Among the best – that is to say, the most morally trustworthy and authoritative – of people that I’ve ever known, my grandfather on my mother’s side figures near the apex. Holden Doane was a farmer in the true hill-Yankee mould (hardworking, tireless, thrifty, resourceful, respectful of the land and its limits and potentials), belonging to a long line of Vermont farmers of the same name going back to 1815. Even my first memories of him are those of an ancient old man, but as powerful and sturdy as the maples he tapped for a living. Powerful – but not violent. Holden Doane was a Methodist to his very bones, including in his commitment to peace, a commitment which went far deeper than mere outward pacifism. It was built into his habits, his character. He was careful, spare and gentle in his voice – but when he spoke, you listened. When he made a request of you, you did it. His patience was the stuff of hagiography. He cared deeply for all of his neighbours, even those who tried that legendary patience. And it goes without saying that he loved all of us far more deeply than we could have appreciated.
I remember that my mother once described him, politically, as an ‘Eisenhower conservative’: ever distrustful of the ‘Three Bigs’ (that is to say, ‘big government’, ‘big business’ and ‘big organisations’). He believed that hard work should be rewarded; laziness not so much. His opinions of new developments (whether a Walmart or a new tract of suburban housing in former farmland) were seldom expressed, but I never remember them being at all positive. His land and its ways: that he understood. His community: that too. But the party of Eisenhower, as it turned out in his later years, cared very little for either of those things. Without changing his fundamental beliefs or political orientation, toward the end of his life he became an Obamacon and an environmental activist – a devotee of the countercultural way of Andrew Bacevich and Bill McKibben.
Why do I bring up my grandfather and his relationship to politics?
Simply put: a few of my friends online simply do not see the use of conservatism. For them, conservatism merely consists of a set of empty, discredited pieties: a body of myths that even its adherents don’t believe and are willing to cast off when inconvenient. Worse still, conservatism has become, in their eyes, the embodiment of hypocrisy. Watching the same evangelicals who despised the forty-second president for his infidelities and crass womanising turn a blind eye to the forty-fifth’s, has been particularly galling to them. Most recently, some of my online acquaintance have latched onto Ross Douthat’s recent sadly ill-thought article on ‘incels’ as proof that conservatism is a morally-bankrupt whited sepulchre filled with the rotting bones of ressentiment and lust for power over others.
I’m here to (again) push back against that particular prejudice. I cannot, and never will, accept the idea that my grandfather’s views were morally-bankrupt, lived as they were from the context of a life that was more than merely conventionally moral, but actively generous and aggressively peaceable (if that makes any sense).
The intellectual substance of conservatism – not, I hasten to record, the shadow of it that stalks American political fora like a particularly deranged hobgoblin – is something that’s gripped my imagination since the eighth grade, when I had a contrarian Irish-American High Tory social studies teacher who taught us out of Howard Zinn’s People’s History. But the one who really fired my enthusiasm for that substance was the Mount Holyoke poet-historian Peter Viereck. His work fairly brimmed with the same powerful-but-gentle spirit that presided over our family visits to the Vermont maple farm. Like my grandfather, too, Viereck was deeply alienated from the rank ideological morass that took the place of his initial poetic vision, and by the wild, tyrant-spirited demagoguery that threatened to replace at every turn the moderation he had so carefully cultivated.
Is conservatism, in the Doane-Viereck sense that I’m using the word here, doomed forever to a Faustian bargain? Are the only choices before it, those of becoming a monster, or else becoming an increasingly-irrelevant and watered-down shade of liberalism? I dearly hope not. And insofar as all good things do partake in some fundamental existence, I dare to think that this substance may yet survive the doom which its imitators attempt to inflict on it. Even though my own politics seem to default to some form of Christian socialism, I’m still not quite comfortable with the label. I continue to draw inspiration and strength from other wells, including that which Holden Doane tended so faithfully.
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