxy or way of life and thus censorship was "consubstantial with political existence" because some repression was "indispensable to the flowering of good men."

To be clear, it is not merely Freedom Conservatives who maintain the emphasis on the Lockean liberal founding emphasizing the Declaration of Independence, equality, and enlightenment natural right theory — other scholars have done this as well. Yet, the long-held disputes between West Coast and East Coast Straussians, paleoconservatives, southern conservatives, and other conservatives about whether or not we had a “liberal” founding based on natural law and limited government is fodder for another essay.

It is sufficient for purposes of this article to note that there is ample reason to both doubt the extent of Locke’s influence upon the founding against classical republicanism and Christian natural law as well reason to consider the Constitution as a counter-revolution which limited the liberalism and democratic spirit of the Declaration. As Willmoore Kendall and George Carey showed in the "Basic Symbols of the American Political Tradition," the language of compacts and the natural law entered into American politics more than a half century before Locke even published his most notable treatise and referenced ideas going back to Thomas Aquinas and Saint Augustine.

As with the broader disputes between Freedom Conservatives and postliberals from this last year, the critical response of the neo-Manchesterians has been informative. The dispute about whether to be an American conservative requires a defense of liberalism or classical liberalism naturally take the debate into the question of economic freedom. The neo-Manchesterians defense of market and free trade fundamentalism has been telling. Take for example this post from a Freedom Conservative signer, who accuses Marco Rubio of adopting the socialism of Chavez. Another accuses Rubio of “abandoning first principles” and employing “name calling” by referring to such conservatives as “free market fundamentalists.”

Senator Rubio is not, of course, the only target. The dislike for Oren Cass at American Compass from neo-Manchesterians is such that they make the incredulous suggestion that Cass “debunked the market fundamentalist boogeyman in 2019.” A cursory read of Cass’ essay would show both that he notes that “some policies have sought to let markets run riot — especially cross borders” while making the broader argument that economics was beginning to move beyond neo-liberalism and the reason was that the traditional economic tools did not answer the question of “what goals a society should orient itself toward.”

There is ample wisdom from past luminaries of the modern American conservative movement that we can turn to on this question. The conservative historian and frequent National Review contributor Stephen Tonsor gave a speech to the Philadelphia Society in 1977 in which he argued, “the inherent atomism in economic calculation must yield to the collective concerns of the community” and if economics had dominated the conservative movement for decades, “conservatives during the next twenty years will have to engage themselves more completely with the realms of value, community, education and science.” Tonsor understood that it was the failure to link community with liberty that gave libertarianism its “utopian character.” 

Similarly, a celebrated response from this corner of the right in the pages of Reason magazine is instructive. The criticism of Senator Rubio is that he is essentially advocated for “picking winners and losers” and isn’t really charting a new course is following Oren Cass’ observation that all government economic policy is industrial policy.  

Freedom Conservatives might do well to recognition a concession that even the great fusionist leader, Frank Meyer, was willing to make:

There is an inherent tragedy in the history of classical liberalism. As it developed the economic and political doctrines of limited state power, a free market economy, and the freedom of the individual person, it sapped, with its philosophical and ethical utilitarianism, the foundations of belief in an organic moral order. But the only possible basis of a respect for the integrity of the individual person and for the overriding value of his freedom is a belief in an organic moral order; and without such a respect the doctrines of political and economic liberty cannot stand.

Of course, Meyer, as he would five years later in his debate with Bozell in the pages of 1962, emphasized that freedom was still the first order principle for libertarian conservatives:

Political freedom, failing a broad personal acceptance of the obligation to duty and to charity, is never viable. Deprived of an understanding of the philosophical foundations of freedom, and exposed to the ravening of conscienceless marauders, men forget that they are fully men only to the degree that they are free to choose their destiny, and they tum towards whatever fallacy promises them welfare and order.

Meyer emphasized freedom from coercion and noted that while he respected the wisdom of the conservative opponents of the 19th century classical liberals, he believed that, “Sound though they were on the essentials of man's being, on his responsibility to seek virtue, and on his duty in the moral order, they failed too often to realize that the political condition of moral fulfillment is freedom from coercion.”

Meyer himself could have heeded the wisdom of the great American conservative of the 19th century, Orestes Brownson, who wrote in 1864 that:

The great misfortune of modern liberalism is, that it was begotten of impatience and born of a reaction against the tyranny and oppression, the licentiousness and despotism of governments and the governing classes; and it is more disposed to hate than to love, and is abler to destroy than to build up. Wherever you find it, it bears traces of its origin, and confides more in human passion than in divine Providence. The great majority of its adherents, even if they retain a vague and impotent religious sentiment, and pay some slight outward respect to the religion of their country … forget that it is precisely to introduce the elements of truth, justice, right, duty, conscience into the government of individuals and nations in this world, as the means of securing the next, that institutions of religion exist.

Here, Brownson reminds of one final and significant error within the framework of the Freedom Conservatives: their Whiggish tendencies. Sixty years ago, in Suicide of the West, James Burnham reminded conservatives that the historical optimism of liberals and their notion of historical development led them to believe there are solutions to social problems — that the "good society" can "actually be realized in this world."

Such Whiggism risks taking on the notions of Marquis de Condorcet of human plasticity and rationality and the notion that nature had "set no limits to the perfection of the human faculties" because the "perfectibility of mankind is truly indefinite." The desire towards "immanentizing the eschaton," as Eric Voegelin put it, was something that the greatest conservative minds of the 20th century warned against and is wisdom we should maintain now. " The natural limits of man, set by the bounds of original sin, must be part of any sound conservatism and thus, the historical progressivism of the so-called “New Whigs” attached to Freedom Conservatism must likewise be dismissed.

The final thing that Freedom Conservatives get wrong is that they lack interest in coalition building in favor of maintaining the purity of their ideological cause. Let us give the final word to the singular Whittaker Chambers, who in a letter to Ralph de Toledano in 1956, complained about the purity of Frank Meyer and its effect upon an effective conservative movement:

Is there some defect of my eyesight that makes it impossible for me to see things right? I ask because I have just been engaged in a lively controversy with [Bill] Buckley about Frank Meyer’s review of The Outsider. I hold that the review missed the point completely or deliberately dismissed it, thereby selling Colin Wilson to the Liberals or shutting another window on that stifling little room where conservatives huddle together and hear each other moan. By now, it is less a room than an air-raid shelter. With space and provisions so short, only the elect can beg entry. Once in, you are condemned to lifelong residence because, outside, the air is unbreathable to use whose lungs are pure, while the wells are contaminated and all ordinary food is death to touch because of the fall-out.

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