The Return of Street Corner Conservatism

Washington Free Beacon ^ | 23 Dec 2016 | Matthew Continetti

[Rummyfan]

Richard Nixon was plotting his 1968 presidential campaign when he received a letter from a high school English teacher in Pennsylvania. The correspondent, a young man named William F. Gavin, wasn’t certain Nixon would run. But he sure wanted him to. “You can win,” Gavin wrote. “Nothing can happen to you, politically speaking, that is worse than what has happened to you.”

Gavin cited Ortega y Gasset to explain why Nixon was uniquely suited to lead during the violence and uncertainty of the late 1960s. “You are,” he went on, “the only political figure with the vision to see things the way they are and not as Leftist and Rightist kooks would have them.”

The forceful and eloquent style of Gavin’s prose impressed top Nixon aide Patrick J. Buchanan. Gavin soon joined the nascent campaign, beginning a career writing speeches for the thirty-seventh president, for Senator Jim Buckley of New York, for Ronald Reagan, and for congressman Bob Michel, as well as composing novels, nonfiction books, and journalism. Gavin understood well the political realignment that brought city- and suburban-dwelling white working class ethnics—Irish, Italians, Greeks, Pols, and Slavs—rather tentatively into the Republican camp. “The Nixon aide who understood the Catholic opportunity best,” Buchanan wrote later, “was Bill Gavin, who had grown up Catholic and conservative, his views and values shaped by family, faith, and friends.”

[YaReally]

I think this is important. A few years ago, the news media was controlled, now anything is game, anything is in the archives. Sure, fake news and such is hurting this but things will sort themselves out.

[Altura Ct.]

The conservatism of Donald Trump is not the conservatism of ideas but of things. His politics do not derive from the works of Burke or Disraeli or Newman, nor is he a follower of Mill or Berlin or Moynihan. There is no theory of natural rights or small government or international relations that claims his loyalty. When he says he wants to “conserve our country,” he does not mean conserve the idea of countries, or a league of countries, or the slogans of democracy or equality or freedom, but this country, right now, as it exists in the real world of space and time. Trump’s relation to the intellectual community of both parties is fraught because his visceral, dispositional conservatism leads him to judgments based on specific details, depending on changing circumstances, relative to who is gaining and who is losing in a given moment.

[PIF]

WF Gavin must have been drinking something ...

[Steve_Seattle]

"Sure, fake news and such is hurting this but things will sort themselves out."

Speaking of fake news, yesterday one of the lead stories on the MSN web page was that "North Carolina is no longer a democracy" because some leftist pinheads put together a computer program that says it isn't. I checked official records, and found the following:

North Carolina state legislature (both houses): 111-R, 64-D, less than a 2/1 Republican advantage.

Massachusetts state legislature (both houses): 159-D, 40-R, nearly a 4/1 Democratic advantage.

[Steve_Seattle]

I think your well-written comment comes close to describing what motivates Trump. He is more like a general than a politician, and - as Wilford Brimley said in a comic role (Seinfeld) as Postmaster General - "I'm a general, and it's the job of a general to get things done."

Thus, although Trump is somewhat motivated by a traditional ideal of America as formed by his 1950s education, he is essentially a pragmatist frustrated by our inability (or refusal) to solve problems that he thinks are solvable. He is not an intellectual, but he is not dumb, and he knows how to set goals and get people to execute them.

Despite his lack of government experience, his vast business background makes him far better prepared for the presidency than someone like Barack Obama, who was basically a front-man for the interests of international socialism, and who - despite his claims of being non-ideological - was very much so.

Trump is truly non-ideological in the traditional sense, but is motivated by one big idea: the idea of American greatness.

[oblomov]

I wasn’t aware of William Gavin.

This is a brilliant piece.

[Impy]

Ping

Very interesting article