REMEMBERING WHO WE ARE
Observations of a Southern Conservative
M.E. Bradford
Athens: University of Georgia Press
1985
This collection of essays and papers by M.E. Bradford differs from what I expected. From the reviews it seemed that Bradford was defending "authentic" America as a xenophobic, tribal community. This community was seen as bound up with racial slavery, but also (implausibly enough) with the thinking of Thomas Jefferson, someone normally associated with the Enlightenment. Through Bradford's fevered imagination, Jefferson was turned into a tribalist; and the founding of America, as Bradford was interpreted in the Claremont Review, became a proto-Nazi attempt to create a "community of blood and soil." Bradford's reviewers, even friendly ones, note the "anger" in his remarks about the War Between the States (a.k.a. the Civil War), the civil rights revolution, and finally, his own unsuccessful bid for the directorship of the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH). Even more recently, owing to massive bureaucratic opposition Bradford was denied the post of National Archivist. Sympathetic and unsympathetic reviewers both insist that Mel is looking back in anger.
My own reading has shown that none of these judgments is correct. Bradford has an unsettling habit of appealing to sentiment to express complicated arguments, but his views are neither malicious nor reminiscent of Nazi thinking. On this last point I would stress a critical distinction ignored in one particularly graceless tirade against him, between nazism’s faintly Jeffersonian appeals to agrarian virtue, something which could also be found in European peasant parties; and the more distinctively Nazi cult of violence and racial engineering. Bradford is an agrarian traditionalist, but not an advocate of Nazi programs and ideals. Regrettably his critics, and particularly the disciples of Leo Strauss, are unwilling to recognize this distinction. Although Bradford and the Straussians, most notably Harry Jaffa, have been arguing political philosophy for years, one would have hoped that neither side descended to name-calling.
There are, in fact, genuine philosophic differences between the two. Citing – inaccurately, I believe - Notes on the Revolution in France, the late Leo Strauss judged Edmund Burke, the father of historical conservatism, to be a "radical" historicist, who had treated morality as a function of historical forces. According to Strauss, the opponents of the French Revolution who had appealed to history and custom were even more dangerously revolutionary than were their enemies on the Left. Among Strauss students, Harry Jaffa has pushed the case against historical conservatism perhaps the furthest. Jaffa sees the defense of inherited, non-egalitarian institutions as an opening wedge for fascism, and he identified true conservatism with the support of democratic equality. Jaffa and his school have certainly been inventive in putting together their own Great Tradition. They cite selectively Aristotle, Plato, Aquinas, Locke, Jefferson, and their favorite statesman, Lincoln, in order to establish a pedigree for their concept of American democracy. But even less zealously egalitarian Straussians - for example, Joseph Cropsey at the University of Chicago - take a starkly rationalist and anti traditionalist approach to political theory. They regard the best regime as one devised by individual reason - and never to be confused with the
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