Photograph of William F. Buckley, Jr. from the October 17, 1964 Saturday Evening Post
In a 1964 Saturday Evening Post article, in the course of discussing Goldwater’s “recantation” on Social Security, William F. Buckley, Jr. observed that
American politics is evolving into a religion . . . a far thing from the practice of the science, or even the art, of government. And, accordingly, people are demanding that their spokesmen act not merely as administrators or leaders, but as priests and votaries of the political dogmas and liturgy that are in fashion.
Buckley explained that it would not have been politically feasible for Goldwater to make a statement that, despite being opposed to the Social Security program in principle, he would leave it alone as a practical matter. Goldwater’s political predicament was a bad sign. A political culture is less than enlightened, Buckley suggested, if it can settle only for total intellectual adherence to a predominant opinion.
What the people wanted is what is known in religious terminology as “internal assent.” “The people”—I am here assuming that there is solidarity on the issue—are demanding an explicit affirmation of belief in an article (Social Security) of a political creed (state welfarism). The exaction of that homage amounts, in fact, to a tyrannization of the conscience. It is ironic that the tendency, in our progressively secular culture, is to go further than the individual was asked to go during the late Middle Ages, when most Western governments were blunt theocracies.
A political culture—to return to my phrase and to make an obvious point—is formed by cultural factors: such as what we learn in school and what we listen to in the media. Education and the news can create conditions in which political dissent becomes heresy.
But ours is an increasingly inquisitorial cast of mind. Our colleges and universities, although they are always coming out noisily against formal loyalty oaths, are busily engaged in brewing their own conformity. And so is it in the opinion-making network. The Establishment’s witches stir away at those great vats of dogma, which are ladled out to the altar boys and communicants as Essence of Liberalism, and any one who declines to drink the stuff down is as suspicious as that furtive little fellow next door whom yesterday we were denouncing to the Inquisitor because he hadn’t attended church on the Feast of St. Bonaventure . . . .
Buckley, of course, recognized that a certain kind of consensus is necessary to maintain civil society. What he objected to wasn’t consensus; it was conformity. And more specifically, the kind of conformity demanded by democracy run to the extreme.
The engines of conformity are powerful. Conformity to the popular view is always a drag upon a person’s reason and emotion, and even his conscience; and it is good, up to a point, that it should be so, inasmuch as people have decided to live together rather than apart. A society that seduces the conscience by sweet reason is one thing; but ours is developing into a society that harpoons the conscience, and tows it right into the maws of the mother vessel, there to be macerated and stuffed into a faceless can.
This kind of political conformity, which proceeds by reducing political personalities to a common denominator, is not only ugly and ultimately boring (monotony and a lack of genuine variety are just as dull politically as they are musically). The demand for conformity poses a practical problem. Requiring ideological purity in a candidate—whether the ideology is on the left or the right—produces its opposite:
The argument can always be made that people elevated to power are thereupon poised to use their influence toward mischievous ends, that therefore it does accomplish something to force them to put on the public record views which are congruent with the majority of the time and place. Yes, that argument can be made. It is an argument that says in effect that you can get so you can really trust a politician by simply corrupting his spirit . . . .
Buckley ended his article with an example of a political personality that resisted conformity’s tendency to corrupt one’s principles. Buckley ended—after a few wry comments—with Belloc:
The enemies of the human spirit are outpacing even the population explosion, and it becomes harder and harder to fight them down. It is so much easier to succumb, and there are so many formulae for doing so gracefully, and the great conscience-shriver is the wink on Univac’s face on election night. We have come a long distance from the way of Hilaire Belloc when he ran for Parliament, to the way of John F. Kennedy when he ran for the Presidency of the United States. In the terms I speak of, we have unprogressed. In 1960 John F. Kennedy pleaded with his fellow Christians, of Protestant denomination, not to take seriously the fact that he was by “accident of birth” a Roman Catholic. Hilaire Belloc was asked by a lady, while answering questions from a platform in 1906, whether it was true that he was a “papist.” “Madam,” he roared out his answer at the top of his voice, reaching into his pocket and drawing out a rosary, “do you see these BEADS? I say them every MORNING as soon as I get UP, and every NIGHT before I go to BED. And if YOU object to THAT, Madam, I can only PRAY to God that He will spare me the IGNOMINY of representing YOU in Parliament!” Belloc won, and achieved something more than his own election.
For now, I will only add that we, as a political community, could achieve “something more” if we had more politicos with l’esprit de Belloc. How we cultivate that spirit in order to get those politicos….that’s a thought that needs some elaboration.
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