Conservatives Must Understand Where They Went Wrong Before They Can Go RightIn Claes Ryn’s latest book, The Failure of American Conservatism And the Road Not Taken, the esteemed professor chronicles how conservative intellectuals denigrated history and tradition to America’s detriment.By: Nathanael Blake
August 28, 2023
The thing about greatest hits is that they are usually pretty good. And Claes Ryn’s new book, The Failure of American Conservatism and the Road Not Taken, is no exception. The volume collects articles, essays, and book excerpts spanning the decades of Ryn’s distinguished career as an academic and public intellectual, and it provides a compelling diagnosis of where the right went wrong. It also offers a valuable contrast with Patrick Deneen’s disappointing new book, Regime Change, which is suspicious, even hostile, toward our founding. In contrast, Ryn roots his conservatism within our constitutional order, battered and besieged though it may be.
To be sure, and as Ryn notes in an extended introduction, conservatism was “up against high odds in a deteriorating civilization.” The shame of conservatism’s failure is not in defeat itself but rather in “the way in which it perceived and handled those odds.” In particular, Ryn demonstrates that many of conservatism’s failures to conserve are due to supposed conservative leaders who embraced anti-conservative ideology. Indeed, rather than republishing his own writings, Ryn could have proven this point by simply quoting Bill Kristol’s tweets, with a reminder that Kristol was once considered a leading conservative intellectual.
However, Ryn’s curated work offers further wisdom for conservatives from a source whose credibility was earned by having been right when many others were going wrong. I began my graduate studies with Ryn — taking many classes with him and eventually writing my dissertation under his direction — at the tail end of the George W. Bush presidency, and the events of those years particularly vindicated his long opposition to neoconservatism.
Even setting aside all of his other accomplishments, Ryn ought to be honored for his prophetic understanding of how the intellectual and moral failures of the neocons would lead to political and policy disasters. As this book demonstrates, he made this case to both scholarly and lay audiences through lucid and compelling prose that was a model of bringing philosophical insight to bear on politics.
Leo Strauss vs. TraditionPhilosophical questions about the nature of truth, reason, and history have political implications and effects. By the end of the Reagan years, Ryn had identified the fundamental flaws of neoconservatism, which he traced to philosophical failures by the influential political theorist Leo Strauss and his many disciples. As Ryn observed, “When it comes to addressing questions of moral universality and right, Strauss asserted, history and tradition lack all authority.” This position was presented as anti-relativist, and even among conservative intellectuals, there was “little awareness of the radically anti-conservative implications of Straussian anti-historicism.”
Many on the right saw Straussian appeals to universal principles and absolute truth as a bulwark against moral relativism, which is why they swallowed Strauss’s rejection of history and tradition. But we are finite, fallible beings. We do not grasp the good, the true, and the beautiful in the abstract perfection of supposedly universal philosophical propositions but rather within the particularities of our historical existence. It is not relativism to acknowledge the limits of our capacities to apprehend, articulate, and instantiate moral truth. Rather, as conservatives of all people ought to know, this is an important part of the moral life, which must be lived in the here and now, rather than an abstract realm of universal propositions.
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Source:
https://thefederalist.com/2023/08/28/conservatives-must-understand-where-they-went-wrong-before-they-can-go-right/
