CONSERVATISM

CONSERVATISM. A national political and intellectual movement of self-described conservatives began to congeal in the middle of the twentieth century, primarily as a reaction to the creation of the New Deal welfare state, but also in response to the alleged erosion of traditional values and the American failure to win a quick victory in the Cold War. Among the factions within this movement, traditionalists typically stressed the virtues of order, local custom, and natural law; libertarians promoted limited government, laissez-faire economics, and individual autonomy; and militant cold warriors sought primarily to combat communism. Despite these internal differences, by 1960, conservatives had formulated a coherent critique of liberalism and built a network of political activists. In 1964, they mobilized to win the Republican presidential nomination for Senator Barry Goldwater and, subsequently, remained a major political force.

Although this late twentieth-century movement stands out in its size and success, from the outset, American life was influenced by men and women who, by some plausible standard, can be considered conservatives. Modern conservative thinkers sought to legitimate their own worldviews by discovering precursors in the eighteenth, nineteenth, and early twentieth centuries. Liberals responded that conservatives were merely stringing together an incongruous list of heroes for a nation whose history was, in a broad sense, liberal. Conservatives themselves often acknowledged the dilemma. Disagreeing among themselves about the essential features of modern conservatism, they offer differing evaluations of plausible precursors. Thus, any account of a conservative "tradition" is inherently problematical.

Early American Conservatives

Few modern conservatives honor the Loyalists, whose commitment to order led them to oppose the American Revolution. Rather, Edmund Burke, a British Whig who supported the cause of independence but despised the French Revolution, is typically cited as the intellectual founder of American (or Anglo-American) conservatism. The Constitution wins praise from modern traditionalists for protecting private property and limiting democracy, and its foremost authors are rightly credited with skepticism about human perfectibility. In the late eighteenth century, however, a charter that established a republic and barred religious tests for office hardly looked conservative. Moreover, skeptical of the strong central government latent in the Constitution, libertarians sometimes hail the Antifederalist defense of local prerogatives and insistence on a Bill of Rights.

While a handful of libertarians look back favorably on Thomas Jefferson, most modern conservatives scorn his optimistic view of human nature and enthusiasm for the French Revolution. They find the leaders of the Federalist Party, which rose and fell in competition with the Jeffersonian Republicans, much more appealing. Certainly, the Federalists valued hierarchy, order, and religious fidelity more than equality, democracy, and tolerance. Yet the party was by no means unambiguously conservative by modern standards. Alexander Hamilton's economic program sanctioned federal intervention, not laissez-faire, to foster capitalist development. John Marshall's jurisprudence grudgingly yielded to legislative expressions of the popular will. Furthermore, the second generation of Federalist politicians tried to save the party in the 1810s by muting their public critique of democracy.

Equally problematical is the relationship between modern conservatism and the Whig Party, which rose and fell in competition with the Jacksonian Democrats. Especially in New England, the Whigs were more likely to value decorum, orthodox Christianity, and deference to authority. The party insisted that it was preserving the moderate democracy of the nation's founders against the usurpation of power by "King Andrew" Jackson. Prominent Whigs, including Daniel Webster, even called themselves conservatives. Yet the Whig record falls short of the modern libertarian or traditionalist ideal. The party not only advocated federal appropriations for "internal improvements," but also pioneered flamboyant electoral politics in the "hard cider" campaign of 1840.

The Civil War and Conservative Politics

The antebellum South produced a distinctive intellectual conservatism in which a critique of unfettered democracy, federal power, and bourgeois individualism was increasingly tied to a defense of slavery. In the writings of James Thornwell, William Trescott, and George Fitzhugh, the slave South remained within the mainstream of Christian civilization, while the free North was capitulating to "ultraism" in the form of infidelity, socialism, and women's rights. At the same time, John C. Calhoun adapted the founders' republican ideas to protect southern interests. According to Calhoun's doctrine of the "concurrent majority," the two foremost factions in the United States—the slave states and the free states—had a right to protect their basic interests. Accordingly, the Constitution should be amended to provide for two presidents, one from each section and both armed with the veto.

Defeat of the South in the Civil War facilitated the rise of what the political scientist Clinton Rossiter called "laissez-faire conservatism." The leading ideologist of this persuasion, William Graham Sumner, adapted social Darwinism to the American scene. Not only did the fittest survive to acquire great wealth, Sumner contended, but the concentration of wealth in the hands of a competent few also maximized its productive (hence, moral) use. In a democracy, the less fit majority tried to capture the state in order to redistribute or redirect wealth. But no government could administer wealth as wisely as the industrialists and entrepreneurs who created it.

Not only did the dour, secular Sumner decline to think of himself as a conservative, but he also recognized that laissez-faire conservatives fell short of his limited government ideal. The Federalist and Whig belief in social stewardship did steadily erode with the disappearance of those parties. Yet late nineteenth-century Republicans in particular advocated both protective tariffs and federal expenditures for internal improvements. In order to strike down popular legislation that impinged on property rights, laissez-faire conservatives increased the power of at least one branch of the federal government: the judiciary. Similarly, it is ironic that the hundreds of vetoes cast by conservative Democrat Grover Cleveland in order to limit regulations and expenditures actually enhanced the power of the presidency.

What is usually called the Progressive movement has been particularly perplexing to modern conservatives—and with good reason. As libertarians lament, Theodore Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, and others who rode the bipartisan tide of reform created the regulatory state. Traditionalists regret that they also rallied "the people" against so-called special interests. Yet progressive Republicans and Democrats were sufficiently nationalistic in their social views and restrained in economics to preclude the creation of an explicitly conservative party. Furthermore, seeking to limit the influence of "unfit" ethnic and racial minorities, many Progressive reformers supported less democratic forms of municipal government and the disfranchisement of African Americans.

The New Deal and the New Conservatives

World War I, the subsequent red scare, and the cultural conflicts of the 1920s combined to move the political center of gravity in a more conservative direction. The major party presidential nominees were more skeptical of the regulatory state than Roosevelt or Wilson had been. Social critics and social scientists assailed the excesses of mass democracy. Organizing to protect their ways of life, diverse cultural conservatives promoted "100 percent Americanism," defended Prohibition, campaigned against the teaching of evolution in public schools, and expanded the Ku Klux Klan into the largest nativist organization in American history.

Culturally, conservative literature and criticism flourished, too. During the nineteenth century, James Fenimore Cooper, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, and many lesser writers affirmed tradition, order, and authority rather than economic development and democracy. Their post–World War I counterparts included the irreverent pundit H. L. Mencken, the "new humanists" Irving Babbitt and Paul Elmer More, and the Nashville Agrarians.

The Great Depression and the New Deal finally produced a clear and durable left-center-right political spectrum. Proponents of the welfare state, in calling themselves liberals, typically supported the Democratic Party and followed Franklin D. Roosevelt. Opponents complained that Roosevelt had stolen that honorable label to camouflage his socialism, but they nonetheless came to call themselves conservatives. Conservative attacks mixed laissez-faire conservatism with venerable fears of federal control and corruption. Few defended laissez-faire more zealously than the former Democrats who led the anti-New Deal Liberty League. Although the question of federal intervention in the economy was central to sorting out the political spectrum, conservatives also thought that Roosevelt's Jewish, Catholic, and cosmopolitan followers fell short of being 100 percent Americans, as did his activist wife, Eleanor. Starting in 1937, southern Democrats—incensed by the New Deal's mild concessions to African Americans and Roosevelt's attempt to expand the Supreme Court—joined northern Republicans in an informal conservative congressional coalition to fight further expansion of the welfare state.

A distinct far right crystallized during the 1930s. Senator Huey Long, Father Charles Coughlin, and lesser activists agreed with conservatives like former President Herbert Hoover and Senator Robert Taft that the New Deal was bureaucratic, corrupt, and un-American. But far right activists not only placed a higher priority on revitalizing (as opposed to conserving) what they considered to be the American way of life, but sometimes also favored economic redistribution. Most of them rooted their politics in theologically conservative versions of Christianity, and many embraced anti-Semitic conspiracy theories. To liberals and radicals, this far right looked like an American fascism.

World War II and the Cold War heightened fears of disorder and subversion, energized a religious revival, and strengthened the congressional conservative coalition. Leaders of the modern conservative movement that began to coalesce in this hospitable environment ranged from irresponsible demagogues like Senator Joseph McCarthy to impressive thinkers like the traditionalist Richard Weaver and the libertarian economist Milton Friedman. No intellectual was more important than William F. Buckley Jr., who provided a forum in National Review magazine for attacking what he called President Dwight Eisenhower's "dime store New Deal." In 1960, Buckley took the lead in founding the Young Americans for Freedom, which became a base for the Goldwater campaign. While warding off liberal charges of "extremism," the modern conservative movement set its own boundaries to the right by repudiating anti-Semites, the John Birch Society's conspiracy theories, and segregationist presidential candidate George Wallace. Staunch conservatives typically opposed civil rights legislation as a violation of states rights and local custom. Equally important, the residual fear of military intervention abroad that had marked Robert Taft and Herbert Hoover subsided as conservatives demanded victory in the Cold War.

The political polarization of the 1960s and early 1970s strengthened conservatism. Racial conflict, secularization, liberalizing sexual mores, and the stalemated war in Vietnam War alienated many moderate Democrats, especially white southerners and working-class Catholics. Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford drew these groups into the Republican Party, even as many conservatives denounced both presidents for compromising with congressional liberals and the Soviet Union. During the late 1970s, Democrats also lost support within two other constituencies. Jewish "neoconservative" intellectuals thought Jimmy Carter too hard on Israel and too soft on the Soviet Union. Theologically conservative Protestants discovered that this "born again" Baptist president was more liberal than they had thought. Such fundamentalists and evangelicals formed the bulwark of the New Christian Right. The leading organization of this kind, the Moral Majority, was led by the Baptist minister Jerry Falwell.

The election of President Ronald Reagan in 1980 brought significant change to modern conservatism. The Republicans were now clearly the more conservative major party. Yet Reagan's conservatism was more complicated than Goldwater's two decades earlier. While Reagan denounced big government, promoted tax cuts, and undermined labor unions, his administration ran record deficits and only slightly diminished the welfare state. He celebrated religious faith in general but gave scant support to New Christian Right efforts to ban abortion or restore prayer to public schools. A large military buildup and strident anticommunist rhetoric were intended to weaken the Soviet Union. Ultimately, however, Reagan accepted a version of détente as a means to end the Cold War.

Post–Cold War Conservative Identity

Post–Cold War conservatism was marked by a loss of focus, internecine disputes, and false starts. The New Christian Right leader Pat Robertson ran an ineffective race for the Republican presidential nomination in 1988. Conservative Pat Buchanan challenged President George H. W. Bush's renomination in 1992, primarily because Bush had agreed to a tax increase. Bush's defeat by Bill Clinton, a supporter of affirmative action, gay rights, and abortion, brought temporary unity to conservative ranks. In 1994, assailing Clinton's advocacy of national health insurance as well his cultural liberalism, Republicans under the leadership of Representative Newt Gingrich won control of both houses of Congress for the first time in forty years. During 1998–1999, conservatives spearheaded the unsuccessful effort to remove Clinton from office for lying under oath about his sex life. Adapting old arguments, traditionalists and New Christian Right clergy presented Clinton as a symbol of corrupt cultural relativism in general and the moral decline of the 1960s in particular.

This campaign not only dissipated energy on the right, but also revealed many conservatives as self-righteous and hypocritical. George W. Bush won the presidency in 2000 by advocating a practical and ecumenical conservatism that welcomed women, blacks, and Hispanics to the cause. Aside from a few traditionalist intellectuals and the staunchest fundamentalist Christians, there was no coherent conservative movement to Bush's right.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

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Brennan, Mary C. Turning Right in the Sixties: The Conservative Capture of the GOP. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1995.

Buckley, William F., Jr., ed. American Conservative Thought in the Twentieth Century. Indianapolis, Ind.: Bobbs-Merrill, 1970.

Dillard, Angela D. Guess Who's Coming to Dinner Now? Multi-cultural Conservatism in America. New York: New York University Press, 2001.

Doenecke, Justus D. Not to the Swift: The Old Isolationists in the Cold War Era. Lewisburg, Pa.: Bucknell University Press, 1979.

Genovese, Eugene D. The Southern Tradition: The Achievement and Limitations of an American Conservatism. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1994.

Hodgson, Godfrey. The World Turned Right Side Up: A History of the Conservative Ascendancy in America. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1996.

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Lora, Ronald. Conservative Minds in America. Chicago: Rand McNally, 1971.

Nash, George H. The Conservative Intellectual Movement in America since 1945. New York: Basic Books, 1976.

Patterson, James T. Congressional Conservatism and the New Deal: The Growth of the Conservative Coalition in Congress, 1933–1939. Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1967.

Rossiter, Clinton L. Conservatism in America: The Thankless Persuasion. 2d rev. ed. New York: Vintage, 1962.

Leo R.Ribuffo

See alsoLiberalism ; Republican Party ; Whig Party ; andvol. 9:The New Right: We're Ready to Lead .