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Fall 2012

A Road Not Taken

A conversation with Michael Brendan Dougherty
Interviewed by Gerald J. Russello
In a pair of recent articles for the American Conservative, Michael Brendan Doughertywho may
also be the only conservative to grace the Apollo Theater stagehas been exploring a path not taken
by the Republican Party, but which could have been taken in 1992 with Patrick J. Buchanan's
electrifying speech at the Republican National Convention. In that speech, Buchanan asked his
fellow Republicans to connect with conservatives of the heart, those Americans who wanted to
preserve the lives they had built in their own communities and who had little taste for the extended
military entanglements without clear objectives, capitalist destruction, and big-company welfare that
has seemed to define the party since then. In a sense Buchanan was simply defending what he had
been defending since his years with Nixon: the New Majority, a subject described with great skill by
Dougherty.

Thanks for sitting down with us today. What was the genesis for your article on Buchanan and the
New Majority?
Well, the American Conservative celebrated its tenth anniversary this November and because Mr.
Buchanan was so important to the founding and to the continuing mission of the magazine, Dan
McCarthy and I thought it might be profitable to reconnect our readers (and ourselves) with his
thought in a more thorough way.
Also, I suppose I had been re-reading his books and I came to see that to define him as a paleoconservative was a kind of injustice. It just seems like too small a label. If you look at his books going
back to his days with Nixon, I think you can see that he is less interested in some kind of finely tuned
ideology and more interested in the will of a new electoral majority that was supplanting the New
Deal Coalition as the dominant one in our politics.
Lastly, it was our guess that Romney would go down to defeat, and that it would be time for
conservatives to reflect on how they lost their majority.
You make an interesting point that Buchanan, while a leading conservative, was not really in the

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movement, and suggest that a conservative electoral majority may not have much connection with
the congeries of think-tanks, institutes, and publications many think of as conservatism. What in your
view is the connection between this intellectual and policy apparatus and a Buchanan-like electorate?
Yes. I thought that was interesting. Although there are no typical paleo-conservatives, the feeling
among that type is that somehow the conservative movement was stolen from them. But Buchanan
told me in our interview that he just thought so much of what amounted to the movement was a
waste of time: babbling was the word he used.
I think the influence of conservative movement institutions in America is wildly overstatedby
conservatives in the movement, by liberals on the outside of it, by everyone, really. There is a certain
subset of Republican voters who like the ideological instruction and entertainment provided by these
outlets.
But the type of person involved in the conservative movement is unrepresentative of the conservative
electorate as a whole. The average ideological worker went to and graduated from a good college. He
is a Bobo in taste and style, and he is unlikely to have ever worked with his hands. He is more likely
to be a convinced Catholic or a convinced atheist; sometimes this last bit depends on his romantic
prospects.
The New Majority that excited Buchanan as a thinker and operative was something much bigger
than the conservative movement.
The New Majority was a combination of white ethnics, Protestantsespecially evangelicals, and
Catholics like Buchanans own family. Does that coalition even exist anymore? If not, why not?
I think it still exists, but it would be unable to grant the kind of forty-nine-state majorities that Nixon
and Reagan won. Catholics cohere less and less as a bloc of voters unless you separate out those that
attend Mass once a week. But once youve done that youre describing the real divide in American
politics: White married couples who attend church and have children are much more likely to be
Republicans. Single women, immigrants, blacks, and the unchurched are disproportionately
Democrats. That McGovern coalition that the New Majority used to trounce is growing larger and
larger every day.
Your colleague Dan McCarthy recently wrote about outsider conservatism, arguing that the history
of conservatism is more inclusive and flexible than its detractors (and some proponents) suggest. Is
there a way to bring back a New Majority message with such groups as Hispanics or AfricanAmerican voters?
I tend to give strange answers to this question. On one level, McCarthy is absolutely right that the
conservative intellectual tradition really did stand against the conformist forces of modernity. But in
my view that kind of modernism seems to be going away. The Organization Man is probably dead for
good. As someone who has recently fallen in love with the Yankee conservatism of the Adams family, I
tend to think that if conservatism has a mission now it may be in impressing a certain character on
Americas elite. But thats another conversation.
Could the GOP find a more diverse electorate? And could this diverse electorate empower conservative
reforms? I think in the long term the answer is yes, but Im pessimistic about the short term. Parties
tend to long outlive their electorates, so I dont think that if the GOP loses its grip on Texas (to take
an example) it will be rapidly heading toward extinction. I see prospects for the GOP in the Northeast

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for instance. But until the GOP can learn to win votes in cities, it is still a remote possibility.
My guess is that the Republican party will continue to get whiter and older. Ethnically and racially
diverse democracies tend to have tribal politics, and the Republican party has become a kind of
desiccated husk for the New Majority. It reflects their fears of cultural and economic dispossession
while doing little or nothing to halt that process, or to reconcile their constituents to a more diverse
United States. As the GOP becomes whiter, I fear that its political antagonism to a wildly diverse
Democratic party will increase racial antagonism generally.
There are probably several ways of interrupting that process. Most everyone thinks the GOP should
reach out to the growing Hispanic population as the best bang for the buck. I think it is more
natural for a conservative party to reach out to African-Americans as a first step of reaching urban
voters generally. They are more churched, and as America becomes more diverse they are the minority
that stands to lose the most. Conservatism as an intellectual tradition is the right vehicle for
preserving the voice and the concerns of Americas oldest minority.
Your point about African-Americans is an interesting one. During the recent election, Republicans
were often accused of making subtle (or not so subtle) racial innuendo, yet since at least Reagan
conservatives have in fact opposed a lot of ways liberalism seeks to divide and organize along racial
lines. Are the accusations fair, and how can Republicans revivify their color-blind conservative
message?
This is a complicated question. At the abstract level, I think intellectual conservatives should
understand that in a mass democracy, the conservative appeal may always have a tinge of fear and
hatred for those below or outside. At the same time, liberals have to accept that their policies,
however justly conceived, may be sold with resentment and envy. Thats a problem of mass democracy,
not conservatism or liberalism. It is a problem that has to be carefully managed.
Granting the above, I dont think liberals are wrong to point out the jagged racial edge to some
conservative politicking. Look at some of the commentary by conservatives about black voters during
the era of Obama: Oh, they just want handouts. This is a disgusting sentiment and one that makes
anything that might appeal to black voters about conservatism toxic by association.
Most conservatives like to think that they have principles that are color-blind: the eternal verities and
such. I think this is a kind of self-flattery that excuses historical ignorance on our part. Enslavement
stripped Africans of their ethnicities, their languages, and their religion. That means more than any
one other group in this country African-Americans are a people created by the history of our nation
and its politics: commerce, slavery, the Civil War, emancipation, the civil rights movement. It is a
navet bordering on psychosis to suggest that black politics should conform to some imagined
color-blind set of principles. Just junk that and start reaching out into the black community. I sense a
real hunger on their part for political competition for their vote and support.
There is an absolutely electrifying intellectual tradition of black self-sufficiency and independence that
is a good fit within a big-tent conservatism. And it is larger than Booker T. Washington. Zora Neal
Hurston endorsed Robert Taft in the 1950s. Malcolm X was in many ways both more radical than
King and more conservative too. This tradition is not at all color-blind, but it is localist,
communitarian, religious (Muslim and Christian), and entrepreneurial. I also think conservatives
should start political discussions on our drug war, on prison reform, and on policing that can and
should help us re-connect with African Americans.

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The Republican Party since 1992 has seemed to erase its differences with liberalism on a number of
issues, from military interventions to immigration to free trade. Is this a case of the party being
co-opted by liberals or simply cowed into not arguing for the principles Buchanan represents?
Here is where things get complicated. The modern American conservative movement has always been
in favor of free trade as part of its hostility to taxes and the federal government generally.
Neo-liberalism has moved much of the machinery of the left in favor of free trade as part of their
cheerleading for globalization, third-world development, and prosperity generally. Buchanans
opposition to free-trade and immigration is due to his stalwart loyalty to the political coalition of the
New Majority. He saw that working-class whites and their living standards were threatened from
above by changes to trade policy, and from below by competition from low-skilled and semi-skilled
immigrants.
On these two issues of immigration and free trade, if the Republican party was co-opted at all, it was
by ideological conservatives who favor both.
What do you think Buchanans legacy will be, and do you see any successors?
It is hard to know what he will be to the future. Some will just pour obloquy on him, of course, and
for the usual reasons. He may be seen simply as a failed populist presidential candidate, a kind of
historical echo of Bryan. He should certainly be remembered as the man who named the culture
war that still is at the heart of our political differences today; he really did define the battle. I also
think he does represent a road not taken by the Republican party.
He has no successors, at least not complete ones. There is something of his populist antagonism that
suffuses the whole conservative movement, but very little of his more reflective side. For a time Ann
Coulter wrote as sharply (if not as well-educated or as wisely) as he did. As I wrote in my article, he
stands somewhere between the tub-thumpers and the Big-Name Intellectual Cassandras on the right.
Intellectually he is far, far beyond the old columnists like Pegler, but not quite in the league of a writer
like Oswald Spengler.
Posted: November 25, 2012 in Interviews.

Copyright 20072016 The Russell Kirk Center for Cultural Renewal

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