Reagan Was Wrong

Fairlie didn't assail American conservatives because he was a liberal in Burke's clothing: he was just as quick to castigate the Democrats when they screwed up, and with just as much spiky humor. But however much they erred, he argued, the Democrats remained "the normal governing party of the most powerful and most restless free nation in the world." The vital difference between the parties lay in their views of government itself. Like many Democrats, he believed that the political realm was the only place where a free people could contend with the tyrannies of all the other realms—especially the economic one. Even after reporting on political malfeasance in more than a dozen countries on three continents, Fairlie insisted that politics was "essentially good" and politicians "the most hopeful messengers of a society's will to improve."

Conservatives, by contrast, showed an infuriating hostility for Washington, nothing like the "gusto" brought to politics by Fairlie's beloved FDR. "The Reaganite conservative does not trust the political system, and so is always trying to circumvent it; he does not trust the instincts of Congress, but places profound faith in the wisdom of the executive if he is in charge; he does not trust the deep religious instinct of a people, unless it is decked out in the tawdry costume of a minute of silent prayer in school. The only loyalty that eight years of Reaganite conservatism has inspired is of each to the country of his self." Extend Fairlie's argument to the present, and Dick Cheney, with his consistent and inventive transgressions, begins to look like one of the least conservative leaders we've ever had.

Fairlie didn't offer any bullet-pointed plan for how American conservatives could reclaim the soul he believed they'd lost (and needed to reclaim, since "conservatism more than liberalism needs a soul"). But if he were writing now, he would find any attempt to rebuild the Reagan coalition, or to reassert the principles that elected him, foolish and unconservative. He would argue instead that Republicans need to try once again to "civilize and broaden" conservatism, even though they've failed so many times before.

This doesn't mean making marginal improvements to the racial mix at the voting booth. It means finding a way to uphold our best traditions while ceasing to profess "a conservatism that is just one long grouch at the twentieth century." It means bringing a genuine compassion to government, as opposed to the sloganeering kind. And it means learning to love America in all its messy kaleidoscopic glory, as Fairlie did. During last year's campaign, he would have been thrilled by Barack Obama's story and what it demonstrates about the possibilities of American life (though quick to chasten his Kennedy-esque ambitions), and he would have eviscerated Palin's notion that there's such a thing as "real America." For someone who never learned to drive, Fairlie contrived to spend much of his time away from the Eastern Seaboard, falling more and more in love with this immigrant nation. "Ameri-ca must be kept open," he insisted in 1983—"no technique, no system, no ideology, must be allowed to close it down."

That, too, is a romantic view, but one that Fairlie never abandoned, not even when he had good reasons. During the 1980s, his fecklessness with money and increased drinking led him to lose his apartment in Washington. The years that other writers of his caliber might have spent in suburban comfort, putting together the anthologies that would outlive them, Fairlie spent living in his office at The New Republic, since he had nowhere else to go. Even as he went on skewering the Republicans and immoderately praising the country he understood so much better than they did, he didn't grow bitter. Far from it. The most direct counsel he offered to American conservatives was the advice that the great journalist Walter Bagehot had offered to their British counterparts a century earlier. It's even more worth heeding today, when their spirits are so low: "Try a little enjoyment."

© 2009