I don’t agree, for reasons that the “Firing Line” episode below ought to make clear. But that didn’t stop me from hatching a plan when I worked for the Paul campaign in 2008 to net WFB’s endorsement. He had said some encouraging things about Paul, so I leaned on a friend of mine whom Buckley had begun to cultivate as a protege (he had many) to lobby for his imprimatur. We never went through with it, for the very good reason that WFB was failing fast — this was in mid-February, and Buckley died Feb. 28. If he had recovered, though, we would have put to the test whether his frustrations with conservative movement he had done so much to build would have led him to make a revolutionary endorsement.

It should be noted, though, that at the height of his prestige WFB was reluctant to support insurgent conservative candidates. In 1964, James Burnham had convinced him that Goldwater simply couldn’t win in November, which led Buckley to the brink of throwing National Review‘s support behind Nelson Rockefeller in the Republican primaries. If Goldwater lost in California, Buckley decided, NR would call for him to drop out. Bill Rusher, Bill Rickenbacker, and others were prepared to tender their resignations, though in the event Goldwater pulled through and Buckley relented.

Despite all that, there’s some reason to think WFB was getting more unconventional toward the end. Asked by Corey Robin in 2001 what kind of politics a young 21st-century William F. Buckley would embrace, he replied, “I’d be a socialist. A Mike Harrington socialist. I’d even say a communist.” He was mostly joking, but the remark suggests he was aware of how stale movement conservatism had become.

“My notion of a Whig, I mean of a real Whig (for the Nominal are worse than any Sort of Men) is That he is one who is exactly for keeping up to the Strictness of the true old Gothick Constitution.”

– Sir Robert Molesworth, Preface to Francois Hotman, Franco-Gallia (as cited in Trevor Colbourn’s The Lamp of Experience.)

There’s a good deal of irony in the contrast between the free-spending “conservative” Reagan and the frugal “liberal” Jimmy Carter, who as Diggins rightly notes “was as antistatist as Reagan” and accomplished much of the federal deregulation—removing entry barriers in air travel, trucking, and other fields—for which Reagan would sometimes receive credit. While both the left and the right have made Reagan out to be a great scourge of government power, Diggins demonstrates that the president’s rhetoric was more anti-statist than his actions. Reagan’s conservatism, too, was not what his admirers and detractors often claimed that it was; the religious right flourished in the 1980s, but Reagan—a divorced, socially tolerant movie star—hardly embodied it. Both Carter and Reagan’s successor as governor of California, the former seminarian Jerry Brown, were much more traditionally Christian (and more fiscally parsimonious) than Reagan, who “opened the American mind to optimism and innocence, leaving it closed to sin and experience.” Reagan, a believer but not much of a churchgoer, “seemed to offer a Christianity without Christ and the crucifixion, a religion without reference to sin, evil, suffering, or sacrifice.”

Read on.

A reader on @TAC thinks I’m too kind to Reagan in the Buckley review. The litany of bad policies and personnel choices under Reagan is lengthy: the federal government grew and the executive branch became more secretive and less accountable; the neoconservatives gained a permanent foothold in the GOP; Reagan’s judicial appointments were often flawed; the U.S. pulled out of Lebanon but became more enmeshed in Third World proxy warfare; the drug war escalated; etc. For the case against Reagan, see Murray Rothbard, as well as Peter Hitchens’s TAC review of The President, the Pope, and the Prime Minister: Three Who Changed the World.

On the other hand, while conservative movement hacks regularly overestimate Reagan’s contribution to the end of the Cold War, his critics continue to underestimate that contribution. A relative of mine who was no admirer of Reagan interacted with Eastern Europeans quite a bit in the late ’80s and early ’90s. The Poles and Czechs and East Germans certainly did feel a debt to Reagan, even to the point of naming their children after him. He was the first American president in a generation who did not equivocate about the evils of socialism and the Soviet empire. The nations of what had traditionally been Central Europe had seen their sovereignty signed away by Roosevelt and Truman at the Yalta and Potsdam conference. Reagan seemed to repudiate those concessions.

He did so without starting World War III or, what was a greater risk, eliciting a Soviet crackdown. He took fire from the neoconservatives and movement cons for his negotiations with Gorbachev — which were not always as friendly as they are popularly remembered as being — but Reagan successfully de-escalated the Cold War in Europe while giving moral support to the captive nations. That Reagan did both of these things is astonishing: had anyone else been in office, the one should have undermined the other. Think of Gerald Ford asserting in debate with Jimmy Carter, “there is no Soviet domination of Eastern Europe.” Republicans could, as Nixon did, “go to China,” but in doing so they appeared to be surrendering the moral high ground. Reagan was firm and flexible in exactly the right proportion, and it was no accident. He genuinely believed that communism was evil — a term that doesn’t carry much weight in realpolitik — and he genuinely believed that people longed to be free and were basically good. The former was a conservative belief, the latter a liberal one. Both proved to be indispensable at the moment when he was president. (I should note, by the way, that Peter Hitchens’s piece in the March 2011 issue of The American Conservative is essential reading, especially for those who think that history had a simple happy ending once the Soviet empire fell — the corruption and post-communist forms of despotism that took root throughout much of the former USSR after 1991 attest to the darker side of history.)

At home as well, Reagan accomplished an historical remoralization — not in the sense of renewing morality, but in restoring morale. That has entailed a mixed legacy: Americans, especially conservatives, began to reaffirm markets over Great Society (if not New Deal) planned and the country became more entrepreneurial. We entered a new era, one in which the dominant political tones would be those of neo-liberal economics. Cutting taxes and growing the economy came to take precedence over creating new government services — at least, rhetorically they did. In practice, Leviathan continue to grow during Reagan’s years and afterward, and new kinds of economic insanity flourished, above all the now pathological Republican belief that economic growth is a freedom-preserving panacea. Reagan was not, in fact, as much of a neo-liberal as his epigones — as Jeff Riggenbach has pointed out, he was actually more of a protectionist than the presidents on either side of him. But even if Reagan’s policies had a Buchananite tinge to them, the worldview that predominated on the right after the Reagan era was one of free-trade agreements and open borders. And beneath this neo-liberal veneer, neo-imperial foreign-policy views proliferated, thanks to the neoconservatives that Reagan brought to government and to the exceptionalist and democratist rhetoric Reagan himself employed. On the other hand, it should be remembered that Reagan also had Buchanan and other traditional conservatives in his administration. The president hardly handed power directly to the neoconservatives.

Reagan’s foreign policy in Europe and toward the USSR was a success of world-historical proportions — again, not because he brought down the Berlin Wall or the Soviet Union, but because he encouraged the Europeans who did tear down the wall, and he avoided the grandiose military-strategic blunders of Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon (as well as Bush, Clinton, Bush II, and Obama). His foreign policy elsewhere was mixed, but again not catastrophic, which is actually saying a lot. At home, his policies were also mixed and he sowed seeds that would bear terrible fruit in the Great Recession. Letting those seeds grow into entangling weeds, though, is something for which Clinton and Bush II deserve more reproach. Reagan was the right man for his time and place; the trouble is that once he had left office his Emersonian optimism was turned into a hard and cynical neo-liberal statism by his successors, both on the right and in the Oval Office.

It’s worth tuning out all the noise that usually accompanies this dispute and taking a long view of what happens when marriage intersects with politics. A good source is Carle Zimmerman’s Family and Civilization. In the post-Roman West, marriage moved from tribal authority (where, for example, prohibitions regarding consanguinity of spouses were not always firmly fixed) to church authority (which was uniform and universal). With the rise of Protestantism, marriage fell increasingly under state authority — owing not only to rejection of the Catholic Church, but for a variety of theological reasons having to do with the proper division of power between secular and ecclesiastical government. As state and church grew further apart (even where they did not formally separate), marriage became by default a primarily secular institution. Not that it had ever been completely religious: common-law marriages in Britain, for example, were only grudgingly acknowledged by religious authorities.

While this was going on, government itself was becoming less personal and more ideological. Republicanism and democracy necessarily laid as great a stress on equality before the law as on popular rule. “Equality before the law,” though, is not a static concept — any individual or group that feels itself to be treated unequally in any way has an incentive to extend the sphere of “legal” equality into, say, questions of wealth or social status. The state itself has motives to broaden its own power — that is, to find new domains over which to extend “the rule of law” and all the mechanisms of adjudication and enforcement that come with it. And since the state begins by admitting few distinctions among its subjects under the rule of law, as the law expands into new areas of life, conventional social distinctions among its subjects collapse. Legal criteria replace all other criteria as administrative law grows.

Because of this, the institutional logic of the modern state is almost unavoidably incompatible with an institution as person-specific and historically complex as marriage. What has been happening for over a hundred years now — much longer in some places — is the redefinition of marriage along lines that accord better with the universal logic of liberal democracy.

Marriage was a necessary institution for heterosexuals not because it was the only setting in which children could be produced or because it’s the optimal setting in which to rear them (true as that may be), but because heterosexuals over time generally will produce children, and marriage is the institution that differentiates legitimate from illegitimate offspring. (In cultures where women were not expected or permitted to work, marriage was an institution necessary for their security as well. This function is also obsolete.) Once the legal debilities and social stigma had been removed from illegitimacy, marriage was already redefined. At that point, marriage lost its institutional and legal anchor and became a free-floating nexus of affection.

The scope of affections granted recognition by the state is now expanding, as a result of anterior changes within society. Even though most Americans still oppose gay marriage, few Americans still hold that homosexuals ought to be stigmatized. What’s a government to do in the face of such a seeming contradiction? Homosexuals have their reasons for demanding access to marriage, the state gains some advantage from granting it to them and has no internally logical reason to deny their petition, and marriage itself no longer has the qualities that once defined as a necessarily heterosexual institution. In this environment, it’s not surprising that the majority will to keep marriage exclusively heterosexual does not prevail.

What practical consequences follow? There won’t be much more homosexuality as a result of this, nor is there any reason why heterosexuals should now be more or less likely to get or remain married. The question of polygamy is completely separate from that of gay marriage — one may follow on the tails of the other, but there’s no reason, even by the state’s peculiar logic, why that must be so. (Certainly plenty of societies have had polygamy without gay marriage.) Conservatives are right to see large implications behind the liberal view of marriage, but they have failed to confront the fact that the liberal view of marriage was already triumphant long before gay marriage appeared on the horizon.

The indirect consequence of the California decision will, of course, be to re-energize the Republican base, which will turn out millions of voters who want to make America moral again, though every time they vote the result is never more morality but only more war and deficit spending. The Left, for its part, will see this decision as a victory and continue to embrace the leveling power of the federal judiciary, even though an excessive reliance on the federal government in general and the judiciary in particular has deprived the Left of a popular base for 40 years — both because there’s little need to organize among the people so long as a few judges can achieve your will, and because relying on those judges only alienates majorities whose will is frustrated. These symbolic victories guarantee that there will be a more right-wing electorate.

The law continues to find new areas of life to bring under its purview, and Judge Walker’s ruling on Proposition 8 may facilitate new legal intrusions into religious and family life. In the sort term, though, the most serious ramifications to flow from his decision will be seen in electoral politics. The ruling gives new currency to a peculiar inversion that took place long ago, one that saw the Left abandon the battlefields of economics and political power for the priestcraft of human rights, and the Right abandon educational and cultural hierarchy for pseudo-populist politics.

Gordon presents the Rothbardian libertarian view of these Cold War conservatives. The facts are not in much dispute: Kendall was a majoritarian who favored a very broad interpretation of what majorities could legitimately do in politics; as Gordon notes, that extended to defending the Athenian jury majority that sentenced Socrates to death. It’s not that Kendall did not believe in any law higher than the popular will — he argues in his Socrates essay that it might have been better if the Athenians had changed their ways to live according to the philosopher’s strictures — but in earthly politics the majority was the safest and best repository for power. Burnham, by contrast, admired the Machiavellian elitist tradition, and was no more sympathetic than Kendall to laissez-faire, natural rights, or John Stuart Mill. Kendall strongly supported “McCarthyism” at home; Burnham was keen to wage “World War III” (the original name of his long-running National Review column) by means of aggressive “political warfare.” Buckley may as a young man have been influenced by his father’s Old Right leanings and by the Albert Jay Nock that he read, but by the time he left Yale he was deeply imprinted by Kendall and would later be further formed by Burnham. (Indeed, after WFB Sr. died, WFB Jr. told Burnham that he was now the closest thing he had to a father.)

The Right, which had been broadly non-interventionist and civil libertarian before National Review, became militaristic and anti-libertarian as a result of the Cold Warriors’ influence.

All of that is true as far as it goes. But there’s more that must be said. First, one should not take for granted that being a Cold Warrior means always and necessarily being in favor of great military crusades. Buckley and Kendall had, after all, both opposed U.S. involvement in World War II before Pearl Harbor, and Buckley by the end of his life had become sharply critical (albeit inconsistently so) of the Iraq War. Pat Buchanan, of course, is a signal example of a staunch Cold Warrior who turned against our post-Soviet foreign policy. Kendall and Burnham died long before the end of the Cold War, but it’s interesting to note where a younger contemporary and collaborator of Kendall’s (George Carey) and the most devout student of Burnham (Sam Francis) wound up: Carey and Francis each became trenchant opponents of the interventionist Right. Should we take it for granted, then, that Kendall or Burnham’s thought is intrinsically belligerent? Or might it be open to question how their ideas apply to the post-Cold War world?

They were certainly not libertarians, and the end of the Cold War would not have changed that. But Burnham and Kendall would have made very poor neocons or Bush Republicans; they had implacable objections to the centralization of power in the executive branch. Perhaps those objections would have given way (as did those of man other conservatives) in the Reagan era or thereafter, but perhaps not — Burnham seems to have held out against the worship of the presidency that began to overtake the Right during the Nixon administration. Libertarians need not be satisfied by Burnham and Kendall’s opposition to the imperial presidency, but others on the non-neocon Right might find that this speaks very well of them.

A third point that might be raised in considering Burnham and Kendall is that they presented very insightful (but hardly unproblematic) ideas about a subject on which the libertarian literature is thin: power. The tendency among libertarians has been to treat political power either as an evil that can and should simply be removed from human life; it is not something whose ethics and practices require great theoretical elaboration, any more than the ethics and practice of murder require much theorizing. (It’s not the case that there are no libertarians with a sophisticated understanding of power, I hasten to add, but in general libertarians take little interest in power beyond anathematizing it.) Kendall and Burnham are incisive students in different schools of thought about political power. Burnham is particularly valuable for his study of the mythical and psychological underpinning of power; Kendall is excellent on the relationship between rhetorical and constitutional forms and political practice. These are topics to which anyone who wishes to preserve liberty — whether or not he’s a libertarian — should give careful attention, and Burnham and Kendall can each be a useful guide.

One arrives at a certain estimation of Kendall, Burnham, and Buckley by looking at where they came from, and what the Right was like before they rose to prominence, and where they wound up (along with most of the rest of the Right) during the Cold War. That picture is one of movement away from noninterventionism and liberty at home toward a permanent garrison state. But one arrives at a very different estimation if one looks at the period from the Cold War to today. There one sees an overreaction to Communism, to be sure, but also a prophetic awareness of the intractability of power in politics and the dangers allowing the executive to aggrandize himself and reduce the citizenry to a plebeian mass. Far from leading to where we are today, the thought of Burnham and Kendall suggests at least a few ways in which we could have avoided the path the Right (and the country) is now set upon.

It’s hard for anyone who’s not a liberal to miss the fact that the same administration that gave us the Civil Rights Act also escalated the Vietnam conflict from a run-of-the-mill (and quite bad enough) Cold War exercise into a full-scale war that claimed the lives of tens of thousands of Americans and several million Indochinese. Logically, of course, the Civil Rights Act does not entail the Vietnam War, nor vice versa. But libertarians, traditional conservatives, and other skeptical types might note, paraphrasing a cliche, that any government powerful enough to remake the world in ways you like is also powerful enough to remake the world in ways you do not like. Moreover, in a democracy — unless you happen to be a progressive or a millenarian, a believer in some inevitable march toward human perfection — the vagaries of public opinion are such that even if you get what you want now, you should anticipate the turn of the tide sooner or later.

Liberals are not worried about this because in addition to their progressive biases they have a technological bias. They think they understand how the magic box of government works, so of course they believe the good can readily be separated from the bad. Alas, those of us who are not liberals have trouble sharing that faith, and to our eyes it looks as if nice ideas like democracy, human rights, and progress have piled up body counts quite as impressive as sinful motives like hate, intolerance, and racial animus. To us, the problem lies not in the intentions of whoever is using that magic box, but in the fact that the box will kill as well as save regardless of who wields it.

We would rather find other ways of achieving our goals — even other ways for other people to achieve their goals — that do not employ the infernal machine. The liberal response, as shown by the hysterical reaction against Rand Paul, is to insist that anyone who won’t use the magic box must be indifferent to the suffering of the unemployed, the homeless, or victims of racial discrimination. Liberals believe that government power is tame and can be wielded with precision. Non-liberals believe that power, even when caged, is wild and unpredictable.

(To be sure, there are right-wing liberals who believe that the magic box just has to be used in reverse, as a carefully targeted weapon for hurting evil people, even if doing so necessarily creates social and economic dislocations in one’s own vicinity. Libertarians think they can smash the box or at least throw it away. The traditional conservative believes the box cannot be destroyed and if lost or hidden will only tempt ambitious men to find it again; therefore the safest thing is to keep it in the possession of someone not inclined to use it very often, who will jealousy guard it from falling into the hands of others. In real terms, this conservative perspective is not only about what person or class of persons should wield power, but more importantly what habits and psycho-cultural conditions conduce to limiting power. “Habits of restraint” are the safest repository for power.)

The machinery of government, particularly with the invention of “representation” and positive law, creates the appearance of scientific precision. We can specify what power is to do by writing careful, detailed laws, and by intelligently and honestly electing good men to draft and enforce those laws. These practices are worth something, but they delude us into thinking government is more benign than it is — indeed, even when we can see that the results are not benign, the ingrained myth of precision and accountability may overpower our own senses. It is only when one adopts the habit of trying to look at government in a different way that one begins to see that another, less rose-tinted interpretation may be more accurate.

This is not to say that bad things won’t happen if one doesn’t use the magic box; it’s not even to overlook the good that will be accomplished if one does use it. The point is that the price of expanding government power and the unpredictability of power’s effects, even in spheres far away from the focus of reformers’ attentions, must always be kept in mind. That means there should always be room for debate about any measure that expands the scope of power, even if it does so with the purest of intentions.

There’s little point in arguing about any of this with liberals or millenarians, however. Their confidence and optimism, their belief in the rationality of power and the goodwill of men like themselves, is invincible.

The Fifth Amendment had stipulated that “no person” shall be deprived of property “without due process of law.” The Fourteenth Amendment repeated this, but with the provision directed specifically against “any State.” Now the ingeniously simple formula was to define a corporation as a “person,” whose property under the Fourteenth Amendment was then not subject to deprivation by any State without due process of law. In practice this meant that any regulatory action by the states could be appealed to the Supreme Court, which thus gradually replaced them as guarantors of property rights. As described by Charles A.Beard: “before the end of the nineteenth century the once almost sovereign powers of the States over property and business within their borders were reduced to mere shadows of their former greatness.”

By a logical extension of the corporate person argument the railroads, again for instance, soon found it expedient to apply to national instead of State courts, under the interstate commerce clause. That procedure brought the granting of injunctions against strike action, the violation of which in turn resulted in summary imprisonment of labor leaders, without jury trial, for contempt of court. Thus the national development of industry on the one hand, and of trade unionism on the other, led through the channel of the Fourteenth Amendment to the nationalization of governmental power and the resumed weakening of federal structure. Business leadership, too “practical” to theorize on politics, welcomed this centralization of power as long as it seemed to favor laissez-faire at the expense of labor organization. There was all too little anticipation that, in the name of democracy, this favoritism would eventually be reversed.”

That’s taken from Morley’s Freedom and Federalism. His chapter “The Fourteenth Amendment” elaborates the story. Morley is not, of course, arguing that he’d like to see businesses or individuals deprived of their property or rights in a lawless fashion at any level. But the structure of government matters as well as its content, and the combination of a liberal reading of the Fourteenth Amendment with the concept of corporate personhood wrought tremendous changes in the way governments works, in its scope and machinery. Power fled the people in the states and was absorbed and amplified by the institutions of the federal government — first by the Supreme Court, to a lesser extent by Congress, but ultimately and to the greatest extent by the executive branch, whose agencies, in the name of rights, can now seize property (the DEA), kill (the CIA), interfere in business (the FTC), censor communications (the FCC), and manipulate elections (the FEC) with nary a thought to “representation” or the legislative process. The corporate state turns out to be the executive state — which probably in the end becomes the military-security state. We’re not there yet, but we’re well on our way.

Nisbet and Molnar have a good deal in common. Both were deeply influenced in their understanding of state and society by French Catholic counter-revolutionaries such as Maistre and Bonald. But Nisbet is more Burkean and Molnar more reactionary in his theory of state and society. Molnar, for example, is less inclined to grant that the church should be an “intermediary” institution — on the contrary, as his essay makes clear, the reduction of the church to the level of a mere association has destroyed it; its earlier place was on par with the state and above civil society.

To gauge the distance between Nisbet and Molnar accurately, it may be useful to draw back and look at three general views of state and society that have won currency since the French Revolution. The three do not correspond exactly to the philosophies of liberalism, socialism, and conservatism, but there’s a rough match. The “liberal” view of state, society, and the individual holds that society is naturally harmonious, with the interests of diverse individuals (who are the reality behind such secondary institutions such as the family, church, etc.) coinciding to the benefit of all. Crime and war are therefore aberrant and pathological rather than systemic and recurrent. The place of the state, if it has any place at all, is to suppress these incidental eruptions of violence and maintain a set of legal rules that apply equally to all — which is to say, the law is not a battlefield. The latter-day anarcho-capitalist variant of this view says that the state is not in fact necessary to maintain rules and suppress sporadic violence; even those functions can better be performed by non-state agencies.

The “socialist” view, by contrast, holds that society is persistently (if not naturally) disharmonious, divided into classes of exploiters and exploited. Institutions reflect this fundamental social division, with the state, established churches, and property in land being instruments by which the exploiters extract the very lifeblood of the exploited. The social struggle is primary, institutions are merely tools, and it may be possible — through reform or revolution — for the exploited class to turn the instruments of oppression against their oppressors. In the utopian Marxist vision, the need for tools of exploitation finally disappears altogether once the exploited no longer have to use them to defend themselves or to achieve justice against their exploiters. But for now, the state either reflects the demands of the oppressor class (according to the more radical opinion) or else is an arena in which good and evil originating in the socioeconomic sphere must contend.

By way of an example of this “socialist” view, consider the fight over corporate spending and “campaign finance reform.” Modern “liberals” — that is, reformist social democrats — believe that through free and fair elections the public should be able to put in power honest representatives of the people’s (i.e., the exploited class’s) will, who will then use the state to restrain the exploitative tendencies of the private sector (which likes to cheat workers, pollute the environment, etc.). Corporations tend toward evil, in this picture, because they represent the few who have more wealth or power than the many (as a result of exploitation or, at any rate, some kind of unfairness), while democratic government supplies a means by which the many can keep the few in check. But democratic government constantly has to be guarded against perversion into non-democratic government — through the influence of corporate corruption, for example — which would turn the tables and allow the state to become once more not a defensive mechanism for the many but an extractive mechanism for the few.

The radical or anarchist variant on this “socialist” view of society and government says that government and other long-established institutions inherently favor the exploiting class, indeed are inseparable from their interests, and must therefore be abolished rather than reappropriated. The left-anarchist criticizes the anarcho-capitalist for wanting to close only one of the channels of oppression, the state, while leaving others, such as land ownership, untouched. Indeed, left anarchists who believe (as Noam Chomsky seems to do) that the state more amenable to democratic pressure than are other institutions may even accuse the anarcho-capitalists of creating a worse system than the one that already exists by removing a potentially public institution and giving more power to private interests.

The third view of society and state roughly corresponds to conservatism, but overlaps with a few other philosophies or ideologies as well. This is the view that society is naturally disharmonious, but can be brought to a degree of harmony through the action of certain institutions, particularly the state. The “liberal-conservative” variation on this view says that ultimately reconciling the conflicting interests within society is beyond any state’s power, therefore the best that can be achieved is a temporary suppression of conflict by balancing forces. This is, of course, quite similar to, but less optimistic than, the pure “liberal” view of society and state — the difference comes down to how persistent and regular one believes social conflict to be. The fascist or nationalist variation on this view says that the coercive power of the state can successfully harmonize society, if only by eliminating foreign influences and disruptive “intermediary” institutions. Finally, the “traditionalist” variation on this view is that perfect harmony cannot be achieved, nor can much long-term peace be achieved by balancing competing interest groups within civil society, therefore all power must rest in the hands of established authority (church and state). The traditional view is suggested by this passage from Molnar’s “The Liberal Hegemony”:

Let us state bluntly that while churchmen and state administrators are tempted by their closeness to power and the abuses derived therefrom, members of civil society are exposed to the temptations that their daily activities offer. … Put in a simplified way, State and Church never quite trusted the agitation in the forum and the marketplace, the myriad intertwined interests, the greed, the occasions for immorality. The all-time consequence was (it still is, read the papal encyclicals) the insistence on the supremacy of Church and State over civil society…

Nisbet and Molnar both subscribe to the third view of society and the state, Nisbet to something like its “liberal-conservative” variant and Molnar to the “traditionalist” or authoritarian version.

It’s worth stressing again that the three general views correspond only roughly to “liberalism,” “socialism,” and “conservatism.” There’s plenty of overlap and admixture. Classical liberals and libertarians, particularly the more radical among them, can agree to some extent with the socialist view that the state embodies power divisions within society, though the liberal/libertarian would be inclined to say that the state creates, rather than reflects, those divisions. Traditionalists who subscribe to the third view of state and society may find their perspective shattered after a revolution has disestablished the church and subordinated the state to civil society. At that point, traditionalists may find much of value in criticisms derived from views of state and society that are not customarily their own.

Not only are there many combination and permutations of the three basic perspectives and their variants, but adherents of each group tend to make some effort to speak the language of the others. Here, for example is a traditionalist-authoritarian explaining how “liberty” works within his system (and doesn’t work within a rival liberal system):

What is important to the life of the taxpayer is liberty; what is important to the political life of the nation is authority, the precondition of the spirit of continuity, decision and responsibility.

“Authority at the top, liberty below” is the basic maxim of royalist constitutions.

The ridiculous [French] republic, one and indivisible, that we know so well, will no longer be the prey of ten thousand invisible, uncontrollable little tyrants; instead thousands of little republics of every sort, “domestic” republics like families, “local” republics like towns and provinces, “intellectual” and “professional” republics like associations, will freely administer their own affairs, guaranteed, coordinated and directed as a whole by one sole power which is permanent, that is to say personal and hereditary and with an interest in the preservation and development of the state.

It is to be noted that such a state, so powerful in its proper function of government, will be extremely feeble from the point of view of acting against the interests of the citizen. Whereas the citizen of the French Republic is left only with his own meagre individual powers to protect him against the mighty state machine, the citizen of the new kingdom of France will find himself a member of all kinds of strong and free communities (family, town, province, professional organization, etc.) which will deploy their strength to protect him from any interference.

The guarantees made to citizens in the republican state are entirely theoretical. They are, in fact, derived from a theory (the rights of man) which leads to the repudiation of the state’s prerogatives. In practice these guarantees entirely disappear. Respecting the paramount prerogatives of the state, monarchist theory confers upon the citizen practical guarantees, guarantees of fact: not only are they theoretically inviolable, they are in practice very difficult to violate.

Liberty is a right under the republic, but only a right: under the sovereignty of the royal throne liberties will relate to actual practice — certain, real, tangible, matters of fact.

That’s a bit of Charles Maurras from J.S. McClelland’s The French Right: From de Maistre to Maurras. The similarities to Nisbet are plain enough — Maurras even goes so far as to say that strong intermediary institutions will provide a buffer against the state, which should complicate the picture for anyone who wants to dismiss reactionaries as simple statists. But Maurras’s description of the organs of civil society as being free to “administer their own affairs, guaranteed, coordinated and directed as a whole by one sole power which is permanent,” is still quite different from Nisbet’s insistence (in a 1978 essay, “The Dilemma of Conservatives in a Populist Society”) that “the American Constitution … is conservative to the core in its regard for separation of powers in the national government … its strict limitation upon powers granted the national government, and its strongly regionalist-localist emphasis…” A key question is, should civil society have some institutional power over politics at its largest scale (whether national or whatever) or should civil society have only indirect, noninstitutional influence — power over its own small-scale affairs perhaps, but none over the large-scale prerogatives of the state? For the traditionalist-authoritarian, the state should be as closed as possible, and thereby insulated from the conflicting interests and intrigues of civil society. For the conservative-liberal, some degree of openness is desired.

Choosing the right candidate for a particular district doesn’t just mean selecting a generically liberal candidate for a liberal district. Someone like Hoffman was not too “conservative” to win NY-23. But he was too ill-versed in local issues to do himself any good.