Nearly two-thirds of the way into Norman Mailer’s classic work, Armies of the Night – an autobiographical third-person account of the 1967 “March on the Pentagon” protest against the Vietnam War – Mailer turns a memorable phrase. He calls himself a “Left conservative.” The novel term was, characteristically for Mailer, more richly suggestive than precise. But his striking moniker hits the central chord of our time.
“Left conservative” connotes an emphasis on material and historical conditions, and on intangible values that transcend history. Those are the two fundamental spheres of life. To put it more concretely: the parent who worries about affording precious goods like healthcare and college, and is drawn to a politics that calls on government to guarantee both, yet who feels helpless and enraged when they are accused of belonging to a group associated with injustice in the distant past is, very possibly, a left conservative. The person who wants a radical restructuring of taxes in order to channel more money into affordable housing, yet who is chilled by the stigmatising of religion in modern life could well be a left conservative.
The phrase, and the politics it entails, is now the holy grail of America politics. Across the country, Americans are striving to resist the erosive speed of cultural change, even as they protest intensifying inequalities of wealth, and the accelerating elusiveness of healthcare, housing and higher education. They want the ballast of tradition and stable values, existing outside the pressures of government and the marketplace, and they want government to regulate the marketplace and make it more humane. Desiring both goals at the same time would explode the brain of a liberal on the one hand and a conservative on the other. But it is the way most people live their lives. That is why, as the November election proved, the terms “liberal” and “conservative” no longer apply to American politics.
Politics, in America at least, seems to have entered a syncretic phase, much like the religious sects and cults competing for dominance during the disintegration of the Roman Empire. That resolved itself in what you might call the left conservatism of early Christianity, in which the sustenance of the poor through charity existed alongside the institutional social discipline of the early church. Human beings need food, shelter, and meaning. They need, that is to say, the skills and techniques to master the world around them enough to survive and flourish in it. But they also need “interdicting” (to borrow a term from Philip Rieff) values to help them accept the limitations of their mastery, in order not to destroy the world around them. Which brings us to Christopher Lasch, Steve Bannon and Donald Trump.
A 20th-century political theorist of striking originality and iconoclasm, Lasch might seem in a different intellectual universe to Bannon, or Bannon’s political tribune. But in their different ways, all three men are connected to the electric current of our historical moment. It was Lasch who first established left conservatism as an intellectual style, notably in the books The Culture of Narcissism: American Life in an Age of Diminishing Expectations and The Revolt of the Elites and the Betrayal of Democracy – works that were beguiling in their independence, increasingly influential after Lasch’s death and entirely frustrating in their dearth of practical effect.
Lasch’s thought is complex, but it can be summed up briskly. A man of the old left, he came to loathe the way progressives rejected the lessons in limitations and humility taught by history; he himself said he preferred hope based on past experience to an optimism fuelled by a rigid idea of the future. He scorned the progressive faith in rationalist programmes for endless social mutations (its prescriptions for raising perfect children, for example) and its relentless drive to put “self-improvement” – e.g the present movement to cleanse the individual of all bias, prejudice and unkindness – at the heart of civic life.
Lasch saved his most scathing analysis for the liberals’ creation of a “therapeutic culture” (again, a phrase coined by Philip Rieff) that medicalises acts of will and minimises personal responsibility. Its later iteration is the vogue of attributing to individual “trauma” actions that might well have their origin in character; that is to say, in an irreparable moral quality rather than a fixable accident of development. These principled aversions were the “conservative” side of Lasch, which could sometimes take a turn into stern biblical intensity.
The “left” side of him could be no less ringed with fire. He was repelled by the way liberalism comfortably fused with market forces, turning out individuals estranged from a sense of community, cut off from tradition and driven by appeals to appetite – alienated figures who turn to consumption for connection and fulfilment. As for the corporations that dominate so much of contemporary life, Lasch wrote that they, “put a premium on the manipulation of interpersonal relations, discourage the formation of deep personal attachments and at the same time provide the narcissist with the approval he needs in order to validate his self-esteem”. He was as opposed to Reagan’s supply-side cant (“a society dominated by the free market, in which the ‘American dream’ means making a bundle, has small place for ‘family values’”) as he was to identity politics (“in practice, diversity turns out to legitimise a new dogmatism, in which rival minorities take shelter behind a set of beliefs impervious to rational discussion”).
Nor did he cotton to William F. Buckley’s fusion of free-market capitalism with Catholic precepts. To the extent that he valued religion, Lasch disdained the idea of, as he wrote, “a just, loving, and all-powerful creator”. That, in his eyes, was as deluded a mental construction as the rationalist liberal faith in the perfectibility of humankind. Lasch embraced what he called “the central paradox of religious faith: that the secret of happiness lies in renouncing the right to be happy”. He also meant that for secular liberals, who believe that history marches inexorably towards happiness.
Left conservatism runs through American intellectual life like a counter-motion to the polarities of American politics. Again, it runs parallel to how most people experience and navigate everyday life, which to say as a fluid mix of “liberal” and “conservative” sentiments. You could take as left conservatism’s intellectual starting point the work of Philip Rieff, who believed in the necessity of authority as custodian of rich, erotic, secret private life. Or you could begin with Lasch, who quarrelled, in his writing, brilliantly with Rieff. The line would extend through, in no particular order, Daniel Bell, Hannah Arendt, Ralph Ellison, Eugene Genovese, David Rieff (Philip’s son), Alan Wolfe, Stanley Crouch, to mention a few. The non-ideology had, for a while, an unofficial headquarters of sorts in the literary back pages of the old incarnation of the New Republic magazine.
That is the intellectual context. Perhaps the most astounding development in American intellectual history is the way left conservatism escaped, as it were, from the laboratory of American intellectual life into American politics. Steve Bannon, whose odious but formidable talent has been to marshal into action Lasch’s analysis of the social and cultural havoc wreaked on American autonomy by the liberal mania for control, has written of his fondness for Lasch’s Revolt of the Elites. Lasch’s belief that liberal mandarins have cut themselves off from the values and traditions that motivate and protect the working class is everywhere to be found in Bannon’s influence on Trump. Lasch himself, however, would hardly have embraced the way his contempt for the therapeutic society has led to MAGA’s contempt for scientific authority in general; he would have rejected Bannon’s agitation of rather than ministration to the working class. And he would be been revolted by Trump’s own revolt against the elites, consisting as it does of a visceral intolerance for any system of values that does not exalt Trump’s centrality and his superiority. Lasch would have seen right through the sham of Trump’s “populism.”
For all that, the ideas of Lasch, who believed in the persistence of the past into the present, might still serve as the occasion for a political rebirth after a year of defeat and dissolution for the progressive left as it has organised itself for about a decade. In that case, history could well begin as farce and end, not in tragedy, but in a liberating display of mistaken identity. What Trump’s advent and ascent might mean, in the riot of syncretic American meta-politics now, is that a true left conservative could be waiting in, and perhaps even on, history’s wings.
Yet there is one stubborn problem with a left conservatism: woven as it is into the rhythms of the quotidian, it is closer to the moral, even to the poetic, than to the political imagination. It shies away from noisy praxis and draws naturally toward a quiet green shade in which to reflect. Here is an example, taken almost at random from the collective wisdom of our species, in this case from Yeats, who mischievously claimed to have found it in an “old play”: “In dreams begin responsibilities.” Never was a truer liberal sentiment uttered. Never was a truer conservative sentiment uttered. If only politics could reflect on it and absorb the line’s wisdom before starting its scrimmage. But it could well be that “left conservative” is so redundant with being human that a politics founded on it would not know where to begin.
[See also: Twilight of the American elite]
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