CHAPTER 10National Review, Congress and the American Tradition, and Suicide of the West

During his tenure at the Central Intelligence Agency in the early 1950s, James Burnham met a charismatic recent Yale graduate named William F. Buckley. Twenty years Burnham's junior, Buckley was also raised in a wealthy Catholic family. Although Burnham had abandoned Catholicism as a young adult, Buckley practiced and preached his faith. Both were relatively aristocratic in outlook; they questioned the innate abilities of the masses. And both men liked to argue for the mere sake of arguing. Buckley needed sparring partners, too, although he attacked more gently and humorously than Burnham.

In 1955, Burnham helped cofound with Buckley the conservative magazine National Review (NR). NR became the most important conservative journal of the second half of the twentieth century. Its publisher's statement from the first issue in November 1955 explains that the magazine opposed “Big Brother government,” any attempts at social engineering, and the conformity of the intellectuals. Diplomatically, the magazine called communism “satanic utopianism.”¹ Coexistence with the USSR was neither possible, desirable, nor honorable; victory had to be achieved. The magazine harvested writers from The Freeman. A June 1954 edition of The Freeman included articles from future NR columnists Buckley, Burnham, Max Eastman, and Russel Kirk. Along with Burnham, inaugural editors Willmoore Kendall and Willi Schlamm had been former leftists. The magazine accommodated various conservative voices, and intellectual disagreements between editors were encouraged.² Buckley later called Burnham NR's “dominant intellectual influence.”³

Burnham's columns usually denounced liberals, communists, and other pundits. He continued to spread themes he had preached in his three anticommunist works: war raged. It could not be wished away. Maybe Americans did not want to fight the Cold War, but the Cold War had to be fought. And won. And it could be won. The Soviet Union was weak. The United States just needed a consistent, aggressive foreign policy aimed at its destruction. When combined, America's best weapons were force and will. NR gave the Cold Warrior a megaphone that he used to promote these ideas to American conservatives for the next twenty-three years in hundreds of columns and various blurbs.

The magazine's appearance was fortuitous because the months after its founding were critical in Cold War history, allowing the magazine and Burnham to showcase their strong anticommunist voices. The impetus was Nikita Khrushchev's “secret speech” in February 1956. Never intended to be publicized, Khrushchev detailed the crimes of Joseph Stalin. The speech was a bombshell because no longer could evidence about Stalin's brutality be dismissed as an imperialist invention; it had now been corroborated. Riots ensued in Stalin's native Georgia. The speech confirmed to anticommunists like Burnham what they already believed: that there was no essential difference between Hitler and Stalin, or the systems they ruled over. Communism equaled Nazism.

Burnham responded by resurrecting the issue of Lenin and his responsibility for the Soviet catastrophe. Khrushchev exalted Lenin in his speech, insisting that the Bolshevik used violence only when necessary. Dismissing Marxists and other leftists who assumed that everything would have been different in the first socialist society had Lenin lived, Burnham maintains in an NR article that Lenin condemned “imperialists” and “class enemies” more forcefully than Stalin.⁴ And Lenin's penchant for blood was greater than Stalin's, before, during, and even after the Revolution. What about Trotsky? His former American disciple flatly muses that maybe his body could be held in a mausoleum too, except it had been cremated after his assassination—by his comrades. Violence and terror were endemic in the communist experience.

Khrushchev's speech also sparked significant revolts against Soviet influence in Eastern Europe. In Poland, anticommunist protests were crushed with the help of dozens of Soviet tanks. NR's senior editor dryly notes: “And as they rolled over Polish bodies the Communist tanks flattened also the soft rhetoric of our George Kennans and Stewart Alsops, our experts and smug journalists, who have been telling us how the Soviet regime has come to be accepted by its subjects, how (in Kennan's servile words) ‘there is a finality, for better or worse, about what has occurred in Eastern Europe.’”⁵ Burnham retorts that helpless Poles clasping hands when confronted by tanks—emboldened by the soldiers who joined them—spoke the truth about the Soviet empire, not America's “correspondents and diplomats.”⁶

Encouraged by the spirit of criticism, what began as an attempt to voice concerns became a full-fledged revolution in Hungary where Imre Nagy established a more liberal regime. Fearing change, particularly the Hungarian desire to leave the Warsaw Pact, Khrushchev responded again with tanks. Roughly thirty thousand Hungarians were killed. Nagy was executed and a new pro-Soviet government was established. The crushing of the revolt marked a crucial moment in the history of communism. The French and Italian Communist Parties fractured while the British Communist Party lost two-thirds of its members.⁷

The lack of an immediate US response devastated Burnham. Rollback could have begun. Buckley said he had never seen Burnham so angry.⁸ The United States formally practiced containment or inaction, so hopes for the liberation of Eastern Europe were lost. Burnham argues in a blurb that it appeared to European nations that Americans had helped incite revolts, yet failed to support them when they materialized.⁹ Two weeks later he wrote: “The rulers of the Soviet Union appear to have proved what the world has long suspected: that they can perpetuate no aggression so bold, or brutality so base, as to cause the United States to take a stand.”¹⁰ He later insisted that no better opportunity for liberation had existed because all of Eastern Europe stirred with discontent as the post-Stalin regime was still raw.¹¹ The Hungarians showed their hatred for the Soviet regime and the United States idled. From this point onward, Burnham wrote, everyone knew that the United States would not materially support anyone trying to free themselves from the Soviet yoke.

A lack of Western response in the Middle East irked the hardliner, too. Several months before the Hungarian Revolution, Egyptian President Gamal Nasser nationalized the British-owned and operated Suez Canal, angering most of the West. “The decline of Western prestige has never been more starkly pointed than by Gamal Abdel Nasser's seizure of the Suez Canal Company,” Burnham begins one piece.¹² Contending that Nasser “hijacked” the canal from its rightful owners, Burnham asserts that the British were not expelled from India and Egypt with force. Rather, she (and the United States) suffered from a “moral collapse—a defect of will.”¹³ And there were practical consequences because the canal was part of the chain that linked the West (not the “Soviet dominated Heartland”) to the oil-rich Middle East.¹⁴ Without Western guards at the canal, communists could also have more access to Asia and Africa.

When it came to Israel's position in the region, Burnham was not a Zionist. He recognized the tendency of Israel to expand, and how it used the Western media to promote its interests. He just favored Israel when it blocked Soviet encroachment, as it did in his mind in 1956. In 1955 Egypt purchased large sums of arms from the Soviets (via Czechoslovakia), leading Burnham to declare, “Today the Communists arrive openly, bearing arms and gifts—and ideas.”¹⁵ Burnham was concerned with geopolitical significance of the sale. Invoking the geographer Halford Mackinder, Burnham stressed the strategic importance of the Near East since it is a “Land Bridge” between Eurasia and Africa.¹⁶

The sale of Soviet arms to Egypt and the Suez crisis helped provoke Israel to attack Egypt on October 29, 1956. Two days later, the British and French joined them. However, the Soviets ominously hinted that they would assist Egypt. Fearing a broader Soviet-US conflict, the Eisenhower administration pressured the Israeli, French, and British governments to remove their troops while the UN condemned the attack. Burnham felt this was another show of Western weakness. He bemoaned in “Abstractions Kill the West,” that the condemnation sacrificed “our allies, our strategic interests, and the inner imperatives of our civilization.”¹⁷ Burnham wondered how the UN, with American support, could criticize France and Britain while condoning Nasser, “a willing tool of Communist imperialism.”¹⁸ Burnham shows what he believed was the irony of Eisenhower's policies in Hungary and the Middle East: instead of applying force and pressure against the Soviets in Hungary, the administration chose to do so against France and Britain in the Middle East as they fought against Soviet infiltration.¹⁹

Burnham never saw American and Western involvement in foreign parts of the world as forms of imperialism because they countered Soviet imperialism. He asserted that those who did were duped by communist propaganda. Burnham believed that the United States and Europe must act—preferably in concert—to confront communism, wherever it tried to spread. He had little concern for UN legalities. For the Machiavellian, the ends always justified the means because in the geopolitical arena, only power restrained power.

During NR's first full year, Burnham championed ideas that he preached as a Marxist and as a Machiavellian. In the critical Cold War year of 1956, he demanded action. Eastern Europe and the Middle East had become tests of Western will. Inexorable historical trends that shaped the world may no longer favor our civilization. Power must be demonstrated in some form, or it would be used to erase the now-contracting West. He would soon tackle this subject more fully in a book.

After a year of working with fellow NR editors, Burnham helped provoke a crisis that nearly led to his resignation. It began when he suggested that the United States work with Soviet leadership to remove communist troops from satellite territories—what Burnham called the objective. Western powers would leave West Germany too; she could then be unified and completely disarmed. Central and Eastern Europe would be neutralized.²⁰ Why would the Soviets accept this? Burnham contended that the move would permit the Soviets to concentrate on fixing their turbulent home front. In Leninist terms, it meant taking one step backward so two could be taken foreword.²¹

The proposal earned the indignation of most NR editors, including Buckley. They deemed it unrealistic and in violation of one of Burnham's own cardinal principles: never negotiate with communists. Burnham's most notable critic was Willi Schlamm, arguably the original number-two man at NR, after Buckley. Genuine animosity existed between Burnham and Schlamm. According to former NR staffer Daniel Kelly, Schlamm threatened to quit the magazine if Burnham's proposal was published. Burnham told Buckley that he needed to assert more “authority” and that he should not coddle Schlamm's “neuroses.” Personal tensions between Burnham and Schlamm simmered. Burnham offered to resign, but Buckley would not allow it. The frustrated Schlamm left the magazine a year later, never to return.²² Burnham exerted power. He became the de facto number-two man at NR.

Burnham's NR articles usually interpreted the Cold War in an unconventional manner; he never trusted the pundits, or the communists. For example, Sputnik did not impress Burnham. In its wake, as Westerners lauded Soviet science and technology, Burnham penned a piece titled “Disinformation Bureaus” that described how “Red psychosis” promoted a tendency to believe anything positive about the Soviet Union.²³ Everyone believes, he wrote in the article, that the Russian standard of living had risen since tsarist days, despite a lack of evidence for this contention. Or, if the Soviets had lots of bombers and warships, then they must have a great air force and navy. Or, because they had advanced mechanized agriculture, they must produce lots of food. Or, the Soviets were ahead of the United States scientifically and technologically, so they must lead in the fields of mechanics and engineering. According to Burnham, the Soviets told us that Sputnik I weighed 184 pounds and that Sputnik II weighed 1,120 pounds. But why do we believe them? Insisting that the Soviets were masters of disinformation, he contended that they had special schools aimed at teaching dissimulation (as did the United States). They taught that the best way to persuade intelligent people to believe a falsehood is not to tell them something untrue, but rather to present them with independent items, allowing them to deduce the falsehood on their own.²⁴ This was how communists manipulated Westerners.

Burnham proclaimed that communists were liars. In fact, it was their revolutionary duty to lie.²⁵ In an article titled “Words of East and West,” the senior NR editor asserts that Westerners assume that the nature of discourse is to communicate information and truth. Any errors in communication are accidental. But this is a Western phenomenon, not a universal one. Burnham insists that Japanese politeness has nothing to do with how they really feel about you. For many Africans, the line between reality and illusion, science and magic, past and future is vastly different than that of Westerners. A Muslim's religious faith may differ dramatically from the words he or she expresses to define it. For Burnham, this means that when communist nations like China say that rice production had doubled, it should be questioned. When the Soviets say they have fired a 7.1-ton satellite, it might not be the truth. If Khrushchev continues to preach disarmament to reduce tensions, we needed to resist the natural inclination to believe him. For the Soviets, words were merely more weapons in the Cold War. Burnham reminds the reader that Sun Tzu wrote that “all warfare is based on deception.”²⁶

Burnham also reviewed books for NR, such as Henry Kissinger's Nuclear Weapons and Foreign Policy (1957). He acknowledges that the book's arguments were formidable. What most interested the reviewer, however, was the liberal reaction to the book: liberals loved it. The work was sponsored by the Council on Foreign Relations, a “bristling fortress of the Liberal Establishment.”²⁷ Even J. Robert Oppenheimer praised the book. All of this despite the fact it was a “massive retaliatory assault on the foundations of Liberal foreign policy.”²⁸ On issues such as coexistence, disarmament, the banning of nuclear weapons, and Soviet sincerity, Burnham declares that Henry Kissinger “shatters the logical supports of the Liberal façade.”²⁹ Then why then did liberals extoll the book? Burnham posits some theories: maybe it was because Kissinger did not assault individuals by name; he described arguments made by Dean Acheson and other liberal publicists, but he never criticizes them. Or maybe it is because Kissinger, nor his bibliography, cite any “Liberal-anathematized writer.”³⁰ Such citations would seem necessary because, as Burnham contends, “a good part of the cogent analysis of, say Soviet intentions and methods is not altogether a fresh discovery by Mr. Kissinger.”³¹ Burnham was feeling shunned by liberals.

And to some degree he was. John Kenneth Galbraith provides one example. He was an archetype liberal who Burnham roasted.³² Galbraith tried to malign Burnham by ignoring him. Galbraith's classic work The New Industrial State (1967) makes references to “the managerial class,” “the managerial revolution,” and “managerial capitalism,” but credit was not given to Burnham in the first edition. The omission was so glaring that Galbraith subsequently wrote Burnham to acknowledge his influence and apologize, stating that “we liberals have ignored your contribution.”³³ He promised that Burnham's name would appear in future editions. And it did, in a footnote. The note cites Burnham for popularizing the term “managerial revolution” and continues by stating that “partly, perhaps, because he was a strong and on occasion eccentric conservative, and change in economics is usually led by liberals, Burnham's contribution has not had the recognition it merited.”³⁴ Galbraith would later send a follow-up letter apologizing for calling Burnham “eccentric.”

Burnham's favorite target was America's most famous diplomat, and maybe the field's most important writer. Shortly after reviewing Kissinger's book, Burnham briefly reviewed Kennan's The Decision to Intervene (1958), a work that described US involvement in the Russian Revolution.³⁵ Burnham extolls the contents and historical analysis of this book, recommending that Kennan spend more time writing diplomatic history and less time complicating it by lecturing in England. In late 1957, Kennan delivered six lectures at Oxford that analyzed US-Soviet relations called the Reith Lectures. Burnham would have been vexed by Kennan's description of Soviet economic and technological advances, suggestions that non-Western nations could have normal relations with the USSR, his fears of a nuclear arms race, and his questioning the utility of a stronger, US-led North Atlantic Treaty Organization.³⁶ Many of Burnham's Cold War writings were tacitly aimed at Kennan, especially the latter's thoughts on an arms race.

Kennan received and at least occasionally read NR. In December 1958, an article appeared in the National Review Bulletin (an NR supplement edited by Burnham) that declared that the former ambassador to the Soviet Union wanted to eliminate America's atomic weaponry.³⁷ A perplexed Kennan wrote a letter to the editor, insisting that he had never made such statements.³⁸ He contended that he found NR “lively, well-edited and rarely dull.”³⁹ But Kennan noted significant differences between himself and the editors. For example, he did not believe that the United States needed to engage in an “all-out war” against Russia as soon as possible. Containment's architect deemed this view “catastrophic.”⁴⁰

In 1959, Burnham temporarily turned his attention toward domestic affairs when he penned Congress and the American Tradition. The book was partly an attempt to defend McCarthy and his investigations, and partly a demand that Congress assert its authority. Deeply pessimistic, the work feared that Congress might soon be vanquished by a Caesar-like executive.⁴¹ Burnham wanted to justify the predictions made in The Managerial Revolution: power was becoming more centralized through the bureaucracy. And he sought to apply his ideas presented in The Machiavellians: for democracy to succeed, central authority must be curbed. Congress had to assert power.

Burnham writes that the Founding Fathers were not “ideologues” like the leaders of the French Revolution because they recognized that people were not completely good or rational.⁴² America's founders liked ideas, but they did not worship “Reason,”⁴³ and they respected tradition.⁴⁴ For example, the author notes that John Dickinson of Delaware wrote: “Experience must be our only guide. Reason may mislead us.”⁴⁵ The founders sought to create a government that was neither too strong nor too weak. It had to collect taxes and defeat foreign enemies, yet too strong a government would limit justice and liberty.⁴⁶

The anti-idealogue theorizes in Congress and the American Tradition that whatever type of political system existed, power naturally concentrates in the sovereign.⁴⁷ America's founders tried to thwart this with different branches of government; ambition must counteract ambition. This worked for more than one hundred years because in the nineteenth-century Congress curbed the power of the presidency. Burnham contends that America's great political leaders during this time were members of congress and senators, such Henry Clay, Daniel Webster, John C. Calhoun, and John Quincy Adams. He notes that Adams preferred the position of congressman to president because, as Adams wrote in 1830, Congress degraded no one, not even the president.⁴⁸ In 1832, Calhoun resigned the vice presidency to become a senator. That was how it was supposed to be.

The system began to falter in the twentieth century when imbalance emerged. In the book, Burnham claims that Woodrow Wilson began the shift from congressional government to presidential government.⁴⁹ Franklin D. Roosevelt perpetuated the trend, bathing alone in America's celestial light while Congress slumbered in the shadows. The process continued with Harry Truman. He did not even get congressional support for his war in 1950, reasoning in his memoirs that a president must act without congressional authorization if Congress stalled.⁵⁰ Burnham notes that Nixon resigned from the Senate in 1952 to become vice president, a reversal of Calhoun.

This centralization meant more power for the bureaucracy, what Burnham calls the “fourth branch of government.”⁵¹ He suggests that government agencies exercised “extraordinary authority” over national life.⁵² In theory, these agencies were arms of Congress because Congress created them and could abolish them. In practice, these agencies developed their own political life. They expand, and then Congress loses the ability to supervise them. They became independent and sovereign: “The bureaucracy, like the Carolingian Mayors of the palace in eighth century France, not merely wields its own share of the sovereign power but begins to challenge the older branches for supremacy.”⁵³ Burnham argues that their arrogance grows, evidenced by the fact that in meetings between bureaucrats and members of congress, the former were more likely to be tardy than the latter.⁵⁴

Congress and the American Tradition insists that liberals fostered Caesarism because of their faith in reason and government. They believe that when guided by reasonable men, government promotes reform and progress.⁵⁵ For Burnham, conservatives have more realistic attitudes toward human nature because they recognize that people are not always governed by reason. Conservatives favor a mixture of elements—some aristocratic, some democratic—in their efforts to balance power.⁵⁶ Conservatives will usually favor Congress over the president.⁵⁷ And they are more prone to take the Constitution—a document that restricts the power of the executive—literally. All of this leads to the diffusion of power.

Congressional investigations were one way for Congress to assert its authority.⁵⁸ Contrary to the liberal argument (during the McCarthy era) that congressional committees were dangerous, the anti-anti-McCarthyite states that they were required to preserve the republic. He declares that congressional investigations were normal. There had been 30 by 1814 and more than 330 and by 1928. The pace had quickened during the 1940s and 1950s. And Burnham insists in Congress and the American Tradition that virtually nothing had escaped the grasp of congressional investigation committees: wars, banks, riots, scandals, mining, agricultural, railroads, lobbying, real estate, the post office, and oil were some examples.⁵⁹ Modern congressional committees were in fact quite benign; Benjamin Wade, chair of the Committee on the Conduct of the Civil War, was allegedly eager to use a sawed-off shotgun that he kept under his desk.⁶⁰ Burnham believed that the purpose of investigation was critical for democracy, specifically their goal to inform the public: “Through public investigations Congress informs the citizens about the nation's problems at the same time that it is informing itself.”⁶¹ Liberal critics of investigation committees have to recognize that a democratic form of government cannot exist without the power to investigate.⁶² Even Woodrow Wilson—hardly a defender of Congress—wrote about the importance of Congress as an oversight committee that reported its findings to the public.⁶³

In Congress and the American Tradition, Burnham contends that the decline of Congress “takes place within the pattern of the long-term, world-wide historical trends.”⁶⁴ The rise of liberal ideology in the early twentieth century exemplified this because liberals had assumed most positions of power, both inside and outside of government.⁶⁵ Even the Supreme Court under Earl Warren had succumbed to liberalism.⁶⁶ Existing political structures linked the managerial elite, the courts and the bureaucracy with a Caesar-like executive.⁶⁷ Intermediary institutions such as states were acquiescing.⁶⁸ Burnham reminds the reader that he had predicted this “managerial revolution.”⁶⁹

The author declares that Congress must remain strong. It must exert power. If present trends continued (and Burnham usually believed they would), Congress would crumble, leaving the United States with a Caesar-like dictatorship in which Congress would become “a legislature in form only.”⁷⁰ Fearing what Schlesinger would later call an “imperial presidency,” Burnham cites Edward Gibbon's description of Augustus: “He destroyed the independence of the senate. The principles of free constitution are irrecoverably lost, when the legislative power is nominated by the executive.”⁷¹ Burnham recognizes that humans had free will—although they rarely exercised it properly—so the future was never written in stone. Great leaders willing to resist centralization must emerge. He declares that an active Congress was the only way for liberty and democracy to survive: “If liberty, then Congress, if no Congress, no liberty.”⁷²

Congress and the American tradition is a product of the second James Burnham, the paleoconservative paragon. Pessimistic about the future of the United States and its democratic system, the work contends that the executive branch had become too active. The best remedy was Congress. Whereas The Managerial Revolution assumed that Congress would get subordinated to the managerial and bureaucratic elite, Burnham now champions Congress. It must stay strong. The future of American democracy hinged on this institution.

The book would be the last that he dedicated solely to domestic affairs. Paleoconservative Samuel Francis lamented that Burnham “wasted much of his later career in what turned out to be rather ephemeral anticommunist polemics that had little impact on actual policy after the early 1950's.”⁷³ Francis wished Burnham would have spent more time promoting themes from The Managerial Revolution, The Machiavellians, and Congress and the American Tradition. But in the post–World War II era, fighting communism was Burnham's raison d’être. The United States faced a dangerous international foe that threatened her existence more than a united managerial/bureaucratic elite. The contents of his writings for the next two decades reflect this.

The greatest threat to American democracy for Burnham remained communism. Around the same time as Congress and the American Tradition appeared, John Foster Dulles passed away, weeks after resigning his position of secretary of state. Perceived as a man who thwarted communism with religious zeal, Dulles received praise from most of the international community at the end of his life. Burnham was characteristically less impressed. In a piece titled “The Dulles Record: An Appraisal,” Burnham writes that Eisenhower's leading diplomat preached liberation but merely practiced containment.⁷⁴ At least he really did practice containment, unlike his predecessor, Dean Acheson. The piece claims that Dulles had “deeply believed in blocking further Soviet advance and has striven mightily to uphold his belief in practice. Communism is godless and evil; as such, Mr. Dulles has resisted it from the stern duty imposed by his Calvinist-trained conscience. Communism threatens his country and his civilization; therefore he has resisted as a man of the West and a patriot.”⁷⁵ These are the kindest words Burnham expressed toward an American Cold Warrior. Burnham still qualified his admiration by bemoaning that Dulles also accepted the negative consequences of containment because he resisted advancing into Soviet territory. He was passive during obvious times of Soviet weakness, such as Stalin's death and the Hungarian Revolution.⁷⁶ Consequently, despite success at curbing Soviet advances in Europe, the Soviets had made gains in the Middle East and Africa. Dulles must be judged by this, too, Burnham reasoned. In the late 1950s, the United States was still playing the defensive. More needed to be done.

The 1960 presidential election between John F. Kennedy and Richard Nixon provided an opportunity. Burnham was offered the chance to contribute to the foreign policy plank in the 1960 Republican National Platform. To his credit, he offered specific suggestions: “The purpose of the foreign policy of the United States is to safeguard the national security and advance the national interest. This calls for a peaceful world order based on freedom and justice.”⁷⁷ For Burnham, peace, freedom, and justice are not inherently good. They are not ends and they do not exist in isolation. Woodrow Wilson's idealism had no place in Burnham's foreign policy. Instead, national interest did. As Burnham reasons, because the communist goal worked against the national interest of the United States, the goal of US foreign policy should be to weaken the communists.⁷⁸

The hardliner continues that the communist world had dedicated itself to the destruction of the United States and the establishment of a communist totalitarian system. Appeasement or a negative foreign policy could not suffice. The United States must work to reduce communist power so that it no longer threatened the United States, and world peace. He writes that the United States should demand the withdrawal of Soviet troops from Eastern Europe, require the liquidation of all Soviet propaganda apparatuses, and call for free elections in Eastern Europe. Once these were confirmed, then and only then would the United States evacuate its overseas bases. Next, both sides could work on mutual disarmament. Until this occurred, the United States had to prepare for World War III. This meant strengthening all aspects of the US armed forces, maintaining existing alliances, obtaining the support of newly developed nations, employing the same psychological propaganda that the communists employed, pledging American support for all free peoples around the world, and continued nuclear testing.⁷⁹

Burnham also wanted to promote more international free trade, especially between the United States and less developed nations. This would not only benefit both sides economically but also would help bring the countries under US sway. Every nation was another potential ally. In the foreign policy plank, he even recommends investing in Africa to promote its economic development.⁸⁰

Kennedy's election provided Burnham another figure to advise (and mostly chastise) from afar. Burnham pleaded with the new administration to focus on Cuba. Removing Castro from power must be America's priority. On the eve of the Bay of Pigs episode in April 1961, he asserts in an NR article: “When once the Cuban operation gets really going, with a definite area under anti-Castro control, then it must be carried through with overwhelming power, maximum speed, and total success. Failure would be a catastrophe beyond calculation.”⁸¹ Burnham demands US displays of power: “What is crucial is that we should somewhere, in some theatre or on some vital action make a stand of unconditional firmness: that we should strike a blow against the enemy. That blow will reverberate around the world, and will mark, or could mark, the decisive turn.”⁸² The article presents myriad options: Cuba, the Congo or even Laos. Burnham believed that Cuba was the most plausible option because a strong anti-Castro contingent already existed there. And the new regime was still unstable. The action required US force because a regime built on force must be eliminated using external force.⁸³

Predictably, Burnham deemed Kennedy's Bay of Pigs invasion tepid, insisting that the president “lost his nerve” when he canceled a second airstrike.⁸⁴ This only made toppling Castro more difficult. Doing so must remain America's top priority, and violence provided the best means: “Our own central power has got to be brought to bear directly, this time: preferably—and it would be more humanely so—in a concentration so massive that prolonged resistance would be out of the question.”⁸⁵ No alternative existed. Burnham maintains that the unpleasant reality, which so few chose to face openly, although many knew it in their hearts, was that US military action would be required to dislodge the Castro regime.⁸⁶

Burnham's cites The Economist's contention that Kennedy's foreign policy was in “disarray.” He maintains that part of the problem was that too much power was given to “eggheads.”⁸⁷ Rational and intellectual, the eggheads tell us that they know what is best for the rest of us. But they ignore the fact that emotions, passions, habit, and customs play just as an important role in shaping human conduct as rational thought. Arthur Schlesinger was Burnham's perfect egghead. He points out that the Kennedy administration had used the Harvard historian's white paper to guide the Bay of Pigs. According to this document, the Cuban people hated Castro and would revolt against him.⁸⁸ Burnham adds sarcastically, “the Cuban people, observing that Professor Schlesinger's boss declined to provide the force that could have smashed Castro's planes and tanks, concluded that it was better to have your head under a yoke than no head at all.”⁸⁹ Burnham partly faulted the Cuban fiasco on his former Congress for Cultural Freedom ally.

Burnham had hoped the Bay of Pigs would induce some modesty in the young president. The capturing of a U2 spy plane over the USSR on May 1, 1960, embarrassed the Eisenhower administration. In another NR piece, Burnham reasons that the Bay of Pigs was worse because at least the spy plane operation yielded some positive results. This president needed to ensure that his actions matched his lofty rhetoric. For example, Kennedy had reminded an audience that “the complacent, the indulgent and soft societies are to be swept away with debris of history.”⁹⁰ The hardliner agrees. Nations had fallen without ever firing a shot or having their borders crossed.⁹¹ Yet Kennedy stopped testing nuclear missiles and sought disarmament conferences. The president had acted with confusion toward Cuba and loosened embargos on the Soviet Union. Burnham maintains that instead of speaking eloquently, the young president should temporarily stay silent, reflect on his rhetoric, and then ensure his actions matched his words.⁹² The power theorist suggests that the president of the United States take a time-out.

Burnham blamed the president's action in Cuba—and lack of action after the construction of the Berlin Wall—for the Cuban Missile Crisis. Why did Khrushchev put missiles there in the first place? The former Marxist contended that using the Marxist–Leninist paradigm to understand the world, Khrushchev believed the United States was paralyzed because of contradictions inherent in the capitalist system. He was emboldened by Kennedy's weakness. And whereas some Western observers naively viewed Khrushchev as “de-Stalinizing” the USSR, the anticommunist asserts that the attempt to arm Cuba revealed the first secretary's aggressive side. Burnham insists that “the butcher of Ukraine” was probably not a man to be trusted.⁹³

According to Burnham, US reluctance to use more hard power in Cuba had geopolitical consequences that would reverberate for years, and probably decades. Almost two years after the Cuban debacle, the Cold War strategist insisted that instability now characterized the world. After World War II, when the United States demonstrated her strength by crushing Germany and Japan, a bipolar world emerged in which conflicts raged only between the superpowers. Everyone now knew that the United States would not use nuclear weapons, under any conditions. Decay seemed to have set in. Americans presumably lacked the requisite will to prevail. Consequently, Charles de Gaulle could easily launch an independent nuclear weapons program, India could annex Goa, and Afro-Asians in the United Nations could assert more power.⁹⁴ The breakdown of the bipolar world also means that the Chinese no longer feared the United States or Moscow; they could pursue their own course.⁹⁵ Nations used America's reluctance to use power as a pretext to demonstrate their own power.

President Kennedy was assassinated on Burnham's fifty-eighth birthday. The tragedy provided the apostate Marxist an opportunity to attack the Hegelian–Marxist holist view of reality. Applied to the Kennedy assassination, holism meant “that neither intelligence nor courage nor any techniques, program or policies can make man the self-sufficient master of his fate … and that is why John Kennedy's death, or any death, could not be a tragedy for Khrushchev, Mao, or Oswald, but only a passing rearrangement of atoms in the eternal dialectic of matter out of which the universal Communist society, with the beginning of ‘truly human history, will inevitably emerge.’”⁹⁶ For Marxist holists, society resembles a giant montage that inevitably progresses toward communism. Individual parts and pieces by themselves are trivial because it is only in relation to the whole that they have any meaning. Kennedy's assassination, for Burnham, was like removing a small speck of paint from the montage. It meant nothing for communists because, for them, everything fundamentally moves toward communism.

Burnham may have denounced holism in this article, but the philosophy remained part of his worldview; he usually saw everything as interconnected. His Web of Subversion suggests that American society was linked together by communists who had infiltrated American institutions. Alger Hiss, the Rosenbergs, and Harold Ware were not atypical individuals—they represented a bigger problem. The former Marxist also applied holism to the international arena. Significantly, at this time, Burnham did not distinguish between Soviet and Chinese communism; they composed a giant montage. In his 1960 analysis, he emphasizes their shared Leninist methods and goals of world conquest. Unfortunately, he maintains, American “scholars” and “journalists” were naïve because they trusted Khrushchev's words about peace, cooperation, and disarmament.⁹⁷ And they believed that the alleged Sino-Soviet rift had made communism less threatening because now, internal squabbles hindered its advance.⁹⁸ Burnham says that this was a diversion. He discourages the reader from discerning between different forms of national communism, contending that such a misunderstanding only prevented noncommunists from pursuing the proper course of action.⁹⁹

Burnham's ideas about an aggressive foreign policy influenced one of the most important conservative works of the twentieth century: Barry Goldwater's Conscience of a Conservative (1960). Burnham's fingerprints are all over the foreign policy section of the work. The book was ghost-written by Brent Bozell, his colleague at NR. Conscience of a Conservative attempts to explain the conservative philosophy and make it practical. It contains conservative opinions on myriad issues, such as government regulation, civil rights, taxes, the welfare state, education, and confronting the Soviet behemoth. It appeared on the New York Times bestseller list.¹⁰⁰ The book remains relevant to conservatives six decades later.

Domestically, Goldwater insisted that state power inevitably will increase “because of the corrupting influence of power, the natural tendency of men who possess some power to take unto themselves more power. The tendency leads eventually to the acquisition of all power—whether in the hands of one or many makes little difference to the freedom of those left on the outside.”¹⁰¹ For the senator, power was related to freedom. State power, by itself, did not necessarily restrict freedom. Some government actions even increase freedom, such as keeping enemies away and removing obstacles to free trade. But too frequently, especially when those in power are left to their own devices, power becomes concentrated in the hands of the elite, not the people.

The final chapter of Conscience of a Conservative, titled “The Soviet Menace,” starkly reveals Burnham's influence. It declares:

Though we are still strong physically, we are in clear and imminent danger of being overwhelmed by alien forces. We are confronted by a revolutionary world movement that possesses not only the will to dominate absolutely every square mile of the globe, but increasingly the capacity to do so: a military power that rivals our own, political warfare, and propaganda skills that are superior to ours, an international fifth column that operates conspiratorially in the heart of our defenses, an ideology that imbues its adherents with a sense of historical mission; and all of these resources controlled by a ruthless despotism that brooks no deviation from the revolutionary course. This threat, moreover, is growing day by day.¹⁰²

Goldwater continued that American political leaders were “appeasing” and “accommodating” the communists. And the United States was not using her power correctly. In Conscience of a Conservative, the senator from Arizona insists: “Even in the early 1950s, when America still held unquestioned nuclear superiority, it was clear that we were losing the Cold War. Time and again in my campaign speeches of 1952 I warned my fellow Arizonans that American Foreign Policy has brought us from a position of undisputed power, in seven short years, to the brink of possible disaster. And in the succeeding seven years, that trend, because its cause remains, has continued.”¹⁰³ The root cause, Goldwater argues, was that the Soviets understood that nature of the conflict while Americans did not. He claims that if an enemy seeks to conquer you, you are at war with the enemy, unless you surrender. While the Soviets were trying to conquer the world, Americans sought to pacify it. This explains why Americans were losing the Cold War. The United States must wage war, or she would perish.¹⁰⁴ These declarations summarized Burnham's Cold War polemics: pessimism, the belief that vacillation characterizes US foreign policy, the futility of dialogue, the skillfulness of Soviet propaganda, American consciousness toward Marxism must be raised, critiques of the concept of peace, the Soviet desire for world conquest, and the idea that communists can be defeated only through aggression.

These words do mean that Goldwater was Burnham's preferred candidate for president. Burnham was less of an ideological purist than many of his NR colleagues. He supported the more moderate Nelson Rockefeller over the Arizona senator in Republican primaries. This may be perplexing given Rockefeller's liberal reputation, but this was not based on his foreign policy. The governor's Cold War views were similar to Burnham's: he was a Cold War hawk who sought larger defense budgets, promoted political warfare, and advocated nuclear testing. Like Burnham, he was an economic centrist who was resigned to the New Deal.

Once Goldwater captured the GOP's nomination for president, Burnham made specific suggestions to his campaign. He reminded the senator that it was his duty to safeguard national security. The communists sought to destroy the United States. Therefore, the United States must work to limit the power of communists. Burnham declares in an NR article, “This and this only can remove the continuous possibility of general nuclear war, can assure peace and provide the conditions for freedom.”¹⁰⁵ The United States must also show its support for captive nations. And it should support a “Freedom Academy” at home and abroad for the training of anticommunist militants.

Burnham believed that the United Nations could not help in the struggle for the world. He continues his criticism of the organization in a pieced titled “What to Do About the UN.” Reasoning that all nations pursued their own interests, it asserts that the United Nations, at least diplomatically, was meaningless, regardless of what the “disillusioned junta from the upper echelons of the Establishment” told us.¹⁰⁶ Burnham cites Democrat Cold Warrior Henry “Scoop” Jackson who believed that the United Nations did not provide the best path for peace and justice. According to Burnham, Jackson maintains that “the UN is not a substitute for national policies wisely conceived to uphold our vital interests.”¹⁰⁷ It futilely tried to bring peace to a world in which struggle was natural. To weaken it, Burnham argues that the United Nations should not vote on “matters of substance,” but only on administrative and procedural measures.¹⁰⁸ This can be achieved by US representatives declaring that they would no longer vote on matters of substance. All subsequent votes would be meaningless. Burnham states that this reform, in turn, would provide the United States—to quote Jackson—“a new mature sense of the burdens of responsible leadership.”¹⁰⁹

The advocate of US leadership addressed what he deemed to be a public revolt against foreign aid. Too often, he maintains, people claimed they were either for or against foreign aid. But that was irrational because foreign aid encompassed so many different areas. Each aspect of foreign aid must be judged individually, based on a cost-benefit analysis.¹¹⁰ Yet, according to Burnham, this was impossible because no one ever studied the benefits of foreign aid. The president had said he would commit $5 billion in foreign aid to confront communism. But did it really weaken communism? Nobody knew, because no efforts had been made to findout.¹¹¹ The general public, however, might not understand aspects of foreign policy. Burnham notes that foreign aid sometimes benefited American businesses because the recipients of the foreign aid often ended up buying American products. He maintains that that $100 million new road in Vietnam benefited the builders of US machines that constructed the road and the owners of the American ships that transported the materials for the road. American engineers, with their special allowances, would all get paid, thanks to foreign aid. Foreign aid would allow for Americans to get rid of their agricultural surplus. And it would also allow the Pentagon to unload older equipment, thus creating a demand for new equipment. This would improve US defenses and benefit its arms manufacturers.¹¹²

Burnham did not necessarily oppose foreign aid. He believed that foreign aid could be good, as long as it promoted US interests. The internationalist calls some of it an “indispensable instrument of the policy of the United States.”¹¹³ Examples included aid to places like Taiwan and South Korea, where US aid was used to bolster defenses. And it allowed the United States to maintain a presence in certain countries. The Soviets had successfully used aid to increase their presence in parts of Africa. However, he questions the way it was administered, something he acknowledges could be “disgraceful.”¹¹⁴ He singles out economic assistance programs that at times bolstered only anti-US interests, such as in Egypt, Brazil, and Bolivia. And sometimes it hindered the receiving country by promoting inflation. Burnham calls the revolt against foreign aid a sort of “neo-isolationism.”¹¹⁵ NR's senior editor maintains that “for every quid there should always be a balancing quo.”¹¹⁶ The United States doled out foreign aid too frequently while demanding nothing that benefited its interests.

In 1964, Burnham pondered the future of Western Civilization in Suicide of the West: An Essay on the Meaning and Destiny of Liberalism. The book complements Spengler and Toynbee. Like Spengler, it studies the rise and (potentially) the decline of the West. Like Toynbee, Burnham emphasizes the challenges that confronted Western Civilization. Whereas Spengler saw civilizations as organic units that naturally lived and died, Suicide of the West follows Toynbee by asserting that civilizations do not necessarily die naturally—they may commit suicide. The book's primary argument is that liberalism is the ideology of Western suicide because it cannot thwart the West's biggest challenge: communism.

The book reveals the influence of the final thinker that nourished Burnham: Edmund Burke. The young Burnham was a Marxist who believed revolution could regenerate the world. The middle-age Burnham was a Machiavellian who believed that the ruling classes must be resisted for tyranny to be thwarted. The most mature Burnham embraced Burke. Like Machiavelli, Burke was a pragmatic empiricist who eschewed the philosophical method; the English statesman scolded the “professor of metaphysics.”¹¹⁷ Championing prudence, Burke wondered how the same person who would never even tinker with a broken clock would attempt to fix something as complex as society.¹¹⁸ Burke accepted social change, just gradual social change. He wrote: “All we can do, and that human wisdom can do, is to provide that the change shall proceed by insensible degrees. This has all the benefits which may be in change, without any of the inconveniences of mutation.”¹¹⁹ Burke favored organic change, change that drew from past experiences.

The times must also be considered: Burke held that the French Revolution was fundamentally misguided because it was the product of Enlightenment thinkers and radical politicians. Enlightenment philosophers believed that using reason could improve society. Their political successors, such as Robespierre, applied these ideas by creating wholescale alterations to France, almost overnight. Burke argued that this was too much change too fast. The mature Burnham—writing in tumultuous 1960s and 1970s when the civil rights movement bloomed at home and decolonization (and its legacy) dominated the world abroad—agreed. Like Burke, Burnham accepted change, but he resisted dramatic, quick change led by ambitious individuals. Distrusting change inspired by ideology, Suicide of the West suggests that the human mind does not need to constantly meddle in human affairs. Not as rational as believed, sometimes it made things worse.

The book should also be understood as part of a debate between fellow NR colleagues Brent Bozell and Frank Meyer over the future of the West. The devoutly Catholic Bozell maintained that the rise of individual freedom in the modern era threatened Western civilization by drawing humankind away from God.¹²⁰ He reasoned that restrictions on freedom by government were vital to promote the virtuous life, as expressed by Christianity. Meyer agreed that virtue is important. He differed by contending that humans must have freedom to pursue their own virtue, not one coerced by government.¹²¹ The state cannot be an instrument of virtue, or it becomes authoritarian. Meyer believed Western civilization was declining because freedom and virtue were seen as two separated spheres. He believed that the free individual could and should act virtuously. Western politics and culture unfortunately discouraged this by making people too dependent on each other or the state. Burnham's arguments about the plight of the West revolved around liberalism and its inability to confront Western challenges.

Suicide of the West does not blame liberals for Western decline. The book interprets the ideology as a symptom and argues that liberals cannot slow the civilization's contraction. The book contains insight about the left-hand side of the political spectrum. At the same time, like most politically charged works, the book is illogical at times, and some supposed truths are not as true as the author would have the reader believe. Burnham graciously dedicated the book to “all liberals of good will.”¹²²

Burnham wanted to define his terms, so he asked, what makes someone liberal? He creates thirty-nine positions that broadly characterized liberals, particularly distinguishing them from everyone else. Examples include the following: all forms of segregation are wrong, everyone has the right to free public education, everyone has the right to express their opinion, progressive and inheritance taxes are fair, society is largely to blame for the failure of individuals, the primary goal of foreign policy should be peace, Joseph McCarthy is the most dangerous man in politics since World War II, nuclear disarmament is good, and congressional investigating committees are dangerous.¹²³ It was not that conservatives did not believe any of these and that all liberals believed all of them. Rather, liberals would be more likely to agree.

Adopting the scholastic method of Thomas Aquinas, the former philosophy professor posits a liberal argument, and then tries to refute it, such as:

1. L2: Human beings are basically rational; reason and science are only proper means for discovering truth and are the sole standards oftruth, to which authority, custom, intuition, revelation, etc. mustgive way.

2. X2: Human beings are moved by sentiment, passion, intuition and other non-rational impulses at least as much by reason. Any view of man, history and society that neglects the non-rational impulses and their embodiment in custom, prejudice, tradition and authority, or that conceives of a social order in which the non-rational impulses and their embodiments are wholly subject to abstract reason, is an illusion.¹²⁴

Or:

1. L14: In social, economic, cultural as well as political affairs, men are of right equal. Social reform should be designed to correct existing inequalities and to equalize the conditions of nature, schooling, residence, employment, recreation and income that produce them.

2. X14: It is neither possible nor desirable to eliminate all inequalities among human beings. Although it is charitable and prudent to take reasonable measures to temper the extremes of inequality, the obsessive attempt to eliminate inequalities by social reforms and sanctions provokes and can at most only substitute new inequalities for the old.¹²⁵

Burnham insists in Suicide of the West that the field of genetics supported his criticisms of liberalism because it reveals that humans have a “permanent sub-stratum” that creates them, distinct from their social environment.¹²⁶ He asserts that some people, by their nature, are inferior morally and intellectually.¹²⁷ And the pessimist writes that their numbers are increasing in comparison to those with “superior assets.”¹²⁸

Burnham expresses doubts about liberal education, arguing that there was no evidence that education based on reason and science could actually solve social ills.¹²⁹ He writes that the Athenians were the most educated people of the ancient world. They fell due to internal decay to both the Spartans and Macedonians.¹³⁰ Germany may have been the most educated country in the world in the 1920s and 1930s.¹³¹ How did that work out? The Bolshevik Revolution in Russia in 1917 successfully spread mass education, but were the people of Eastern Europe any better off? Burnham notes that Japan adopted Western-style education in the late nineteenth century. What did this lead to? Even in the United States, urban cities tended to be far worse off than their less educated rural counterparts. And the progressively educated cities are worse off in many respects than they were decades ago, before compulsory education arrived.¹³²

By emphasizing reparable social conditions, Burnham bemoans that liberals will only reluctantly blame individuals for their criminal behavior. Instead, the onus is placed on some sort of education or institution.¹³³ This means that the mugger, the poor, and the unemployed “cannot be blamed … for the faulty institutions into which they were born.”¹³⁴ The liberal treatment required, then, is not punishment, but simply fixing the social institutions that led to their failures in the first place. For Burnham, this leads to permissive attitudes toward what he called “erring members of the community,” especially if they belong to some group that seems “less privileged than the general average.”¹³⁵ He reasons that if ignorance and faulty institutions explained the homeless, the poor, the mugger, and the jobless, then “the generals, landlords, merchants, bankers and even white segregations ought also, by the same logic, be relieved of their burden of personal guilt.”¹³⁶ They too are merely unfortunate products of the circumstances into which they were born. Like the mugger, they should not be judged or criticized.

Chiding liberals for having too much faith in humanity, Burnham asserts that they naively believed that all people, when given the choice, would choose peace over war, justice over unfairness. But the author opines that individuals and groups often choose injury and injustice for others and even themselves. Nations like Egypt, Indonesia, and Ghana had chosen despotism over democracy, guns over butter.¹³⁷ And for Burnham, the liberal who always opposed segregation was naïve because segregation dominates all societies. Examples include young and old, peasant and warrior, male and female, slave and citizen, believer and unbeliever, rich and poor, egghead and blockhead, chess players and beer drinkers.¹³⁸ Burnhams suggests that the division of society into separate spheres was natural and not necessarily bad.

Suicide of the West continues Burnham's attacks on ideology. It argues that ideology attempts to study events by using a preexisting set of ideas, but this precludes the adherent from seeing the bigger, more practical, picture. And ideology cannot be refuted by logical analysis and evidence: “An ideologue—one who thinks ideologically—can’t lose. He can’t lose because his answer, his interpretation and his attitude have been determined in advance of the particular experience or observation. They are derived from the ideology, and are not subject to the facts. There is no possible argument, observation or experiment that could disprove a firm ideological belief for the very simple reason that an ideologue will not accept any argument, observation or experiment as constituting disproof.”¹³⁹ Any holes in the ideology can easily be patched up to satisfy the believer. Those working within ideological frameworks must at least sometimes bend reality so it conforms to an ideology. Burnham insists that for the faithful, attitudes can always be adjusted so that no observation can ever undermine ideology.¹⁴⁰ He notes that ideologues divide people into two: those who share my ideology and those who do not. Discussions with “the other kind” are fruitless.¹⁴¹

The former Marxist ideologue maintains that humans who favor an ideology do so not because they are convinced rationally that it is true, but rather because it serves a psychological need.¹⁴² The dialectical materialism preached by communists is an extreme example of ideology. Liberalism is another, although it is a softer form of ideology. Burnham calls liberal ideology “not a consciously understood set of rational beliefs, but a bundle of unexamined prejudices and conjoined sentiments.”¹⁴³ Liberal beliefs are more satisfactory when they are not made fully explicit, but rather lurk in the background, coloring rhetoric.¹⁴⁴ Peace, progress, equality, and democracy warm the heart, but they are in practice quite slippery.¹⁴⁵ Burnham insists that they cannot successfully guide human conduct.

Burnham continues in Suicide of the West with an example of two Black men he frequently encountered outside of work. They picked up boxes from stores, a menial task that at least allowed them to feed themselves and their family. He writes that they were friendly and cheerful. The simple operation was organized by “some dim exploiter in the background,” who makes small deals with other businesses.¹⁴⁶ The workers earned minimum wage. The mayor of New York wants to raise it, however, in accordance with ideology. The consequence would probably be that the whole business folded, and these men would lose their jobs, prompting them to become “bums and delinquents.”¹⁴⁷ For Burnham, society becomes a worse place for everyone involved as the ideology is satisfied.

Liberal attempts to solve the problem of “skid row” provide another example. Burnham notes in Suicide of the West that every large city in history has had some sort of end of the line for the poor and destitute.¹⁴⁸ For liberals, it is a macabre situation that requires fixing. For the professed realist, skid row is just part of the “long and wonderfully intricate natural evolution of the city.”¹⁴⁹ Self-contained, skid row shields the rest of society from its potential destructiveness. Society after all is “hierarchal and differentiated, not equalized or regimented.”¹⁵⁰ Burnham contends that recent liberal attempts to correct the situation in New York City had only made things worse because now, instead of being part of a self-sufficient society, the displaced downtrodden have been “lurching” around the city, bumping into “respectable citizens,” and generally making a scene wherever they plod.¹⁵¹

Burnham's social philosophy was Burkean. The English statesmen believed that gradations among values and men were natural. In Reflection on the French Revolution, he holds that “the levellers therefore only change and pervert the natural order of things; they load the edifice of society, by setting up in the air what the solidarity of the structure requires to be on the ground.”¹⁵² The best societies recognize social distinction and duties. Burke did not favor a rigid caste system. He continues by maintaining that wisdom and virtue should be the two qualifications to rule—and these could be found in the common elements of society. He resists, however, social fixing guided by individuals who ignored nature's laws. For Burnham, skid row was a law of nature that could not be fixed.

Burnham argues that these ideologically driven reformers merely tried to assuage their guilt about the fallen world around them.¹⁵³ Christianity solved the problem of guilt by recognizing humanity's fallen state.¹⁵⁴ But liberalism has no such pretenses. Consequently, beset by guilt, the liberal becomes consumed with change, what Burnham calls “method rather than results.”¹⁵⁵ One attempt at reform follows another. The author compares liberalism to a religion; he contends that the liberal can faithfully go about his day, believing certain myths that give him or her self-assurance. This means showing “loyalty to the correct egalitarian principles, voting for the correct candidates, praising the activists and contributing to their defense funds when they get into trouble, and joining promptly in the outcry against reactionaries who pop up now and then.”¹⁵⁶ The liberal spirit is never at rest.¹⁵⁷

The critic of liberalism shared this skepticism of perpetual reform with Russell Kirk, author of the classic The Conservative Mind: From Burke to Santayana (1953).¹⁵⁸ Kirk wrote regularly for NR, although he rarely mingled with the editors in New York City because he preferred the trappings of agrarian life. Like Burnham, Kirk was a Burkean who questioned laissez-faire capitalism and ideology (the book decries “dupes of ideology”).¹⁵⁹ Kirk also saw the darker hues of humanity, and he questioned Enlightenment assumptions about the utility of reason. Championing tradition, Kirk scolded liberal opposition to “permanent things.” By this he meant the things that make us human—fixed standards that allow us to judge individuals and societies. In The Conservative Mind, Kirk asserts that liberals have little need for any of this as their “lust for change never lacks agents.”¹⁶⁰ Kirk believed liberal ideology did not provide tools for understanding and improving the world.

Burnham agrees when he states that the liberal ideology is “not well designed for the stark issue of survival.”¹⁶¹ Many liberals deride Western Civilization, believing it is bereft of redeeming features. And it is certainly not superior, suggesting that it is not worth defending.¹⁶² The author contends in Suicide of the West that liberalism prefers the contraction of the West over colonial expansion. Burnham argues that this creates problems in the non-West. In Latin America, for example, liberal ideology enthusiastically wants to eradicate all vestiges of colonial rule, without preparing the requisite structures to replace it. This creates a power vacuum, one probably filled by a dictator or communism.¹⁶³

In his analysis of ideology, Burnham draws from the English political philosopher Michael Oakeshott. His Rationalism in Politics and Other Essays (1962) is an idiosyncratic work that nonetheless attracted more attention from conservatives than liberals. In his book, Oakeshott critiques attempts at applying the rationalist method to politics, believing this favored theory over practice. For Oakeshott, human experiences are too diverse to uncover any widely applicable laws or principles, so calls for utopianism should be distrusted. And the human mind—contrary to what it believes—never examines the world in an independent fashion; it is shaped by habit and custom. He specifically condemns the “ideological style of politics,” something he called a “confused style.”¹⁶⁴

For Burnham, disarmament remained one of liberalism's biggest flaws. In 1953, the Soviets detonated a hydrogen bomb in northern Kazakhstan, about nine months after the United States did the same in the Pacific. Calls for ending nuclear proliferation followed. The 1955 [Bertrand] Russell-Einstein Manifesto (named after the logician and the physicist who sponsored it) called on world governments and citizens to find peaceful solutions to conflicts. The manifesto stated that to save humanity, people must remember their humanity. It also maintained: “Although an agreement to renounce nuclear weapons as part of a general reduction of armaments would not afford an ultimate solution, it would serve certain important purposes.”¹⁶⁵ Marches for disarmament grew in the United States, especially as the Vietnam War escalated.

Burnham writes in Suicide of the West that disarmament, in theory, was fine. If everyone renounced their weapons, peace would ensue, and then everyone would win. The problem was that communists had no intention of eliminating their weapons until they had conquered the world. Burnham asserts that communists preached pacificism to the West, shrewdly using propaganda to strengthen their position. He maintains that western liberals misunderstood what the Soviets meant by peace. When Khrushchev preaches the “struggle for peace,” he means the fight for the victory of the proletariat and the spread of communism.¹⁶⁶ When this happens, Khrushchev believes, peace will follow. Peace will come only when communism spreads. Burnham argues that for communists, peace existed in North Vietnam and Hungary, but not in the United States or England. Liberals preaching peace naively enabled communism by weakening America's means to fight communism.¹⁶⁷ A world without US arms became a world controlled by communism, hardly a world of peace.

Liberalism's ambivalent attitude toward force and violence provided another example of liberalism's inability to meet Western challenges.¹⁶⁸ Recognizing that not all liberals were pacifists, Burnham noted that Roosevelt, Kennedy, and Johnson all used violence. But because of their intellectual predisposition against violence, they never used it correctly: “They therefore tend to use it [force] ineptly, at the wrong times, and places, against the wrong targets, in the wrong amounts.”¹⁶⁹ After all, Burnham insists, force is inherent in society. Everyone knew that if the United States eliminated its military forces and instruments of coercion, it would be overrun immediately. Unfortunately, liberals used just enough force to ensure that the United States was not overrun. Cuba and Vietnam provided examples. Contending that liberals had more say in the Kennedy–Johnson administration than in any previous one, the hardliner argues that, consequently, US use of force had never been so “awkward.”¹⁷⁰

Suicide of the West displays the pessimism of the second James Burnham. He believed that the West was in a period of despair. Hundreds of years of expansion were ending. Cuba and the Middle East provided two recent examples. Communism posed the greatest and most obvious threat to the West because if communists continued to advance at the same rate, they would have conquered the world by the end of the century.¹⁷¹ The only impediment to communist expansion was the West, but Burnham insists in this book that the West had not shown the ability to reverse communist conquests. It had merely shown the ability to vacillate. Liberals could not defend Western civilization because they could not defeat the communists: they “cannot strike with consistent firmness against communism, either domestically or internationally.”¹⁷² Liberals could only defeat conservatives. Although liberals were not communists, the two groups shared too many “axioms” in common, such as secularism, welfarism, and optimism about human nature and its ability to reform.¹⁷³ They were even against the same things: McCarthy, Franco, the John Birch Society, colonialism, House Un-American Activities Committee and Herbert Hoover provided just some examples.¹⁷⁴ The author rationalizes that liberals, therefore, could never completely oppose communism. Given that, Burnham reasons, if liberalism prevailed, the West was doomed to fall to communism.

In Suicide of the West, Burnham does keep a small measure of optimism—a tiny window open for a ray of light. In the last paragraph of the book, he asserts that the final collapse of the West was not “inevitable.”¹⁷⁵ Its contraction could be reversed. If this happens, liberalism will have no more purpose; it will fade away. There are signs of hope—he called his book one of them.

Suicide of the West was Burnham's last original book.¹⁷⁶ And it unifies elements of both James Burnhams. His previous books expressed his domestic and geopolitical fears separately. The Managerial Revolution predicted the centralization of American political institutions and economy. The paleoconservative works, The Machiavellians and Congress and the American Tradition, prescribed ways to resist this trend in order to preserve liberty. The Struggle for the World, The Coming Defeat of Communism, and Containment or Liberation exposed the Soviet threat. They maintained that power had to be used against communists, or they would conquer the world. Suicide of the West does all of this. It argues that liberal expansion at home paves the way for authoritarian communist dominance in the West, partly because liberals never properly used force. Unwilling to condemn imperialism, the book recommends Western influence in areas like Cuba, the Middle East, and Eastern Europe—by force if necessary—to save the West.

Some of Burnham's critiques of liberalism are not as logical as the logician would lead the reader to believe. For example, Burnham critiques liberals for their seemingly inconsistent views on race. On one hand, liberals believe race does not really exist—it is a social construct. Yet on the other hand, race was a critical identity for many liberals. Liberals sought not just sympathy for certain races; they desired guilt and culpability. Burnham calls these liberal attitudes toward race “irrational” precisely because of liberal opinions.¹⁷⁷ Why? Because if race does not exist, Burnham reasons, then the race cannot be guilty.¹⁷⁸ Yet when liberals say race does not exist, they mean biologically, not socially. Social perceptions about race are real, as are their social consequences, although they may be misguided. Just because race does not biologically exist does not mean one's perceived race cannot have an impact on another perceived race.

The author's critiques of education are specious, too. Burnham shows no connection between the fall of Athens and its relatively educated citizens. The Athenians also excelled in the arts, poetry, and science more than most anyone else. Does that mean that the fall of Athens undermines these fields in any way? Lots of uneducated civilizations have fallen—Toynbee describes some. Or, yes, the Soviets educated their citizens. And, yes, the Soviet Union was miserable. But again, the logician shows no connections between the two. Conceivably, the Soviet Union would have been even worse if the majority of its citizens remained illiterate during communist rule.

Regarding critiques of reform, Burnham does precisely what he cautions against: he relies on abstract concepts, such as assuaging guilt, instead of focusing on results. Even if one grants that a sense of guilt inspires proponents of change, every attempt at reform must still be judged on its own because sometimes reformers are successful, such as their efforts to improve American urban working and living conditions in the early twentieth century. Skid row may always exist, but some skid rows are more humane than others, such as those that promote the safety of its residents. Reform can be wasteful and make things worse, or it may make things better. Burnham should have studied reform the same way he studied foreign aid, by examining individual cases. The Machiavellian and Burkean approaches constantly analyze the means and the ends. And they avoid extremes on both sides.

Reviews of Suicide of the West were predictably divided along ideological lines. Writing for the New York Review, leftist Irving Howe panned the book, calling it calling it “as puerile as a Birchite pamphlet.”¹⁷⁹ Conservative philosopher and NR contributor Gerhart Niemeyer loved it, particularly its critique of “ideological thinking.”¹⁸⁰ Henry Kissinger wrote a short review for a German publication. The future secretary of state wrote that the book should be read by Americans and Europeans, arguing that Burnham “proves that the Western world's power has been steadily declining since 1917…. He demonstrates that the cause of this decline is not an external influence nor a lack of material strength, but simply an internal failure—a collapse of the will to survive.”¹⁸¹ Kissinger (a power theorist himself) would soon have the opportunity to exercise that will.