[The Man Who Invented Conservatism: The Unlikely Life of Frank S. Meyer by Daniel J. Flynn (Encounter Books, 2025; 562 pp.)]
As many of my readers will know, Frank Meyer was a key figure in the effort by William F. Buckley, Jr. to suppress the Old Right (which was committed to non-interventionist foreign policy and limited government) with the ardent prosecution of the Cold War, even to the extent of a preventive nuclear war against Soviet Russia. Buckley’s principal means of advancing his ideas was his magazine National Review, and the remarkably well-read Meyer for many years edited the book review section and wrote a large number of reviews himself.
Famously argumentative and combative, he could deliver instant rebuttals from the floor if he heard a speech he disagreed with—and he almost always did disagree. Concerning this style of conservatism, he could say, with Thucydides, “all of which I saw, and a great part of which I was.”
You would not expect him to be a friend of Murray Rothbard, but Meyer usually defies expectations. In the 1930s, he had been a member of the Communist Party—both in America and Britain—the latter during his student years at Oxford. But reading Friedrich Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom had a strong effect on him—he wrote a favorable review of the book in the Communist magazine New Masses—and after years of mental struggle, he became a committed individualist, in large part owing to the influence of Rose Wilder Lane. In what follows, I’d like to discuss some of what we can learn from this surprising source.
Let’s begin with his account of Hayek’s argument against planning:
The appeal of his argument to decent, democratic people lies in the contention that government economic planning demands the accumulation of immense power in central organs and that therefore, so long as production is not unlimited, what men shall have and do will have to be decided by the arbitrary decision of other men… He claims further that because agreement on such questions cannot be arrived at democratically, those who govern, no matter how democratically they are chosen, no matter how good their intentions, will then have continually to increase their use of sheer power to enforce those decisions. The net result will be a completely regimented society in which the individual would have no freedom and no real voice.
That is very well put, but the rejection of central planning is hardly controversial these days. Let’s turn to something that is controversial. Meyer was a vigorous critic of the “Great Emancipator,” Abraham Lincoln. Flynn notes that,
…in a “Books in Brief” review of Dean Sprague’s Freedom Under Lincoln, the overseer of National Review’s book section [i.e., Meyer] wrote that the sixteenth president established “an authoritarianism that was, in terms of civil liberties, the most ruthless in American history.” He applauded the author for laying out the factual record but criticized the “feeble excuses” he makes for Lincoln.
Several readers wrote letters of complaint, and in response, he said: “I have over a number of years come to think that the general admiration for Abraham Lincoln is ill-founded.” Flynn notes that Meyer “held that waging total war guaranteed the bitterness that followed and the disregard for civil liberties ushered in centralization and ultimately doomed federalism.”
Readers of Rothbard know that he rejected equality—not just equality of results but also equality of opportunity. Meyer agreed. In an article, “Again on Lincoln,” written in response to the Lincoln idolator Harry Jaffa, Meyer said:
Freedom and equality are opposites: the freer men are the freer they are to demonstrate their inequality; and any political or social attempt—like those so frequent in the twentieth century—to enforce equality leads to the restriction and the eventual destruction of freedom.
Again like Rothbard, Meyer opposed the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 60s:
Meyer, a Northerner who had endured antisemitism and proposed a Ph.D. dissertation on African Americans, nevertheless approached the civil rights movement from a dispassionate, constitutional perspective that moved further from fashion as time passed. For example, he called the Eisenhower administration’s forced integration of Central High School the “Little Rock Invasion.” He believed that imposing a federal vision of the good upon a community equipped to govern itself amounted to centralization and paternalism. He saw in most new civil rights laws the intrusion into private conduct to compel and integration every bit as unnatural as laws forcing segregation,. . .He viewed Martin Luther King Jr unfavorably and his rivals more unfavorably.”
He brilliantly argued against demands by civil rights groups for forced transfers of money to remedy past or present “oppression.”
He lambasted “the egalitarian myth that anyone who is an any way worse off than anyone else can be so only because of oppression or distortion arising from evil men or evil circumstances. If individual A fails where individual B succeeds, it is always the fault of external circumstances, never of his quality or his effort or his moral fiber. Similarly, if group x fails to achieve proportion y of the goods in life, it is forbidden to inquire [even after allowing for a harsh history] of the qualities of the group in its average; instead the omnicompetent state must be brought to bear to take from those who have achieved and give to those who have not.”
It was not just a matter of As and Bs in the abstract: he meant the black civil rights movement: “This movement, he argued, relied on a form of ‘blackmail by violence’; essentially, give us what we want or we shall give you what you do not want.”
Meyer was fortunate that he died in 1972. People who say things like that today are liable to be imprisoned for “hate speech.”
