Bradley Birzer Has Paved The Way for A Third Party

In a previous post I talked about what a center-right “Liberal Party” would look like. I wrote that it would be moderately traditionalist, supportive of small government and the diffusion of political power from federal to state governments, and amenable to free trade. Bradley Birzer, editor of the Imaginative Conservative, fellow of the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library, and chair of History at Hillsdale College, has reflected on what traditional conservatives and libertarians have in common. His observations are pertinent to the formation of a conservative third party.

Both libertarians and conservatives, Birzer writes, are reacting to the subversion of Western culture that occurred during the 19th century. Nietzsche, Marx, and Freud, among others, undermined the Enlightenment’s emphasis on free will and traditional religious authority, paving the way for the expansion of the nation-state and tyranny in the name of progress. “Since the assasination of Czar Alexander II,” Birzer writes, “the ideologues have roamed the world relentlessly.” Idealists seeking to remake the world–and human nature–have sowed disaster and destruction since the Jacobins guillotined Louis XVI. Conservatives have since the publication of Edmund Burke’s Reflections on The Revolution in France yelled, “Stop!”

One excerpt from Birzer’s piece bears extensive quotation:

“It is worth restating that most conservatives and libertarians are, essentially, reactionary and reactive-ist.

“It is certainly worth considering what the two movements, broadly defined, have in common.

“First, each fears the massive enlargement of the modern nation-state, seeing in it the rise of Leviathan.

“Second, each supports–to varying degrees–the free will of the individual person.

“Third, each desires real community to be organic, necessary, and voluntary.

“Fourth, traditionally, each has supported liberal education and the Great Books/Great Ideas of the West.

“Fifth, each has seen warfare (with the crucial exception of the neo-conservatives) as the vehicle by which the state advances toward Leviathan.”

Most fissures within the conservative movement, Birzer notes, occur because of disagreements about the last two points. Philip Giraldi’s recent piece on Victoria Nuland’s tenure at the State Department epitomizes the enmity that exists between paleoconservatives like Patrick Buchanan (founding editor of the American Conservative) and neoconservtive luminaries like Nuland’s husband Robert Kagan. Neoconservatives’ enthusiasm for regime change is unusual in the history of conservatism.

The Dick Cheneys of the world excepted, libertarians and conservatives share an inveterate skepticism of governmental, particularly federal, authority. This observation should form the basis of discussions about the formation of a third party.