On Conservatism and Liberalism

By Revilo P. Oliver

Conservatism

Conservatism, when that word was first used in a political sense, correctly implied the maintenance of existing governmental and social institutions and their preservation from all undesirable innovation and substantial change. In Europe and the United States, however, the term has now acquired a quite different and linguistically improper meaning: it implies the restoration of political and social institutions that were radically changed and subverted to produce the governmental and social institutions that now exist.

Strictly speaking, therefore, “conservatism” has come, paradoxically, to mean reaction, an effort to purge the nation’s social and political organization of deleterious accretions and revolutionary changes imposed upon it in recent times, and to restore it to the pristine state in which it existed at some vaguely or precisely defined time in the past. The persons who now call themselves conservatives, if they mean what they propose, are really reactionaries, but eschew the more candid word as prejudicial in propaganda.

I began as an American conservative: I wished to preserve the American society in which I grew up, not because I was unaware of its many and gross deficiencies, but because I saw it threatened by cunningly instigated agitation for changes that would inevitably destroy it and might ultimately result in a reversion to total barbarism. And with the euphoria of youth, I imagined that the existing structure, if preserved from subversion, would, under the impact of foreseeable and historically inevitable events, accommodate itself to the realities of the physical and biophysical world and perhaps give to the nation an era of Roman greatness.

Over the years, as the fatal subversion proceeded gradually, relentlessly, and often stealthily, and was thoughtlessly accepted by a feckless or befuddled populace, I became increasingly aware that “conservatism” was a misnomer, but I did entertain a hope that the current of thought and feeling represented by the word might succeed in restoring at least the essentials of the society whose passing I regretted. And when I at last decided to involve myself in political effort and agitation, I began a painful and very expensive education in political realities.

Since I have held positions of some importance in several of what seemed the most promising “conservative” movements in the United States, for which I was in one way or another a spokesman, and I was at the same time an attentive observer of the many comparable organizations and of the effective opposition to all such efforts, friends have convinced me that a succinct and candid account of my political education may make some contribution to the historical record of American “conservatism,” should someone in an unpredictable future be interested in studying its rise and fall.

I think I may claim without immodesty that I always saw reality more clearly than anyone in the motley procession of self-appointed “leaders” who, inspired by illusory hopes and imagined certainties, arose to “save the nation,” fretted out their little hour on the darkling state of an almost empty theater, and vanished, sometimes pathetically, into the obscurity from which they came. What I dare not affirm is that I ever saw reality as clearly as some of the shrewd men who cynically exploited – and exploit – the residue of patriotic sentiment and the confused instinct of self-preservation that remains in the white Americans who still respond to one or another variety of “right-wing” propaganda.

An explicit warning: This writing may come into the hands of readers for whom it is not intended. I do not propose to entertain with anecdotes or to soothe by retelling any of the fairy tales of which Americans seem never to tire. If these pages are worth reading at all, they deal with a problem that is strictly intellectual and historical, and they are therefore addressed only to the comparatively few individuals who are willing and able to consider such questions objectively and dispassionately, thinking exclusively in terms of demonstrable facts and reason, and without reference to the personal wishes and emotional fixations that are commonly called “faith” or “ideals.” It is not my purpose to unsettle the placidity of the many who shrink from unpleasant realities and spare themselves the discomfort of cogitation by assuring themselves that some Savior, most commonly Jesus or Marx, had promised that the earth, if not the whole universe, will soon be rearranged to suit their tastes. As Kipling said of the fanatics of his day, they must cling to their faith, whatever the cost to their rationality: “If they desire a thing, they declare it is true. If they desire it not, though that were death itself, they cry aloud, ‘It has never been’.”

Persons who are not capable of objectivity or are unwilling to disturb their cerebral repose by facing displeasing facts should never read pages that cannot but perturb them emotionally. If they do so, they must blame the curiosity that impelled them to read words that were not intended for them. The reader has been warned.

Liberalism

“Liberalism” is a succedaneous religion that was devised late in the Eighteenth Century and it originally included a vague deism. Like the Christianity from which it sprang, it split into various sects and heresies, such as Jacobinism, Fourierism, Owenism, Fabian Socialism, Marxism, and the like. The doctrine of the “Liberal” cults is essentially Christianity divested of its belief in supernatural beings, but retaining its social superstitions, which were originally derived from, and necessarily depend on, the supposed wishes of a god. Thus “Liberalism,” the residue of Christianity, is, despite the fervor with which its votaries hold their faith, merely a logical absurdity, a series of deductions from a premise that had been denied.

The dependence of the “Liberal” cults on a blind and irrational faith was long obscured or concealed by their professed esteem for objective science, which they used as a polemic weapon against orthodox Christianity, much as the Protestants took up the Copernican restoration of heliocentric astronomy as a weapon against the Catholics, who had imprudently decided that the earth could be stopped from revolving about the sun in defiance of Holy Writ by burning intelligent men at the stake or torturing them until they recanted. Pious Protestants would naturally have preferred a cozy little earth, such as their god described in their holy book, but they saw the advantage of appealing to our racial respect for observed reality to enlist support, while simultaneously stigmatizing their rivals as ignorant obscurantists and ridiculous ranters.

The votaries of “Liberalism” would have much preferred to have the various human species specially created to form one race endowed with the fictitious qualities dear to “Liberal” fancy, but cultists saw the advantage of endorsing the findings of geology and biology, including the evolution of species, in their polemics against orthodox Christianity to show the absurdity of the Jewish version of the Sumerian creation-myth. The hypocrisy of the professed devotion to scientific knowledge was made unmistakable when the “Liberals” began their frantic and often hysterical efforts to suppress scientific knowledge about genetics and the obviously innate difference between the different human species and between the individuals of any given species.

At present, the “Liberals” are limited to shrieking and spitting when they are confronted with inconvenient facts, but no one who had heard them in action can have failed to notice how exasperated they are by the limitations that have thus far prevented them from burning wicked biologists and other rational men at the stake.

It is unnecessary to dilate on the superstitions of “Liberalism.” They are obvious in the cult’s holy words. “Liberals” are forever chattering about “all mankind,” a term which does have a specific meaning, as do parallel terms in biology, such as “all marsupials” or “all species of the genus Canis,” but the fanatics give to the term a mystic and special meaning, derived from the Zoroastrian myth of “all mankind” and its counterpart in Stoic speculation, but absurd when used by persons who deny the existence of Ahura Mazda or a comparable deity who could be supposed to have imposed a transcendental unit on the manifest diversity of the various human species. “Liberals” rant about “human rights” with the fervor of an evangelist who appeals to what Moses purportedly said, but a moment’s thought suffices to show that, in the absence of a god who might be presumed to have decreed such rights, the only rights are those which the citizens of a stable society, by agreement or by a long usage that has acquired the force of law, bestow on themselves; and while the citizens may show kindness to aliens, slaves, and horses, these beings can have no rights. Furthermore, in societies that have been so subjugated by conquest or the artful manipulation of masses that individuals no longer have constitutional rights that are not subject to revocation by violence or in the name of “social welfare,” there are no rights, strictly speaking, and therefore no citizens – only masses existing in the state of indiscriminate equality of which “Liberals” dream and, of course, a state of de facto slavery, which their masters may deem it expedient, as in the United States at present, to make relatively light until the animals are broken to the yoke.

“Liberals” babble about “One World,” which is to be a “universal democracy” and is “inevitable,” and they thus describe it in the very terms in which the notion was formulated, two thousand years ago, by Philo Judaeus, which he cleverly gave a Stoic coloring to the old Jewish dream of a globe in which all the lower races would obey the masters whom Yahweh, by covenant, appointed to rule over them. And the “Liberal” cults, having rejected the Christian doctrine of “original sin,” which, although based on a silly myth about Adam and Eve, corresponded fairly well to the facts of human nature, have even reverted to the most pernicious aspect of Christianity, which common sense had held in check in Europe until the Eighteenth Century; and they openly exhibit the morbid Christian fascination with whatever is lowly, proletarian, inferior, irrational, debased, deformed, and degenerate. Their maudlin preoccupation with biological refuse, usually sicklied over with such nonsense words as “underprivileged,” would make sense, if it had been decreed by a god who perversely chose to become incarnate among the most pestiferous of human races and to select his disciples from among the illiterate dregs of even that peuplade, but since the “Liberals” claim to have rejected belief in such a divinity, their superstition is exposed as having no basis other than their own resentment of their betters and their professional interest in exploiting the gullibility of their compatriots.

In the Eighteenth Century, Christians whose thinking was cerebral rather than glandular, perceived that their faith was incompatible with observed reality and reluctantly abandoned it. A comparable development is taking place in the waning faith of “Liberalism,” and we may be sure that, despite the cult’s appeal to masses that yearn for an effortless and mindless existence on the animal level, and despite the prolonged use of public schools to deform the minds of all children with “Liberal” myths, the cult would have disappeared, but for the massive support given it today, as to the Christian cults in the ancient world, by the Jews, who have, for more than two thousand years, battened on the venality, credulity, and vices of the races they despise. In 1955, however, the extent and pervasiveness of their power in the United States remained to be determined.

There is one crucial fact that we must not overlook, if we are to see the political situation as it is, rather than in the anamorphosis of some “ideology,” i.e., propaganda-line, whether “Liberal” or “conservative.” The real fulcrum of power in our society is neither the votaries of an ideological sect nor the Jews, clear-sighted and shrewd as they are, but the intelligent members of our own race whose one principle is an unmitigated and ruthless egotism, and implacable determination to satisfy their own ambitions and lusts at whatever cost to their race, the nation, and even their own progeny. And with them we must reckon the bureaucrats, men who, however much or little they may think about the predictable consequences of the policies they carry out, are governed by a corporate determination to sink their probosces ever deeper into the body politic from which they draw their nourishment. Neither of these groups can be regarded as being “Liberal” or as having any other political attitude from conviction. The first are guarded by the lucidity of their minds, and the second by their collective interests, from adhesion to any ideology or other superstition.

About the Author

Revilo P. Oliver (1910-1994), an American scholar of international stature, taught Classics at the University of Illinois for 32 years. He knew twelve languages, and wrote articles in four of them for academic publications in the US and Europe. Oliver earned his doctorate from the University of Illinois in 1940, and in 1947 began his teaching career with the Classics department there. During the early 1950s he was both a Guggenheim and a Fulbright fellow.

A brilliant and meticulous stylist, Oliver’s writing could be elegant and erudite or sarcastic and scathing. Between 1955 and 1959, he was a frequent contributor to William Buckley’s National Review. He helped to organize the anti-Communist John Birch Society, and for some years served as a member of its National Council. Oliver was a frequent contributor to the Society’s main periodical American Opinion until 1966, when he resigned following a policy disagreement with founder Robert Welch.

He was a friend and supporter of the Institute for Historical Review. From 1980 until his death he was a member of Editorial Advisory Committee of the IHR’s Journal of Historical Review.

This writing is from the anthology America’s Decline: The Education of a Conservative (1982), pages 1-4, 79-83. It appeared in The Journal of Historical Review, Sept.-Oct. 1994 (Vol. 14, No. 5), pages 21-23.