The American Conservative Movement; J. Chamberlain

501 A REVIEWER'S NOTEBOOK The American Conservative Movement by John Chamberlain B efore he was elected to the U.S. Senate, the late John P. East of North Carolina was a professor of political science. A man of great scholarly attainments, he took time out from active politicking to produce a book, The American Conservative Movement (Washington, D.C.: Regnery, 279 pp., $18.95), about the seminal thinkers he consid ered most responsible for the resurgence of the American conservative movement. His choices were seven scholars: Russell Kirk, Richard Weaver, Frank Meyer, Willmoore Kendall, Leo Strauss, Eric Voegelin, and Ludwig von Mises. In investigating his seven choices, East dis covered that they had a most important common religious denominator. They were one with Plato in accepting the certainty of a myste rious creator who was responsible for man as he is, a creature capable of "ascent" but also prone to lapses. Some of the seven were Chris tians, some preferred to let their belief in a cre ator stand without reference to Christ and the Incarnation. As for Mises, who wrote purely as an economist, he said his classical liberalism had never pretended to be more than a philos ophy of earthly life. Even so, he said' 'it is not to be denied that the loftiest theme that human thought can set for itself is reflection on ulti mate questions . . . the liberals do not disdain the intellectual and spiritual aspirations of man."

Since Senator East's seven thought as one on first principles, there is an inevitable repetition in their biographies. But the surprising thing is that minor differences make for some rather ex citing cross currents of argument. Frank Meyer, for example, who became a Roman Catholic before his death, had bones to pick with Russell Kirk on the subject of Ed mund Burke. He conceded that Burke was right in standing against the excesses of the French Revolution. But if Burke had lived at the time of the so-called Glorious Revolution in the Britain of 1688, he would have been wrong to stand on what Meyer calls "the multitudinous wrappings of code and custom." The New Conservative, said Meyer, "is shaped by such words as 'Authority,' 'order,' 'community,' 'duty,' 'obedience.' 'Freedom' is a rare word; 'the individual' is anathema. The realities of this suggested society are a mixture of those of eighteenth century England and medieval Europe-or perhaps, more aptly, they are those of Plato's Republic with the phi losopher-king replaced by the squire and the vicar. "

For all his contentiousness, Frank Meyer took it upon himself to hold libertarians, clas sical liberals, and conservatives old and new together when they went to the polls. East doesn't think Meyer should be called a "fu sionist" (he was, at the last, a Christian thinker). But he realized that there were practi calities involved when it came to elections. Willmoore Kendall was another fractious soul when it came to differing with colleagues on subservient matters. A believer in close tex tual analysis, Kendall was convinced that John Locke, the instigator of the peaceful 1688 re502 THE FREEMAN. DECEMBER 1988 volt against· the arbitrary Stuart kings, was a "majoritarian. " That was enough to damn Locke in Kendall's eyes. But the American Founding Fathers, who, like Locke, were fighting the presumption of a king to tax as he chose, were not worried by Locke's majori tarian views. They were sure that, with proper exemptions in a Bill of Rights, no majority would ever dare to discriminate against minori ties in a way that might deny the "rights of Englishmen. "