In an interview on The appeal of conservatism

Nash is a classic, it’s fair to say. You have two books on your list that are more obscure and both are about the interaction between business and conservatism. The first is from 1951, by Robert Green McCloskey, American Conservatism in the Age of Enterprise 1865-1910. What do we have to learn from a book about the Age of Enterprise?

I put these books on this list partly as a provocation because I realise that most of the folks picking conservative books are inside the conservative movement. Since I’m not, I thought I would pick two provocative books. 

And the provocation is what?

The provocation is that conservatives often like to paint themselves as populists – when in fact much of their strongest support, financially certainly, comes from business people, often big business people, often business people resisting social reform, resisting trade union organisation. I think both these books make that clear. I found McCloskey very enlightening when I read him back in the 1990s because he offers real insight into two areas that I think are very important in understanding conservatism. One is the rise of social Darwinism. He talks a lot about William Graham Sumner. I always like to argue to my liberal friends that they ought to have a lot more sympathy for William Jennings Bryan than they do from simply watching Inherit the Wind about the Scopes trial – the reasons why Bryan resisted Darwin that went beyond a fundamentalist critique of science. Social Darwinism was, and still remains, in my view, a pernicious doctrine that saw the competition among classes as leading to the rise to the top of the worthiest people. It’s essentially a doctrine that preaches the futility of social reform – far better to let this often vicious struggle be carried out because, in the end, it strengthens societies. I never like to toss around the word fascist because it is over-used but I think that fascists did make use of some of these ideas later on to rationalise systems that democratic conservatives themselves would reject. I think that social Darwinism is important in our history and McCloskey gets at that. The other important area is the role of a very conservative Supreme Court in our history. He talks about Judge Stephen Field and I think in the debates we are about to have over what I see as increasingly activist courts, it is very useful, again – whatever side you are going to be on in these debates – to revisit the conservative activism in the courts in the Gilded Age. 

Stephen J Field was on the Supreme Court 1863 to 1897 and was a results-oriented champion of laissez-faire policies and property rights against all-comers, which is much more than social Darwinism.

I agree. In fact, I think the religious right is helpful to us collectively because I think the religious right does resist social Darwinism. I mean, I disagree with them in their view of evolution and the science curriculum but I think that their very Christian sense of compassion turns them off to any idea of social Darwinism and I think that’s a positive good. 

It’s interesting that one of McCloskey’s subjects – the others being Sumner and Stephen Field – is Andrew Carnegie, who was famous for saying that wealth ought to be used philanthropically, that a man should not die rich. 

Right. Andrew Carnegie was a promoter of the self-made person and he did do wonderful things. There is a public library in my hometown of Fall River, Massachusetts that is one of those Carnegie libraries that carries the famous inscription on the top that he put on many of his other libraries – The People’s University. Again, it’s one of the reasons I recommended Nash first, despite my sometimes embattled relationship in my column with conservatism: I have a lot of respect for conservative ideas and I think that those conservatives who did take their social obligation seriously did a lot of good for the country. Another book I might have put on this list was William F Buckley’s book Gratitude, which is a wonderful book on the importance of service. I think that there are many varieties of conservatism and what Buckley says about the obligation of gratitude partly does come from his Catholic Christian roots. I think it’s an orientation toward life that ends up being a fundamentally generous orientation. Which is why I always try and teach my children – never judge people by their politics if you happen to disagree with them.