Understanding Contemporary American Conservatism

Joel D. Aberbach

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317193999
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Contemporary American conservatism – a mélange of ideas, people, and organizations – is difficult to define; even conservatives themselves are unable to agree about its essential meaning. Yet the conservative movement is well financed, exerts strong influence in the Republican Party, inspires followers throughout the land, and has spawned a network of think tanks and media outlets that are the envy of its competitors. It is a powerful political force with which to be reckoned. This book examines how that has come about and what contemporary conservatism signifies for US politics and policy. It looks at the recent history of conservatism in America as well as its antecedents in the UK, traces changes over time using American National Election Study data from 1972 to the present in what it means when people say they are conservatives, and assesses the prospects for American conservatism, both in the near term electoral context and over the longer term as well.

1 Contemporary American Conservatism as a Legacy of the 1960s

An Introduction

DOI: 10.4324/9781315563381-1

From the vantage point of 2016 American conservatism and what is loosely called the American conservative movement (a mélange of ideas, people and organizations) looks like a behemoth, though an often ungainly and troubled one. While the last president conservatives backed left office in 2009, the conservative movement is well financed, has huge influence in the Republican Party, has followers throughout the land, and has a network of think tanks and media outlets that are the envy of its competitors. But it was not always such. Indeed, in 1964 it appeared American conservatism had failed a major test and might be headed for the dustbin of history. However, following the scorching defeat of Barry Goldwater in the 1964 election there emerged a strong conservative movement and a reinvigorated Republican Party that won seven of the next fourteen presidential elections and in 1994 took over both houses of Congress for the first time in many years, and has continued to control at least one house of Congress for much of the period since. This book examines what made all this possible and what contemporary conservatism means for the United States. It focuses on how prominent identification as a conservative is in the United States, what people who call themselves conservatives believe, and how the structure of conservative beliefs has evolved over time.

Perhaps the most famous line written by the conservative William F. Buckley, Jr. appeared in the inaugural issue of National Review (1955). Buckley said of his newly-born magazine: “It stands athwart history yelling Stop.”¹ At the time, few but the small circle around Buckley thought that conservatism would achieve its current position in American politics, and probably fewer still thought that it would develop in the ways that it has. Inside of a decade, the conservatives’ favorite (Senator Goldwater) won the Republican nomination for President, lost the election in a landslide, and then the conservative movement came roaring back, reaching high points (or low points, if one disagreed with its thrusts) in the administrations of Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush. While conservatism has hardly achieved a smaller state – compare the expenditures of the American government at the start and end of the Reagan administration (Federal outlays in 1981 were $679.2 billion and they were $1,064.4 billion in 1988) and then at the start and end of the administration of George W. Bush ($1,862.8 billion in 2001 and $2,982.5 billion in 2008)² –it has surely reached into the lives of Americans and affected how they live and how their government operates.

Before going to a description and analysis of how and why all this happened, it is useful to step back a bit and ask what conservatism is and how it has evolved in the contemporary United States.

What Is Conservatism?

The plain fact of the matter is that there is no universally accepted definition of conservatism. George Nash, perhaps the leading contemporary intellectual historian of conservatism, makes this point in the introduction to his magisterial volume on The Conservative Intellectual Movement in America Since 1945, and he is surely right that the content of conservatism is heavily a function of time and place.³ Conservatives are trying to conserve something, but what they are trying to conserve may no longer exist or may even be defined in terms of an ideal world. Ordinarily, however, conservatism is marked by resistance to ideas and policies that are advocated by non-conservatives or by skepticism about changes emerging from social or economic developments in the broader society.

Samuel Huntington identifies what he calls three theories of conservatism as an ideology. One is that conservatism is the ideology of the aristocracy, and derives from the resistance of the aristocracy to changes in the latter part of the eighteenth century and the first fifty years or so of the nineteenth century. A second is that conservatism is “defined in terms of universal values such as justice, order, balance, [and] moderation.” This is obviously closer to the ideal end of the spectrum than to the pure conserving end. Finally, conservatism may be defined as “the passionate affirmation of the value of existing institutions,” an affirmation likely to be most virulent when those institutions appear to be under challenge.

Huntington, in general agreement with most scholars, focuses on Edmund Burke as the “conservative archetype” whose ideas form the basis (or, as Huntington calls them, the “basic elements”) of conservatism as we generally think about it today. These include the idea that religion is at the very foundation of civil society, that “existing institutions embody the wisdom of previous generations,” that experience is superior by far to theory as a guide to proper behavior, that social classes and hierarchy are natural features of society, and, quoting Burke directly, that one should be biased “in favour of any settled scheme of government against any untried product” since reforms are likely to make things worse rather than better.

Further, as Huntington notes, Burkean conservatism, unlike most ideologies, lacks a “substantive ideal.” The institutions that evolve may differ according to time and place, so that what is conservative in one context may be quite the opposite in another. This is an extraordinarily important point because Burkean conservatism is not reactionary – it does not oppose change at all costs. Indeed, it encompasses the acceptance of changes that become institutionalized and there is a kind of cautious dynamism about it.⁴

Chris Patten, then a Tory (Conservative) Member of Parliament (and now the Chancellor of the University of Oxford), wrote a quite revealing book in 1983, laying out The Tory Case. Drawing on Ian Gilmour (Inside Right: A Study of Conservatism, Hutchinson, 1977), he dates the origin of the modern Conservative Party to Burke and the Portland Whigs joining Pitt the Younger as Britain faced dealing with the aftermath of the French Revolution of 1789. Patten stresses that the characteristics marking conservatism in Britain were established in this period. They include a “belief in evolution rather than revolution, [and] a preference for prudence rather than logic,” a “defence of property and order and an organic view of society,” and “an unashamed patriotism.”⁵ Patten goes on to say a bit later: “Seeking to conserve the best of the past, trying neither to preserve everything nor to prevent the arrival of tomorrow, is the hallmark of a Conservative.” He then quotes Burke: “A disposition to preserve and an ability to improve, taken together, would be my standard of a statesman.”⁶

I shall return to a comparison of British and American conservatism later in the book, but for the moment it is sufficient to point out that Patten sees it as very different from many of the strands in modern American conservatism.⁷ It is those strands and the somewhat tumultuous evolution of American conservatism that makes it both fascinating and frustrating, both for those who study it as well as for many of its adherents.

Mainstream American conservatism before World War II and in its immediate aftermath, especially in the Republican Party, shared some important elements with the type of conservatism described in the paragraphs above. The leading conservative figure in the Republican Party was arguably Senator Robert Taft of Ohio. He rose to the top of the party in the Senate and was a major contender several times for the party’s nomination for president. His political nickname, “Mr. Republican,” says it all about his standing. Taft’s failures to win the presidential nomination came from the triumph of those in the party (particularly the “Eastern establishment” that Barry Goldwater and his followers so despised) who felt that the country would not support someone with his views and instead backed Wendell Wilkie, Thomas E. Dewey, and Dwight D. Eisenhower to carry the party’s banner.

What did Taft believe? The picture painted by James T. Patterson’s biography is one of a man who might not be a lock for the title “Mr. Republican” (or, indeed, “Mr. Conservative”) today. He was an isolationist and an opponent of executive dominance of foreign policy, and even in the post-war period voted against the NATO treaty and made clear his view that the US could not solve the world’s problems and should be fearful that it could “slop into an attitude of imperialism where war becomes an instrument of public policy rather than its last resort.”⁸ He was “very bright but … impatient with abstractions,” a villain to the labor movement because of his sponsorship of the Taft-Hartley Act, but also a supporter of the right to strike; a supporter of some basic social benefit policies such as public housing and federal aid to education (though with the reprehensible blinders about civil rights that unfortunately marked many of the men in his generation) as a practical means to “preservation of the family by ensuring it a decent environment”; and a proponent of a floor under income. His biographer notes that following his death in 1953 “no one remained with force enough to restrain the right wing of the party, and Democrats like Lyndon Johnson in the Senate and Sam Rayburn in the House had to stay the impetuous thrusts of men like Barry Goldwater to make possible even the limited legislative accomplishments of Eisenhower’s presidency.”⁹

Without taking a stand on who was impetuous, it is clear that conservatives were, as Lee Edwards of the Heritage Foundation describes them, “a disputatious lot.”¹⁰ In the 1950s and 1960s they were mainly divided between traditionalists and libertarians, and much ink has spilt in later periods elaborating more complex divisions. However, the early 1960s witnessed both an attempt to meld the disparate intellectual strands into a unified movement (“fusionism”) and success in nominating an assertively conservative candidate (Barry Goldwater) who, to use the words of one of his campaign slogans, presented “A choice, not an echo.”

Fusionism, whose founding is identified with Frank Meyer of the National Review, sought to unify traditional conservatives and libertarians through their intensely shared anti-communism.¹¹ And Goldwater’s success in achieving the 1964 Republican nomination was a triumph of conservative insurgents over the Republican establishment (Eastern and otherwise) that had successfully nominated more moderate candidates. Indeed, Goldwater’s candidacy was, in many ways, a celebration of a new-found vigor in practical politics that accompanied a surging interest in the intellectual tenets underlying the various notions about what it means to be a conservative.¹²

Goldwater’s book, The Conscience of a Conservative, was a snappy and provocative statement presenting conservative ideas in a way that inspired many people (and frightened still more when they heard about the contents). While Goldwater lost the election decisively (getting less than 40 percent of the vote), his campaign left a set of legacies that reverberate today: 1. He took a states’ rights stand on civil rights, cementing the African American vote as a Democratic vote and laying a firm foundation for the “Southern strategy” that has marked Republican national campaigns since and remade Southern (and national) politics in the process. 2. He gave conservatives a taste of electoral victory in nominating politics and inspired a generation of activists who eventually rose from the ashes of his defeat. 3. While many Republican office holders distanced themselves from Goldwater’s campaign, Ronald Reagan gave what came to be known as “the speech” in support of him, an act that cemented Reagan as a major figure in the conservative world. 4. Ironically, Goldwater’s overwhelming defeat in the Democratic landslide of 1964 and the accompanying extraordinary and liberal Democratic majorities in Congress paved the way for the flood of Great Society legislation that passed in 1965, legislation that was (and, in many cases, still is) anathema to many conservatives, thereby energizing the movement. (While the Voting Rights Act of 1965 was particularly important in reshaping Southern politics to the benefit of the conservative wing of the Republican Party, contemporary American politics also still reverberates with lingering debates about Medicare, anti-pollution programs and the like.) 5. Finally, the Vietnam War, heavily identified with Johnson, along with the upheavals in society that we know today simply by the term “the sixties” (actually a period that went roughly from 1965 to 1974), repelled many people, some of whom disagreed with the substance of the changes and others with the style of the change agents. This lack of legitimacy created a climate of distrust in government that has bedeviled the liberal, progressive wing of the political spectrum and been a boon to conservatives. In short, overwhelming defeat ultimately gave birth to a re-energized conservative movement and constituency that eventually re-shaped American politics.

While the turmoil of the sixties was ultimately a boon to conservatism and, along with anti-communism, fostered an important degree of cooperation among those who found both the Great Society and many of the movements of the sixties threatening, it did not lead to intellectual consensus. The academic literature about conservatism, and often the public debates, are replete with references not only to traditionalism (sometimes called paleo-conservatism) and libertarianism, but to neo-conservatism, the religious right (a vigorous political force, especially since the founding of the Moral Majority in 1979 and of other groups later on, with their opposition to the 1973 abortion rights ruling of the Supreme Court, and strong defense of “traditional” family life) and even Midwestern conservatism, among others.¹³ Former liberals, indeed former Trotskyites, became neo-conservatives in their concern to defeat communism and spread democracy. Their attitudes on big government did not necessarily endear them to traditionalists or libertarians. (Irving Kristol, the founding father of neoconservatism famously endorsed the welfare state and saw the role of those who agreed with him “to convert the Republican Party and American conservatism in general, against their respective wills, into a new kind of conservative politics suitable to governing a modern democracy.”¹⁴) The religious right focused on moral issues that many other conservatives ultimately embraced, but did not fit well with libertarian doctrine. Later, so-called “big-government” or “compassionate” conservatives in the George W. Bush administration endorsed an expansion of Medicare to include a major drug benefit, while also insinuating the federal government ever deeper into education at the elementary and secondary level. They also put forth an expansive view of executive power that should have given pause to many more traditional conservatives.

But the point for now is that reactions to what many considered the radical movements of the sixties that changed many aspects of American life (and especially in the South to the effective enfranchisement of African Americans as a result of the Voting Rights Act of 1965), to humiliating defeat in Vietnam, and to Supreme Court decisions like Roe v. Wade in 1973 allowed conservatives, over time, the opportunity to build a political coalition that has transformed American politics. It has not been easy, and because of the complexities of contemporary conservatism, not been consistent, but conservatism today sits astride American politics in a way that few after the overwhelming defeat of Goldwater in 1964 thought possible.

Some Brief Post-1964 Political History

In 1968, Richard Nixon narrowly won the presidency in a three-person race. His “Southern strategy” in particular and his attempt to appeal to “the silent majority,” were initial efforts to take advantage of the turmoil in the country and to transform the political landscape. While Nixon’s huge triumph in the 1972 election was soon offset by reactions to the Watergate scandal and his subsequent resignation, the electoral success of Nixon’s overall political strategy did not go unnotice...