Conservatives Without Conscience

A Brief History of Modern Conservatism: Shallow and Twisted Roots

Numerous recent studies have traced the evolution of the conservative movement.[19] As these works show (but certainly do not concede), conservatism has too often been perverted by small minds, which has enabled any number of extremist forces to subvert its authentic principles. Unlike classic liberalism, which evolved slowly over centuries, modern conservatism was cobbled together, if not contrived, by a relatively small group of intellectuals during a brief period in the late 1940s and early 1950s. Modern conservatism was soon brought into elective politics in the 1950s; its followers then joined forces with Southern politicians in the 1960s, and began flirting with evangelical Christians in the 1970s. Conservatism’s many factions were consolidated under Ronald Reagan’s Republican Party in the 1980s. Less than satisfied with their lot under Reagan, however, evangelical Christians increased their religiously motivated political zealotry in the late 1980s, throughout the 1990s, and into the new century.

While modern conservatism is a post–World War II political phenomenon, its earliest adherents, sometimes labeled the “old right,” date back to those Republicans who refused to follow former president Theodore Roosevelt and his progressive Bull Moose Party during the 1912 presidential election campaign. This group nonetheless chose to remain within the Republican Party ranks and support the reelection of President William Howard Taft. This, of course, resulted in the ascendance of Woodrow Wilson, who was even more progressive than TR, but in those days, conservative purity was paramount. Between the world wars, conservative Republicans played an obstructionist role, blocking Wilson’s League of Nations, opposing American intervention in foreign affairs, resisting non-European immigration, and pushing laissez-faire economic policies. Republican Party historian Lewis L. Gold notes that when “discussing the failures of the United States to intervene in World War I, or the difficulties of the League of Nations in the 1920s, Republicans rarely point out how much their [own] party did to sustain these now discredited policies.”[20]

Early conservatives were groping for something more than a philosophy of opposing anything that departed from the status quo and giving corporations the freedom they sought from government. They were searching for ideas and found common cause in their opposition to the New Deal. No factor did more to stimulate the growth of modern conservatism than the election of Franklin Roosevelt (with the possible exception of the spread of communism). He is the man conservatives most dislike, for he embodies the big-government ideology they most fear. Opposition to FDR’s policies and programs resulted in people like H. L. Mencken and former Republican president Herbert Hoover’s joining the conservative cause, adding stature to the nascent movement.[21] In time, conservatives found political leadership in President Taft’s son, Robert Taft, of Ohio, who became majority leader of the Senate in 1953, but seven months later died of cancer.

Lionel Trilling, a leading voice of the left, observed in 1950 that in “the United States at this time, liberalism is not only the dominant but the sole intellectual tradition….[T]here are no conservative or reactionary ideas in general circulation.”[22] Trilling, for a while, was correct. Intellectual efforts, rather than political leadership, however, ultimately proved more significant for the initial growth of conservatism. The work of conservative scholars, which had commenced in the late forties, although inconsequential at first, did serve to create a foundation for modern conservatism, and a philosophy was developed from scratch. At first they looked to European thinking and tradition, but this seemed un-American to many of them, and they, accordingly, began developing an authentically American conservative heritage. This was not easy, given the liberal tradition of this country, and in fact, nothing in America’s founding, or the creation of the United States, was of a conservative nature.

George H. Nash, himself a conservative, is the leading authority on this intellectual development, and his work The Conservative Intellectual Movement in America is considered a classic.[23] Nash’s study, however, reveals the dubious analysis employed by early conservatives in constructing their philosophy. Nash reports that the post–World War II resurgence of conservatism resulted in three independent schools of thought, all of which developed concurrently. First, Nash explains, “classic liberalism” morphed into “libertarianism,” which held that the expanding powers of the state threatened “liberty, private enterprise, and individualism.” Second, “traditional conservatism” developed in reaction to the secularism among the totalitarian states during the aftermath of World War II. This brand of conservatism called for “a return to traditional religious and ethical absolutes,” and rejected “relativism” as something corroding Western values. Third, Nash reports, there emerged a school of “militant, evangelistic anti-communism.”[24]

The conspicuous weakness in Nash’s work is his failure to report any of the inevitable conflicts among these three early schools of thought. Nash also does not establish any real connection between them other than anticommunism, which they all embraced (as did most progressives and liberals). Thus, he provides little historical insight into early fissures within conservatism, although these would develop into the factions which have yet to resolve their differences.

Early conservative scholars sought to establish the conservative tradition in America, often doing so by turning history upside down. They began with the Declaration of Independence, which involved an attempt to co-opt such profoundly liberal concepts of inalienable rights and equality. The Declaration, which formalized the end of colonial American allegiance to the monarchy of George III, has long been considered a classic statement of liberal political theory.[25] Echoing the words of the liberal philosophers like Jean-Jacques Rousseau and John Locke, Jefferson proclaimed as self-evident truths that “all men are created equal” and “are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights,” including “Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” These are concepts that are hardly articles of faith in conservative thought.

Nash admits that the Declaration was “troublesome” for the early conservatives, and reports that one scholar suggested conservatives should claim that, in fact, the Declaration’s egalitarian ethos had not been carried over to the Constitution; rather, that the Declaration was just that, a declaration and not a governing document.[26] Nash explains that it was ultimately decided “to stress the compatibility” of both the Declaration and the Constitution with conservative views, although that compatibility was created by brazenly reinterpreting the founding events and documents.[27] Accordingly, for conservatives the clause “all men are created equal” would be construed to apply merely to equality under the law and not to “some misty ‘pursuit of happiness’ [as] the true foundation of our polity” and certainly not to the brand of egalitarianism favored by liberals. Most conservatives, in fact, oppose equality, and there is ultimately no clearer underlying distinction between conservatives and liberals than their views on this issue.[*] Nash concludes that in “a variety of ways, then, conservatives sought to drain the Declaration of its explosive [liberal] rhetorical potential.”

19.

Among the better historical accounts that have been written are (listed chronologically): Godfrey Hodgson, The World Turned Right Side Up: A History of the Conservative Ascendancy in America (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1996); Lee Edwards, The Conservative Revolution: The Movement That Remade America (New York: Free Press, 1999); Jonathan M. Schoenwald, A Time for Choosing: The Rise of Modern American Conservatism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001); and Gregory L. Schneider (ed.), Conservatism in America Since 1930: A Reader (New York: New York University Press, 2003).

20.

Lewis L. Gould, Grand Old Party: A History of the Republicans (New York: Random House, 2003), 488.

21.

See Joseph Scotchie, The Paleoconservatives: New Voices of the Old Right (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction, 1999).

22.

William Rusher, “Toward a History of the Conservative Movement,” Journal of Policy History, vol. 14, no. 3 (2002). See also Kirk, The Conservative Mind, 476.

23.

Historian Jennifer Burns has called this “a rare work of history that remains the authoritative treatment of its subject nearly thirty years after publication.” Rarer still, she explained, is the fact that it appeared in prepublication form as a forty-seven-page insert in the National Review (December 5, 1975). Ms. Burns noted that this “work exerts a deep influence on our common understanding of conservatism in America.” While George Nash’s politics are difficult to discern from his work, Ms. Burns reports that he is a conservative. See Jennifer Burns, “In Retrospect: George Nash’s The Conservative Intellectual Movement in America Since 1945,” Reviews in American History, vol. 32 (2004), 447–62. (I have relied heavily on Nash’s work because of the near universal esteem with which it is held by conservatives among all the factions.)

24.

Nash, The Conservative Intellectual Movement in America, xv.

25.

Because conservatives do not view the Declaration of Independence as based on liberalism, I had to scratch my head for an authority that was clearly neither liberal nor conservative yet stated the obvious fact of its classic liberalism. The Wikipedia online encyclopedia has its weaknesses (for example, its entry for yours truly has clearly been distorted by my detractors, but I have never bothered to correct it to see if the entry is self-correcting), yet I thought this a good source to make my point, for clearly conservatives have been quite active in getting their point of view into the Wikipedia. Of the Declaration, and the Constitution, Wikipedia states that “the United States Constitution and the United States Declaration of Independence are both documents that embody many principles of classic liberalism.” See “classic liberalism” at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Classical_liberalism.

26.

Unfortunately, Nash happened to mangle his material and its source regarding this significant point. Nash stated: “On one occasion, Jeffrey Hart of Dartmouth College in effect conceded the Declaration to the liberals. He then insisted that its doctrine was not theory of the Constitution, whose Preamble had conspicuously failed to list ‘rights’ or ‘equality’ among the purposes of the new government of 1788. There were, in fact, two theories of government present in the Revolutionary War period, and liberals could claim only one of them.” Nash cited John Hallowell, American Political Science Review, vol. 58 (September 1964), 687. However, the Hallowell book review to which Nash refers makes no mention of Jeffrey Hart, who had a very interesting read on the Declaration. He said, “I regard the Declaration of Independence as just that, a declaration of independence from England, written by Englishmen in the Colonies to establish their position on a foundation that would be accepted in England. In that context, the phrase ‘all men are created equal’ means that Americans are equal to Englishmen in their capacity for self-government. When we go beyond the Prologue to the list of particulars in the indictment of George III, we have that passage about him inflicting the ‘savage Indian tribes’ upon our frontier settlements, the Indians slaughtering Americans without regard to age or sex. This, I think, ‘de-universalizes’ the ‘all men are created equal’ in capacity for self-government. The Indians were a stone-age people who had not invented the wheel and had no written language.” (E-mail exchange with author.)

27.

Nash, The Conservative Intellectual Movement in America, 194–95.

*

Princeton sociologist Douglas S. Massey, speaking for liberals, explains that what “distinguishes liberals from others is the belief that the rights and privileges outlined in the Declaration of Independence and enumerated in the U.S. Constitution are guaranteed to all people regardless of their characteristics, inborn or acquired. Thus, equality of opportunity should be offered to all persons resident in the United States, whether male or female, black or white, gay or straight, rich or poor, owner or worker; and liberals believe that equality of opportunity should exist not only in theory but in reality.” Douglas S. Massey, Return of the “L” Word: A Liberal Vision for the New Century (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005), 12.