The Mount Vernon Dead End

My column for The Week expands on the qualms about the Mount Vernon Statement that debuted yesterday on this site.

The Mt. Vernon declaration is meant to inspire memories of the famous Sharon Statement, issued in September 1960 by the newly formed “Young Americans for Freedom.”

But the contrasts between that document from 50 years ago and this new document are very telling.

The “young” in YAF’s title was no empty promise. The host of the Sharon meeting was William F. Buckley, then 35. The Statement was drafted by M. Stanton Evans, then 26. Most of the attendees were closer to Evans’ age than to Buckley’s. The weekend’s grand old man, direct mail genius Marvin Liebman, was all of 37.

By contrast, the youngest of the Mt. Vernon signatories is almost as old, 34, as the oldest of the Sharon signatories. The majority of the initial Mt. Verson signatories are over 60. Not for me (age 49) to deny the wisdom of age - but somehow over the past half century, conservatism has shifted from the politics of the next generation to the politics of the previous one.

As you might expect from the youth of its authors, the Sharon Statement articulated a new departure in American politics. The Buckley-Evans right repudiated the isolationist foreign policy of the previous generation’s Mr. Conservative, Robert Taft. Taft had opposed the military draft in 1940, opposed Lend-Lease, and opposed the formation of NATO. The Sharon Statement instead championed militant anti-communist internationalism:

“[T]he forces of international Communism are, at present, the greatest single threat to [American] liberties[T]he United States should stress victory over, rather than coexistence with, this menace.”

At the same time, the document rejected Taft’s partial surrender to New Deal measures like Social Security and public housing in favor of emphatic libertarianism:

“[W]hen [government] takes from one man to bestow on another, it diminishes the incentive of the first, the integrity of the second, and the moral autonomy of both.”

The Sharon Statement set in motion important real-world political events. Only six weeks before the Sharon conference, Sen. Barry Goldwater had spoken to the Republican National Convention in Chicago, urging a conservative takeover of the GOP. The activists gathered in Sharon would help make Goldwater himself the Republican nominee only four years later.

The Mt. Vernon statement promises no comparable ascent. The document seems an end in itself, an exercise in coalition management that offers a little something to everybody. It nods to neoconservatives who see a “national interest in advancing freedom and opposing tyranny in the world.” It extends a hand to Tea Party activists convinced that Barack Obama is leading the country toward socialism and fascism. But what does it add up to? To what question is this statement an answer? To what future does it point?

Click here to read the rest.