Conservatism

Conservatism. The term “conservatism” did not gain parlance in American politics until the middle of the twentieth century. The United States has never had a national party bearing that label, in contrast to Great Britain and Canada, for example. When Peter Viereck published Conservatism Revisited in 1949, and Russell Kirk The Conservative Mind in 1953, they invoked an understanding of that term that had clear European antecedents, especially in Edmund Burke, British statesman of the late eighteenth century. Burke, particularly in his criticism of the French Revolution, evoked tradition and the mystique of history to countervail any present generation's fascination with newness and change. He urged a discriminate but not implacable defense of the standing order, with its rank and hierarchy. Burke's conservatism appreciated folkways and local color, but it especially celebrated the symbols of unity, in crown and state, that preserved the organic quality of the nation.

In the United States, this brand of conservatism had to compete with other forms. The revolutionary spirit that fostered American independence often expressed hostility to Old World social and political institutions and located a contrasting American identity in the new nation's youth and republican simplicity. In the first political party system, the Federalist party espoused an early form of American conservatism. Alexander Hamilton's economic program envisioned an alliance of the federal government with the business classes, but the Federalists also found a religious constituency in the established churches of New England. The Whig party generally continued this alliance. Henry Clay's “American System” looked to the federal government to assist in the nation's economic growth. At the same time, Whigs tended to support a moral politics, embracing such causes as temperance and antislavery. In antebellum America, rival elements in the Democratic party often complained of both the social elitism and the “moral imperialism” of the Whigs. A number of writers and artists of the Antebellum Era, including the novelists James Fenimore Cooper and Nathaniel Hawthorne and the painter Thomas Cole, offered a distinctly conservative perspective in their work.

The Republican party, arising in the mid‐1850s, inherited the Whigs' moral fervor and became an antislavery party. Its sponsorship of homestead legislation, construction of a national railroad, and creation of land‐grant colleges continued the economic nationalism of the Federalists and Whigs. The party, however, came increasingly under the influence of business interests that made defense of property rights a major priority. In the Gilded Age, conservatism came to be associated with laissez‐faire minimal‐government principles and found its major voice in the judicial branch of government as it became a bulwark against state regulation of business activity. This libertarian and free‐market brand of conservatism gained in theoretical and rhetorical significance thereafter. It found expression in such antistatist and elitist proponents as H. L. Mencken and Albert J. Nock (1870–1945), and in economic theorists like Friedrich von Hayek, whose The Road to Serfdom (1941) challenged Keynesianism. Later, the monetary theories of the University of Chicago economist Milton Friedman (1912– ), gave free‐market economics more theoretical persuasiveness and solidified that philosophy in American conservative ideology.

The Cold War added another component to American conservatism: anticommunism. In 1950, the Wisconsin senator Joseph McCarthy launched his campaign to expose communists in the State Department. The investigation of Alger Hiss, a former department official accused of communist affiliation by Whittaker Chambers (1901–1961), lent drama to the anticommunist movement. Chambers's autobiography, Witness (1952), an emotional center for a large conservative readership, described communism as a deadly challenge to Western civilization and especially to its religious tradition. Like Chambers, a remarkable number of anticommunist conservative intellectuals, in fact, came from the political left. They included Max Eastman, Will Herberg, Frank S. Meyer, and the novelist John Dos Passos (1896–1970). William F. Buckley Jr.’s National Review, launched in 1955, provided a forum for free‐market, anticommunist, and religious conservatives.

These conditions gave rise to a new kind of conservatism that became dominant in the later twentieth century: populist conservatism. In 1964, a movement in the Republican party took control from its moderate eastern wing and nominated Senator Barry Goldwater of Arizona for president. Goldwater, supported by conservative intellectuals and the many college chapters of Buckley's Young Americans for Freedom, campaigned against union shops, compulsory Social Security, and government projects such as the Tennessee Valley Authority. He appealed to Americans troubled by the Cold War stalemate and called for decisive action against the communist threat. Goldwater's defeat helped open the way for a more emphatically populist conservative, George C. Wallace of Alabama. Wallace first gained national attention by defying court‐ordered desegregation, but in campaigns for the presidency, his attacks on government officials and the social elites that he believed controlled them proved to have wide appeal.

Ronald Reagan inherited the momentum of populist conservatism and rode it to political success. Intellectually, Reaganism also owed much to a new group of “neoconservatives” made up of former leftists, including Jewish New Yorkers, such as Norman Podhoretz and Irving Kristol. Their disaffection with liberalism often derived from issues like affirmative action and school busing to achieve racial balance. The neoconservatives charged that liberalism had moved from a legitimate concern with equality of opportunity to an illegitimate preoccupation with equality of results. Neoconservatives, furthermore, often registered populist prejudices in their attacks on liberal elites, whom they saw as dominant in academe, the media, and government.

Winning the presidency in 1980 thanks to the populist wing of the Republican party (and many disaffected New Deal Democrats), Reagan combined important strands of American conservatism in a significant new way, employing populist rhetoric while working in the interests of corporate America and the wealthier classes. Insisting that “the problem is government,” he saw a great economic future for America once business enterprise was liberated from government restraint. At the same time expressing conservatives' recoil from the countercultural movements of the 1960s and 1970s, Reagan invoked a traditional America rooted in the religious and patriotic values of earlier times. He thus garnered support from religious conservatives affiliated with such groups as the Moral Majority of the televangelist Jerry Falwell. Finally, Reagan expressed an unrelenting hostility toward the Soviet Union, describing it as an “evil empire.” The collapse of communism and the demise of the Cold War at the end of the 1980s set the stage for a new configuration of American conservatism.
See also Christian Coalition; Early Republic, Era of the; Fundamentalist Movement; New Deal Era, The; Republicanism; Sixties, The; Temperance and Prohibition.

Bibliography

Ronald Lora , Conservative Minds in America, 1972.
George H. Nash , The Conservative Intellectual Movement: Since 1945, 1976.
Robert M. Crunden, ed., The Superfluous Men: Conservative Critics of American Culture, 1900–1945, 1977.
John P. East , The American Conservative Movement: The Philosophical Founders, 1986.
Jerome L. Himmelstein , To the Right: The Transformation of American Conservatism, 1990.
J. David Hoeveler Jr. , Watch on the Right: Conservative Intellectuals in the Reagan Era, 1992.
Mark Gerson , The Neoconservative Vision: From the Cold War to the Culture Wars, 1996.
Lisa McGirr , Suburban Warriors: The Origins of the New American Right, 2001.

J. David Hoeveler