THE TALK show host lays out his argument borrowed from a book he’s just read, or at least consulted, while on holiday. He calls liberalism “the ideology of our national suicide.” Driven by guilt and the temptation of socialism, liberals consider the American dream a nightmare because it “distorts their bright vision of human perfection with such corny concepts as national sovereignty, Constitutional limitations upon Federal power and the religious principle of personal responsibility.” If and when liberals succeed in their aims, he announces, “the American Republic will have died, and by its own hand.”

This could be any conservative media star: Tucker Carlson, Mark Levin, or Laura Ingraham. Anyone on Fox’s prime-time lineup. Instead, it’s April 18, 1965. The pioneering conservative talk radio host Clarence Manion is summarizing the latest book by James Burnham.

The United States is perhaps as polarized politically and socially as it ever has been in its modern history. A striking fact about the 2020 Presidential Election was the extent to which hyper-partisans treated it as the decisive moment for the future of the nation. As the conservative philosopher Kenneth Minogue observed, “The psychological mark of ideological entrapment is the feeling of despair which accompanies the prospect of defeat in argument.” Donald Trump’s many lawsuits, the Stop the Steal rallies, and the January 6 Riot evince all the markers of ideological entrapment on the Right.

Polarization on the Right has many parents: geographical sorting, direct mail hyperventilating, negative partisanship, talk radio, click-hungry websites, and news and social media echo chambers. But the extremes of polarization we see today have origins in both the logic and often the text of mainstream American conservatism’s most influential thinkers. Not only have the lines between respectable conservatism and extremism often been porous and blurred, but conservative intellectuals gave high-brow expression to the ideas that fuel polarization and ideological entrapment.

James Burnham and Willmoore Kendall were two of the most serious thinkers in the early conservative movement. They explicitly articulated the beliefs of the American Right, and worked alongside other activists and intellectual entrepreneurs to forge a political movement. For all their insight, Burnham and Kendall helped give birth and intellectual legitimacy to a conservative movement primarily defined by its opposition to liberalism, resentment of elites, distrust of democracy, and drive to fight the liberal destruction of the America and “the West.”

They were very different men. Kendall was flamboyant but deeply troubled. Burnham was consummately buttoned down, his personal manner masking his intellectual intensity. Of similar ages, their careers paralleled one another. Both were former Trotskyists; both studied at Oxford University; both had careers in academia and military intelligence; although conservatives, neither was a die-hard free marketer. Both felt the touch of Catholicism: Kendall a convert, Burnham for much of his life an apostate.

Both Kendall and Burnham mentored William F. Buckley, Jr. Kendall taught Buckley at Yale, informing his thinking and mode of speech. At one stage, Buckley attributed “whatever political and philosophical insights I have” to Kendall’s “tutelage and his friendship.” In 1951, Kendall introduced Buckley to Burnham. Using his intelligence connections, Burnham first found Buckley a position in the CIA. Years later, they cofounded National Review, which Kendall initially joined as book review editor. After Buckley’s father died in 1958, Buckley told Burnham he ranked “second to none” among his male relationships.

The two theorists brought very different assumptions to conservatism. Burnham largely discounted democracy through an elitist cynicism; Kendall’s flyover-country populism put great faith in the American people, anticipating the Silent Majority. The polarity is clearest in the titles of their books, published within a year of each other. Kendall presented The Conservative Affirmation, Burnham prophesied The Suicide of the West. Yet although their analysis ran along different tracks, they shaped the logic of conservatism in similar ways.

SOFT-FACED, well-dressed, and impeccably mannered, Burnham was an unlikely radical. From a well-to-do Midwestern family, he attended elite prep schools, Princeton, and then Oxford. He wrote and lectured on art and aesthetics, earning a teaching position at New York University. The economic collapse of the 1930s and the influence of his colleague, Marxist thinker Sidney Hook, upended the haute-bourgeois Burnham’s worldview. He moved to the radical Left when he cofounded the Trotskyist American Workers Party in 1932. Throughout the 1930s, he “wrote extensively for the radical and revolutionary press, edited various publications, wrote pamphlets,” and engaged in factional struggles. In his memoirs, Hook recalled Burnham’s reputation in leftist circles, and the mutual embarrassment at his lavish mode of living.

Seedy-looking members of the Socialist Worker’s Party ... would find Burnham in formal dinner dress, together with his guests at the table or in the midst of late bibulous partying. Burnham would excuse himself, have a hurried whispered consultation with his comrades, and then return to his dinner party.

Despite being one of Trotsky’s chief interpreters and mouthpieces in America during the 1930s, by the end of the decade, Burnham broke with the exiled communist. Burnham lost faith in the empirical realities of Marxism and reoriented his thinking toward an increasingly conservative realpolitik in which “acts and the consequences of acts” were “far more revealing than words.”

The first step in Burnham’s post-Marxist journey, The Managerial Revolution, published in 1941 and stringently reviewed by George Orwell, who detected a kind of Leninist power worship in Burnham, combined materialist analysis and futurology. Burnham argued technology and expertise created a new social class, managers, who would presently inherit the earth. Not only were the managerial class taking power—in Nazi Germany, the Soviet Union, and even, to a lesser extent, through the New Deal, the United States—they generated an ideology to sustain their class and replace bourgeois liberalism. Burnham extrapolated the argument to its limit and predicted not only coming state ownership of the economy and growth of the executive and administrative state, but also Nazi German victory and the split of the Soviet Union into Asian and European halves.

How political and economic structures produced self-justifying ideologies captivated Burnham. And he could not resist grand predictions. These were key themes of his work. He expanded on the core insights of The Managerial Revolution by reading European “elite school” thinkers who taught that in any society an oligarchy necessarily holds power. In The Machiavellians, Burnham’s follow-up to The Managerial Revolution, he placed himself in this tradition, but also committed himself to defending “civilized,” if not democratic, society, both through geopolitical maneuvering and supplanting decadent bourgeois ideology with heroic myth. 

Burnham became an avatar of intellectual anti-communism, and put his mission into practice in the early 1950s for American military intelligence. He cofounded the Congress for Cultural Freedom, hoping to build an “anti-communist united front.” Mamaine Koestler, the wife of his ally Arthur Koester, remarked that “Burnham looks very sweet and gentle ... but he is much less scrupulous about means than” her husband. Eventually, Burnham became frustrated by the CIA’s efforts to placate the European non-communist Left. His superiors sidelined him in 1952. Late the following year, Burnham cut his ties with New York University and the American intellectual Left. Burnham’s iron intensity had no patience for liberal centrism as he strode from the radical Left to the anti-communist Right.

A RESTLESSNESS defined Willmoore Kendall. Born in Konawa, Oklahoma, son of a blind and possibly irreligious Methodist preacher, he was a child prodigy. It’s hard to keep track of his early career: he first attended university at the age of thirteen. After studying and teaching at various institutions and working as a reporter in the 1920s and early 1930s, including as foreign correspondent for the United Press in Spain, Kendall went to Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar in 1935. He earned his Ph.D. at the University of Illinois in 1940, teaching at four different universities in seven years before embarking on a civil service and intelligence career focused on Latin America. Kendall loved chess, wore loud sport coats, spoke three languages and read and wrote three more. He was depicted in fiction by both William F. Buckley, Jr. and Saul Bellow. “Mr. Mosby,” Bellow wrote, “had made some of the most interesting mistakes a man could make in the twentieth century.” After a peripatetic existence, Kendall became associate professor of political science at Yale in 1947. A “non-party” conservative by the time he arrived at Yale, politics and personal volatility—exacerbated by alcohol, marital breakdowns, and mental health—destroyed his position at Yale as he dissipated his intellect on various unfinished projects. As Kendall’s life fell apart, he had a “profound religious experience” and converted to Catholicism. His acolyte Buckley described Kendall losing “the cynicism that he acquired as a precocious scholar at Oxford and as a young and gifted teacher in the turbulent ‘30s,” to become “one of the few fine and intensively moral figures of our time.”

Kendall’s reputation was made by his first book, a contrarian interpretation of John Locke published in 1941. Through a close reading, Kendall contended that Locke believed in natural rights, but such rights were shaped and limited by local communities. Kendall became a theorist of representative democracy and social consensus. “All political societies,” and especially this “people of the United States,” are built “upon what political philosophers call a consensus,” he wrote. Societies change in slow, organic, and deliberative ways. “Freedom of thought and freedom of expression there are and must be, but within limits set by the basic consensus.” Kendall firmly believed government should not undermine society by enforcing abstract rights that cut against the orthodoxy. His friends and biographers suggest Kendall’s fear of social collapse emanated from his time in Civil War Spain and the flagitious violence he had witnessed there.

In Kendall’s view, the American people, especially those between the Appalachians and Rockies, were basically conservative. Theirs was an unspoken consensus that only required articulation when its precepts were attacked. In other words, conservatism manifested as a defensive measure in response to the liberal establishment. Kendall resented it. Liberals, Kendall wrote, write “proposals born of their instinctive dislike for the American way of life and for the basic political and social principles presupposed in it.”

This concept of social consensus informed conservative thinking on the majority’s inherent right to establish norms. For a time, it seemed Kendall’s majoritarianism might be an anti-liberal logic in defense of conservative mores against the burgeoning Rights Revolution led by the Warren Court, especially since he wrote in a constitutional idiom. As Kendall and many conservatives found, however, the rhetoric of rights is extremely powerful.

For both Burnham and Kendall, Joseph McCarthy was a turning point. They put their reputations on the line. Kendall defended McCarthy as a champion of America’s consensus. He collaborated with his students William Buckley and L. Brent Bozell on the tawdry book McCarthy and His Enemies. In a semi-fictionalized account by Buckley, Kendall asked, “Isn’t that what Joe McCarthy is saying: that the Communists are illicit members of the American society?” The anti-anti-McCarthy Burnham broke with the intellectual Left over McCarthy, saying when liberals leaped over themselves to denounce McCarthyism, they fell for the “diversionary semantics” of “communist tacticians.” There was no turning back after McCarthy. When Burnham quit Partisan Review’s advisory board, its editor warned him he had “committed suicide” socially. Kendall found it hard to be taken “as something other than egg-head McCarthyism” by his scholarly peers.

Incensed by the dominance of liberal public opinion, these well-credentialed but professionally damaged academics joined Buckley’s fledgling National Review in 1955 and became increasingly reliant on conservative grants and organizations. At National Review, Kendall influenced not only Buckley and Bozell, but younger writers like Garry Wills. Burnham became Buckley’s ablest lieutenant, writing a column on the “Third World War,” as well as editing the National Review bulletin and the main magazine three months out of the year. He helped shape the magazine’s style and editorial direction.

FOR DISTINCT but related reasons, Kendall and Burnham concluded that America’s political tradition was critically threatened in the 1950s and 1960s. Kendall always rooted his sense of conservatism in American practices. It “is idle to speak of conservatism without at least tacit adjectival reference to a particular time and place,” Kendall wrote. “We should speak about ‘American Conservatism,’” not “Conservatism in America.” Burnham had more of an international emphasis, but a conservative foundation induced him to study Congress, initially in response to liberal research on congressional investigative powers after McCarthy and the House Un-American Activities Committee.

Burnham and Kendall both argued liberals and conservatives understood the American political system differently. Beholden to a cult of action, liberals emphasized the executive branch and administrative bureaus of the federal government and justified their authority by nationalized plebiscitary votes. By contrast, Kendall and Burnham argued, congressional representatives were closer to their constituents and natural conservatives. In his investigation, Burnham found the Framers intended Congress to be the preeminent branch of government, but also that the tension between the branches was a system of countervailing forces that secured liberty. Franklin Roosevelt shattered this arrangement, ushering in executive-bureaucratic supremacy. Burnham foresaw “the popular despotism (Caesarism) into which this shift, if the prevailing tendency continues, must … lead.” As a stylist, Burnham wrote crystalline prose, giving his dire predictions a veneer of reasonableness and certainty. “Can constitutional government, can liberty, survive in the United States?” he asked. “If liberty, then Congress; if no Congress, no liberty.”

Along similar lines, Kendall argued in The Conservative Affirmation, published in 1963, that “the Founders of our Republic bequeathed to us a form of government that was purely representative.” Now America had two competing majorities: the legitimate representative majority, expressed in Congress, and the plebiscitary majority of the Supreme Court and presidency. “The central destiny of the United States” hinged on the tension between these majorities. Would the Republic be “much the same as that intended by the Framers, or one tailored to the specifications of egalitarian ideology”—“‘open’ or relatively ‘closed,’ egalitarian and redistributive or shot through and through with great differences in reward and privilege, a ‘welfare state’ society or a ‘capitalist’ society”?

Kendall extended his point in a lecture series composed at the height of the civil rights movement and published posthumously in 1970. He argued that the foundational “symbol” of American politics, dating back to the Mayflower Compact, was the virtuous people deliberating under God and the law. In the Gettysburg Address, however, Abraham Lincoln substituted this foundational symbol for equality, “derailing” the American tradition and providing ammunition for liberals to use rights talk to slice through America’s social orthodoxy.

The arguments are not without insight, but these chief thinkers of movement conservatism rehearsed the clichéd lament of constitutional decline and liberal perfidy. In conservative discourse, the political order is constantly on the precipice of destruction (or heroic resuscitation). The stakes are enormous: a return to the Founders or liberal Caesarism.

Not only did Kendall and Burnham raise the stakes to apocalyptic levels, they undermined conservative trust in democracy. On the question of democracy, Kendall and Burnham were worlds apart. Kendall, the arch-democrat, idealized deliberation, holding that social orthodoxy and political legitimacy emerged up from communities. Burnham, the elitist, started from the “Iron Law of Oligarchy,” arguing that, at best, the ruling class could bring the masses along through civic mythology and good governance. Kendall put all his faith in deliberative democracy; Burnham treated democracy as one of many potentially useful constraints on elites. Both men attacked modern democratic tendencies from their contrasting positions, putting them firmly within National Review’s circle of democracy skeptics.

Singing from the same choir book, Kendall and Burnham criticized national political movements as “democratism” or plebiscitary democracy. They argued democratism treated bare national majorities as divine mandates that overrode all restraints, whether salutary political structures or communities’ social orthodoxies. Democratism reduced complex issues into binaries “resolved” in plebiscitary votes or in the person of presidential candidates. Burnham warned this process led to the politicization of all issues and bureaucratic centralization. Fortunately, widespread trust in the Constitution provided “juridical defense in depth.” Kendall and Burnham especially distrusted political movements linked to rights talk. Burnham saw rights as an ideological façade for ruling classes, Kendall saw them as a threat to the American political tradition. Kendall warned that social revolutionaries who in their zeal would not “take ‘No’ for an answer” and wait in the political “ante-room” would destroy America’s constitutional framework. “Plebiscitary presidential elections,” Kendall wrote, “cannot become the central ritual of our system without destroying the system.”

Specifically, Kendall feared the civil rights movement. In 1963, Kendall confessed privately he was “for segregation of the bulk of the American Negroes”—more so than he had been before Brown v. Board of Education. Not on racial grounds, he added, but because the movement threatened the social consensus and constitutional morality. In practice, Kendall’s concept of social consensus gave veto power to the most recalcitrant parts of society until they could be defeated in Congress. Abstract “consensus” lent theoretical support to Southern white filibustering and domination of Congress through the seniority system.

Kendall and Burnham fomented distrust in the legitimacy of national elections and in democracy beyond their specialized definition. To conservative audiences, every liberal candidate became a would-be tyrant. Kendall, Burnham, and the many blunter iterations of the argument in the conservative press created a demonization of liberal candidates that has reached a crescendo today. Likewise, through their emphasis on the need to constrain plebiscitary democracy, Kendall and Burnham fostered a conservative mentality that, over the history of movement conservatism, justified and continues to justify anti-democratic measures, including voter suppression.

AS THE conservative movement coalesced around Barry Goldwater in the early 1960s, Kendall and Burnham defined conservatism as a defense of tradition animated by conflict with liberals. “Liberalism is anti-traditional,” Burnham wrote in his 1964 study of liberalism, The Suicide of The West. “I rather think that the attitude toward tradition furnishes the most accurate single shibboleth for distinguishing liberals from conservatives; and still more broadly, the Left from the Right.” Likewise, to Kendall’s mind, America’s “Judaeo-Christian” public orthodoxy and constitutional structure were its tradition; conservatism was the defense of these things against aggressive liberals. He drew a metaphor of a battle line. On the Left, “a disciplined and battle-wise enemy, with crystal clear war-aims and a grim determination to win.” On the Right, isolated pockets of resistance standing firm on disparate issues. America faced a choice between “the Liberal Revolution” or “the destiny envisaged for it by the Founders of our Republic.” Conservatives, Kendall argued, needed to forge a conscious political identity and stronger practical alliances to staunch the liberal advance.

In The Suicide of the West, Burnham detailed how liberals had gone from a focus on freedom and liberty to fixated on creating peace and justice through coercion and welfarism. It had become a secular faith motivated by guilt. Burnham drew up a thirty-nine-point list of positions—from “1. All forms of racial segregation and discrimination are wrong” to “14. Colonialism and imperialism are wrong” and “34. Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression.” A pure liberal agreed with all these statements, Burnham claimed, and a reactionary opposed all. In general, “most persons fall fairly definitely (though not in equal numbers) on one side of [the liberal line] or the other.”

If Kendall thought liberalism wrecked the Founders’ America, Burnham saw it as the capitulation of Western civilization. To him, liberalism was “the ideology of Western suicide.” He observed three problems facing the West: “the jungle now spreading within our own society, in particular in our great cities”; “the explosive population growth and political activization” of the “world’s backward areas,” primarily amongst the “non-white masses”; and “the drive of the communist enterprise for a monopoly of world power.” Western elites, beholden to liberalism’s “rationalistic optimism, its permissiveness, its egalitarianism and democratism, and by its guilt” lacked the will to confront these challenges. No liberals had fire in their belly for “suffering, sacrifice and death.” Alert to the structural foundations of ideology, Burnham concluded that, functionally, liberalism “motivates and justifies the contraction” of the West “and reconciles us to it.” Burnham and Kendall overestimated liberalism, considering it a coherent and existential threat.

Within the conservative orbit, both men’s careers diverged sharply. Kendall accepted a payout from Yale University to resign his tenure in 1961. He lived in Spain and France briefly, and taught at several universities before founding a Ph.D. program at the Catholic University of Dallas. He left National Review under a cloud, and his once close friendship with Buckley turned bitter. He died suddenly in 1967 having left a mark on American conservatism, albeit not the decisive one of his ambitions. Burnham on the other hand stayed at National Review until a debilitating stroke in 1978. In retrospect, Buckley considered him “beyond any question” the “dominant intellectual influence in the development” of the magazine. Ronald Reagan awarded Burnham the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1983.

Throughout his time at National Review, Burnham pushed for accessibility—better copy, better design, greater emphasis on contemporary issues, and pitched toward a broad audience. He argued the magazine should support candidates like Dwight Eisenhower and Richard Nixon even though they were not conservative favorites. Other editors at the magazine often found him imperious, even un-conservative.

In the early 1960s, Burnham counseled Buckley to attack the John Birch Society, an organization not entirely unlike QAnon. In an analytical mode, Burnham suggested the Birchers could be the seed of an American form of fascism. Yet a critical review of Burnham’s Suicide of the West connected Burnham to the Birchers, calling it “as puerile as a Birchite pamphlet,” combining “academic hauteur with fanatic shrillness.” Burnham castigated the Birchers, whose leadership claimed American liberals, including Eisenhower, formed part of an immense communist conspiracy. At the same time, Burnham himself argued liberals unconsciously led a national suicide in the face of communism. The line between Burnham and the Birchers was real, but their analysis of liberalism pointed in the same direction. They both plausibly existed on a Kendallian battle line, a fact clear to radio host Clarence Manion, who drew on Burnham for his show and cofounded the John Birch Society.

American conservatives tell themselves many origin stories. Narratives are necessary to create a political identity. But political identities are also forged in war, and conflict is central to American conservatism. Kendall and Burnham contributed significantly to this intellectual architecture. They articulated and in some cases established conservative tropes, endowing them with a patina of intellectual sophistication. Key themes include that modern democratic trends cannot be trusted, liberal elites are attacking America, and conservatism is ultimately the antithesis of modern liberalism.

From the John Birch Society up to the sophisticated explicators of conservatism like Burnham and Kendall, the threat of liberalism to America and the West demanded conservatives commit themselves to anti-liberalism. It was—and remains—the unifying logic of the American Right, bringing together issues as varied as school choice, abortion, marginal tax rates, states’ rights, and the rollback of communism as conservatism. In 1997, National Review editor-in-chief John O’Sullivan updated conservatism “After Reaganism.” He decried liberal elites who supported disintegrating “existing society” and replacing it with “bureaucratic management” through multiculturalism. Long-time National Review editor Jeffrey Hart, a friend of Kendall’s, recognized the argument as a successor to Burnham’s. Liberalism “still is the ideology of Western suicide – but now is expressing itself in the domestic agenda.” And so it remains in the conservative imagination.

Worldviews create action. Ultimately, the pathologizing of liberalism and antagonistic defining of conservatism leads to posturing and polarization. Within National Review, Burnham counseled tactical moderation. Kendall fetishized deliberation, which couldn’t have imagined the information silos of the social media age. But their apocalyptic mindset undercut any serious chances for conservatives to strike alliances with the center, or even center-right. There’s no compromise with evil. Domestically, anti-liberalism encourages the American Right to overlook bad actors within their ranks. Conservative unity is the priority against vicious liberalism. On the global stage, far from strengthening America by stiffening the liberal spine as Burnham intended, a polarized America struggles to act decisively. Burnham and Kendall’s ideas have filtered through to talk show hosts, columnists, and TV stars. What incisive ideas they had have been beaten into cudgels. The anti-liberal glue of conservatism has become its objective. The struggle is the point.

Joshua Tait is a historian of American conservatism. He holds a Ph.D. from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

Image: Reuters.