Reagan Was Wrong

When Henry Fairlie came to America, the editors of this magazine deemed his arrival sufficiently momentous to run a page-long story about him. The 42-year-old writer had been called "the most controversial political journalist in England" and "the first of the Angry Young Men" for his piercing and heterodox columns in the British press—including his most celebrated one, in which he coined the term "the establishment." After his 1966 move to the United States, he would write some of the liveliest and most provocative essays of his time about what NEWSWEEK called "the American scene."

Fairlie's sharp eye, stylish pen and outsider's perspective let him capture why he loved this country (our freedom, our gadgets, the endless space) and attack us natives for how we sell it short (our wavering belief in America's greatness, our uptight yuppie ways). Even now, decades later, these pieces hold up beautifully: while editing a new anthology of his work, Bite the Hand That Feeds You:Essays and Provocations, I found funny, timeless examples of his writing in The New Republic, The Washington Post, The New Yorker and other papers and magazines that published him.

Read today, when America's political ideologies are in flux, some of these arguments turn out to be surprisingly, urgently timely. Fairlie arrived when the Republican Party was regrouping in the wake of Barry Goldwater's loss, and he lived long enough (until 1990) to see it assume power under Ronald Reagan. The trajectory horrified him. For Fairlie—a lifelong, if idiosyncratic, Tory—the ideology that came to dominate American conservatism after World War II didn't live up to America's best traditions. It was, in fact, no conservatism at all. He didn't explicitly predict that in 2009 we'd watch this ideology fall rather spectacularly to pieces, but he knew it couldn't last long. When a rudderless Republican Party seems in danger of humiliating itself to death, Fairlie—a conservative who saw from the era's beginning how badly it was going to end—deserves a fresh hearing.

Fairlie was no theorist. And while he wrote five books—including The Kennedy Promise, an early, critical account of the Camelot years—he wasn't a pamphleteer. He was a freelancer, a position he held for nearly 40 years. This choice was rooted in principle, because he demanded the independence to write what he wanted when he wanted. It was also a function of his genius for burning bridges. (He drank, had endless affairs and distilled his relationships with editors and proprietors to the title of his unfinished memoir, Bite the Hand That Feeds You.) So Fairlie's critique of American conservatism needs to be assembled from pieces scattered over several decades and many publications. He stated its theme most clearly in an essay for Harper's in 1984: "The fundamental and persistent weakness of American conservatism is that it is not nourished by any distinct tory spirit."

Fairlie's views of toryism, like his views of most things (America, women, Parliament, Scotch), were deeply romantic. He described his kind of conservative as one who stands alongside "the King and the People, against the barons and the capitalists." In other words, government's role was to preserve tradition and social order, not to speed the accumulation of great power and wealth among the elites or to enact sudden or overreaching reforms. He warmed to this view as a boy, when summers on a family farm in Scotland taught him that "nothing very much changes, and then changes only slowly." He refined it as an adult, coming to revere the leadership of Winston Churchill, whom he called "the greatest tory of them all," and absorb the writings of Michael Oakeshott, "the most formative conservative political thinker of his generation." When he arrived in America, he expected to find conservatives with similar beliefs. Instead he found the Republicans.

Fairlie's critique of American conservatism began with a GOP heresy: that by embracing the free market so completely, the party had gone calamitously awry. "The conservative can all too easily drift into a morally bankrupt and intellectually shallow defense of those who have it made and those who are on the make," he wrote. Without a humanizing tory influence, conservatives were apt to forget "the ugly face of capitalism"—the way that the market tends to coarsen and destabilize society, making the gross national product fodder for our "gross national appetite." Republicans, he argued, could never succeed in uniting the country as long as they supported business interests so completely with both their policy choices and their rhetoric: "The nation cannot be brought to you, as if it were Masterpiece Theatre, by a grant from Mobil Oil," he wrote.