A Voice in the Modern Wilderness

The Law & Liberty Podcast

Anyone could be forgiven for not knowing much about Peter Viereck. The eccentric historian and poet was one of the first mid-century thinkers to robustly embrace the “conservative” label, but he fell out of favor with movement conservatives and has been largely forgotten. John Wilsey thinks that’s a mistake. He joins Law & Liberty‘s editor, John Grove, to talk about Viereck and his unique conservative manner of approaching the challenges of modern life.

Related Links

John Wilsey, “Peter Viereck’s Unadjusted Conservatism,” Law & Liberty
Peter Viereck, Conservatism: From John Adams to Winston Churchill
Peter Viereck, Conservatism Revisited
Peter Viereck, Unadjusted Man in the Age of Overadjustment
John Wilsey, Religious Freedom: A Conservative Primer (pre-order)
Claes Ryn, “Peter Viereck: Traditionalist Libertarian?” Law & Liberty
Robert Lacey, Pragmatic Conservatism

Transcript

James Patterson:

Welcome to the Law & Liberty Podcast. I’m your host, James Patterson. Law & Liberty is an online magazine featuring serious commentary on law, policy, books, and culture, and formed by a commitment to a society of free and responsible people living under the rule of law. Law & Liberty and this podcast are published by Liberty Fund.

John Grove:

Hello and welcome to the Law & Liberty Podcast. I’m John Grove, the editor of Law & Liberty. And I’m filling in today for regular host, James Patterson. Today I’m joined by Dr. John Wilsey. John Wilsey is Professor of Church History and Philosophy and Chair of the Department of Church History and Historical Theology at Southern Baptist Theological Seminary. He also serves as the book review editor of the Southern Baptist Journal of Theology. He’s the author of several books, including American Exceptionalism and Civil Religion: Reassessing the History of An Idea. Also God’s Cold Warrior: The Life and Faith of John Foster Dulles. And coming this April, Religious Freedom: A Conservative Primer. Last May, he contributed a piece to Law & Liberty called “Peter Viereck’s Unadjusted Conservatism,” which we will link to in the show notes. And I thought we would talk a little bit more about Viereck, who is a very interesting and unique kind of conservative. So John Wilsey, thanks for joining us.

John Wilsey:

Thanks, John, for having me. It’s great to be with you.

John Grove:

All right, so first, why don’t you tell us a little bit about Viereck, his background, his career, his influence, or maybe lack thereof, influence such as it was, and a little bit about his personality because he had a bit of a unique personality?

John Wilsey:

Yeah, he was a fascinating person. He was born in 1916, and he died in 2006. So he lived … I don’t think he made it to 90. I think he made it to 89. So he lived a long life. He was one of the first in the new conservatism movement of the postwar period. He wrote a piece for … Oh, I think it was The Atlantic. I have it somewhere. It was a piece for … I think it was the Atlantic Monthly. I could be wrong about that, but he wrote it in 1941. He was just a young man, and he said … The title of the piece was “But … I’m a Conservative.” And as you know, back in those days, he observed that the word conservative was not a term that a lot of people used to describe themselves. In fact, the term conservative was a term that was received a lot like, people might say, reactionary today.

It wasn’t a really positive term, it was kind of a negative term, but he embraced the term. And Klaus Wren, I believe, gave him the credit for sort of reinvigorating the term conservative and popularizing it so that people use it and they’ve used it for a long time since the fifties, since certainly The Conservative Mind came out in 1953. But Peter Viereck was apparently one of the very first to identify himself proudly as a conservative in the post-war conservative movement. He was a historian. He got his PhD in history from Harvard, and he wrote his dissertation on an intellectual history of Nazism.

His dissertation was published under the title of “Metapolitics.” He dedicated the work to his brother, who he says on the front matter, he says, “To my brother, who died fighting the Nazis.” So, a fascinating situation there. His brother went into the army and fought and was killed in Italy during the war. His father, George, had a really interesting background as well. George had been a pro-German figure. He lived in America, but he was very pro-German. During World War I, he was sort of a partisan for the Kaiser during World War I and during America’s involvement in World War I. And then, in the rise of Hitler, he became an apologist for Hitler and for fascism and was an unapologetic fascist all the way through the thirties and the forties, despite the fact that both of his sons had joined the army.

Peter joined the Army as well, but he never saw any combat. So, the father was actually imprisoned. I can’t remember exactly what the circumstances were, but he was imprisoned for his Nazi sympathy during World War II and suffered a great deal of disgrace in regards to that. The two were also estranged. Didn’t speak to each other for several years-

John Grove:

Can imagine.

John Wilsey:

Over this, but they did have a reconciliation. For years, Peter tried to get his father to read his doctoral dissertation, Metapolitics, and his father refused to read it, but at the end of his life, he finally did consent to reading it when he was quite old and declining in health. And he read the book … And this is all a story that Klaus Wren relates that after he read the book, he said, “Peter, you were right.”

John Grove:

Wow.

John Wilsey:

So George, the father, not only did he reconcile with his son, but he also recognized how wrong he was.

John Grove:

Well, there’s influence for you.

John Wilsey:

Yeah. Oh gosh. It’s incredible. I wish I could have such influence over my children.

John Grove:

Right.

John Wilsey:

Anyway, so his family background is quite compelling, but as I say, he was born in 1916 and died in 2006. He was a historian. He was a specialist in Russian history and also wrote on fascism. He was a continental European historian, and he taught for many years. I think he taught for just under 50 years as a full-time professor. But then he stayed and continued to teach classes at Mount Holyoke College in Massachusetts. I think he taught for a year or two at Harvard as well when he first started teaching. But he taught the bulk of his career at Mount Holyoke. And there are really interesting stories about him at Mount Holyoke. I have two sources. One is Lisa Bradford who teaches at Seattle Pacific University. She is working on a biography of Viereck, has been working on it for quite a few years now. And she was really helpful in my research on Viereck. And then also my own freshman advisor from my undergraduate days, Marion Strobel, who took him for several classes when she was an undergraduate at Mount Holyoke.

My professor, Dr. Strobel, had him in the sixties, and then Lisa had him in the eighties. And listening to them tell stories about him as a professor was fascinating. I also got to talk to George Nash a little bit about him. George Nash was friends with Peter Viereck and George Nash has interesting insights on him as well.

John Grove:

What are some of those eccentricities as a professor because you’ve told me about these in the past?

John Wilsey:

Yeah, they were funny. And you just try to think about, “Could a professor survive today?” I don’t think he could. Okay, so he enjoyed climbing the trees on campus and the students would walk past and see Professor Viereck sitting up in a tree. He was late to class. Every time class met he was late. He was always about 15 minutes late and classes were 50 minutes to an hour or something like that. So he didn’t come for block classes. Sometimes I’m 15 minutes late to my class, but I have a three-hour class. When you have an hour class, it’s a little bit different, but he was always late. He never gave any feedback when he graded papers. He never returned any papers. Found out that-

John Grove:

You don’t get that today.

John Wilsey:

Yeah, yeah. They’ll get you on that one. You would find out how you did in the class when you got your report card at the end of the semester.

John Grove:

Yeah. I actually had a high school algebra teacher that was kind of like that, but fortunately for me, your grade was always higher than you actually deserved.

John Wilsey:

Yeah, yeah.

John Grove:

Which is probably how he got away with it.

John Wilsey:

Yeah, right. That’s exactly right. What else? He would wear a scarf, like a muffler, all year long even during the warm months.

John Grove:

I’ve seen a picture of him with a scarf on.

John Wilsey:

Yeah. Yeah. He was an eccentric guy, but the students loved him. One group of students that my professor told me about had invited … She was among them who invited him to dinner at someone’s house. I don’t know. It was at a home in town, and he was an hour late. They weren’t really surprised that he was late. But the reason why he was late was funny. Daylight savings time had passed about a week earlier, and he had forgotten to change his clock. So he had been an hour late to everything.

John Grove:

It could just be like he just doesn’t do daylight savings time.

John Wilsey:

He’s one of those people that just doesn’t … He can’t even, you know what I mean?

John Grove:

Yeah, right. So it sounds like, essentially, we might say he was an individual and-

John Wilsey:

He was.

John Grove:

Part of what sort of piqued my interest in this piece that you wrote and interest generally in Viereck is that specifically what you wrote about him really speaks to this question about the conservative and the individual, and I’ll get to that a little bit more directly as we go, but that’s something that sort of runs through some of his writing and some of the things that you’ve written about him here, that he appreciates rootedness, he appreciates formation of people by social authorities and so forth, like most conservatives do. But at the same time, he definitely has this powerful sense of the individual and he doesn’t lose sight of that at all. So let’s start maybe by just talking a little bit about what conservatism is for Viereck, and what it means to be conservative, I guess.

I’ll pull out this quote that you quoted in the Law & Liberty piece, which I think is a really beautiful quotation and I’ll see what you have to say about it. So this is Viereck, says, “The conservative principles par excellence are proportion and measure, self-expression through self-restraint.” That’s an interesting phrase right there, “self-expression through self-restraint.” “Preservation through reform, humanism and classical balance of fruitful nostalgia for the permanent beneath the flux.” That’s also a phrase I really, really love in this quote, “a fruitful nostalgia for the permanent beneath the flux.” “And a fruitful obsession with unbroken historical continuity. These principles together create freedom, a freedom built not on the quicksand of adolescent defiance, but on the bedrock of ethics and law.”

So I thought we might just use that quote as a jumping-off point to say a little bit about Viereck’s understanding of conservatism, his understanding of freedom, and how freedom relates to continuity and order, because he seems to value all of these things, which today increasingly people talk about as if they’re very divergent and don’t go together. You have to choose one or the other.

John Wilsey:

Yeah. Yeah. I love … That’s one of the most beautiful statements, one of the most beautiful definitions of conservatism that he gave there.

John Grove:

I agree.

John Wilsey:

I’m just looking at it again. “Self-expression through self-restraint, preservation through reform, humanism and classical balance, a fruitful nostalgia for the permanent beneath the flux—”

John Grove:

I love that phrase in particular because it’s got this word nostalgia that I’m going to bring up again in another context in just a second but that word nostalgia is in there, and yet it’s this nostalgia for the permanent beneath the flux. It’s not like nostalgia for just the flux of a hundred years ago or just sort of the surface-level stuff that you can find maybe somewhere in the past, but it’s nostalgia for something permanent that’s sort of beneath the surface of things. It seems to me like that kind of gets at his notion of the freedom that a person experiences is that you have this sort of flux going on around you at all times that you can kind of get swept up in? And some people associate freedom with that, but then there’s also this permanent underneath. What do you think about that?

John Wilsey:

Yeah. So one of the things he talks about a lot and reflects on a lot is change, the nature of change in the world in time. He’s a historian, so he’s very interested in change. Change is part of the nature of things. It’s part of the nature of the universe. It’s not something that we try to resist as conservatives. It’s not something that we don’t like as conservatives. A lot of times, conservatives are regarded as people who don’t like change. Actually, I think it’s human nature anyway. This is me talking. I think it’s human nature that we don’t like change. Nobody likes change. Certain kinds of changes. I wouldn’t want my house to burn down; that’s a change. Nobody likes some kind of changes; everybody loves the familiar, and that’s sort of a conservative impulse is to love the familiar and to be drawn to the familiar.

But Viereck’s ideas were interesting when it comes to tradition. He talked about the difference between tradition and traditionalism, that conservatives revere tradition, but they don’t receive tradition uncritically. They receive tradition through a critical lens. So some traditions, because of change, are no longer workable, they’re no longer pragmatic, and they may be immoral. And so those traditions you jettison. But you keep the traditions that, as we will talk about in a second I think, that are those things that are rooted in who we are as a civilization. And I think that’s what he means when he talks about the permanent beneath the flux. There’s always going to be change—circumstances will change, technology will change, and culture will change. But as those changes take place, you have a bedrock, sort of a river bed underneath that the water flows over that river bed, but the river bed stays the same. Those things are the roots that we have that make us who we are and that we conserve.

So he does; he identifies the fruitful nostalgia for the permanent beneath the flux as one of the conservative principles par excellence. And getting back to your original question about his individuality, the individual and the community, the society, shouldn’t ever be seen as these … It was seen as isolated for one another, I should say. Viereck was big on that. He thought that there needed to be a balance between the individual and the society, the public and the private, you might say. He was very Tocquevillian in that regard. When you strike the balance between the individual and the society, the individual and the community, then you have the conditions for freedom that are all set up for you.

John Grove:

And this sort of gets to the title of the book that you’ve focused the most on in this piece, The Unadjusted Man in the Age of Overadjustment. I think what you’re saying now is sort of getting to that question of unadjusted and over-adjusted. So in that book, he has these three sort of paradigms, the maladjusted man, the over-adjusted man and the unadjusted man. And I think this is where you’re going. So why don’t you kind of say what are those different types of people and why is the … I know one version of the book said that the unadjusted man is like a new hero for the twentieth century or something like that-

John Wilsey:

Yes. That’s right.

John Grove:

What are those three maladjusted, unadjusted and over-adjusted?

John Wilsey:

Over-adjusted, yeah.

John Grove:

And then why is the unadjusted man his sort of ideal?

John Wilsey:

He was very cautious about how the culture embraced technology and consumerism and post-war, as they say today, affluenza, we might say today. Especially with something like technology, he was fond of quoting Walt Whitman describing the railroad when Walt Whitman said, “We don’t ride on the railroad. The railroad rides on us.” In fact, I think he quotes that at the beginning of Unadjusted Man in the Age of Overadjustment. Yeah, “We don’t ride the railroad; the railroad rides on us.” He thought that if we simply receive all kinds of these movements in technology and in affluent post-war life, we lose something of our humanity. When we become over-adjusted to the culture, then we lose our roots, we lose our humanity, and we become sort of isolated from those who went before us and no good to those who are going to come after us.

John Grove:

And when you say the culture, this is sort of the flux in the line we were talking about before?

John Wilsey:

Yeah, that’s right. That’s right. I hadn’t quite made that connection, but I think that’s a fair connection. Very Burkeian in the sense that he saw society as a contract between the dead, the living, and the yet-to-be-born. He was fond of citing that line and Burke in his book on the revolution.

John Grove:

So, the unadjusted man is kind of able to keep some of the daily distractions at bay and not let that sort of define them. It would make sense then what the over-adjusted person is, the person that’s just kind of flying around. Just their entire existence is sort of defined by the forces around them.

John Wilsey:

That’s right.

John Grove:

But what would it mean, though, to be maladjusted? Because that one’s the one that sort of sits out.

John Wilsey:

Yeah, maladjustment; he didn’t like that either because maladjustment was being something like a misanthrope. Somebody who rejected society, who lived on an island. And he had those geographic metaphors. He said that a maladjusted man is a man who lives on the island, isolates himself from society, rejects society wholesale like a misanthrope, like someone who just doesn’t … He’s just not feeling it, as the kids say.

And then there’s the over-adjusted man who lives on the mainland. So the one who is defined by the culture, who takes his cues and his entire identity and just is blown by the winds of culture. The unadjusted man lives on a peninsula that is still connected to the mainland but far enough away, distant enough to where the man is able to know the culture be seen in the culture, but not of the culture. In the same sense as John 17, the high priestly prayer, “Be in the world, but not of the world.” The reference to the Lord’s high priestly prayer, I think is the best description or the best analogy to the unadjusted man. Certainly, Viereck didn’t advocate being a Luddite or completely withdrawing from the culture, but he was very suspicious of the new technology of television, for example. He didn’t like television. He thought that television would have deleterious effects on the culture. He wasn’t wrong about that.

John Grove:

Add him to the list of mid-century people that we read today that we sit back and think, oh my goodness, what would they say today-

John Wilsey:

Right. Exactly.

John Grove:

… if they say this about radio or television?

John Wilsey:

Yeah. He also didn’t like the mass construction of neighborhoods. He didn’t like that. I can see why. I can see why, looking back. And I’m kind of like that too whenever I see drive past places on the countryside that I’ve driven past many times and they’ve been farms and fields and I see that there’s bulldozers out there, they’re building a new subdivision. I don’t like that. I think that’s tragic. And I think that he had the same kind of a view.

So adjustment to the culture was also … There’s a subtitle to the book that he wrote, Unadjusted Man, you indicated a second ago when he first wrote the book in 1956, it was published under the title, The Unadjusted Man: A New Hero for Americans. And then it was reprinted in 2004 under a new title, The Unadjusted Man in the Age of Overadjustment, and then there’s a subtitle, Where History and Literature Intersect.

And I want to say real quick, I think it’s important to note, he was a historian, but he was also a poet and he wrote several collections of poetry during his lifetime. In fact, after about 1956, maybe, maybe 1960, he didn’t write any more works on history or conservatism at all, he wrote poetry. And he won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1949 for his collection, Terror and Decorum. So that’s just a side note, something that is fascinating about him.

And that’s one other thing about the unadjusted man is that he is a person who loves aesthetics, loves the beautiful things like poetry. That’s one of the reasons why he climbed the trees on campus was because they were beautiful and he wanted to drink in the beauty of the earth around him and climb the tree and look up at the sky and get up close to the tree and be part of it. That was something that he loved. He loved beauty for its own sake. People thought he was strange for that reason, and that was making his point. He wanted to be someone who loved beauty for beauty’s sake and in the world that’s moving in haste, chasing the almighty dollar, fascinated with the latest technological wonder, you don’t have time to stop and appreciate truth, beauty and goodness for their own sake.

So he wrote poetry for that reason, and he loved beautiful things for their own sake. That’s part of being unadjusted to the culture, is that you’re paying attention to the right things, the things that are true and good and beautiful, and recognizing that culture is passing, it’s flux as you said a moment ago. So he advocated for us to be unadjusted to the culture.

John Grove:

So that description, I think a lot of people would probably expect then his politics to be something that might get described as reactionary. And yet, in your sort of biographical sketch of him earlier, you mentioned he had this background of studying right-wing ideology, extremist ideology, of course right and left don’t work perfectly on Nazis and so forth—but what is usually described as a sort of right-wing ideology. And a lot of the book is actually very critical of what we would usually term as sort of reactionary politics. So he’s very critical of what he calls Americanism, and I think what he means is a really robust nationalist identity.

In particular, I wanted to pull out this one section of the book; I have the 2006 edition, which we should also warn our listeners about what we were talking about earlier. The 2006 edition published by Routledge has some strange editorial, or not editorial omissions, seemingly just accidental omissions, including the first three chapters of the book are not in it.

John Wilsey:

They’re just gone.

John Grove:

Which you have to go find somewhere else. So fair warning to anybody who’s about to go drop 45 bucks or whatever it is on Amazon.

John Wilsey:

Fair warning.

John Grove:

You’re not getting the whole book. But anyway, one of the chapters of that book hits very close to home in terms of the sort of ideological debates going on in conservatism today. It’s called the rootless nostalgia for roots. And this was written in 1956, and his target is a lot of first generation figures in the conservative movement, a lot of people that are sort of well regarded by people like you and me today. But this is what he says about the danger that a certain strand of what he calls the new conservatism might fall into.

So he says, “The main defect of the new conservatism threatening to make it a transient fad, irrelevant to real needs is its rootless nostalgia for roots. Today’s conservatism of yearning is based on roots that either never existed or no longer exist. Such a conservatism of nostalgia can be of high literary value. It is also valuable as an unusually detached perspective toward current social foibles.” So that kind of gets, I think, maybe to what you were just talking about, the sort of ability to rise above the noise of modern culture. But he says it does real harm when it leaves literature and enters short-run politics, conjuring up mirages to conceal sorted realities or to distract from them.

And so then he goes on to mention a whole lot of familiar movements and familiar people in that section. He mentions, for instance, an interesting discussion he has there is about the southern agrarians where he says that they’re a fantastic literary voice, like an essential literary voice, but if you use them as a starting point in politics, you’re going to fail. And then he also, then also, that’s where he uses the phrase “Americanist” as a sort of robust nationalist, he goes after McCarthy and McCarthy’s defenders. So there’s this sort of distinction he seems to make between … There’s this sense in what you’ve just described of the person who really wants to have a critical eye on the modern world, who does not want to be defined by the passing cultural fads. But at the same time in politics he seems to be saying you have to be able to live in the world that you inhabit. Is that his, don’t be maladjusted. You have to accept where and when you live, find a way to make your way, but don’t be defined by it.

John Wilsey:

No, I think that nails it. I think that nails it. And that’s-

John Grove:

You kind of talk about that. I’ll introduce this, then I’ll let you go. But you talk about it in this other phrase that he uses where he says the, by trying, I think this is connected to the rootless nostalgia for roots. These are people who don’t have actual real roots in their life today that they’re building on, but instead they’re sort of manufacturing pretended social roots from a hundred years ago, 200 years ago or something that they’re just making up and trying to build something around that. And I think that will lead then to the discussion that you made of what he calls the Ottantotts, O-T-T-A-N-T-O-T-T-S-

John Wilsey:

The Ottantotts.

John Grove:

So what were the Ottantotts, and why was that approach to politics not productive for Viereck?

John Wilsey:

Yeah, the Ottantotts, the Ottantotts. I tell you what, he’s a poet, he’s a poet.

John Grove:

That’s very true.

John Wilsey:

He can turn a phrase like no one can. I love this one phrase from that chapter that you were reading from where he says, he’s talking about Americanism, sort of of the America Firsters of his day, the isolationists.

John Grove:

We don’t hear that anywhere today.

John Wilsey:

Yeah, and I think he’s talking about the Robert Taft wing of the Republican Party, “In the name of free speech and intellectual gadflyism, they are justified in expounding the indiscriminate antiliberalism of hothouse Bourbons and czarist serf-floggers.”

John Grove:

Yeah, yeah. I highlighted that, too. I’ve thought about putting that one as well. Yeah.

John Wilsey:

Oh, man. It’s just, he can turn a phrase. He’s wonderful reading. I tell you, it’s sad that his works are not in print and we have to rely on these very imperfect-

John Grove:

He’s very flawed.

John Wilsey:

Yeah, but going back to the Ottantotts, the Ottantotts, he talks about this in his book Conservatism: From John Adams To Churchill that he wrote in, I think he wrote it in 1956 as well, the same year as this one. Okay, so the Ottantotts: he gets that word ottantott from the Italian word ottant­otto, which means 88 in Italian. And he’s referring to the King of Sardinia in the late eighteenth, early nineteenth centuries during the French Revolutionary period, who was an ultra-royalist who was a follower of Joseph de Maistre’s sort of radical right-wing conservative ideology. And he tells an anecdote about how the King of Sardinia would go around muttering, “Ottant­otto, ottant­otto, 88, 88,” as if to say that if we can just go back to the world of 1788, the year before the revolution, then all would be well. So-

John Grove:

I quoted this, by the way. I quoted you in a piece I wrote a month or so after you published this. I quoted that very line.

John Wilsey:

Hey, well, thank you.

John Grove:

Yeah.

John Wilsey:

Yeah, it’s an amazing quote.

John Grove:

Mumbling 1788.

John Wilsey:

Yeah. People who do that are not rare. If only we could go back to 1960, prior to the 1960 election, and if we could only go back to before the hippies and whatever, pick something. If we could only go back to 1861.

John Grove:

Or 1788, or the referendum-

John Wilsey:

Or whatever.

John Grove:

Or whatever it is, yeah.

John Wilsey:

Just pick something. That desire to go back in time and have a perfect world, have this perfect setup before things got really bad, and all would be well, that’s an Ottantott expression. And he uses the word, the term ottant­otto to describe these traditionalists, these authoritarians, these rootless rightists in search of roots. That chapter is fascinating because he’s talking about … He has certain people in mind. And I find it interesting that in his critique of the hard right, he talks about romanticizing conservatives like the Southern Agrarians. He takes shots at Russell Kirk.

John Grove:

He does, yeah. Which is we’re going to get to why he was and remains a controversial conservative in just a second here, and that’s one of them

John Wilsey:

At one point in here, and I’m trying to find where it is there, maybe you can help me. He is talking about new conservatives; he doesn’t name them, who start new magazines, and it’s just clear who he’s … I’m pretty sure he is talking about National Review and William F. Buckley.

John Grove:

Well, maybe this is a good time to turn to that since our minds are going in this direction. So he called himself a conservative. He was pivotal in bringing that term up out of the ashes. But boy, he criticized a lot of people that I’m kind of inclined to like. I mean, Russell Kirk.

And we were talking about this earlier before we recorded that he has good things to say about Russell Kirk too. It’s not as if he was just blasting Kirk left and right, but he has some heavy criticism of Kirk and a lot of other … We see that first wave of movement conservatives. And by and large, they, I think reasonably enough given what he said about them, they didn’t particularly like him either.

John Wilsey:

No, they didn’t like him either.

John Grove:

So he did not fall into the mainstream of twentieth-century conservatism. And as you say, he’d even stopped really writing about politics and conservatism for a long, long time. So what’s the key difference between Viereck and somebody like, let’s say Kirk, let’s not say Buckley maybe, but at least Kirk, because Kirk, maybe you do a quick read of both of these guys. They seem somewhat similar. I mean, Kirk’s going to-

John Wilsey:

They do.

John Grove:

Most of us would certainly not read Kirk as a sort of really actionary, although there are people, Frank Meyer also sort of criticized him for being that way. But instead as somebody who maybe is pretty similar to what we were just talking about with Viereck, you have to be attuned to the permanent things, don’t get swept up by society around you, but at the same time you do live in this world. So what would you say, why was there this big break? What kept Viereck from being a voice in the mainstream conservative movement?

John Wilsey:

Yeah, that quote that he has about Kirk that … He’s quoting Clinton Rossiter, who said, “Unfortunately for the cause of conservatism, Kirk has now begun to sound like a man born 150 years too late and in the wrong country,” and-

John Grove:

Which I’m pretty sure Kirk … Didn’t Kirk say something like that about himself once?

John Wilsey:

Probably, I don’t-

John Grove:

Like, “I was born in the wrong century,” or something like that. I don’t know, maybe. We would have to look that up, maybe he was riffing off these people saying that about him, sort of embrace it.

John Wilsey:

As you said, Kirk, I think he has more good things to say about Kirk than bad things. He was critical of Kirk in that he didn’t think that Kirk was tough enough against McCarthy. But then I sort of think that’s a little bit unfair because Kirk was not in the United States during the height of McCarthyism, and it’d be kind of hard for him to be a partisan against McCarthy from Scotland when he was writing Conservative Mind. So I don’t know. They had these disagreements, the two of them, but there’s so much more that they have in common than things that they didn’t agree on.

To read Kirk, to read say, Roots of American Order, for example, and then to read Conservatism: From John Adams To Churchill, certainly Viereck talks a lot more about European conservatism in that book. But to read the two, they really are complementary works. It’s difficult to see a lot of distance between them. However, when it came to Buckley, I think Buckley and Viereck did have some political differences, but they had some strong personality differences also.

John Grove:

I could see that.

John Wilsey:

When Buckley wrote God and Man at Yale, Viereck wrote a review of it for the New York Times, I believe it was the New York Times, and he said, “The book is valuable,” but, “Someday being intelligent and earnest, Buckley may give us the hard-won wisdom of synthesis.” Someday, be intelligent and earnest. Wow, that’s pretty rough. That’s not good. So he wrote a blistering review of God and Man at Yale, and Buckley was immediately anti-Viereck after that. So Buckley was an eccentric as well. He was a weird bird too in his own way. He could be quite elitist. And if you weren’t an East Coaster, then something was wrong with you, and so forth.

So the fact that Viereck was such an eccentric, I can’t remember if it’s [inaudible 00:39:32] or somebody who relates a story about the two of them we’re walking down a street talking and Viereck ran into a signpost or something like that, and it really threw Buckley off. It was very off-putting. You would never find Buckley running into a signpost. So Buckley didn’t like his eccentricities, he was put off by them. But the biggest thing, I think, and this was something that Frank Meyer said, Frank Meyer accused Viereck of being a fake conservative, a wolf in sheep’s clothing because he supported Adlai Stevenson in 1952 and in 1956, and he was also someone who did not support the jettisoning of the New Deal.

John Grove:

So I’m going to jump in right now and say, okay, I like a lot of what I read with Viereck, but gosh, I don’t know. Some of this stuff he says about the New Deal, “Well, there’s nothing like …” I look at the New Deal, I kind of … I mean, I’m sort of on the same page as some of those mid-century conservatives that say, “Well, this is the centralized state taking over what has traditionally been the purview of civil society, of families. People get old, guess what? Now, the government takes care of you. You don’t have families.” It seems like a very strong conservative in the Viereck vein, the conservative argument that the New Deal really does undermine the sort of cultural social authority that he seems to value.

So, one, why did he not see it as so bad? I’ll put another one out there: another conservative who seems to be very similar to my mind with Viereck is Robert Nisbet. I don’t know what their relationship was, but Nisbet, of course, is very critical of that New Deal direction. So, I wonder why Viereck does not see it as such a big deal. And secondly, I think I know the answer to this, can somebody like me who, I’m more on Nisbet’s wavelength on that, can I still value and find a lot of good stuff in Viereck, even if that’s a sticking point?

John Wilsey:

Yeah, I think you can. I think we all can, because we may disagree with Viereck on this, just as you’ve articulated, but Viereck had conservative reasons for supporting Stevenson and I wouldn’t say he supported the New Deal, but he did think that it was a mistake to get rid of it, to jettison it. And it goes back to what we were talking about with regard to the flux, the change, by the 1950s, the New Deal had been in place for 20 years, and the country had gotten sort of accustomed to the New Deal being a part of society, being an ingrained part of society. And he was a realist in that sense. He said that this is the world we live in, the New Deal is part of our world, and it’s a futile sort of position to take to say, let’s get rid of this because you can’t get rid of it.

It’s not realistic to pass legislation to divest the country of the New Deal. As complex as it is, and as far-reaching as it is, it’s just not realistic. It might be a similar kind of thing to talk about Obamacare today. You can’t get rid of Obamacare because it’s so ingrained in society now. It’s been around for a long time and people depend on it and so forth and so on. And so you can’t support an unrealistic set of policies. So his solution was to localize the New Deal, to take the New Deal and reform it and make it a bottom-up kind of a system instead of a top-down sort of a system. So to get rid of that—

John Grove:

So that sounds a lot better.

John Wilsey:

Yeah, to get rid of the centralizing impulse of the New Deal and to reform the New Deal in a way that the institutions of the New Deal would serve local communities, instead of being a 10,000-mile-long screwdriver from Washington, DC. He supported Adlai Stevenson, but he talks about this in that chapter, Rootless, Establishment for Roots, about how, for example, James Madison was somebody who was a dear friend of Thomas Jefferson, ultimately would join the Democratic-Republican Party, as he describes, became a liberal. And yet he wrote Federalist Number 10 and wrote pretty much half of the Federalist Papers. And the Federalist Papers is a conservative document and one of our roots in the American constitutional order.

So what he describes is that here’s Madison, who is a liberal, and he is sort of joining the cause of the Federalists in advocating for the Constitution. So you have someone, how should I say it, he’s from the other side. He’s not a conservative, but he’s joining the conservatives for this particular purpose. He talks about Adlai Stevenson as being a liberal, but he’s actually much more conservative than Dwight Eisenhower, who Adlai Stevenson was someone who could do good for the Democratic Party to keep the Democratic Party from rushing to the left and becoming radicalized. And he said that it’s also good for a liberal to come into the Republican Party to keep that party from rushing to the right and becoming extreme on the right.

John Grove:

That’s interesting because people talk about that very much today, that both parties have really sort of just been purged by and large of anyone that’s not pretty solidly in line with John Fetterman’s aside and a few other handfuls of odd ducks, but yeah. Well, that’s interesting and a little bit more nuanced than what I had gotten from a sort of glancing look at Viereck. So before we move on from Viereck then, what would you suggest to a listener if they want to read the first thing to read for Viereck. Would it be Unadjusted Man, or would it be the conservatism book, or what do you think is the best introduction?

John Wilsey:

I would say the best introduction is Conservatism from John Adams to Churchill.

John Grove:

And we’ll link to that in our show notes.

John Wilsey:

And that’s a reprint as well, but I think that reprint is a faithful reprint.

John Grove:

Yeah, it has all the charges.

John Wilsey:

I believe it’s Transaction that did it as well. Another one that’s great, and I think if you’re new to Viereck and you read Conservatism and you enjoyed it, the next step then to take would be to read his Conservatism Revisited. He wrote that in—

John Grove:

Right. I looked at that. 10 years ago I looked through that, I think.

John Wilsey:

Yeah, he wrote that in 1949. I think it was his first book that he wrote. And the edition that’s available to us now has a beautiful introduction by Klaus Wren. Very lengthy. I think it’s about 70, 80 pages where many of the stories I told I got from that introduction by Klaus Wren. Not the stories from his Professor days, those were from other sources, but Klaus Wren gives a really beautiful biography of Viereck. There’s also a book called Pragmatic Conservatism by Robert Lacey, in which he has a quite lengthy chapter on Viereck, I believe. I’m pretty sure it’s that book.

John Grove:

That’s a relatively recent book, I think.

John Wilsey:

That’s a recent book. So Robert Lacey did that treatment. So those are all good. And then of course, his poetry, I think the one to read is Tara Decorum. I’m not a poetry person. Some people are. I like poetry, I guess. I’m not anti-poetry. I’m no expert, but when it comes to his poetry, I think the one to get ahold of is the one that he won the Pulitzer.

John Grove:

Right. All right. Well, tell us-

John Wilsey:

The Unadjusted Man, it’s a classic and you can get that. And despite its flaws, it’s a fantastic book, but I would say read those two books on conservatism first.

John Grove:

Okay, great. So tell us about your next book coming up in April. And interesting, I knew you had been working on Viereck, and I knew you had been working on this other book. I thought they were separate, but you actually said Viereck actually takes, as you say, a starring role in this new book, Religious Freedom: A Conservative Primer. So tell us a little bit about the book, maybe how Viereck fits into that, but just generally the book as a whole and why you wrote this one.

John Wilsey:

Yeah, thanks. The book is called Religious Freedom: A Conservative Primer. It is being published by Eerdmans. It comes out in April. And the thesis of the book is that conservatives are in the best position to conserve and preserve the American tradition of religious freedom. And so I take a sort of a Tocquevillian angle. Tocqueville said that in America, the spirit of religion and the spirit of liberty are in harmony with one another, contrasted with in his native France, where they were at war with one another. So how did Americans maintain that harmony between the spirit of religion and the spirit of freedom? And so in answering that question, I say, “Well, the conservative tradition is the path forward for that. Conservatives revere tradition, conservatives revere authority, conservatives revere order, conservatives revere freedom, all for the sake of human beings, human persons.” So conservativism is a humanistic disposition.

Viereck takes a starring role because in the first chapter, the chapter on what conservativism is, I actually look at Kirk and Viereck and sort of define traditionalist conservativism through the lens of both Kirk and Viereck. And I did that on purpose. I wanted to put the two together. I think that people who do know who Viereck was automatically go to this conflict that he had with several people in the movement early on, but I want to just insist that Viereck and Kirk are much closer than they are foes or partisans against one another. And I think that that demonstrates that conservativism is primarily pre-political and a disposition and not a set of ideologies. And when people like Frank Meyer and William F. Buckley accuse Viereck of being a wolf in sheep’s clothing, they’re being ideological. They’re being false to their own confession, as it were. And so I think that putting them alongside each other is more helpful.

John Grove:

Sometimes, too, now talking 50, 60, 70 years later, some that personal animosity is no longer as alive. And so you can sit back a little bit more and say like, “Hey, how different really were these guys?”

John Wilsey:

Yeah, were they really? So, anyway, that’s the thesis of the book. I also look at some of the features of conservatism and how these things relate to religion and religious freedom in the American tradition. So it’s coming out in April, and I’m excited about it. I hope it’s going to be good. I think it’s good, but that’s-

John Grove:

Great. I’m sure it is. I’m looking forward to reading it for sure.

John Wilsey:

It doesn’t really matter what I think.

John Grove:

Right. Yeah. All right, well, John, thank you so much for joining us here. Had a great talk. And we will link to a lot of the books and references that we made here on our show notes. So check that out at lawliberty.org. So thanks again, and we’ll talk again soon.

John Wilsey:

Thanks so much.

James Patterson:

Thanks for listening to this episode of the Law & Liberty Podcast. Be sure to subscribe on Apple, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts, and visit us online at www.lawliberty.org.