In an interview on Conservatism and Culture

You’ve got a third book from this period – talk about being an exile – by Garry Wills. Nixon Agonistes is obviously a landmark – why is it a landmark for you, though?

Wills was the writer who made me want to write about politics. It’s so creative and imaginative, just in the prose, that it has the power of the novel. At the same time, Wills asks these enormous questions. He’s really looking at the market, and our idea of liberty, and what it really means. It’s interesting because Wills wrote this book in a period of transition, he was moving from the right to the left. Wills was the most prized protégé of Bill Buckley and James Burnham. They thought he was the next genius, that he would lead conservatism into the promised land. In fact he had never been comfortable with some of the ideology. Wills was kind of a communitarian; he didn’t like Randian economics, for instance, or the Randian world view, or even any kind of economic individualism. He was always very suspicious of it, partly because he’s very religious, but also because Wills was in tune to all the subtle changes in the culture, just as Bellow and Updike were. The civil rights movement made a tremendous impression on him, as did the war in Vietnam. So he began to rethink his own first principles; why was he following Nixon around? He gives you the best, most vivid picture of Nixon you will ever read – Nixon physically, Nixon’s speech, Nixon’s ideas, Nixon’s background. Wills came from the right, so he understood that much of the protest of this period, in 1968, was coming from the right. He has a brilliant setpiece on George Wallace. Everyone else of this period was looking only at the new left, at the student radicals, the Black Panthers. Wills thought there was as much energy and danger coming from the far right as there was from the far left. So it gave a scope to that book that you won’t find anywhere else. I read this book every year.

Yes, for all the talk of the revolutionary movement on the left in the 1960s you had at least as strong and a much longer lasting one on the right, and very relevant to this day.

Rick Perlstein has gotten that pretty well. He saw that the Goldwater campaign of 1964 was a tremendous moment politically. What we sometimes forget is that it carries over into the 70s. Within the movement, Reagan’s campaign of 76 was really a high point – that was almost more important than his victory in 1980. It was in essence a kind of third party campaign which conservatives of the moment – Pat Buchanan, Kevin Phillips, Bill Rusher – were all calling for. They wanted Reagan to run as a third party candidate.

There’s this romantic notion of a kind of insurgent, revolutionary movement that’s going to change everything.

Modern conservatism has almost always been an insurgency within the Republican party. It goes back to Taft, the several campaigns he ran, and the election of 1952, which was bitter. That nomination fight was as bitter as any in modern American history. The National Review was founded with the idea of chasing the Eisenhower moderates out of the Republican party, and even possibly forming a third party instead.

What happens when you get an insurgency without the ideas or the intellectual energy behind it?

Then you get a kind of anarchy in my view, which is what we see now. At least in those days you had very serious-minded people like Wilmore Kendall, who was really Wills’s mentor as he was also Buckley’s, James Burnham, Whittaker Chambers himself, though he died in 61. Then, later, there was Buckley who understood the requirements of a civil society, that governance is actually a very conservative idea, because it keeps the anarchic impulses from running rampant. All these ideals that are being lost now…