People of the Book

People of the Book

Why do libertarians produce better literature than conservatives?

By Brian Doherty

After gifting us with such lists as the top 50 conservative rock songs, this year National Review offered, under the guidance of political reporter John J. Miller, the “Ten Great Conservative Novels” of the postwar era.

Miller is a literature buff whose tastes are more inclusive of pop and genre fiction than were those of such highbrow conservative lit gurus as Irving Babbitt or T.S. Eliot. The novels NR selected, though, were all by reputable novelists, some with known conservative sympathies, some not. Their themes promote such modern conservative ideas as the evils of the Soviets, the counterculture’s erosion of proper culture, and the technological destruction of human nature.

National Review presented them not to celebrate a recognized right-wing canon, but to promote works of likely interest for conservatives craving ideological sympathy. As Miller told me, “I do think conservatives respond to art in certain kinds of ways and certain kinds of messages resonate with them. I’m not talking about propaganda, but about insight into human nature and shared worldviews—and a sense when reading this book that you are among friends or someone you can learn from.”

But when Miller sought suggestions for the list on his blog, various commenters protested that the project was unconservative in principle: Stalinists were the ones who had to categorize art politically. Someone who calls himself “Das” noted, “If a novel just plays out and lets life unfold I believe conservatives can claim it as a conservative novel. Why? Conservatives invest themselves in life not politics. … Conservatives don’t grind axes in art, they just let life play out.”

Now, it is true that conservatives have generally avoided the totalitarian temptation to squeeze everything into a political mold. But they have also managed to avoid the creative arts in the formation and shaping of their ideas—this despite their movement’s self-appointed reputation as keeper of the canons of Western culture.

Fiction is nearly absent in the offerings of the Conservative Book Club. The institutions and periodicals on the Right most dedicated to belles lettres, such as the Intercollegiate Studies Institute and Modern Age, are the most obscure outposts on the conservative frontier. The conservative godfather who most strongly advocated literary roots for political thought, Russell Kirk, is on a long downhill slide in influence while Sarah Palin rises.

The modern Right’s most popular contribution to humane letters, movement apparatchik William Bennett’s bestselling 1990s compilation The Book of Virtues—bits of prose and poetry meant to slam home lessons about self-discipline, honesty, work, and faith—might seem on the surface to fill Kirk’s bill. But that devotee of Eliot, Faulkner, and Waugh had his sights set on work that was more complicated, less reducible to an easily labeled fable. Kirk thought literature could deliver not just potted lessons but help us “perceive, beyond mere appearances, a hierarchy of worth and certain enduring truths … drawn from centuries of human experience.” Literature’s role in the cultivation of the moral imagination, Kirk wrote, is to transmit “to successive rising generations … a body of ethical principles and critical standards and imaginative creations that constitutes a kind of collective intellect of humanity.” As Kirk scholar Donald Atwell Zoll put it, “central to Kirk’s social and political commentary was the conviction that ethical and normative truths are often best conveyed through a symbolic veil, as found, for example, in the medium of great poetry, rather than by the means of discursive explication.”

One important American political movement did find a huge part of its core understanding of “ethical and normative truths” conveyed not through “great poetry” in the traditional sense, but at any rate through imaginative literature. It included such marvelously entertaining pulpy hugger-mugger as a genius who invents an impossible energy-generating machine that shuts down a corrupt statist government, which tries to fight back with a death ray built by a mad scientist. Then there were the Moon rebels tossing giant rocks down on a repressive earth government to win their independence.

That movement is libertarianism, which unlike conservatism in its popular sense has deep roots in imaginative fiction—though not literature of the quality that Kirk, himself an author of genre fiction in the gothic horror vein, tended to promote. Libertarians’ literary heroes are Ayn Rand and Robert Heinlein, whose Atlas Shrugged and The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress are respectively referenced above.

Over the years, right-wing thinkers have claimed novelists from James Fenimore Cooper to today’s Tom Wolfe. But finding conservative activists who avow direct inspiration from them for launching their ideological lives would be quite a trick. In contrast, many, perhaps even most, movement libertarians of the 1960s-90s generation would have no problem admitting influence from works of fiction. While other novels, particularly the anarchistic Illuminatus! by Robert Shea and Robert Anton Wilson, have their devotees, Rand and Heinlein and their occasional epigones rule the literary libertarian roost.

Why is libertarianism more fictionally attuned than conservatism? Conservatives have had, especially in the past generation, more real-world accomplishments in politics and media for adherents to glom onto for inspiration. Perceiving themselves as closer to worldly power than libertarians can, young Republicans can locate living heroes. Who needs the emotional support and intellectual stimulation of the literary imagination when you can see the world you want either in the near pre-Obama past or in a future that’s just a GOP electoral victory away? While traditional conservatism is historically rooted in many literary traditions and themes from the Greek and Roman classics to Shakespeare to the New Humanists and Southern Agrarians of the early 20th century, modern conservatism has become too much of politics to think much of art.

Libertarianism, by contrast, has remained something for which imagination is appropriate and necessary. The 20th century provided little useful fodder for contemplating the world as it should be from a libertarian perspective—what the Russian-born novelist and philosopher Ayn Rand believed was the purpose of literature. But the Obama age has created a fresh wave of fascination with Rand’s dystopia, as thousands hear echoes in daily headlines of her novels’ world of government takeovers of major industries, distribution of economic power via political pull rather than market success, and elevation of a feckless compassion above reason and reality. Want to see the real damage that fashionable leftist attitudes against the libertarian version of individualism can have on the human soul? Read Rand’s saga of two philosophically opposed architects and their respective rises, falls, and rises, The Fountainhead.

After Rand, the most prominent literary influence on the movement’s adherents has been Robert Heinlein—a living example of that grotesque yet exciting science-fiction vision: the man with two heads. He was a peculiar mix, half Goldwaterite, with his ferocious individualism, admiration for the virtues and accomplishments of rugged frontiersmen, and belief in a foreign menace to our way of life that needed to be defeated by any means necessary, short of the slavery of the draft. See, for the most vivid example of this side of Heinlein, his 1959 novel Starship Troopers, in which a sometimes despised brave minority of soldiers keeps a culture free and safe from alien bugs (read: communists).

But Heinlein was also half iconoclastic libertine hippie. He advocated the harsh and comic questioning of tribal mores and celebrated the evasion of everyday taboos by an enlightened elite in his most popular novel, 1961’s Stranger in a Strange Land. It involved a beatific free-love cult started by a human raised by Martians and provided for many of its readers—including, alas, some members of the Manson family—a morally imaginative glimpse into the living out of less traditional ways of dealing with family, tribe, and sex.

By allowing readers of The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress to inhabit a world where “rational anarchist” philosophers could team up with supercompetent and superattractive men and women to conquer tyranny and establish a world where taxing people for things they didn’t personally support was just not done, Heinlein became a hero to many young libertarians, including David Nolan, the founder of the Libertarian Party, and Robert Poole Jr., the founder of the Reason Foundation (whose magazine, Reason, I work for).

But the very nature of libertarianism’s largest literary influences could seem to damn a movement thus guided. Those dedicated to the traditional humanities could easily condemn Rand and Heinlein as unworthy of serious attention. They both wrote unequivocally unrealistic works that were driven more by plot and theme than character. Heinlein’s novels are unabashed science fiction, involving aliens and extraterrestrial living. Rand’s Atlas Shrugged was essentially science fiction as well, requiring a super-science gimmick for its plot and climax. But if these classics fail in terms of prose or characterization to live up to the highest standards of non-genre literature, it could be argued that in fantastic circumstances we can most vividly contemplate the possibilities of counter-realistic politics.

The major reason libertarianism has a firm base in literature—even popular literature—that conservatism lacks comes down to a purity of ideas and goals. Libertarianism is still a project, essentially, of the moral imagination, and one with a unity of purpose. Conservatism, meanwhile, has become a project of electoral wrangling. As a political coalition more than a set of agreed theory, conservatism has enough variance to fit passionate anti-interventionist poet Robinson Jeffers and neocon editorialist Mark Helprin uncomfortably under the same umbrella. You see Southern Agrarians, thought of as conservative heroes by some intellectuals, defending an anti-industrialism that is nowhere to be found in the effective modern political and media Right. That may seem to show the promise of a worldview that is bigger, wiser, more complicated than libertarian simplicities; in fact, it suggests a movement that has lost philosophical cohesion in pursuit of real-world success.

Gregory Wolfe is a man of letters from a right-wing movement background who now edits the literary journal Image. He reminds us that however difficult crafting a culture that will influence society in salubrious directions may be, it’s still vital to try. “Political battles are shaped by the stories we tell, the symbols that are the most living and vibrant in experience,” he says. And if a novel can help people imagine and feel the vitality of personal responsibility, for example, “when people end up debating tax policy, what their understanding of human nature is and how that understanding was nurtured brings them to talk about it in certain ways.”

Conservatism is no longer about a subtle and coherent understanding of the human soul, but about running the modern state and winning influence for that purpose. Governance ought to require a great deal of refined moral imagination. But those most obsessed with gaining power are least likely to have a sense of humane width or even to understand its importance. That’s the sort of irony about which any number of nuanced and enriching works of literature could be written.