Conservatism

Conservative elements have shaped American political culture since the creation of the republic. Around 1800, they flowed through two separate political positions. The first was a commitment to republican government stewarded by an educated, judicious, and propertied elite. Best represented in spirit and style by the Founders themselves, an enlightened elite could instill order, stability, and wisdom in the body politic. Eager to be virtuous, this elite would guarantee the spread of civic virtue—so ran a loosely conservative line of argument. The early republic's other conservative element was a resistance to radical change and especially to the change symbolized by the French Revolution. The corollary to such resistance was reverence for tradition, which might mean the tradition of British law, as absorbed into the United States, or the Judeo-Christian heritage within American culture, in all its variety, or the traditions that gradually rose up around the US Constitution. Reverence for tradition and resistance to radical change were often associated with the British political thinker and member of Parliament Edmund Burke ( 1729–1797 ), a conservative hero in America from the eighteenth century down to the present day.

Several protoconservative formations emerged in the course of the nineteenth century. The augmentation of antislavery sentiment in the North fostered a reactionary mood in the South, starting in the 1830s and 1840s. The South's political philosopher was John C. Calhoun ( 1782–1850 ), who defended states' rights against the feared interference of the federal government. Calhoun and his supporters sought to preserve a particular image of southern culture and, if necessary, to do so by exporting slavery westward, an aspiration that would lead to war. In 1861, secession was framed as a conservative act by many southerners who construed the Civil War and Reconstruction as evidence of a radicalized North. In the second half of the nineteenth century, as socialism and social democracy made inroads in the United States, a dichotomy arose between those who equated the capitalist system with exploitation and those who worried about a new militancy and statist overreach. Other polarities— liberal-conservative, left-right, Republican-Democrat in the modern sense—would crystallize around this original dichotomy of attitude.

In the early twentieth century, there was an extant and recognizable business conservatism, cultural conservatism, and intellectual conservatism. Business conservatism opposed the ascendant Progressive movement, which championed the expert's ability to disaggregate power and wealth by fortifying the government's regulatory powers. Touched at times by social Darwinism, business conservatism promoted the free market, individual enterprise, and a theory of political economy based on limited government. Cultural conservatism drew inspiration from the Scopes Monkey Trial of 1925, as conservative Protestants fought against multiple enemies: the secularism of science, the hedonism of the big cities, and immigration's remaking of American society. Their activism helped make temperance the law of the land from 1920 to 1933. Intellectual conservatism turned away from all that advertised itself as modern, defining modernity as disorientation and cultivating a hunger for the better times either of the early republic ( as in Henry Adam's 1918 memoir, The Education of Henry Adams ) or of the distant European past (as in T. S. Eliot's 1922 poem, “The Waste Land”). Business and cultural conservatives could enjoy the 1920s as an era of Republican presidents, from 1922 to 1932, but this was cold comfort to intellectual conservatives who saw modernity continuing apace. The Ku Klux Klan and other nativist groups beholden to a certain romance of the past were active throughout the 1920s.

A conservative viewpoint that did not survive the Second World War was isolationism. Right-wing isolationists rejected the liberal internationalism of Woodrow Wilson ( 1856–1924 ) and his Democratic Party. They wanted Fortress America, and they worried, after Roosevelt's election in 1932, that the Democrats would once again march the country into a world war. The heterogeneous anticommunism of the interwar Right was as strong as it was existential, but it did not encourage advocacy of a more interventionist foreign policy. From 1941 until 1945, the United States and the Soviet Union were wartime allies. The American-British-Soviet alliance was practical rather than ideological. Its ideological instability was obvious once Nazi Germany and imperial Japan were defeated in 1945.

From 1945 to 1989, the Cold War determined the substance and structure of American conservatism. First, the Cold War planted a bipartisan foreign-policy establishment in the US State Department, the Pentagon, the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), and the White House, a dynamic that helped return conservatives to the political mainstream after their Depression-era tribulations. Later on, the Cold War would inspire conservatives to form an establishment of their own, brought into being by a conservative movement. This establishment would come into its own in the 1980s, and it would endure long beyond the Cold War.

Much of the Republican Party welcomed the containment strategy pioneered by the State Department's Russia specialist, George Kennan ( 1904–2005 ), and adopted by President Harry Truman ( 1884–1972 ) to contain the Soviet Union's expansionist goals. Much of the Republican Party also agreed with the internationalist intentions of the Marshall Plan, aimed at rebuilding Europe, and the establishment of the NATO (North Atlantic Treaty Organization) alliance. Significantly, the conservative initiatives of Wisconsin Senator Joseph McCarthy ( 1908–1957 ) from 1950 to 1954 were directed at the problem of domestic communism. McCarthy, who retained some midwestern isolationist reflexes, did not propose an alternative strategy to containment. Nor did Dwight Eisenhower ( 1890–1969 ) when he became president in 1952. Eisenhower embodied establishment conservatism. He had run for president in part because of his dedication to an activist American foreign policy, to NATO, and to the continuance of the Korean War (begun under Truman). Eisenhower perpetuated the New Deal welfare state he had inherited from Truman and Roosevelt. Eisenhower presided over the socalled Quiet Decade in American culture, colored by the patriotic consensus forged in World War II. A calm proponent of quiet, Eisenhower did not use the word conservative to describe his Republican Party.

After Eisenhower, establishment conservatism died a slow death. Eisenhower's vice president was Richard Nixon ( 1913–1994 ), who lost the 1960 election to John F. Kennedy ( 1917–1963 ). In 1964, Nelson Rockefeller ( 1908–1979 ), another establishment figure, lost the GOP nomination to Arizona senator Barry Goldwater ( 1909–1998 )—an outspoken conservative—who lost the general election in a landslide. Nixon then won two presidential elections, in 1968 and 1972. Nixon had a moderate side expressed in environmental legislation, antipoverty legislation, the foreign-policy doctrine of détente and the opening of diplomatic relations with Mao Zedong's China. Nixon's moderation was among the casualties of the Watergate scandal ( 1974 ). Yet, already in 1968, Nixon had started to reconsider Republican Party strategy. With his law-and-order rhetoric, he courted white ethnics. With his focus on southern states, he reimagined the electoral-college calculus of American conservatism. Unlike Eisenhower, he had to acknowledge a conservative movement that was too important to ignore.

The conservative movement had, from the beginning, aimed at destroying establishment conservatism. Its leader was William F. Buckley Jr. ( 1925–2008

THE REAGAN PRESIDENCY

POST-REAGAN DIVISIONS WITHIN CONSERVATISM