Noonan: Thank you for asking. I think this is something we should talk about more, and something I would urge
NR to address with a greater force or breadth. Bill Buckley and his hardy band James Burnham, Jeffrey Hart, etc. brought to their task a certain missionary zeal. They thought they had to explain this thing, conservatism, to an American public that had just come through 25 years of the New Deal and had not heard or seen conservatism announced, put forward, or explained in a coherent way in more than a generation. (Russell Kirk of course was very much a part of this project, in perhaps a broader way.) Let me tell you, everyone wants to talk about politics, and the kind of ad McCain should cut, but what about the philosophies that animate our politics? But briefly, my views. You can debate whether conservatism is a philosophy, a program of settled ideas, a school of thought, a way of seeing the world. I tend to see it, to experience it, as a way of being, a way of understanding the world and responding to it. I cannot help but think that knowing there is a God is the start of all conservatism. (Apologies to agnostic friends who are various kinds and flavors of conservative.) Once you know that you know something big. From there you go on to knowing man. “If men were angels . . . ” They are not, so you don’t want to give them too much governmental power. I’ll throw forward some words and phrases meant to be shorthand for a lot. Prudence. A sense of reality. Understanding limits. Respect for tradition it didn’t happen by accident. The long view. Respect for the individual and his rights. A knowledge that life is worth living, we’re lucky to be here. I would add or emphasize, for me, a Catholic sense of mystery we don’t know all, can’t know all, must do our best. I think of ideology as some abstract thing dreamed up by intellectuals and squished down on the heads of human beings “You will conform your actions to my ideological assumptions and expectations!” I see philosophy as something that rises up from human beings who observe and live with human beings. Conservatism is not an ideology. That’s the last thing it is.
Lopez: I tend to think there will be a serious revisiting of our founding principles both 1776 and 1955 (the year
National Review was founded) after this election, whatever happens. Agree or disagree?
Noonan: You may remember we first spoke of this last spring, in Rome? The first wave will be . . . well, it will be as ugly as the past month. Uglier, as those with some responsibility for the past seven years turn their finger not on themselves but on others. (I happen to think careerism has become an unseen force in much of the fighting. Conservatism didn’t used to be a career, it was a sailing against the wind, a pushing back against the age that is pushing you, and it was often lonely, individual, painful. It has been for me.) The second wave will be more important, a real surveying and rethinking. A going back to the texts, Burke to Kirk, but also a deeper attempt to apply conservative principles and insights to reality as it is on the ground. For it must be applied to the reality as it is on the ground, to the facts, or it will not be conservative. Burke respected reality so much his enemies said he worshiped a thing just because it was. So yes, there will be seminars and symposia, and activists will have epiphanies on the Amtrak Acela while delayed at Wilmington. But here’s the most important wave. What I have been reminding people in speeches lately is America is not made in Washington. America is made in America. So this is step three, and will happen concurrently and for a long time with step two: look to the states and the counties. Briefly: I don’t believe in political saviors I don’t think life is as a rule that dramatic, clear cut, resolved, or necessarily heroic. But what is happening in the states, and who is leading in and rising in the states, is going to yield up the leaders of the future. The great story of the next few years, and maybe longer than a few, will be what is happening there, and what is happening in the American culture. The McCain-Palin moment will pass; America will continue. Conservatives have to stop looking to Washington, it cannot solve our lives. And it’s not a very conservative impulse, to always be looking at and to the federal establishment.
Lopez: When people have been reading you for years, they sometimes think they know you too well. And feel betrayed when you don’t say what they might. And think they can read your unspoken motives. Just to clear the air here, when you sit down at your computer to write a column, what are you thinking? What is your goal? Who are you seeking to please?
Noonan: I feel I’m responsible to what I think is the truth, and to my readers, and I don’t think I can seek to please anyone. At the same time it grieves me I mean real grief when I disappoint readers. When I began what I did not know would become, but became, my break with Bush, in 2005, I came under great professional pressure, and prolonged criticism. But I don’t only disappoint Republicans. I disappoint the Right of course but also the middle, and the Left. On the latter, I guess the column that received the most heated response very recently was when I scored Obama for saying thoughts as to when life begins are above his pay grade. I said everyone who ever bought a pack of condoms knows when life begins. This got a lot of colorful e-mail. Among Republicans, my goodness my criticism of the Republican leadership in Washington, that band of lobbyists who didn’t find it all so convenient to be separated from power sources that wasn’t greeted so well. But I’ll tell you the larger attitude I bring to work. I don’t write to people whom I assume agree with me. I don’t write with the assumption my readers are nodding their heads. The
Journal has such vast readership, especially on the Internet, with a stretch from conservative to liberal to the middle to the curious but unformed. Connected to that, I think perhaps you know something of my background? I am from a working-class family that knew all the problems the working class knows a general lack of stability, etc. It was a hard place. My family were Democrats, as those who are not secure in this world often were and often are. As I became politically conservative, I became used to holding a minority viewpoint, not only in my family but in the places I worked. I came to separate personal relationships from political ones one of the old friends I love most is probably, or at least on alternate Tuesdays, a Communist. But the larger point is, in all my experience, from young womanhood through now, personal and professional, I have always lived somewhat against the grain, and never in an intellectual ghetto where we all agree and see the world the same. So I just never assume agreement. Writing for Reagan underscored all this. He didn’t talk to “the base” when running for president, or while serving, he talked to the whole country, and was well aware of the terrain the facts, the variety of thought and experience. That is my habit or inclination: talk to everybody, not a sliver or piece of the population, do your best. And I’m always thinking that I’m talking to people who one way or another struggled, and I don’t mean solely economic struggles, I mean life is full of struggle, for everyone. This is never far from my mind. As to method, I write about 5,000 words a week in order to cut from it what I think I’m seeing and what I think is worth saying.
Lopez: At what moment in the campaign season did you feel a need for “Patriotic Grace”?
Noonan: I’m feeling it right now.
Lopez: What do you hope to contribute with
Patriotic Grace?
Noonan: The encouraging of taking the long view, to say what I think: We are going to wind up saving our country in the next ten or twenty years, and we must concentrate on it now, and on such actions as we can take to make that great struggle more likely to succeed. To remind us we’ll all have to get through it together. To discourage a political teamism that becomes gangism. To encourage people to love their country, to love your foe even as you criticize him, to understand a movement even as you stand against it. And to remind people not to be governed by their e-mail inbox. This is in a way a challenging time to be a citizen, with so many people feeling robbed of their peace. But it’s a wonderful time to be a writer. So these are your answers, my beloved Kathryn, and after heartsickness and even some leading questions, may we once again after the election once again go to Mass together, and have fun.
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