Not-So-Beautiful Losers: How Conservatism Won the Cold War – and Lost the Peace

Ronald Reagan was America’s greatest twentieth century statesman. It is altogether fitting to remember him as the “Great Communicator,” but his rhetorical excellence went deeper than mere personal charisma. More than any president since, he understood that ideas have consequences – and that to defeat Soviet communism and restore confidence in America’s future, he needed to unite the people around a truly conservative vision.

There is no doubt that John Ganz, author of When The Clock Broke, would disagree with that sentiment. A fully committed man of the Left, he clearly believes that conservatism broadly and Reaganism specifically are little more than ideological fig leaves for oligarchy and hate. But his book, a history of the political crack-up that occurred in the early 1990s after Reagan exited stage right, nonetheless proves just how sorely this country needs an imaginative conservatism.

The fall of the Soviet Union should have heralded a bright new dawn for American politics, but as Ganz demonstrates, that was far from the reality. He intricately documents the rise of a new kind of political extremism in the early ‘90s, suffusing the atmosphere of American life with a sense of fear and loathing. This moment, according to Ganz, planted the seeds for “the politics of national despair” that now dominate American populism.

Ganz ably profiles many of the flamboyant figures that emerged from this environment, from the eccentric Ross Perot to the racist David Duke. But perhaps the most important—and disturbing—character in this history is Samuel T. Francis, a Washington Times columnist and adviser to Pat Buchanan. A longtime foot soldier in the conservative movement, Francis became one of the most radical members of the emerging paleoconservative faction in the 1990s. His ideas have come to shape right-wing politics today.

As Ganz outlines, Francis came to lose faith in conservatism altogether in the 1990s. He saw Reagan’s presidency as a failure; whatever victories it secured against communism abroad or progressivism at home, it did not go far enough towards a total realignment. Embracing a materialism that would have been altogether foreign to an earlier generation of conservative luminaries, Francis urged the right to adopt class warfare and racial grievance to seize power from what he called the “managerial class.” “Francis also believed that the old conservative preference for Congress and the courts should be abandoned,” Ganz writes, “and the right should instead pursue what he called a ‘Caesarist’ embrace of executive power.” It is no exaggeration to say that Francis pioneered a right-wing form of Marxism aimed at mobilizing a proletariat of what he described as “Middle American Radicals” for the sake of revolution.

Needless to say, most conservatives at the time did not embrace Francis’s new ideology. The “Reagan Beachhead” of institutions established around 1980 kept the columnist at arm’s length, and as his racism became more and more virulent, their leaders essentially ostracized him from the movement. Even the more populist wing of the movement, represented by up-and-coming talk radio talent such as Rush Limbaugh, was more interested in the traditional Reaganite goals of strong national defense, a free economy, and social conservatism than the ideology of right-wing Marxism.

Despite this, Ganz is entirely correct to emphasize Francis’s role in the crack-up; after all, his theory fueled Pat Buchanan’s populist insurgency against George HW Bush in the 1992 Republican primary. Playing off class resentments and post-Cold War discontent, Ganz documents how the would-be revolutionary garnered significant attention early in the race but failed to launch in the end. Buchanan did well enough, nonetheless, to earn a primetime speaking slot at the party convention – and he used his speech to declare the beginning of a new stage of American politics: culture war. Painting a bleak vision of America coming apart at the seams, Buchanan prophesied the coming of our postliberal moment. Unlike Reagan, he was not committed to restoring constitutional government or preserving an American-led world order. Instead, he wanted to lead the “Middle American Radicals” in a revolt against the status quo, limits be damned.

And this “culture war” sentiment has become the dominant mindset of many on the so-called “New Right” today. Buchanan is lauded by organizations pushing for “realignment” – including by Heritage Foundation president Kevin Roberts, who recently praised him for laying the “intellectual foundation for the America First resurgence that has redefined our politics.” Even more troublingly, prominent illiberal ideologues seeking to provide it an intellectual framework explicitly cite Francis as an inspiration. Although less outwardly racialist than the original paleoconservatives, the New Right has adopted the theory they began peddling decades ago. For a certain faction with considerable power in Washington now, Pat Buchanan and Sam Francis have replaced Ronald Reagan and Russell Kirk as conservative heroes.

This new right-wing radicalism is, in part, the consequence of a phenomenon Ganz does a poor job of documenting: the radicalization of the left. Although he occasionally diverts from his narrative about the right to describe the rise of figures such as Jesse Jackson and Bill Clinton, he does not give enough attention to the ways the 1990s birthed an aggressive social liberalism which still animates the Democratic party. The “culture war” mentality of many on the right today is a reaction against that revolutionary spirit. Since the end of the Cold War, the left has come to tangibly threaten the way of life most Americans follow – not even merely traditionalists. Both sides of the “cold civil war” have contributed to the atmosphere of extremism now choking American politics.

And yet Ganz dismissively links the emergence of right-wing Marxism to the idea of “false consciousness,” a manipulation of the working classes to prevent any sense of solidarity. From the paleoconservatives’ immigration restrictionism and evocation of the “thin blue line” to Ross Perot’s quixotic and paranoid quest for answers to the POW-MIA mystery, Ganz dismisses the reactionary impulse that defined the early ‘90s. Although his book is an attempt to understand the conspiracy theorism of the period, Ganz cannot truly interpret it as a historian because he does not leave space for the power of ideas or personality to shape the time. Never once does he stop to truly question the radicalism of the left.

The irony, of course, is that this is precisely the same error committed by the neo-paleoconservatives. As National Review editor Jack Butler pointed out in his own excellent review of When the Clock Broke, there are clear ways in which the left-wing Marxist Ganz agrees with the right-wing Marxist Francis. Both adhere to a vulgar Hegelian philosophy of history with a twisted faith in the dialectic of power. Neither takes seriously the traditional conservative emphasis on constitutional order. Francis rejected Christianity and any notion of biblical anthropology. In the end, all he could see was class, race, and power. And ultimately, this is why his contemporary disciples cannot make sense of Ronald Reagan.

Reagan’s conservatism was a philosophic statesmanship. He sought to use ideas to appeal directly to the American people, because he believed they were fully capable of responding to a call for constitutional restoration. To be sure, Reagan deployed a certain kind of populism to achieve that, but it was always a populism anchored in the principles of the Founding – never mere power politics. He always believed that progressivism and liberalism erred insofar as they abandoned those principles, and therefore made it his mission to put ideas at the front of his presidency. It is no coincidence, for example, that Reagan and his administration helped launch the originalist legal movement; their ultimate purpose was to move away from political centralization and towards a renewed constitutionalism.

The same cannot be said, sadly, of today’s “New Right.” Ganz’s book is helpful insofar as it reveals the extent to which contemporary populism is rooted in post-Cold War anxieties about societal change. But he somehow fails to understand that Reagan’s hopeful conservatism is a superior answer to those worries than any of the power-hungry promises of left or right-wing Marxists. In a speech at the Heritage Foundation delivered towards the beginning of his administration, Russell Kirk praised Reagan for being “sufficiently bold to set his face against the prophets of decay.” Unlike the populists and establishmentarians jockeying for power after his retirement, the Gipper believed that the idea of ordered liberty bequeathed to the American Republic by her Founders was strong enough to meet any challenge. As he put it in his own 1992 Republican convention speech, America is “a country that is forever young” and “while I take inspiration from the past, like most Americans, I live for the future.”

That speech, which Ganz does not substantially cover, was one of Reagan’s finest rebukes of the Marxist mentality. He proclaimed that the United States is not a regime dedicated to class interests or the aggregation of power, but rather an “empire of ideals.” “We were meant to be masters of destiny,” he said, “not victims of fate.” Clearly attacking the paleoconservatives’ isolationism and materialism, he instead called on Republicans to remain true to the original vision of the conservative movement and inspire the American people to embrace “selflessness” and “idealism.”

Reagan concluded his remarks with a poignant reflection on his own place in the American story:

And whatever else history may say about me when I’m gone, I hope it will record that I appealed to your best hopes, not your worst fears, to your confidence rather than your doubts. My dream is that you will travel the road ahead with liberty’s lamp guiding your steps and opportunity’s arm steadying your way.

Sadly, as Ganz’s history makes clear, his successors cannot say the same. George H.W. Bush lacked the unshakeable convictions that steered Reagan’s career; he was simply incapable of inspiring the conservatives of the heart who shared that old faith. And today, too few of the leaders entrusted with the future of conservatism’s political and intellectual institutions would see it restored. It is far easier, they seem to believe, to appeal to our “worst fears” than our better angels.

But as Reagan himself showed, consolidating the conservative movement around populist premises is not a historical inevitability. His presidency was the culmination of a decades-long struggle to replace what Winston Churchill once called the Republican party’s “rich, materialist, and secular” leadership with something far more attuned to the spiritual realities at the heart of the American Founding. Cynical Marxists of the right and the left may scoff at that high ideal, but it is still possible for true conservatives to set their faces against decay.

Michael Lucchese is the founder of Pipe Creek Consulting, an associate editor of Law & Liberty, and a contributing editor to Providence.