Of course, remembering Communism without at the same time remembering Nazism is impossible from any moral viewpoint. American conservatives, however, should not conflate significant ideological differences between the two by focusing exclusively on their "big-government" or "statist" aspects. For if communism is a quintessentially liberal tyranny, Nazism and fascism are both distinguished by the haunting presence of strongly conservative elements. The linear caricature about walking due left till one bumps into Uncle Joe, due right till one hits "der Fuhrer" is obviously a crude simplification. Yet the intellectual nuances behind it are real. All roads lead to Rome, but not all those roads are the same, or even similar. Conservatives who turn a blind eye to the conservatism of the Third Reich risk never coming to grips with the significant definitional challenge to conservatism that regime represents.

Those who dispute the Nazi regime's conservatism might point to a number of conservative German constituencies who opposed Hitler. But conservatives come in different colors, and such isolated trivia therefore have absolutely no bearing on the actual character of Nazi ideology. The fact is, the National Socialists sat squarely on the Right in the political milieu of the Weimar Republic. Their fortunes rose as those of the Social Democrats and Communists, lodged firmly on the Left, fell.

A more sophisticated objection to Nazism as conservative is based on a misreading of Hayek¹s The Road to Serfdom. The lucid power of Hayek's defense of the free market is arguably rivaled only by that of Adam Smith. And one might with good reason expect Hayek, concerned as he is with the tension between government and market, to equate Nazism and Communism on the basis of excessive state coercion. His chapter in The Road to Serfdom entitled "The Socialist Roots of Nazism" strongly implies as much. But even Hayek distinguishes between "the socialists of the Left" and "those of the Right." While he also writes that the latter often started out in the camp of the former and suggests that National Socialism is the logical outgrowth of its liberal Marxist counterpart, such a hypothesis is far from self-evident and would require more documentation than Hayek provides.

Whether any amount of intellectual connection-forging could bear it out, however, is doubtful. Liberalism as it first appeared in 16th century contract theory is concerned primarily with securing the maximum possible sphere of individual freedom through the deliberate use of reason. Admittedly, different strands of liberalism construe freedom differently. A Victorian liberal opposes generous poorhouse benefits, which violate his conception of liberty as negative. After adding a positive component to the definition, however, a member of Lloyd George's cabinet one generation later supports them. Radical differences in policy do not necessarily correspond to differences in ideology. What makes both the above attitudes liberal is their avowed commitment to human freedom. Paradoxically, this is true even of Marxism, conceived within the same intellectual framework of contract, consent, and right pioneered by Hobbes and Locke. Oppression, class struggle, and the utopian end-state are all understood as the logical exfoliation of objective, historical laws that can be discerned through the use of reason. Related to this reliance on reason, and shared by liberalism of every kind, is the inherent notion of Progress. Once Reason is made the central principle of a regime, there is no logical obstacle to indefinite improvement of the human condition on earth.

Significantly, the Nazis rejected this contract-theory paradigm entirely. The very idea of individual freedom was disdainfully dismissed as contemptible English commercialism; the primacy of Nation over individual promulgated in public displays of brazen, militaristic glory. The Third Reich did not settle for making this, as the Soviet Union did, a practical reality of every day politics ‹ they asserted it as a moral precept. The vigor of the Volk was antecedent to the individual not just as a matter of course but as a matter of philosophy; and this, as Sam Huntington has written in his seminal article on "Conservatism as an Ideology," is one of the bread and butter staples of conservatism. Again, even if practice invariably fell short of theory, Communism at least claimed to espouse Reason, whereas the Nazis reveled in renouncing it. Whereas Communism accepted the corollary to Reason that is Progress, Nazism rejected it with the same epistemological abandon, constructing in its stead a cyclical cosmology that meshed perfectly with the regime's racialism. Once ethnicity is held to be determinative of human excellence, indefinite linear advancement is indeed out of the picture; one can hope only for successive cycles of racial vitiation and renewal.

The most legitimate objection to identifying the Nazi regime as fundamentally conservative, then, is actually another component of conservatism that Huntington identifies in his article. The essence of conservatism lies not in any specific set of ideas but in the modus operandi employed ‹ gradual, incremental change. Yet the Nazis spurned gradualism; they were revolutionaries who effected what is perhaps the most gruesomely violent social upheaval in history. Is "conservative revolution" not an oxymoron, a hopeless contradiction in terms? Would it not be more accurate to simply label the Nazis illiberal radicals?

The functional tension between conserving and revolutionizing is obviously significant; but instead of disproving the idea of Nazi conservatism, it actually points to a fundamental, definitional problem of conservatism itself. Conservatives must finally come to grips with it, at least if they wish to finally establish conservatism as a robust political philosophy and a viable prescription for governance.

The possibility of a conservative revolution, counter-intuitive though it may be, is actually tacitly conceded by both Left and Right in the United States. Hence the widespread use of the term "Reagan Revolution" to describe the elections of 1980. One public official at the time expressed the paradox pithily, saying that it was precisely because he was conservative that the prevailing political milieu allowed him to stand for change. Reagan, after all, was elected on a vision that included rolling back certain aspects of the welfare state going all the way back to the New Deal.

Indeed, when the survival of a tradition or way of life is at stake and threatened by new institutions inimical to it, the conservative faces a dilemma. Should his presumption in favor of the status quo override his attachment to the endangered tradition, or can his support of endangered values justify rolling back the invidious institutions stifling them? What if only the speedy removal of the corrosive institutions in question can keep tradition from being ablated out of existence? Does a more accelerated, nay, revolutionary rollback then become justified on conservative grounds? Abortion is the perfect example. The constitutional decision legalizing it is now more than a quarter of a century old. At what point does the American conservative reconcile himself to the institutional change thus wrought? Or can he remain "conservative" even by opposing that decision in perpetuity, defining the referential point of his conservatism as a pre-Roe tradition receding ever faster and farther into the night?

Somewhat analogously to the pundits who seized on the idea of a Reagan revolution, German thinkers in the early twenties were also keenly aware that preserving old, endangered values might sometimes necessitate drastic measures. Except that in this case, the values they sought to resuscitate were really old, the institutional and intellectual roots choking them reallydeep. Only a "conservative revolution" could extirpate the institutional and intellectual bramble-weed. Among Germans, the actual term appeared first in 1921, in the work of Death in Veniceauthor Thomas Mann; it was subsequently made more rigorous through the writings of Hugo von Hofmannsthal and Moeller van den Bruck. As these thinkers conceived of it, the conservative revolution would reconnect the Volk to the primordial vitality it enjoyed in the Middle Ages. One had to dig through five centuries of modernity to get there, razing the entire spirit-emasculating edifice of rational philosophy down below even its ground-zero level of the 16th century Renaissance. The prize lay dormant in the basement. Once exhumed from the rubble, it would correspond nicely to what certain 19th century Romantics had envisioned ‹ the throbbing, robust, life-distilling force that is the German, spiritually pure and ethnically undefiled.

Many of the original expounders of "conservative revolution" strongly disapproved of Hitler's agenda. Regardless, they developed a specific intellectual framework that could be used to justify definite courses of action. Within that framework, the backwards-looking Nazi revolution acquires a conservative hue its inherently forward-looking, ostensibly rational Marxist counterpart can never acquire. One might well ask, again with the rhetorical backdrop of "Reagan revolution" in mind: if 50 years is an acceptable time frame within which a conservative can operate to undo institutional innovation, heck, why not 500? What exactly is one conservative with reference to? If it is only an existing set of institutional arrangements, the truly principled conservative can never oppose any law once it has been passed. But relaxing the time frame back behind the immediacy of Now is no solution either. How far back? Depending on the answer, the Salient could become the most left-wing publication on campus, inasmuch as we remain, I dare say, among the more rabid of Harvard students in our unflagging moral support of those liberty-tree toting radicals who broke with England more than 200 years ago.

The dilemma is serious, the answer far from obvious. Given an understanding of conservatism as simple adherence to tradition or the values of days gone by, the Nazis were in a very real sense conservative. Specifying periods that bracket the relevant tradition or values might be a solution, except that ultimately any historical boundary is as arbitrary as any other. Tradition is a fluid category, congealing continuously over time. Even historical periods we take for granted, such as the classical era, the Middle Ages, or the Renaissance, are to a large extent artificial constructs, fruitless efforts to make concrete what is inherently slippery. What the Nazis sought to "conserve," or re-discover, may have been beyond the time-horizon usually associated with conservatism; it was a damnable fiction, no doubt. But the way in which they framed their ideology is what gives it a conservative flavor. In the end, perhaps only way out of the definitional debris is subscribing more to the type of conservatism Aristotle hints at in The Politics. A paradigm shift is needed in conservatism, after which reason is seen not as inhering exclusively in tradition but also as existing independently of and above it. The prudent legislator, on this view, is the one who picks and culls what is wise from a broad spectrum of tradition. He pays particular attention to the confluence of disparate traditions, and he often even defers to unwise, ingrained tradition when the costs of taming human spiritedness to achieve justice are unacceptably high. Such a conservatism would still be fundamentally different from liberalism in the instrumentality ascribed to tradition, even if it did resemble liberalism more closely in the degree of confidence it invests in the ratiocinative powers of the wise. Framed in this way, however, conservatism would definitely exclude monstrosities such as the Third Reich. While in most cases yielding the same concrete results as Burkean gradualism, then, it would avail itself of a degree of definitional, and moral, clarity that we can live with.