Poetry and the Politics of Aspirational Conservatism
Populism, at the moment, is riding high in the saddle. Young people on the left and right alike feel that liberalism has somehow failed and are now reaching for what some have called the “strong gods” of ideology. It is perhaps unsurprising that the socialist vanguard rejects the American Constitution in favor of utopian dreams; the newer and perhaps more troubling trend among those on the right is a nationalism that seems to have little admiration for the principles of this nation’s founding. Rather than respecting the careful limits our Constitution imposes on power, the new ideologues of the right seek to seize as much of it as they can to fight and, they hope, defeat their enemies.
As I have written elsewhere, this attitude is quite understandable in some ways—although destined for failure. Aside from a number of important wins at the Supreme Court, social conservatism seems to be in near-terminal decline. Even the present Republican administration, supposedly put in office by the energy of the New Right, seems incapable of doing much to reverse the damage done by liberalism. Indeed, many of its policies seem to be making social ills such as pornography, addictive drugs, and even abortion far more pervasive. The lesson ought to be clear: one faction seizing power cannot lead to social renewal.
What is most needed, then, is not reactionary rage but what John Wilsey aptly describes as “aspirational conservatism” in his book Religious Freedom: A Conservative Primer. More than the squabbles of party politics, conservatives ought to be concerned with defending our civilization’s way of life and the ordered liberty that sustains it. Looking back to another great crisis in Western history—World War II—the example of two poets, Peter Viereck and T. S. Eliot, can better illustrate the meaning of an aspirational conservatism than the slogans of politicians.
Viereck is a somewhat neglected figure among conservatives today. Wilsey has done a great service by recovering his voice and vision. Born in 1916 to George Sylvester Viereck—who later was convicted as a Nazi spy—the poet and historian became all too well-acquainted with the dangers of reactionary ideology through his father’s poisonous extremism and mania for Adolf Hitler. As Wilsey put it, this “profound knowledge of authoritarian rightism from study and experience” was what “sets Viereck apart from his contemporaries.” While many conservative minds (especially those in the National Review circle) in the middle of the twentieth century focused on the fight against ideologies of the left, Viereck chose to challenge totalitarianism wherever he found it.
In no small measure, this is why Viereck studied the origins of fascist ideology while completing his PhD at Harvard. He wrote his dissertation, as Wilsey summarizes, on how the “Nazis, inspired by Romanticism, shook off the best traditions of Western civilization to take up the cause and identity of the German Volk, a mythological conception of an organic national identity based on racial purity.” As traditional communities broke down and economic disaster consumed the globe, this kind of utopianism appealed by giving the masses false hope. He described this chimerical outlook as “dynamism” or “the cult of power.” It undermined the supporting pillars of our civilizational edifice, such as Christian religion and the rule of law.
Viereck was quite clear that the errors of fascism were morally equivalent to the errors of communism. In a 1940 essay for The Atlantic Monthly calling for his fellow conservatives to awaken to the world crisis of Hitler’s conquest, he wrote that the pagan attitudes of “dynamism” were deeply “immoral” and the “economic materialism” of Marxism was “unmoral.” “Either in excess explodes the civilization we conservatives would conserve,” he argued. “Our fight as young Americans is twofold: against our established cult of economism and mammon worship, and against all attempts to import fascism in its place.”
In a paragraph that feels eerily relevant to our time of campus bigotry and synagogue bombings, Viereck went on to assail the noxious racism promoted by fascists:
In one aspect, the challenge of frank and open Bolshevik church burning is almost less dangerous to us than the more subtly masked Nazi challenge. This mask is anti-Semitism. Those ostrich conservatives miss its whole point who whistle in the dark, thinking “What concern of ours are racial persecutions so long as we’re not persecuted?” Political anti-Semitism is no isolated program. It is the first step in an ever-widening revolt of mob instinct against all restraints and liberties. It is the thin opening wedge for the subversion of democracy, Christianity, and tolerance in general.
“Restraint” and “liberty,” then, were Viereck’s watchwords against totalitarianism. Wilsey explains that in his later writings on conservatism he made a distinction between the dispositions of Edmund Burke and Joseph de Maistre—two contemporary opponents of the French Revolution. While schools descended from both thinkers “hold up tradition in the face of revolutionary change,” the “Burkeans stand for traditional liberties whereas Maistrians champion traditional authority.” Burke was certainly a defender of church establishment, but he was also an advocate of toleration. It was only through the spirit of what he called an “exalted freedom” that society might be preserved. Wilsey says that Viereck’s conservatism, inspired by Burke, became a defense of “the private life” and “a struggle against conformity to the ever-changing whims of prevailing culture.”
At the back of this politics, of course, was Viereck’s strong conception of human dignity, inspired by the Christian and classical traditions. Nowhere did he articulate this with greater poetic force than in a 1946 poem, “Crass Times Redeemed by Dignity of Souls,” later collected in his New and Selected Poems. Originally writing it to memorialize the death of his older brother George—killed fighting Nazis with the U.S. Army in Italy—he expanded it upon learning of the terror of Auschwitz:
Torn out of blackness, soon to choke on black,
Leaning on nothingness before and back,
Tight-lashed to lies by veins and nerves and Will,
My life is darkness. Yet I live to tell
What airy skeleton of shimmer strolls
From flesh that guards its consciousness of souls.
Then love, that gives and gives and loves the more,
Frees us the way the good and daily light
Heals and
shreds and
liberates the night.
Though blinking—burning—shivering in the white
Blaze that each dust-heap blest with speech extols,
May every dark and kindled “I” revere
In every “you” that selfsame fire-core,
In every soul the soul of all our souls.
Viereck’s poetic vision of human dignity is truly beautiful. And yet while there is much to admire in his politics of prudence, in the end it collapsed into an overeagerness to accommodate his vision of conservatism to the New Deal liberalism that dominated Washington in the twentieth century. Unlike the movement conservatives with whom he clashed, Viereck did not fully see the dangers political and economic centralization posed to the “private life” he held so dear. While they arrayed themselves against the statism of Franklin D. Roosevelt and his followers, he attempted to chart a middle course that incorporated central economic planning into conservatism.
T. S. Eliot, by contrast, came to see the ways liberalism degenerates into power-ideology as not unlike fascism or communism. Although he began his career as a public commentator somewhat sympathetic to the “Maistrian” strand of traditionalist conservatism, the crises of the twentieth century caused him to lose faith in political power as a tool for restoring authority. Rather than attempting to build a coalition to win political power, then, Eliot advocated decentralization and a restoration of traditional religion—a kind of Burkean localism. Faith alone, he understood, sustains civilization. That is what we must aspire to conserve.
Although he is rightly considered the greatest of modernist poets, Eliot was also perhaps modernity’s greatest critic. After the horrors of World War I and the spread of revolution shattered Europe’s faith, his long poem The Waste Land gave voice to the traumatized spirit of a generation. He painted a bleak picture of a civilization that had lost its way, a culture dying of a spiritual thirst:
What are the roots that clutch, what branches grow
Out of this stony rubbish? Son of man,
You cannot say, or guess, for you know only
A heap of broken images, where the sun beats,
And the dead tree gives no shelter, the cricket no relief,
And the dry stone no sound of water.
Given this cynicism about the state of the West, it is perhaps no surprise that Eliot turned to reactionary politics for solutions. Early on, his great political hero was a French right-winger named Charles Maurras, founder of a movement called Action Française. Today we would probably describe Maurras’s ideology as “.” Although he was not himself a believer, Maurras hoped that a kind of political Catholicism mixed with a nostalgic royalism could restore the French nation’s greatness. While he never embraced the revolutionary paganism represented by Nazism or the scientistic despotism of Italian fascism, Maurras was fundamentally engaged in the “Maistrian” strand of power politics.
Despite his initial support for Maurras, Eliot over time came to distance himself from Action Française. In his magisterial biography of the poet, Russell Kirk pointed out that Eliot at first saw “Maurras’s royalism and traditionalism” as “bulwarks against totalist ideology.” Sadly, though, Maurras could not control the drift of the French Right toward more noxious politics—as Kirk put it, he may have been “a most talented writer, [but] actually was a most impractical politician.” Eliot began by “seeking for leaders with imagination and courage,” but concluded by losing faith that such leadership could revive civilization and put the “heap of broken images” back together again.
In the 1920s and ’30s, the poet attained a new prominence in the English-speaking world by editing a magazine titled The Criterion. Much of his output at the time was dedicated to excellent literary criticism, but he did occasionally comment on politics. His views of the dominant ideological movements in Europe come across quite clearly in these essays; Kirk wrote that Eliot believed fascism and communism “could offer only old consciences with new faces: neither could make the leap by which a decadent civilization might be renewed.” As the forces of revolution, right and left alike, marched on, he became increasingly wary of power politics altogether.
At the same time, Eliot was deeply concerned with the state of British society. In a letter Kirk quotes, he explained that the conservative government’s appeasement policies toward the Axis powers particularly troubled him because they exposed the emptiness of the culture:
I felt a deep personal guilt and shame for my country and for myself as part of the country. Our whole national life seemed fraudulent. If our culture led to an act of betrayal of that kind, then such a culture was worthless, worthless because it was bankrupt. It had no morality because it did not finally believe in anything. We were concerned with safety, with our possessions, with money, not with right and wrong.
And yet Eliot did not slip into the nihilism so many others on the right did. Nor did he seek to accommodate the socialism of the Labour Party as Viereck attempted to do with the Democrats’ New Deal. “Eliot had been as harsh a critic of his society as ever had been Pound or Lewis or Maurras,” Kirk wrote. “From them he had been distinguished, however, by a temperance of thought and utterance—and distinguished latterly by a faith in transcendent order that these other writers could not accept.” Above all, Eliot set it out as his goal to reinvigorate what Burke once described as the “moral imagination” of the English-speaking people. He spoke of the “Permanent Things,” unchanging truths about the human condition from which we might restore order in the soul and in the commonwealth.
One of Eliot’s most mature expressions of the Permanent Things’ political implications is his 1939 essay “The Idea of a Christian Society.” Written just before Hitler and Stalin jointly conquered Poland, it is a rousing call to reject materialism and ideology and instead cultivate certain elevating spiritual ideals. “As political philosophy derives its sanction from ethics, and ethics from the truth of religion,” Eliot wrote, “it is only by returning to the eternal source of truth that we can hope for any social organization which will not, to its ultimate destruction, ignore some essential aspect of reality.” Merely intoning cliches about “democracy,” Eliot understood, could not save the West from the gathering storm. “If you will not have God (and He is a jealous God),” he thundered, “you should pay your respects to Hitler or Stalin.”
At the same time, though, Eliot maintained a great skepticism about the ability of centralized power to remind people of the respect we owe God. While he certainly believed that the state should be a moral guardian in a Christian society, and even promote true religion, he also held that such a society can only be incarnated on a local level. He called for the reinvigoration or reimagination of parish life along the lines of other pluralist political thinkers of the time, such as Jacques Maritain and Christopher Dawson. “The State is Christian only negatively,” Eliot wrote, “its Christianity is a reflection of the Christianity of the society which it governs.”
If power cannot impose Christianity on a society, though, what can? In The Conservative Mind, Kirk wrote: “Through the whole of Eliot’s writing there runs the idea of a community of souls: a bond of love and duty joining all the living, and also those who have preceded us and those who will follow us in this moment of time.” Even more than state action or social organization, Eliot sought to use his poetry to remind the English-speaking people of this chain of continuity, thereby refreshing what Burke described as the “contract of eternal society.”
Eliot wrote his greatest statement of poetic faith, “Little Gidding,” during the height of World War II in 1941. “We cannot restore old policies / Or follow an antique drum,” the poet wrote—a renunciation, Kirk argued, of his “early hopes” for reactionary politics. Instead, we must embrace history as a pattern of divine providence and hold fast to a faith that “All manner of thing shall be well / By the purification of the motive / In the ground of our beseeching.” The human dignity Viereck articulated becomes for Eliot a perception of our profound relationship with its Creator.
This is a vision of an aspirational conservatism with almost nothing in common with the dominant forms of populism and religious nationalism on the American right today. The prospects for reviving it as a mass political movement are no doubt bleak—but so they were in Viereck and Eliot’s time, as well. The point of aspirational conservatism, of the poetic faith that sustains our civilization, is not to achieve electoral success or immediate political reform. Rather, it is to remind us of our roots, and to encourage us to water them.
This essay is adapted from remarks delivered by its author at the 2026 annual meeting of the Southern Political Science Association.