About eight years ago, while still an undergraduate, I was selected for the Intercollegiate Studies Institute’s annual summer honors program, a weeklong immersion into the great books at a mountain resort in Southern Washington State. I delighted in sitting among the lush forests of the Columbia River Gorge and discussing the intricacies of the past with new friends and mentors. For a student like me, who was brand new to the serious study of the Western intellectual tradition, the program was a treat.
Though the debates that took place at the ISI program were always framed in the context of conservative philosophy, their general tone remained broadly pluralist. There was a mix of neoconservatives, traditionalists, and classical liberals in the program (and no one objected to my being an old-school Appalachian Democrat). ISI felt like an oasis secluded from the troubles of contemporary politics, a rarity in the modern world where young people could simply relish the liberal arts.
But in recent years, the tone of ISI—which since 1953 has been one of the main players in campus conservatism, organizing conferences, reading groups, and the like for undergraduates—has sharply shifted. Once only concerned with current events in the most abstract way, the institute now seems consumed by them. Their lectures are just as likely to concern the war in Ukraine or declining American birth rates as they are Plato or Russell Kirk. This shift mirrors the broader politicization of all facets of political life in our contemporary age, but for ISI it represents something more: A loss of its greatest attribute, its antiquarian, tranquil appreciation of great books.
By tethering the study of Western Civilization to contemporary politics, ISI has morphed into the activist mindset it so frequently denounces as having plagued our universities. There is a great difference between reading Plato to debate the meaning of justice and reading him to attack proponents of immigration or same-sex marriage—a difference that ISI increasingly fails to see.
That said, the move toward current events is not half as distressing as the ideological trajectory that ISI is adopting. Once open to a range of conservative viewpoints, the interlocutors at ISI are now a consistent mixture of post-liberals, integralists, and national conservatives. Headliners for this year’s ISI honors program include few well-known moderate conservatives or libertarians, but it did include liberal critic Patrick Deneen and professional provocateur Michael Knowles. The organization’s podcasts now frequently feature everything from conspiratorial screeds about how Marxism is controlling America to discussions laced with apologia for the Confederacy. ISI’s intellectual range has narrowed to a focus on the supremacy of particular strands of America’s cultural heritage—and they’re often being pushed in the most brutally unintellectual way imaginable.
Such an ideological orientation is inimical to the principles that supposedly undergird ISI in the first place. The institute was built to defend the ideas of Western civilization through a serious appreciation of great books and thinkers. Admittedly, Western civilization is a complex and varied affair that has produced just as much darkness as light—after all, both Winston Churchill and Adolf Hitler emerged from the backdrop of the early 20th century. Yet ISI has always been remarkably good at cleaving to the brightest parts of Western Civilization. The tagline of the organization, “educating for liberty,” signals this noble past. For over 50 years it has stood for the high-minded conservative liberalism that is the hallmark of Hamilton, Lincoln, and Kirk. In practice, this has meant—in the broadest terms possible—defending the idea of a restrained national government, local democracy, and free markets. These three principles are general enough to allow people of drastically different political persuasions to coexist harmoniously.
Yet by embracing nationalism today, ISI has narrowed its intellectual horizons. Conservatism—though far from universally beloved—is generally speaking a much broader ideological camp than nationalism. Nationalism, as it is espoused by ISI, begins with a simple premise: that the individual traditions of a nation are infinitely superior to both local customs and international human rights. If this is the case, then the diverse array of ideas that make up a political community must be simplified to fit some larger narrative that can stand opposed to both pluralism and multiculturalism. Not only are these nationalist narratives antithetical to the prudent wisdom of conservative philosophy, but they effectively shut down most philosophic debates. For example, it is impossible to have an open debate about the meaning of justice if the primary goal of one of the interlocutors is to uphold a predetermined national viewpoint.
In turn, the emphasis on the national undermines the study of great books—transforming it from close reading to something like indoctrination. This is because great books, in all their complexity, do not easily fit into simple narratives. Many on the nationalist right may argue that the great books are great because they defend the national against the cosmopolitan. Yet writers in the canon—such as John Stuart Mill and Georg Hegel—are just as likely, if not more likely, to argue on behalf of a liberal universalism. That cannot be seriously ignored if one wishes to understand the history of Western civilization.
At one point, ISI was even open to engaging with thinkers outside of the traditional conservative mold. In 2008, it granted its “conservative book of the year award” to A Secular Age by Charles Taylor. By granting the award to a social democrat Canadian Catholic, ISI proved that it cared simply about the quality of the ideas expressed in a book rather than about the author’s political bona fides. This was true at the ISI events I attended less than 10 years ago. I distinctly recall one seminar that pitted a devotee of Willmoore Kendall against a former student of Harry Jaffa. Hour after hour that weekend we watched two of the brightest minds in their field argue about natural rights, Abraham Lincoln, and the very nature of republican government. Far from forcing each student to one side or another, the students left with a profound appreciation for the complexity of the American political tradition.
Such broad disagreements now feel like part of ISI’s past.
From pessimism to radicalization.
Fusionist conservatives often act as if the nationalists emerged out of nowhere—as if they seized control of conservative institutions without the slightest prelude beyond the election of Donald Trump. They instead would prefer to sweep out the nationalists and return to business as usual (read Reaganite policies and rhetoric).
The decline of ISI, however, is proof that this cannot happen. Business as usual merely opens the door to the reality we still live in. If we really wish to understand and resolve the problems of nationalism, conservatives must realize they helped cause this crisis.
From the very start, the American conservative movement was founded on a narrative of decline—the idea that Western Civilization has been steeply deteriorating in quality and strength for some time. For 70 years or so, the various schools of American conservatism have been defined by where they believe this decline originated, but in the end, they almost all accept this gloomy interpretation of American history. After all, William F. Buckley Jr.—the undisputed founder of modern American conservatism—once argued that the job of a conservative is to “stand athwart history and yell stop.”
But this strain of pessimistic politics runs into many problems. Most notably, such narratives gradually start to make individuals willing to do almost anything to stem the tide of history. When political rhetoric focuses on how the world is going to hell in a handbasket, people become understandably panicky in their attempt to resolve the looming crisis.
This general attitude was succinctly summarized by Barry Goldwater (and possibly written by Harry Jaffa) in 1964: “Extremism in defense of liberty is no vice. Moderation in pursuit of justice is no virtue.” What Jaffa and Goldwater fail to grasp is that extremism in defense of anything is quite often the greatest political vice imaginable. Too often in history, well-meaning statesmen have unintentionally sacrificed the things that make life worthwhile for the sake of some lofty goal. Goldwater is right that we must not allow moderation to palsy our defense of that which is good, but we must also not allow our defense of those same things to permit us to lose sight of the bigger picture.
For all of its many virtues, ISI bought into the 20th-century conservative narrative of decline lock, stock, and barrel. This began with its founding up until the day I heard an esteemed philosophy professor declare to a room full of hopeful undergraduates that our only hope was to find peaceful lives in a world quickly being consumed by evil. ISI more often than not saw in its appreciation of Western Civilization an attempt to preserve cultural treasures from being eradicated by the march of post-modernity. Given this outlook, is it really surprising that ISI has started to adopt extremist methods and viewpoints to defend a cultural heritage they fear is being eradicated? Ultimately ISI’s emphasis on decline—lifted from the rhetoric of the conservative movement more broadly—could only ever end indoctrination, nationalism, and tragedy.
A return to hope.
In the weeks and months that followed John Quincy Adams’ defeat at the hands of Andrew Jackson in the election of 1828, the scholarly New Englander feared for the future of the republic. He worried that the populist demagogy of Jackson heralded the start of a steep decline in prudent, wise, government in the United States. In short, Adams began to weave his own narrative of political decline.
But rather than turning toward radicalism, Adams found a different path. In the writings of the Roman statesman Cicero, he discovered the following aphorism: “While there’s life, there’s hope.” Adams learned to banish the disease of his decline fixation by dreaming of a better tomorrow.
This may all sound a bit gimmicky—like something out of a self-help book—but as ISI demonstrates, focusing on political and cultural decline leads to a dark place. If conservatives instead approached modernity intending to improve its faults, rather than assume our contemporary culture to be almost wholly evil, it would lead to a vibrant political movement—one that corrects the faults not just of nationalism but the shortcomings of American conservatism more broadly. If nothing else, there is no alternative to this attitude. What decline narratives consistently fail to understand is that there is no returning to the past, just as there is no rushing to the future. When we as a people attempt to stop the march of time, tragedy inevitably follows. In the end, we can only do the best with the present as it comes to us.
The French philosopher Alexis de Tocqueville well understood this fact. He declared that it is not up to us whether we will live in an egalitarian and democratic society. However, we can choose whether that society will be oriented towards those things that sustain human flourishing—community, faith, family, love, and beauty. Instead of focusing on how education has been destroyed by modern accounts of diversity, a flourishing conservatism will focus its attention on finding a healthier way to include diverse viewpoints and backgrounds in our society. Instead of bemoaning the ways in which our cosmopolitan world uproots local custom, we should find ways (as Charles Taylor has suggested) of reconciling locality with a broader view of the world.
All of this requires hope. Even if we are neither sure that the present is all that great nor what the future holds, hope can completely alter our outlook. Instead of wildly clinging to a past that is fast fading away, we can appreciate and promote those eternal truths that must be adapted to each new age to survive. This is where mid-century conservatives went off the rails—they did not wish to adapt to the present; they wished to revive the past.
Organizations like ISI show the sad results of this mistake. If we wish to defend the very best of Western Civilization, hope is our best ally. But despair, nationalist or otherwise, will only lead us further and further away from liberty.
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