The Harvard Conservative

I have always considered the Harvard Conservative a junior version of the National Review. The defining trait of the latter has been accurately suggested by Theodore Sorenson. Speaking at Leverett House several years ago, he remembered that "Mr. Kennedy read Time and Newsweek to discover the misinformation that forms public opinion and browsed National Review to keep his blood hot."

Why does the Review, instead of stimulating unsympathetic readers, never fail to reduce them to helpless, steaming annoyance? Because it obviously delights in clothing cruel prejudices in elevated language? To an extent. But the magazine's chief offense is not crudity, but irreverence. The Left, both liberal and radical, bickers endlessly about how best to score points for Democracy and Progress. The Right, both conservative and lunatic, takes a glum sort of satisfaction in staging hopeless goal line stands. But Buckley and his legions just sit in the stands and snicker, maliciously.

Matters of state probably benefit from a little malevolent giggling from the wings. But does conservative journalism have no more than this to offer? Apparently that question has also occurred to the editors of the Conservative, for they have put out a most un-Review like edition. Much sweat and blood, and very few raspberries from the grandstand.

The theme of this issue (how rarely that can be said of any undergraduate publication) is the distinction between the conservative and racist attitudes toward civil rights. Generally, when unbigoted conservatives discuss civil rights, goodwill and caution are the touchstones. To these, the editors of the Conservative have added concern, even urgency, most unconservative attitudes that derive perhaps from the writers being at a most unconservative age. They understand the challenge of the New Left because they share the generations angers and outlook of the radicals. They want to talk to the New Left.

Some of what they say is both dusty with age and unthoughtful: apocalyptic fears about fascism in the Movement ("It is no secret that the leadership of the more militant groups is authoritarian."): short-sighted and tired admonitions about legislation producing hate ("Title II effectively shoves the Negro down the merchant's throat."); unsubstantiated claims for the free market ("The greatest effect of Title VII may turn out to be an actual decrease in the number of jobs normally open to Negroes.")

But some of the Conservative's message is provocative in the positive sense of the word. It reflects the inspiration of what may be the best volume of popular conservative theorizing in many years: Jeffrey Hart's The American Dissent: A Decade of Modern Conservatism. The book was recently condensed in the Review, and the Conservative makes several laudatory references to it.

In brief, Hart feels that at the core of the conservative tradition lies a profound respect for the dignity of the individual, that property rights are but a means to the end of dignity, and that the chief transgression of the omnipotent and boundlessly optimistic liberal Establishment is not its cavalier treatment of property but its unfeeling disregard for individual dignity.

Zap, the New Right meets the New Left.

In taking off after the "Movement," the Conservative often uses the same arguments the New Left wields against the Establishment. (The Conservative would do well to learn the difference between the two.) "It is no secret that the leadership of the more militant groups is authoritarian," seems a curious statement until one realizes that "militant" here means Dr. King. Given this clarification, would not some of the real militants in the Movement agree? Or consider: "If the Negro is to be a free man, he cannot be engineered into freedom." Is that not Saul Alinsky surveying the Poverty Program?

This game of convergence could be played with a great number of the Conservative's sentences, even paragraphs. For the New Left, I think, it would be worth the effort; for the radical critique of the Establishment seems to me basically a conservative appeal against the insensitivity of a professedly liberal bureaucracy. The conservative tradition of course has no monopoly on dignity and freedom, but that tradition does enjoy a virtual monopoly in intellectually defending those values against secular, plebeian governments. Proudhon and Sorel, French theorists of an older New Left, looked to the great pessimistic conservatives, Pascal and Tocqueville, for inspiration. The American New Left might profit by doing the same.

I don't wish to push the point too far. Though the New Left and New Right use a very similar critique of the Liberal Establishment, they disagree profoundly, and perhaps irreconcilably, when it comes to proposals and affirmations.

If they agree on the definition of indignity, they split sharply over the definition of its opposite. The conservatives assume that men achieve dignity only through individual accomplishments which set them off from the mass. The New Left--partly because it abhors the competitive mentality, partly because it understands the healthy as well as the sick aspects of racial consciousness--sees individual dignity chiefly as a corollary of genuine group dignity.

And groups acquire dignity only through collective action. Both words, collective and action, are almost by definition anathematize to the conservative tradition. They may be incompatible, in fact, with the whole concept of individual autonomy. No one has yet proved that decentralized direct democracy and liberty are consonant. But once again the experiment is being tried, and its promise and excitement lends the New Left an importance in American politics that the New Right will probably never match.

Nevertheless nearly everything in the Conservative is worth careful reading. Exceptions: The lead editorial blends pomposity with obscurity, and deserves but light skimming. "An Interview" can be completely missed. Its point totally eludes me. The rest justifies a trip to your hallway.

Robert Allison's "Conservative Philosophy and Pseudo-Conservatism" effectively dissociates conservative thought from the racist mentality, saying in brief that conservatives think while racists only feel. It is carefully constructed and fairly well-written, far clearer than Mr. Allison's soggy editorial.

Victor Koivumaki has thought out the school bussing issue quite honestly, listed the pro's and con's on both sides, and opted against the technique. He is persuasive much of the time, slipping only once into a non-sequitur, He says that "it is not the role of the militant, transient, outside groups to stir up agitation in school districts for local action," and yet confidently suggests that "the money that would be spent on large scale bussing programs could be put to better use to upgrade weak, racially-imbalance schools." The overemotional association of militancy with outside agitation aside, Mr. Koivumaki's argument fails to tell us how, without "stirring up agitation," school districts are to be forced to spend more in the ghetto. To an extent, the conservative penchant for order and calm muddies the logic of the article.

There is a short study of the anthropology of race by an anonymous author. The editors explain that "the author, an undergraduate at Harvard fears that the article ... would produce antipathy toward him, especially among his Negro friends..." How incredible! What strange friends these must be. This anonymous article does little more than abstract Carleton Coon's opinions on racial origins, carefully making attributions and citing evidence along the way. Completely inoffensive.

The guts of this issue of the Conservative is editor Dunham's discussion of "The Civil Rights Movement and Public Policy." It spreads over ten pages of double-column print, and in my copy of the magazine all ten pages are covered with angry red chicken scratches. Exception can be taken to every single paragraph. In short, it's a pretty effective article. Dunham weaves theory and example with fair skill and maintains a consistency of tone and ideology throughout the whole marathon.

The article deserves a long, thoughtful reply. There's no room here for that, but I'm afraid that it won't get one anywhere. Mr. Dunham is fighting a rear guard action, pecking at what has already been legislated or what some Establishment liberals have asked be legislated. The real action is elsewhere, in the seething ghettoes beyond legislation. It would be a shame, however, if no one bothered to leave the trenches long enough to argue with the New Right. Maybe, just maybe, this curious agreement about "individual dignity" could be expanded into a little, ad hoc Consensus.