The most distinctive feature of the Trump conservatives is their apocalyptic rhetoric--their claim that to save America from being destroyed by Radical Left Democrats, conservatives must set aside their conservative principles of limited government and individual liberty so that Trump can become a Red Caesar and suppress his opponents. Trump has embraced this rhetoric, such as when he posted an image of Napoleon Bonaparte riding into battle with the text: "He who saves his country violates no law." Previously, I have written about how Abraham Lincoln warned about the danger of someone like Trump who would thirst for the splendid glory that would come from becoming America's Napoleonic Dictator and thus destroy the American constitutional order.
There are some precedents in the history of American conservatism for using fear-mongering rhetoric to justify authoritarian one-man rule as the only way to save the country. For example, in its issue of December 16, 1969, National Review published an article by David Atwell Zoll with the title "Shall We Let America Die?" Zoll warned that in response to the violent revolutionary activity of the New Left, liberalism was showing a death-wish. To save America from revolutionary overthrow by the New Left, American liberals would have to engage in autocratic repression. But they refused to do this because this would violate their "libertarian commitments." Consequently, liberalism was helpless before its enemies.
Zoll wondered whether contemporary conservatism was infected with a similar death-wish. Conservatism "does share many civilized values with liberalism: most conspicuously, the values connected with libertarianism and legalism." But if conservatives adhere to the values of libertarianism and legalism, that will hold them back from employing the repressive methods necessary for defeating the New Left revolutionaries. "The serious conservative will not be pleased with the choice he might then have to make between some crude neo-fascism and the despotism of the new evangels of the Left." Surely, however, Zoll declared, "a Bismarck is much to be preferred to a Robespierre."
As Chancellor of the German Empire (1871 to 1890), Otto von Bismarck sidelined the Imperial Reichstag and ruled autocratically through a strong bureaucracy with power concentrated in the hands of the Junker elite. So in pointing conservatives to Bismarck as their model of rule, Zoll was clearly recommending autocratic repression of dissent as the only way to save America from a New Left Jacobin revolution. He concluded by saying that this would affirm the most basic principle of conservatism--the commitment to order.
The readers of National Review in 1969 would have known that in speaking about "the revolutionaries of the New Left," Zoll was referring particularly to the left-wing militant group known as the "Weathermen," who had first arisen in June of 1969, when they took over the national office of the Students for a Democratic Society, and then began a series of militant activities that included bombings, jailbreaks, riots, and shootings. The Weathermen justified this primarily as a way of protesting the Vietnam War. When the U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War ended in 1975, the Weathermen Underground slowly began to disband.
A few weeks after the publication of Zoll's article, National Review published Frank Meyer's response to Zoll (December 30, 1969). Meyer agreed with Zoll that conservatives should see "that the restoration and preservation of order is the outstanding political issue of our present crisis." But the question at issue here, Meyer insisted, was--what kind of order?
Instead of Zoll's proposal of an authoritarian order that would suppress liberty and civility, Meyer argued that American conservatives should support the American tradition of order--"the tradition of the Constitution and the Founding Fathers"--that would be compatible with individual freedom. Within the American constitutional order, "there is no contradiction between the defense of order against criminal elements or rampaging mobs and a free polity." Thus, "the alternative to a Robespierre always present to the consciousness of American conservatism is not a Bismarck but a Washington, not the agent of a Wilhelmine order, but the agent of a free constitutional order."
A few months later, Zoll responded to Meyer (National Review, March 10, 1970). To Meyer's charge that Zoll was rejecting "the American tradition, the tradition of the Constitution and the Founding Fathers," Zoll pled guilty as charged. But he observed: "any stabbing sense of guilt on my part is assuaged by the fact that these stentorian platitudes convey very little precise meaning to me, and if I do glean their general purport, one thing is clear enough: They have nothing to do with the intellectual history of conservatism."
Zoll then indicated that his conservatism was "high Toryism." And the high Tory would see the American crisis created by the revolutionary New Left as a choice "between two forms of social repression: the insurrectionary tyranny of the Left and the primitivistic and irrational retaliations of the Right." The Tory conservative "must not only confront the dangers of the New Jacobinism, but must also moderate the potential excesses of a right-wing radicalism."
Meyer responded with two more articles in National Review (March 24 and April 7, 1970). Against Zoll's purely Tory conservatism, Meyer insisted that "we American conservatives" as defending the American constitutional republic "are at the same time both Tory and Whig, both traditionalist and liberty." That's Meyer's "fusion" of traditionalism and libertarianism (more on that in the next post).
To Zoll's claim that there are only two alternatives in the present crisis--the "insurrectionary tyranny of the Left" or the "primitivistic and irrational retaliations of the Right"--and that the only role for conservatives is to oppose the Left while seeking to "moderate the potential excesses of a right-wing radicalism," Meyer makes two objections.
First, Meyer says that Zoll is foolish in recommending that Tories "limit themselves to the gentle ministrations of a von Papen or a Hindenburg, ameliorating the excesses of barbarian right-wing radicalism--predictably, with as much success." That is to say, no success. Most of the readers of National Review would know that Franz von Papen, a national conservative, pressured German President Paul von Hindenburg to appoint Adolf Hitler as Chancellor and himself as Vice-Chancellor in 1933, with the thought that Hitler could be moderated once he was in government. Well, we know what came of that.
Meyer's second objection is that Zoll's choice between left-wing tyranny and right-wing tyranny is a false dilemma because there is a third alternative. "The obvious and desirable course for Americans is the preservation of our constitutional republic by restoring the rule of law and the authority of our institutions." In doing this, he insisted, "no radical extra-Constitutional steps are necessary," because the "Constitution and the laws on our statute books are generally sufficient, if they are enforced."
Meyer made a few suggestions about what could be done. Leftist criminals should be punished under the criminal laws. Organizations engaged in violent insurrectionary attacks on constitutional institutions should be prosecuted. It might be necessary to ban all outdoor assemblages that are intended to become violent. Such riotous gatherings do not fall within the constitutional right (in the First Amendment) to "peaceably to assemble and to petition the government for a redress of grievances."
Indeed, over the next five years, hundreds of Weathermen would be arrested and convicted for their crimes. Many of them became fugitives who were tracked down by the FBI. Some of the fugitives turned themselves in. Eventually, the Weather Underground disbanded. Thus was Meyer vindicated in his foreseeing that the American constitutional order provided all the means necessary for defending America against the New Left revolutionaries without violating the moral and legal principles of a free society.
From this, we can imagine what Meyer would have said to the Trump conservatives who argue that a Trump dictatorship is the only way to save the American way of life from being destroyed by the radical Left. The election of Biden in 2020 was not a "Flight 93 Election"--a life or death election--because the Biden Democrats did not use their power to kill, imprison, or enslave innocent conservative Republicans. And when Biden's presidency became unpopular, the constitutional order allowed Trump to return to power through a free, fair, and peaceful election. Now that Trump's presidency has become unpopular, we can foresee that the Trump Republicans will be defeated in the coming elections.
This shows how the American constitutional system allows peaceful and orderly partisan political competition within an order based on civility and freedom.
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