Sarah Bramwell

The Philadelphia Society 40^th Gala! National Meeting
May 1, 2004

In your program, you will read that I am a freelance writer. This was true at the time the program was printed, but it is no longer. I am in the employ of Colorado Governor Bill Owens as his deputy press secretary. I tell you this not only because of the obvious benefits of self-aggrandizement, but because my position obliges me to say that the following opinions are my own, and do not reflect those of the Governor. 

Modern American conservatism began in an effort to do two things: defeat Communism and roll back creeping socialism. A half century later, these goals are no longer relevant. The first was obviated by our success, the latter by our failure. So what is left of conservatism? 

Many conservatives, especially since September 11, believe that a major, if not the major calling of conservatives today is to articulate and defend a certain brand of international grand strategy. Let me say that I believe this view to be not only mistaken, but quite possibly harmful to the conservative movement. 

It is mistaken because the truth of the matter is that conservatism neither has nor ought to have a particular foreign policy. I certainly do not mean to say that conservatives should cease to be interested in foreign policy. But the role of conservatives qua conservatives in foreign policy, as in every other area, is to resist the temptations of ideology. Everything else, like so much in politics, is a matter of prudence and judgment, on which there is wide room for legitimate disagreement. 

I suspect that confusion exists today on this rather elementary point in large part because the Cold War created an artificial situation in which all conservatives agreed on the same foreign policy goal and strategy. Communism was an armed, international ideology that threatened to obliterate civilization. All conservatives, therefore, were obliged to fight it and buck up the West’s resolve in the struggle against the Soviet Union. In sum, anti-Communism was not a question on which conservatives could reasonably disagree, but an essential conservative principle. 

No similar principle, however, exists today. Despite this, many conservatives have continued the Cold War habit of making foreign policy into an ideological battle. On one side we have conservatives who believe that the United States has a moral obligation to spread democracy anywhere and everywhere around the globe; on the other, we have conservatives who believe that an activist foreign policy betrays conservatism’s isolationist or “America First” roots. 

Neither view will wash. Isolationism in the 1930s was nothing but a logical deduction from conservative anti-Communism. Right-wingers argued against intervening in World War II because Nazi Germany, as unappealing as it was, thwarted Stalin’s ambitions. With Nazi Germany gone, therefore, hardly a single conservative isolationist remained by the time the Cold War was in full swing. All quondam isolationists either died like Nock, or converted, like Buckley. 

Isolationism, in other words, was a strategy, not a guiding principle. Today, it wears a no less utopian guise than pro-democracy triumphalism. What do we do, after all, with our myriad deployments and alliances around the world? To back out on them all immediately would be disastrous. It is all very well and good to say that in some Platonic Empyrean the United States would only worry about its own liberty and not that of others, but here in our fallen state, such a scenario is unimaginable. 

We likewise have no moral obligation to spread democracy around the world. After all, democracy is not even the best form of government. Conservatives, together with the weight of the Western tradition, have always favored a mixed constitution that balances the interests of the one, the few, and the many. It goes without saying that “We must make the world safe for mixed constitutions” is not the most euphonious rallying cry. 

None of this is to say that some form of isolationist or interventionist foreign policy cannot be endorsed by conservatives. On the contrary, my very point is that both policies could be seen as properly conservative grand strategies for achieving American interests. For some time now, conservatives have enjoyed the liberty to disagree on important questions of foreign policy. What I would like to see is that we be allowed to do so without fear that someone else in the movement will declare us anathema.

My own opinion is that while Islamist-inspired terrorism is the most immediate threat to our security, in the long term our major struggle is against the international class of technocrats that in the name of “international law” seeks to efface our bitterly-won rights to self-government. Conservatives must fashion a strategy not only against terrorism but also against the international New Class, and our strategy for defeating the one must not be inconsistent with our strategy for defeating the other. 

In any case, the important point is once again that articulating and defending some kind of international policy is not the major goal of conservatism in the next forty years. How about the second founding goal of the conservative movement, namely, halting creeping socialism? Like it or not, the administrative state is here to stay. Conservatives can continue to nibble away at it, and the past decade has seen a small wave of reforms that leaves one with some modest hope for the future. We’re not going to abolish social security, but we are going to see private health accounts that give Americans more freedom. The public-school system will clatter along in all its disastrousness, but charter schools will become more and more popular. These and other improvements on the margins should continue, but there are other things that are more important. 

So, when the two founding goals are no longer relevant, what is left for us as conservatives to do? Well, since the 1960s, the conservative movement took on a third goal, namely winning the culture wars. By culture wars, I mean everything from preserving traditional morality, to passing on the Western inheritance, to preserving a distinctly American common culture, to resisting the threat posed by biotechnology to human nature itself. To win these wars, conservatives must make the case against such things as gay marriage, stem-cell research, open borders, and our hideous suburban sprawl. All these battles are really part of the same war—a war, unfortunately, that we seem determined to lose. 

Since my time is limited, I’d like to examine our losing ways by looking only at one issue: gay marriage. In college, even as we conservatives would lament the inglorious decline of the West, even as we steeped ourselves in doom-and-gloom conservatism like so many Romans in their baths, still we could not help but be mightily optimistic about the future of conservatism. Never had conservatives at Yale been so many and so active; never had conservatives had such a wealth of opportunities for writing, bringing in speakers, and influencing the debate on campus. 

And yet in the past nine months, this has all appeared quite hollow to me. Why? Because of the amazing disappearing act conservatives have pulled in the face of gay marriage. After so many advances, it seems, we have rolled over and played dead. 

The most rigorous and intellectually impressive conservative writers—the ones we depended upon to articulate the conservative position on such controversial issues as stem cells, abortion, and affirmative action—have, it seems, been struck dumb. They have relegated themselves to reporting on the political reaction to gay marriage or critiquing the vicissitudes of federal marriage amendment proposals. Virtually everyone has avoided the basic issue of whether sodomy ought to be normalized. 

It used to be that, when challenged in the culture wars, conservatives only gain in strength. The conservative movement benefited greatly from an infusion of intellectual firepower and initiative from disenchanted liberals and democrats during the 1960s and ’70s. Ronald Reagan extended this crossover effect into the political arena, solidifying the intellectual gains that conservatism had made in a very public and concrete way. Conservatism has continued boisterously to defy the aftershocks of the 60s and 70s. 

Now, by contrast, as gay marriage becomes a reality, we have amazingly only become weaker. I have no idea what accounts for this extraordinary lack of nerve. What I do know is that no sooner had the Lawrence decision come down from on high but conservatives, discouraged before the battle had even begun, lamented the inevitability of gay marriage, posited a new world of alternative arrangements, and even urged that family law be in some sense privatized. It seemed that the fighting spirit had all of a sudden departed from even the most reliable conservative organs. 

That few prominent conservative thinkers and writers are making the intellectually difficult and socially risky case against homosexualism has had a devastating effect. Thousands of conservatives—college students, housewives, activists, even President Bush and members of Congress—rely on the pundit class to make the controversial arguments not just so that they know what to think and say, but because the pundit class has given them the intellectual cover to do so. The most important job of polemicists is constantly to move—or, at the very least, defend—the boundaries of debate. In effect, they are expanding and securing the perimeter for the footsoldiers to occupy. Well, when the advance guard goes AWOL, the whole conservative side in the culture wars collapses. 

To say that the institution of marriage is important to Western civilization and therefore worth fighting for is an understatement. And yet when this institution is under attack as never before in Western history, conservatives are silent. One need look no further than the covers and tables of contents of the most prominent conservative journals for evidence of this. Of 50 articles, probably 40 of them will be on the War on Terror, and only two or three on gay marriage. This is the cultural battle of our age, and we write an article here and there on the subject. There is no precedent for this disappearing act in the history of the conservative movement. 

This is precisely what the other side wants. This is a fight, mind you, not only for traditional sexual morality, but for the very liberty that conservatives have always prided themselves on defending. With the advent of government-mandated gay marriage, what is taught in the public schools will change: gay sex will have to be taught just as heterosexual sex is. The words “husband” and “wife” will have to go. Meanwhile, the full power of federal anti-discrimination laws will be brought to bear, making discrimination against gays illegal. Catholic charities and Christian schools may be forced to hire and teach against their religion. I am not being hysterical, for these things have already come to pass in other Western nations. Sure, we have the free speech clause of the First Amendment to protect us, but that only goes so far, and it is subject to the vagaries of Supreme Court interpretation. There is a chance that we conservatives will no longer even be allowed our saving remnant, much less be a major political and moral force. 

Once we lose the gay marriage fight, the hard-won gains that have been made with regard to traditional sexual morality will be lost. How do you argue for abstinence and monogamy when there’s a whole population of people who can get married but don’t bother? Once heterosexual and homosexual sex are equated, all the arguments for traditional sexual morality—from prudence, from nature, from religion—collapse. 

So, where do I think conservatism will be in the next 40 years? I must confess that I am not exactly full of hope. The danger in the next 40 years is not losing the battles but, for want of fighting them, becoming irrelevant. 

The issues with which we will grapple in the coming decades—chief among them cloning and other matters biotechnological—will require our focus and our unity. If we can but put aside our differences for a while, we stand a chance. If we cannot, then we don’t deserve that chance. 

Thank you.