Republican Futures Past: March 2001

After six and a half exhausting years, it seems strange to remember that when George W. Bush hit the campaign trail in 2000, he ran not as an ideologue, but as something of a cipher. There was no talk of grand schemes to bring democracy to the middle east, no bragging about a permanent Republican majority. Bush's major campaign pledges seemed to involve not sleeping with interns and healing the vicious partisanship his own party had done so much to create. In the estimation of many analysts - left and right - there was little to separate the Texas governor from his Democratic opponent.

His candidacy seemed appropriate for a Republican party uncomfortable in its own ideological skin. As libertarian author Ryan Sager tells it, after their disastrous 1995 showdowns with President Clinton over Medicare and the budget, Congressional Republicans had fallen victim to a kind of "Vietnam syndrome," abandoning their own agenda and spiraling into an impotent rage that led them, against their own better judgment, into the impeachment fight. Meanwhile, their electoral fortunes waned. The party's 1996 presidential nominee was the favorite of neither economic conservatives (that was Forbes), nor social conservatives (Buchanan). He was a grey and uninspiring Senator who simply happened to be next in line. That year and in 1998, voters cut away at the GOP majority; by the end of the Clinton presidency Republicans seemed to stand for little but vindictiveness and unctuous sexual moralizing. Even their one significant accomplishment - dismantling AFDC - had been cast as a victory for the Democratic president.

It was in this context that the 41st president's son took to the podium in Philadelphia, in August 2000, to claim his party's nomination for chief executive. Democrats mocked the Republicans for putting more people of color on stage at that convention than ever seemed to vote the GOP line; what observers across the ideological spectrum failed to grasp, though, was how that decision, and the apparently "centrist" rhetoric of the campaign that followed, were carefully conceived elements of a strategy to revitalize and reassert a distinctly conservative politics. In retrospect, it seems more egregious that most analysts missed the significance of Bush's choice of foreign policy advisors, but a careful examination of his domestic policy team, too, might have indicated something of how ambitious a Bush administration would turn out to be.

Instead, after a scandalously resolved election, most observers would have agreed with Daniel Casse, when he wrote in the March 2001 issue of Commentary that, even before the inauguration, "George W. Bush already seemed a man condemned to a presidency of limited expectations" (pp. 19-24). We have come to view the attacks of the following September 11 as the history-altering moment that unleashed the Bush administration's ideological demons. While those events undoubtedly changed the political context in the president's favor, Casse's article, titled "Bush and the Republican Future," demonstrates how those "limited expectations" failed to reflect the true breadth and meaning of the new administration's ambitions - the agenda Bush's team had been preparing since well before the election.

Casse does not understate the dilemma facing Republicans at the turn of the century. "Bush's victory," he says, "could be viewed as marking not the beginning of a new, post-Clinton era but as the last gasp of an earlier one -- the era of muscular, confident, conservative Republicanism." Just as mainstream pundits of the 1990's warned Democrats away from economic populism, so they forecast doom for the Republican party if it failed to, in the words of the New Republic's John Judis, "jettison the socially conservative base it gained during the 80's." This particular analysis aside, Casse agrees that

[T]here is no denying that the GOP has indeed become a party in decline. Many of the issues and conflicts that energized Republicans over the past twenty years have dissipated or disappeared altogether. Even more significantly, from the perspective of presidential politics, the electoral coalition that emerged at the end of the 1970's to sweep Ronald Reagan into office no longer exists in any meaningful form.

To Casse, this state of affairs came about in part because the conservative priorities of 1980 had largely been addressed:

The Soviet Union collapsed. Taxes were cut. Confidence returned. The federal budget was balanced. In time, the party's libertarians and cultural conservatives drifted off to pursue other, sometimes conflicting, political agendas.

A neutral observer might point out that Reagan in fact left massive structural deficits, and that while he made government meaner, he in no sense made it leaner, failing -- as we've discussed in other posts -- to achieve any significant transformation of American political economy. But such criticisms are beside the point. Casse is describing the breakdown of the fusionism that had bound the conservative movement before and during the Reagan years; like Sager, he understands the failures of the Buchanan rebellion and the Gingrich revolution as being both causes and effects of that process. At the center of the breakdown, though, was a policy problem: "tax cuts, once the signature issue of the party, were no longer the galvanizing force they had earlier been." Clinton's stimulus package had both fueled the economic recovery and wiped out the marginal tax cuts theretofore cited by Reagan's supply-siders as their most significant victory. Bob Dole's tax cut proposals had failed to impress the voters, and Republicans, who had once dreamed of totally overhauling the federal tax code, were reduced to advocating "a few incremental measures" like eliminating the estate tax. And the philosophical rot at the heart of the conservative coalition was spreading:

Yet if tax cuts had lost their force as an issue, the party was also unable to come together on much else. Preparing to select a nominee for the 2000 election, the GOP could boast no internal consensus on how to reform Medicare or Social Security, and no single view on what to do with the growing federal budget surplus. Within the party, there were bitter divisions over foreign engagement and military spending. On abortion, trade, immigration, debt reduction, and antitrust policy, no unity was to be found.

Bush seemed unlikely to resolve these uncertainties. In a party whose vestigial ideological camps were the flat-taxers and the Buchananites, Bush was neither. Rather than promising a firm ideological hand, he seemed to project his candidacy as something moderate and humble. As Casse puts it:

[A] plausible reading of his campaign oratory was that, as President, Bush would be a West Texas version of his father -- an establishment Republican filled with the spirit of noblesse oblige who had promised his own version of "compassionate conservatism" and had turned out to be merely a diligent public servent with no clear sense of political mission."

In the final analysis, diligence is probably the last quality anyone might ascribe to our 43rd president, but what matters here is that "compassionate conservatism," which looked so much like a symptom of moderation, was in fact intended as a vector of radical conservatism. And this is precisely the point of Casse's article: "Bush's emphasis on aiding the poor, the disabled, and minorities not only differentiated him from other Republicans but formed the banner under which he advanced what were some truly bold ideas."

What was compassionate conservatism? If it sounded like little more than a focus-grouped public relations slogan, its architects were aware of the charge. In a series of articles published before the election, Bush's domestic policy mentors repeatedly emphasized that, in the words of Stephen Goldsmith, compassionate conservatism was a "coherent, principled philosophy." Or, as Myron Magnet put it in a 1999 Wall Street Journal op-ed, "far from being an empty slogan, it is a well-formed domestic policy agenda."

But what kind of agenda? "At its core," said Magnet, "is concern for the poor -- not a traditional Republican preoccupation -- and an explicit belief that government has a responsibility for poor Americans." But the other notion at the core of compassionate conservatism was that in affirming that responsibility, conservatives could transform the nature of government itself. Goldsmith, a policy advisor to the Bush campaign, wrote that "compassionate conservatism serves as a true bridge from the era of big government as a way to solve social problems to a new era in which we will have a full and healthy trust in the people of this nation to govern themselves." The bridge metaphor is important: in blunter political terms, compassionate conservatism was designed to use the rhetoric of social solidarity to make possible the dismantling of social insurance.

It's perhaps Marvin Olasky (pdf) who presents this equation most clearly. Olasky, commonly described as the father of compassionate conservatism, argues that as long as the public believes that big government helps the poor and limited government does not, voters will choose big government. This is what stands in the way of the longstanding economic conservative dream of truly reducing the size of government. The goal for a compassionate conservative is to use taxpayer money to wean people off of government services. The compassionate conservative believes in using tax dollars to fight poverty -- but it should be done by funneling the money straight into the coffers of local faith-based organizations. The compassionate conservative believes in collecting Social Security taxes -- only to divvy them up and send them right back to individuals for investment in the stock market.

Goldsmith's line about trusting "the people of this nation to govern themselves" reflects the sort of small-is-beautiful attitude that underpins much compassionate conservative rhetoric. Indeed, Olasky's own prose can seem downright anarchist, rhaposidizing about micro-level community organizations taking over from federal bureaucracies. It's also blatantly meant to appeal to religious voters, putting faith-based groups -- even, explicitly, those without any legitimate qualifications -- at the center of its project.

There's too much to compassionate conservatism to unpack here. I'll address some of its major flaws -- and look at its future -- in later posts. In the meantime, I only want to consider what George W. Bush's campaign was attempting to do by embracing Olasky and his fellow-travellers.

For one thing, in the immediate political term, they were trying to get around a brand problem. Casse suggests that the compassionate conservative theme was aimed at "disassociating [Bush] in the public mind from either the confrontational stance of the Gingrich years or the more libertarian impulses of the Reagan era." As he points out, the Bush campaign kept Republican Congressional leaders like Trent Lott, Dick Armey, and Tom DeLay "at arm's length," preferring "a mostly new cast of Republican faces, all apparently selected to emphasize the racial, ethnic, and even ideological diversity of the party."

And this -- like the multiracial cast of the Philadelphia convention -- indicates another of the purposes of compassionate conservatism: to improve the GOP's performance among minority voters. One of the major preoccupations of the Bush circle has been to increase the Republican share of "the black vote" and "the Latino vote"; this goal has informed the Bush administration's decision-making from the very beginning -- as when Karl Rove advised the president to halt the naval practice bombardment of Vieques -- up through the recent battles over immigration. It's not a priority shared by everyone in the party: the Buchananites, of course, want no truck with it, and the immigration fight put the White House sharply at odds with Congressional Republicans, whose district-by-district political calculations were very different. Nonetheless, by helping to address the social concerns -- and religious faith -- of minority voters, compassionate conservatism promised to be an element in this party-building strategy.

It also looked like a way to revitalize the existing conservative coalition, by rearticulating the fusionist logic that had, until recently, held the coalition together. If social and economic conservatives had been drifting apart, compassionate conservatism offered an argument for them to renew their vows: economic conservative ends could be achieved -- could only be achieved -- by social conservative means. Given the importance to the party of evangelical voters and libertarian donors, it seemed a promising arrangement.

Finally, compassionate conservatism was a strategy by which Republicans could move traditionally Democratic issues onto their own turf. Its architects recognized that the GOP simply could not win if it refused to account for the public's interest in Social Security, health care, and education. Compassionate conservatism offered a way for Republicans to engage these issues without betraying their economic conservative base, by emphasizing, in Casse's words, "efficiency, flexibility, and the encouragement of private initiative." This effort, in turn, helped voters see President Bush as "someone like me" -- concerned with domestic matters that mattered to the public yet which had been routinely dismissed by Republicans as little more than fodder for the red pen. The compassionate conservative could say to voters, "I want to improve Social Security and public education." He could, at the same time, say to economic conservatives, "I have a plan for privatizing Social Security and education."

For progressives, the biggest problem with compassionate conservatism is clear: it's essentially a massive pyramid scheme. Basing its "concern for the poor" on an endless series of opportunities to opt out of social insurance, it threatens to undermine social insurance altogether. To economic conservatives, of course, this is meant to be its selling point.

In Casse's early 2001 analysis, this formula looks like a winner:

For how long will voters abide Democratic leaders who remain steadfastly against any use of private accounts for Social Security? How supportive will the public be of Democratic insistence on opposing the use of school vouchers in every case, even for the poorest children? Should the left wing of the party stick to its guns, and should Bush succeed in winning over some centrist Democrats and independents, he may well end up moving these traditionally "Democratic" issues onto the Republican side.

And that, combined with other trends, could prove a turning point for his party.

Casse sees compassionate conservatism for what it was meant to be: an "ambitious project of realignment." His only worry is that Bush's "reticent and stumbling speaking style" might undermine the president's efforts to make his case.

Some Republicans still blame Bush's poor communication skills for the apparent failure of compassionate conservatism in the years since 2001. Certainly they've been a factor, particularly in his inability to convince the public to embrace Social Security privatization -- though there's plenty of evidence that the idea itself turns voters off. Moreover, much of the resistance to compassionate conservatism has come from the economic right, who have reeled in horror at the costs associated with the White House's efforts to "transform" Medicare and education. What was once sold as a means to economic conservative ends is now routinely denounced as a disastrous "big government conservatism," which has in turn been made a scapegoat for the Republican defeat in 2006. Meanwhile, of course, events six months after the publication of Casse's article would offer Rove a more potent political weapon, leading the way for Bush's transformation into a "war president."

The White House has never entirely given up on compassionate conservatism. But, having failed to make significant inroads among minority voters, having left fusionism even more ragged than they initially found it, and having lost the confidence of the American public, the compassionate conservatives find themselves isolated in a party whose new crop of presidential frontrunners are likely to ignore them altogether. The irony is that the most promising ideas for what might constitute the next conservatism -- we'll look at them over the next few weeks -- are not too dissimilar from those propagated by people like Olasky, Magnet, and Goldsmith. Given the confusion and strife among conservative ranks, however, those ideas might struggle to find patrons.

The Republican future of March 2001 suggested no catastrophic attacks, no "long wars," no Abramoffs or Abu Ghraibs. Nor did it anticipate just how fractured the conservative coalition would eventually become. In the months after the inauguration of George W. Bush, the Republican future might not have looked particularly bright, but to those who thought compassionate conservatism could offer a way to revitalize the party and the movement, there might have been, at the very least, a sliver of light on the horizon.

Labels: Commentary, compassionate conservatism, George Bush, Reading Conservative History, Republicans

  ¶ Posted by Paul Curtis 1:44 PM 0 comments

  Republican Futures Past: 1983

In November 1982, during a time of recession and 10 percent unemployment, American voters punished President Ronald Reagan and the Republican party, expanding the Democrats' majority in the House of Representatives by 27 seats.

The following January, as the new Congress took its seats, Commentary Magazine published an essay by James Nuechterlein titled "The Republican Future" [pp. 17-25]. Responding to conservative disappointment, Nuechterlein argued that the results constituted "no realignment, no repudiation" - only a "gentle rebuke." Still, there was no denying the fact that "the Democrats remain the majority party in America."

A quarter-century later, we're accustomed to remembering the 1980 election as the 'Reagan Revolution.' But in the wake of the '82 midterms, Nuechterlein suggested that Reagan had originally earned only a "tentative mandate" - one that Republicans should endeavor to renew despite their midterm defeat. Nuechterlein is clear about the stakes involved:

Reagan is no ordinary President. He is our most ideological chief executive since Franklin Roosevelt, and he intends as consequential a revision of our political economy as did FDR. [...]

[Reagan's] political fate will resonate through our political culture with an urgency that no American will be able to disregard.

The starting point for Nuechterlein's effort to divine that fate is his review of a pair of books published shortly before the midterms. The first, by a Heritage Foundation analyst and former Time Magazine writer named Burton Yale Pines, forecast the emergence of a "traditionalist" movement that would, Pines predicted, transform American culture as much as its politics (click here for a New York Times review of the same book). The second appears to have represented an interesting moment in the evolution of Kevin Phillips, the Nixon strategist who has since become a vehement critic of the right.

By "traditionalism," Nuechterlein tells us, Pines meant:

a revolt against dominant modernist liberal values in virtually every area of public and private life: economics, politics, education, family relations, religion, crime and punishment, and the intellectual world. He means defense of private enterprise; advocacy of growth over redistribution ... preservation of the nuclear family as a cultural norm (which implies, among other things, anti-feminism and repudiation of gay rights); defense of religious orthodoxy and opposition to secular humanism... and an overriding skepticism and fear of government plans to build, by rationalist enterprise, the good society.

The mass evangelical re-entry into electoral politics had only begun recently, during the Carter years, so we might not be surprised that it apparently doesn't quite occur to Pines or Nuechterlein to give this phenomenon the label we know it by today: the Christian Right.

"Fusionism" is another term that neither author uses, even though it is the very concept that frames each author's concerns about the prospects for the future of this new traditionalism. Nuechterlein cites the divide between traditionalists on the one hand, and "conservative and neoconservative intellectuals, corporate executives, and mainline Republicans" on the other. "In Pines's view," we're told, "these two groups seldom communicate." History, of course, tells us that they would learn to communicate quite well before very long.

Still, Nuechterlein is not quite ready to jump in with both feet. While he concedes that the left has unfairly maligned honest conservatives, he points out that

there are crazies, zealots, and fanatics on the right, and there is no greater obstacle to the progress of a responsible conservatism than the perception ... that the Right is inhabited only by inadequate and unhinged personalities.

He criticizes Pines for the latter's "popular-front mentality" - the idea that "there are no enemies on the right." Conservatives will ruin themselves, says Nuechterlein, "if they do not distinguish themselves from the know-nothing fringe." One hardly need point out the irony of the fact that "no enemies on the right" was the concept behind the "11th Commandment" devised to protect Ronald Reagan himself. For the time being, at any rate, Nuechterlein takes comfort in the "apparent failure of right-wing dogmatists to achieve their objectives" in the '82 elections - especially given how organizations like the Moral Majority had inspired liberal fundraising efforts. The message he wants to reiterate is that "a conservative is not at all the same thing as a radical of the right." Twenty-five years later, unfortunately, that message is not so clear.

In Post-Conservative America, on the other hand, Kevin Phillips appears to have predicted a descent into extremism of a somewhat different sort: "radical reactionary upsurges and the emergence of 'a species of European corporate statism.'" Nuechterlein feels compelled to refute Phillips's thesis, which does indeed come across as overly pessimistic - but which is grounded in an otherwise astute analysis of the dilemma with which conservatives would ultimately be faced. Phillips, it seems, argues that Reagan's coalition of economic conservatives, old-line Republicans, and the social right, cannot hold. Ultimately, Phillips says, social conservatives simply aren't on board with the Reaganite dream of remaking America's political economy. Nuechterlein summarizes:

Reagan's program of budget cuts, monetarist restraint, and reduction in marginal tax rates ... held little attraction for the populist Right. That group was more interested in reductions in property taxes - the Proposition 13 phenomenon - than in progressive income tax rates, and its anti-business instincts ... made it suspicious of monetarism. [...]

Moreover, the populist Right's generalized animus against big government did not preclude its expectation that the federal pork barrel would remain accessible to itself. While Reagan's middle-class supporters wanted cuts in welfare, Phillips argues, they were not prepared for the widespread reductions in social programs that the administration's policies called for.

Phillips's pessimism lies in how he predicts this contradiction will resolve itself: with Balkanization, radicalization, and "revolutionary conservatism" demanding massive but illiberal government intervention in the economy, leading even to joint government-business central planning. Thus the European-style corporatism he fears, bearing the possibility of authoritarian politics along with it. What Phillips refers to is, essentially, a variety of fascism.

Nuechterlein derides this apocalyptic vision, arguing that there is no reason to believe that the right will disintegrate into radicalism on account of tensions between economic and social conservatives. Defending Reagan against charges of intellectual inadequacy, Nuechterlein says that

Reagan has already brought a good deal more coherence into American politics than it has experienced in recent years. He has, first of all, united the conservative movement and turned the Republican party into a vehicle of that movement.

And anyway, if social conservatives dislike the president's economic policies, there's no other place for them to go - certainly they won't turn to the Democrats, and any third party would be a waste of their time. Ronald Reagan, according to Nuechterlein, would remain firmly at the head of the conservative coalition. And there was no reason to believe that the project would fail:

The Reagan administration may wind up in ultimate frustration, but Phillips's Chicken-Little analysis simply comes to early in the game for us to believe it is anything but predetermined.

Looking back, certain things do in fact seem to have been predetermined - not by Phillips's analysis, but by economic and political reality. Reagan achieved no consequential revision of American political economy - to echo Nuechterlein, the so-called Reagan Revolution ended in no realignment, no repudiation of the New Deal. As Michael Kinsley has described,

Federal government spending was a quarter higher in real terms when Reagan left office than when he entered. As a share of GDP, the federal government shrank from 22.2 percent to 21.2 percent—a whopping one percentage point. The federal civilian work force increased from 2.8 million to 3 million [even excluding Defense Department employees]. [...]

And taxes? Federal tax collections rose about a fifth in real terms under Reagan. As a share of GDP, they declined from 19.6 percent to 18.3 percent.

For context, Kinsley compares this record to that of President Clinton, under whom the federal civilian workforce shrank, and federal spending grew at half the rate in real terms - and was reduced as a portion of GDP by twice as much - as it had under Reagan. Even during Reagan's term, monetarism was abandoned and Laffer Curves were quietly put away. All in all, Reagan managed some modest cuts in non-defense discretionary spending, but made no dent on entitlements and ultimately racked up massive deficits which forced his successors to raise marginal tax rates, thus wiping out the one Reagan legacy that conservatives have been able to cite as a great triumph of supply-side economics. And, of course, the rise in marginal tax rates under Clinton only fueled the economy.

One might cite Clinton's deceleration of government spending as evidence for a Reagan Revolution that remade the American political context and forced even Democrats to join the small-government bandwagon. Conservatives have often referred to Clinton's pronouncement in his 1996 State of the Union address that "the era of big government is over." This, we are told, is evidence of Reagan's triumph. But the argument mistakes rhetoric for fact (and Clinton's next sentence was a reaffirmation of the need for activist government: "But we cannot go back to the time when our citizens were left to fend for themselves.") And the explosion of government spending under the conservative George W. Bush essentially puts the myth of the Reagan Revolution to bed.

The irony of all this is that the failure of the Reagan Revolution turned out to be a good thing for the Republican party. By avoiding significant budget cuts, Reagan was able to retain the support of the social conservatives who have come to constitute the party's base - and who, contra Pines, were always much more interested in culture than in political economy. Thus the right was not forced to split, and Phillips's dark hypothesis was never tested. The conservative movement may have been saved by its own hypocrisy.

True supply-siders are well represented in the ranks of conservative intellectuals and donors. But they have never had a significant electoral base of their own. The latest Pew Political Typology, for instance, finds that so-called "Enterprisers," who are "strongly pro-business" and "oppose social welfare," constitute only 11 percent of registered voters - dramatically underscoring the extent to which Republican fortunes lie in the hands of "pro-government conservatives." As Phillips and others have pointed out, the populist embrace of right-wing economics extends only as far as the occasional tax revolt will carry it. The Friedmanites have developed various coping strategies in response. They've over-idealized the Reagan years. They've blamed Democrats for blocking the conservative economic program. They've searched for silver linings. But over the past six years, they've had little cover for the failure to advance their agenda - and the result has been a series of noisy complaints about their own party - and especially Bush. In fact, the current administration has, with its "compassionate conservatism," sought a way out of the dilemma facing economic conservatives. But that's for the next installment.

The Republican future of 1983 was fraught with promise and peril. Ultimately it neither realized its promise nor succumbed to the peril. The fusionist conservative movement did not in fact achieve a revolution under Reagan, but neither did it disintegrate into fascism. Rather it has perpetuated itself by a kind of mythmaking: overstating both its successes (as exemplified by Reagan and Newt Gingrich) and its supposed powerlessness under Clinton and the first President Bush. The movement has held more political power than it will admit, but it has accomplished less than it would like to believe. Yet this dual myth has benefited conservatives: it has held the movement together and given it impetus, providing a vision of what conservatives might achieve and a hunger to overcome the political obstacles standing in the way.

But in the era of total conservative government, this sustaining myth ran aground. The obstacles to implementation of the conservative agenda were no longer just political, but structural; conservatives, with only feeble Democratic opposition, and the guiding star of the Reaganite ideology showing the way, were forced to navigate waters far more difficult than they had imagined. This was the dilemma that would confront President George W. Bush, and it was in many ways a legacy of a president who proved, in the end, to be a great actor - but not much of a revolutionary.

Cross-posted at Progressive Historians.

Labels: Commentary, conservatives, Reading Conservative History, Ronald Reagan

  ¶ Posted by Paul Curtis 7:39 PM

  Republican Futures Past: 1956

Among American political journals, Commentary Magazine has had one of the more intriguing histories. Founded by the American Jewish Committee in 1945, the publication's initial purpose was to help engage Jewish intellectuals in the nation's political and cultural conversations. Under founding editor Elliot Cohen - who brought on board writers like Nathan Glazer and Irving Howe - Commentary's editorial line was liberal anti-Communist. Following Norman Podhoretz's takeover in 1960, the magazine moved sharply to the left, only to begin a swing in the other direction by the end of the decade, as Podhoretz and his cohort turned against the so-called New Left (they also reacted against perceived anti-Israeli sentiment in the aftermath of the 1967 Six-Day War). By the mid-70s, liberal/left intellectuals were referring to Commentary's contributors as "neoconservatives" - a somewhat pejorative term meant to denote former leftists who had since become, in Lewis Coser's words, "intellectuals in retreat." Before long, the Commentary circle had become an influential - if sometimes uneasy - part of the conservative movement.

All of this makes digging around in the magazine's archives a fascinating exercise. Having bought myself a subscription, I've been doing just that - and I've come across a trio of articles that provide very interesting insight into how the conservative movement has transformed the Republican party over the past half-century. Each piece - from 1956, 1983, and 2001 - attempts to make predictions about the future of the relationship between conservatives and the GOP, and how that relationship affects political prospects for both the movement and the party. Over the next three days or so, I'll do a post on each article.

The first, from the November 1956 issue (pp. 482-5), is a review, by the now-legendary historian Seymour Martin Lipset, of a book about the history of the Republican party by conservative professor Malcolm Moos. Bemoaning a dearth of academic interest in the major American political parties, Lipset praises Moos's engaged but evenhanded account of the GOP. Moos, an Eisenhower Republican, is apparently willing to document the party's failings as much as its triumphs. It comes a shock to the modern reader when, listing examples of such mistakes, Lipset includes "the antagonism to a strong Executive which has characterized the GOP for the past thirty-six years."

Equally striking is the tradition that the "conservative" Moos celebrates. Lipset summarizes:

Lincoln's leadership; Mark Hanna's far-sighted "progressive conservatism," which recognized in the late 19th century that a stable society would require strong trade unions and that reformist groups did not constitute a challenge to private capitalism; the Progressive Republicans in the early part of this century who fought the excesses of big business power; William Howard Taft, who prosecuted trusts and whose administration sponsored Constitutional amendments for the income tax and the direct election of Senators; and Taft's son Robert, who backed public housing for the poor, and who in 1953 was willing to defend the right of Communists to teach.

It was Robert Taft's death in 1954 - along with the end of Joe McCarthy's reign of demagoguery (which falls on the "failures" list) - that left a void on the Republican right for the nascent conservative movement to fill. November of 1956 was too early for Moos or Lipset to recognize the implications of this. The National Review was only a year old, Barry Goldwater just an unusually-energetic freshman Senator.

What's fascinating is how Lipset and Moos are interested in the historical arc of the Republican party as the story of the development of progressive, not movement, conservatism. Lipset provides a thumbnail sketch of the party's foundational coalition: an alliance of northeastern middle-class conservatives in the Federalist tradition, nativist, anti-Catholic Know-Nothings, and Free Soilers. He doesn't discuss the ideological and regional incoherence of the Whig coalition that preceded the Republicans, but he does point out that, with the passage of the Homestead Act in 1862, the Republicans became the first American political party to secure a lasting marriage between northeastern conservatives and a mass agricultural base (in the Midwest). As Lipset recounts, the northeasterners would dictate the party's industrialist economic policy, while the Midwesterners, in response, would give birth to a reformist progressive tradition.

And yet, by the 1950s, it was the northeastern wing of the GOP that represented progressivism, while the Midwest had become the party's conservative heartland. Among the reasons Moos and Lipset cite for this development are the decline of the nation's rural population - which meant the rise of a conservative bourgeoisie in Midwestern towns (the "middle-sized conservative businessman who is opposed to trade unions, high taxes, and government regulation"), and the increasing internationalism of northeastern capitalism, which went along with a greater willingness to tolerate trade unionism and social welfare policies.

If you've read Rick Perlstein's Before the Storm, you'll recognize this alignment as the powder keg of the mid-50s, when the resentments harbored by "middle-sized" Midwestern businessmen - of unions, of communism, of taxes, of regulation, of foreign entanglements, and of the liberal northeastern Republicans who were accomodating it all - needed only a political spark to explode. Again, Lipset can't be blamed for failing to see this, nor for failing to predict the additional layer of extremism that would come as a result of the Republican strategy of tapping into the white Southern reaction to the civil rights movement after the 1960s. And his attempt to make a prediction about the future of the GOP is grounded in a reasonable analysis. But the historical irony is impossible to miss.

Lipset cites Moos's observation that, when the mid-20th century GOP was out of power, most of its Congressional delegation was drawn from safely conservative districts:

But a Republican running for governor in an industrial state that has a strong Democratic party, or running for the Presidency, must appeal to independent and Democratic voters who will not vote for a reactionary. And so one always finds Republican governors pitted against Republican Congressmen at national conventions, and since 1936 the former have almost invariably succeeded in pushing through a Presidential candidate of their own persuasion.

The result of all this was that Republicans tended to be conservative in the minority but moderate when in power. The Democrats, by contrast, tended to be more progressive in power than out of it. This was because their safest Congressional seats - the seats the party was most likely to hold in a time of weakness - were in the South!

Clearly, things have changed since 1956. The loss of the South - along with a number of other factors - has flipped the dynamic of the Democratic party so that it, like the postwar GOP, is more centrist after it has won than after it has lost. But the Republicans have changed, too. Lipset's model was, in fact, predictive in the near-term. He correctly forecast that the conservative Richard Nixon, if he made it to the White House, would govern from the center (dirty tricks notwithstanding):

One may safely hazard the guess that not even the succession of Nixon to the Presidency would affect this pattern, for Nixon and the party leaders know that a Republican President must be spokesman of the most liberal element in the party.

In fact, this prediction, made with the 1960 election in mind, held true even after two additional cycles had passed.

But the tectonic plates of American politics would shift in the meantime. The conservative movement that was born around the time of Lipset's writing would grow in influence, as it drew support from reactionary populism not only in the Midwest, but in the South and in the Sunbelt. Conservatives would note Nixon's role as spokesman for the liberal wing of the GOP, and resolve to bring an end to such political imperatives. Lipset's 1956 model of the American political landscape would become obsolete by the end of the 70s. Lipset himself was not willing to predict that the Republican party would become as progressive as Moos hoped, but, he said, "neither is it likely to become the tool of deep-dyed reactionaries." It was a reasonable deduction given the calculus of the time, but the calculations have changed.

The reactionaries have, by now, completely extinguished the progressive tradition in the Republican party. The GOP seems to be equally conservative in and out of power, though its varying confidence levels and the theoretical dilemmas within the conservative movement can provide something of an illusion of ideological diversity.

In the long run, American politics tends not to reward parties with narrow ideological range. Now that the postwar conservative movement has reached a rather vexing crossroads, and the GOP looks more vulnerable than it has in a long time, it's difficult to forecast where the party will go next (and it will partially depend, of course, on choices made by the Democrats). But the lesson of the Republican future of 1956 is that the party has found itself embarked upon a very different path than the one historians might have had reason to predict.

(Cross-posted at Progressive Historians.)

Labels: Commentary, conservatives, Reading Conservative History, Republicans

  ¶ Posted by Paul Curtis 3:29 PM 3 comments

  Reading Conservative History 1.1: The Shadow of the Stuarts

Cross-posted at Progressive Historians

Was the American revolution a conservative cause? The question itself is burdened with all the weight of our present-day ideological debates; it’s also fraught with anachronism. Philosophical conservatism per se is a product of the European reaction to the French revolution; in 1763 (and 1776) Burke was still a Whig, his Reflections still years in the future. In that respect, it seems to make no more sense to call the American revolution “conservative” than it does to call the English civil war Marxist.

But historians have broadly understood the revolution as conservative in a situational sense – the colonists seeking, at least at first, not to establish a radical new order, but to defend the English constitution against encroachment by prerogative power. From this general interpretation, some modern conservatives have moved toward a seamless appropriation of the revolutionary story into the narrative of American conservatism. Here, for instance, is Russell Kirk, in his influential 1953 work, The Conservative Mind:

By and large, the American Revolution was not an innovating upheaval, but a conservative restoration of colonial prerogatives. Accustomed from their beginnings to self-government, the colonials felt that by inheritance they possessed the rights of Englishmen and by prescription certain rights peculiar to themselves. When a designing king and a distant parliament presumed to extend over America powers of taxation and administration never before exercised, the colonies rose to vindicate their prescriptive freedom; and after the hour for compromise had slipped away, it was with reluctance and trepidation they declared their independence. [p. 72]

Here the term “conservative” slips almost imperceptibly from a situational understanding to an ideological one: the Founders’ defense of their “prescriptive freedoms” looks to the modern eye like an affirmation of the long Anglo-Saxon tradition, a rejection of government social engineering, a plausible argument for states’ rights, and precedent for resistance to taxation.

In The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution, Bernard Bailyn works from the same basic interpretation of the initial problem, but opens the door to an entirely different understanding of its legacy. As Bailyn explains, what began as a defensive reaction soon became, out of pure necessity, a process of radical transformation. As the crisis developed, the colonists “struggled to work out the implications of their beliefs” and “grasped implications only vaguely sensed before.” In so doing, they thoroughly transformed conceptions of representation, constitution, rights, sovereignty, establishment of religion, social hierarchy, and republicanism, and laid the groundwork for further upheaval over issues like slavery and federalism. Thus situational conservatism led to ideological radicalism.

But that’s for another time. I wonder whether it’s even appropriate to refer to the colonists of 1763-1776 as situationally conservative. True, they acted reluctantly at first, in order to defend a constitutional balance they saw as threatened by corruption and by the expansion of ministerial and parliamentary power. But the very fact that they saw the world this way positioned them, in the context of their time, not as conservatives, but as radicals. Begin with their understanding of the English “constitution,” as Bailyn describes it:

The colonists at the beginning of the Revolutionary controversy understood by the word “constitution” not, as we would have it, a written document or even an unwritten but deliberately contrived design of government and a specification of rights beyond the power of ordinary legislation to alter; they thought of it, rather, as the constituted – that is, existing – arrangement of governmental institutions, laws, and customs together with the principles and goals that animated them. [pp. 67-8]

This arrangement, kept in its proper balance, had as its goal “the attainment of liberty.” Liberty, as the colonists understood it, was always everywhere threatened by power and the corruption associated with power. They were obsessed with case histories of how power had destroyed liberty; a particular influence on their thought was Robert Molesworth’s An Account of Denmark, which described the collapse of a once-free people into tyranny.

The colonists’ preoccupation with the threat to liberty by corruption, and with the constitution’s true role as the balance meant to protect liberty, marked them as in the tradition of what Molesworth called “the True Whig.” More specifically, it positioned mainstream colonial opinion squarely in the tradition of English radical opposition. The works of radicals like John Trenchard, Thomas Gordon, Benjamin Hoadly, Thomas Hollis, and Paul de Rapin-Thoyras were of fundamental importance to the Americans but were marginal in England itself. The American colonists perceived an ever-present threat to liberty in general, and a crisis in the English constitution in particular, because they were positioned within this radical Whig tradition.

The conservatives of the Founders’ day were the Tories, who stood for the ultimate pre-eminence of the monarch’s prerogative power, as well as the mainstream Whigs who had developed a special genius for corrupting and manipulating Parliament in order to expand their ministerial power (thus the rise of Robert Walpole, the first “prime” minister). Powerful Whigs were themselves often derided as “Tories.” But when the radical opposition of the mid-late 18th century looked at these Tories and Tory-fied Whigs, what they saw was not just corruption in the present, but the long shadow of the greatest threat to liberty in English history.

England had escaped Denmark’s fate, but only just – and the agents of tyranny had been the Stuart kings, two Charleses and two Jameses, who had forced the English to defend themselves with a pair of revolutions. The Jacobites, together with their Tory defenders, refused to accept the principle that the power of the monarchy should be kept in balance with the power of Parliament. Charles I’s long period of prerogative rule (that is, his refusal to convene Parliament from 1629-40), was not the proximate cause of the English Civil War, but it was a critical underlying cause. And, as the conservative British historian Paul Johnson has described, it was viewed by Charles’s subjects not merely as an outrage in its own right, but as a disaster for England generally: the country’s interests in Europe and its power on the high seas were neglected; pirates raided the coasts and carried English men and women off into slavery; resistance by the Scots and revolts by the Irish were humiliating. And at home, the English were faced with an empty treasury, a corrupted judiciary, scandalous giveaways of royal favors, divisive royal manipulation of religious affairs, and a destroyed political consensus. All of this led to the widespread conclusion that such misfortune could not be attributed to incompetence alone: there must be a conspiracy to destroy England:

The impression was formed – and on the face of it there was plenty of evidence – that Charles, Strafford and Laud were engaged in a deliberate operation to destroy English liberties and the Protestant religion and install instead a Catholic absolutist monarchy of a Continental type. […]

It was not just a class or a religion that was menaced: it was English civilization. [The Offshore Islanders, pp. 191-2]

All of this clearly parallels the attitudes and paranoias of the American colonists in the years leading up to the revolution; like the English under Charles, they saw a conspiracy to destroy the constitutional balance and the liberty it guaranteed. And they clearly interpreted this threat in light of the lessons learned from the struggle with the Stuarts and their Tory allies – not just in the civil war, but in the Exclusion Crisis, the Glorious Revolution, and the Jacobite uprisings. Thus it was that Stephen Johnson cited the Glorious Revolution as precedent for the colonists’ resistance to “encroaching tyranny,” [Bailyn, 304], that James Otis would recount how the “execrable race of the Stuarts” had forced the “formidable, violent, and bloody” confrontation between the English people and the forces of oppression [ibid, 81], and John Adams’ and Samuel Adams’ arguments were “alive with century-old Popish-Stuart-Jacobite associations” [ibid, 98].

In this interpretation, the conservatism of the Founders’ day was not a static force, but an ever-lurking menace prepared to usurp the painstakingly achieved constitutional balance. It was the constant threat to undo everything that had been accomplished since the Magna Carta. This understanding drew on experiences at the heart of the English political tradition, but it represented, in the context of the late eighteenth century (once the Levellers and Diggers and Clubmen had given way to an accommodating Whiggish compromise), a distinctly marginal radicalism.

Again, it is far too easy to fall prey to anachronism when trying to read precedents for modern ideological battles in the struggles of the revolutionary era. But maybe it’s too simplistic to assume that the rebels, because they viewed their fight as a defensive one, were in any substantive sense acting as “conservatives.” Arguably, one could only believe that such a defense was necessary if one subscribed to certain distinctly radical (in the context of the time) understandings of history and politics. And the forces the rebels opposed were the very same forces that would move in reaction to French radicalism. The same forces with whom Burke would join, when Charles Fox’s sympathies with the French revolutionaries became too much to bear, and who would before long adopt the label “conservative.” To the American founders, those forces looked distinctly familiar – they looked like the Stuart kings, like the very face of tyranny.


Next: American Tories
Previous: Is Conservatism Un-American?

Labels: American Revolution, Bernard Bailyn, conservatism, conservatives, Paul Johnson, Reading Conservative History, Russell Kirk, Tories, Whigs

  ¶ Posted by Paul Curtis 7:14 PM 2 comments

  Reading Conservative History 1.0 - Is Conservatism Un-American?

In his influential 1955 book, The Liberal Tradition in America, sociologist Louis Hartz argued that classical conservatism, like socialism, had never existed as a significant force in American political history. "The American community is a liberal community," Hartz said (p. 3).

By this, Hartz did not mean to deny the conflict in the United States between factions calling themselves "liberal" and "conservative," but to argue that both of these factions were in fact wholly contained within a context that, compared to the European experience, was liberal "in the classic Lockian sense" (p. 4). Lacking a feudal tradition, the U.S. therefore also lacked the ancien regime that would constitute the basic conservative faction. The absence of feudalism in America also meant the absence of the kind of radicalism that opposition to the old structures would fuel in Europe, which in turn would play such an important role in the formation of European conservatism:

One of the central characteristics of a nonfeudal society is that it lacks a genuine revolutionary tradition, the tradition which in Europe has been linked with the Puritan and French revolutions: that it is "born equal," as Tocqueville said. And this being the case, it lacks also a tradition of reaction: lacking Robespierre it lacks Maistre, lacking Sydney it lacks Charles II (p.5).

In the American experience, there is only Locke. The other side of this coin is a rather paradoxical inability to see or to express this all-encompassing liberalism, since, without competing traditions, Americans lack the context:

There has never been a "liberal movement" or a real "liberal party" in America: we have only had the American Way of Life, a nationalist articulation of Locke which usually does not know that Locke himself is involved (p. 11).

This "Americanism" comprises a politics in which all parties are rooted in a fundamental liberal consensus: on capitalism, for example, and on a written constitution based on a priori liberal principles.

It's in this context that Tom Wicker, in his Introduction to the 1991 edition of Hartz's book, can argue that, "in the historical perspective of this book, the so-called conservative revolution that first brought Barry Goldwater to national prominence, and Ronald Reagan to national power, appears to have been a particularly virulent reassertion of the liberal tradition Dr. Hartz identifies (p. x)."

The ultimate point of this blog is to better understand the modern American conservative movement - the present phase of that same 'conservative revolution.' As such, I'm interested in Wicker's claim. Is it accurate or not? And what are the implications either way?

One of the problems here is in defining what is "conservative" to begin with. The classical usage is often in conflict with the current one, and each also faces its own internal tensions. Is conservatism an ideology or is it anti-ideological? Is it primarily about resistance to political action, or about political action in the interest of its various constituencies? And how can constituencies with such often-divergent interests coexist under the same banner?

Going forward, I'll try to examine conservatism as it operates in three different 'modes' - though this analytical scheme may itself evolve as seems appropriate:

1. Situational conservatism. By this I mean conservatism as a sort of mood, a general resistance to social and political change in every era. Probably this is the most superficial aspect of conservatism, but I expect that it is often the aspect that best accounts for its periods of widespread popularity.

2. Instrumental conservatism. This refers to the policies pursued by the various interest groups linked under the conservative banner. Obviously such policies can vary widely by group, by location, and over time.

3. Ideological conservatism. This is conservatism expressed as rooted in certain fundamental, enduring principles, whether classical - the negative view of human nature, the privileging of the social over the individual, respect for longstanding heirarchies and caste distinctions - or more contemporary: low taxes, small government, strong defense, 'family values'.

In and among these three modes there are patterns both of synchronicity and of contradiction. Moreover, we can clearly see some aspects of these modes at work in what is called American conservatism, while others are much harder to discern.

The one historical context in which all three of these elements clearly coincided was in Europe, in the wake of the French revolution. Indeed, "classical" conservatism is in fact a modern phenomenon - it is of course the reaction of the ancien regime to the transformative radicalism of that definitively modern event.

And here we return to Hartz, because for Hartz this is precisely what places conservatism outside of the American experience. According to Hartz, a rough sketch of the European political context would include the following factions:

1. Tories: the political representatives of the ancien regime.
2. Whigs: the propertied liberal right.
3. democrats: the "petit-bourgeois" liberal left
4. revolutionaries: the radical anti-feudalists who would eventually develop into the socialists.

Without either Tories or revolutionaries, the two wings of political liberalism in America would evolve strategies different from those of their counterparts in Europe. The democrats would incorporate not just the petit-bourgeois element, but also the proletariat and the peasants (or yeoman farmers in the American context), making them the generally "unbeatable" natural majority. The Whiggish faction, meanwhile, were unable to pursue the European strategy of "divide et impera ... playing the mass against the ancien regime, the ancien regime against the mass, and the mass against itself (p. 19)." As a result, they were forced after 1840 to abandon their Hamiltonian elitism in favor of a strategy that alternated between the Horatio Alger "mechanism of enchanting the American democrat and the 'Americanistic' mechanism of terrifying him (p. 20)."

This analysis of American history accounts for the political conflict between left and right in the United States, while framing the American right as entirely outside the tradition of what has come to be known as conservatism in the classical sense. But is it convincing? Intellectuals of the modern American conservative movement have certainly self-consciously attempted to articulate links to classical English (and, to a lesser extent, European) conservatism. American conservative writing is riddled with references to Burke, Disraeli, Oakeshott, Hayek.

Some American conservatives have acknowledged the complexities of making these connections from an American context. Writing in Commentary recently, Wilfred McClay discussed some of these tensions:

For Americans, as for others, a conservative sense of the past is expressed partly through shared stories and sufferings and customs, the mystic chords of memory. But that is only part of the story. In the United States, national identity is expressed as well through loyalty to the country’s founding principles and propositions, and to quasi-scriptural documents, like the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, which seek to express them.

Many of these principles, including the “self-evident” assertion that “all men are created equal” and possess “inalienable rights,” have always been put forward as statements of universal scope, and not merely particular or local values. Their universalistic implications have a tendency, indeed, to cut against the equally vital elements in the conservative tradition that argue for the primacy of the local, the settled, and the particular. [...]

To revere America without honoring these principles would mean revering a different country from the one we actually inhabit. But it is true that the principles are not always themselves conservative, either in their applications or their effects. Hence the inherent tendency of American conservatism to show, as the political scientist Walter Berns has pointed out, a dual aspect, combining the customary and the propositional, the affective and the rational, the particular and the general. One should love one’s country both for what it is and for what it stands for; both because it is one’s own and because it embodies or aspires to the highest and finest ideals.

McClay's article is concerned with current conflicts within American conservatism, some of which seem to involve disputes over the implications of some American conservatives' efforts to more vigorously assert what might be seen as "classically" conservative ideas: for instance, on the establishment of religion, or prerogative power.

It does seem that, if the post-Goldwater American right has not generally been conservative in a classical sense, it has lately been developing certain classically conservative tendencies. Returning to the analysis framed by Hartz, then, we can try to understand this development by selecting among a few different propositions:

1. There has never been a classically conservative tradition in America, and post-Goldwater movement conservatism only represents "a particularly virulent reassertion of the liberal tradition Dr. Hartz identifies;" or

2. There has never been a classically conservative tradition in America, until post-Goldwater movement conservatism, which represents a new development; or

3. There has been a classically conservative tradition in America, and post-Goldwater movement conservatism is only the latest expression of it.

In the next installments of Reading Conservative History, we'll examine what aspects of conservatism - whether situational, instrumental, or ideological - we can find in the political processes that gave birth to the American republic.

Next: The Shadow of the Stuarts
Previous: 1974: The Wave on the Horizon

Labels: conservatism, Reading Conservative History, Wilfred McClay

  ¶ Posted by Paul Curtis 3:05 PM 0 comments

  Reading Conservative History 0.1 - 1974: The Wave on the Horizon

I found the book on a dusty shelf in the local coffee shop, piled with the romance novels and the outdated travel guides - free reading for the rare customer without a friend or a laptop. That was me, and the title caught my eye: The New Conservatives: A Critique from the Left. You could judge from the cover that "new" in this context referred to about three decades ago. I skimmed through it for a few minutes, until I realized what I was looking at: notes from the last days of a civilization.

It was, in a political sense, the final words of people who were looking out to sea and beginning to see the shape of what was about to crash down upon them.

The contributors were liberal and socialist New York intellectuals of the 1970s: people like Michael Harrington, Michael Walzer, Joseph Epstein, Hanna Fenichel Pitkin. The editors were the sociologist Lewis A. Coser, and Irving Howe, publisher of Dissent magazine. These were leading public intellectuals: people representing what was then the dominant school of American social and political thought. Since the New Deal, liberal and social democratic ideas had driven the national agenda; even in periods of reaction there had been no real doubt about that. Now these intellectuals had turned their attention to a new development: the emergence of what was being called 'neoconservatism.' For the moment, don't read that term in the context of the present day - Iraq, Cheney, the Pentagon. Understand it in another sense, something more like what Coser's contributers were beginning to see: a growing intellectual 'mood' constituting a sort of leading edge of a new conservative reaction.

The left intellectuals of 1973-4 regarded this neoconservative development with what seems to be a mixture of disdain, bemusement - and growing alarm. The New Conservatives comes across as an attempt to make sense of a movement that liberals could scarcely find credible - yet which they sensed was gathering momentum. In his introduction, Coser described them this way:

These new conservatives do not give the impression of having reflected in a sustained and systematic manner on political philosophy. They express a mood and a fashion rather than a deeply felt political stance. [...] They wish to bring about a counterrevolution of declining expectations. [p. 4]

Later, he reiterates this disdain:

[W]hile neoconservatism need not be taken too seriously as a new departure in political philosophy, it should be taken very seriously indeed as a sign of the regressive drift of social thought in these barren times. [p. 8]

For Coser and his contributors, the neoconservatives - typified by Irving Kristol and Nathan Glazer - represent an abandonment of the promise and the responsibility of real thinking. Epstein calls them "intellectuals in retreat." The fact that the neoconservatives had been men of the left is significant in this analysis: these are fallen intellectuals, "former liberals who got cold feet in the late 1960s [p. 5]."

We can discuss the specific reasons for those cold feet in later posts (at any rate, we're still fighting the same culture war). What I want to emphasize here is the underlying attitude, the set of assumptions on which this entire volume is based. It is the work of a dominant and theretofore confident school of public intellectuals, reading its new opponents and seeing nothing but reactive nihilism. There was no conservative intellectual tradition. Or rather, there had been no such thing. Epstein sets the stage:

Over the past century in America, conservatism has had an ample popular and a scant intellectual following. In American intellectual life, in fact, it was not so very long ago that conservatism seemed a dead issue. [...]

As recently as the middle 1960s, it could still be said with some confidence that conservatism counted for little in intellectual circles. It took the political madness committed in the name of the left to make conservatism not merely intellectually respectable but to many intellectuals deeply appealing - no small task in the United States, where the overwhelming political intellectual tradition has been clearly liberal-left. [pp. 9-10]

Epstein has some sympathy for the motivation behind the neoconservatives' break with the left, but - even as he discusses its growing legitimacy - he clearly understands the new conservatism as based entirely in reaction, as opposed to innovation.

The essays in The New Conservatives call to mind guards defending their ramparts against barbarian attacks: Harrington on the welfare state, Edwin Schur on crime, Robert Lekachman on economic policy. Thirty years later we can see it for the last stand it actually was.

How has so much changed since 1974? Consider Richard Nixon, the bete noir of the 1960s-70s left. The very same year that The New Conservatives was published, William F. Buckley was writing in the National Review about how Nixon was a disappointment, a liberal. Now, in bitter hindsight, many liberals understand what Buckley meant. American political history seems to have pivoted on the once-extreme views of these barbarians, these neoconservatives.

Increasingly over the past decades, conservative "intellectuals" - or have they earned the right to the label free of scare quotes - have set the agenda in public ideas. Even with a Democratic president, liberals spent the 90s reacting and adapting to the conservative paradigm, and by the early 2000s it was the left which had come to seem like a "dead issue." Conservative think tanks churned out policy ideas based on conservative principles; the ideas were amplified by a broadly integrated and massively funded media network, and impressed fully-formed upon conservative politicians elected by breathtakingly efficient conservative electoral machines. In the conventional wisdom, the conservatives constituted the "party of ideas," while Democrats hastened to distance themselves from anything that could cause them to be accused of that deadly political sin, liberalism.

How did this happen? Could such a powerful movement be built on populist smoke and mirrors alone? Was it possible for a "party of ideas" to so thoroughly set the agenda without having any real ideas at all? If there were conservative ideas, were they a completely new development in American political history, or were they the inheritance of a longer tradition? Is there such a thing as creative conservatism, or merely a more energized form of rejectionism - and in what forms might these energies have been lurking in our politics all along?

With those questions in mind, we'll begin next week.

Next: Is Conservatism un-American?
Previous: Introduction

Labels: conservatism, Irving Kristol, Nathan Glazer, Reading Conservative History

  ¶ Posted by Paul Curtis 3:09 PM 0 comments

  Reading Conservative History: A Brief Introduction

This week I'll begin the project that is one of my primary reasons for starting this blog: reading the history and development of American conservatism, from a liberal perspective. I hope to post a new installment roughly once or twice a week - beginning with a brief prologue later today.

Despite the title, this is not exactly a history of American conservatism - I can't claim to to be that systematic, nor can I claim to have captured every source. Instead, I'll be taking advantage of the blog format to do something more like a genealogy of conservatism - or what has been called conservatism - in the United States. I'll be roughly chronological, but that shouldn't imply that I believe in the possibility of uncovering singular origins or ironclad logical progressions through history. Conservative history, like the history of anything, is meandering, contingent, and full of contradictions. I only want to explore some of it in order to better shed light on where we are today.

I argued in my very first post that traditional conservatism was alien to the United States from the founding. That's still something of a working thesis, but I now want to problematize that claim. It's at the top of the list of the questions I plan to ask over the next months (or, god help me, years). A few of those questions:

• Is there a "true" American conservatism? Was conservatism rejected by the American founders?
• Is conservatism ever really drawn from a mass movement, or is it primarily driven by economic, social, and political elites?
• Is there a substantive difference between what you might call "passive" and "active" conservatism? Is "radical" or movement conservatism a fundamentally different project than traditional "anti-change" conservatism?
• What the hell is neoconservatism, really?
• Is conservatism primarily an enduring set of beliefs about the way society should be ordered, or is it primarily a reaction to change? Can the radical ideas of one generation serve as the conservative ideas of another?
• Is conservative governance even possible in modern America?

I imagine that the questions themselves will evolve as the project continues. They may not be the right questions, or they may be asked wrongly. At any rate, the over-arching concern here is to examine the genealogy of American conservatism so as to strengthen the progressive project in this country (and around the world). The present conservative movement grew so powerful, I believe, in part because liberals were so ignorant of it: where it came from, who its players were, how it operated, how it thought, where its weaknesses lay, and how it could grow even stronger.

Have we seen the high-water mark of the current conservative movement? Maybe, but the tide has a long way to go before we can say it has receeded, and it won't go easily. The conservative movement is complex, highly developed, and extremely effective. Truly defeating it - not just winning an election, but winning the war of ideas for a generation - will require a good deal of familiarity with our opponent.

This genealogy is an attempt to advance that knowledge.

Labels: conservatism, conservatives, Reading Conservative History

  ¶ Posted by Paul Curtis 10:48 AM 0 comments

  Reading Conservative History: Archive

Introduction

0.1 - 1974: The Wave on the Horizon

1.0 - Is Conservatism Un-American?
1.1 - The Shadow of the Stuarts

Labels: Reading Conservative History

  ¶ Posted by Paul Curtis 10:47 AM 0 comments