Now That Historians Know So Much
about the Right, How Should We Best
Approach the Study of Conservatism?
Lisa McGirr
Kim Phillips-Fein’s review is a thoughtful survey of the last fifteen years of historical
scholarship on conservatism in the United States. She recounts how a once-marginal set
of questions moved to center stage and produced an avalanche of studies. As a contributor
of one such study of conservatism, I am gratified to have the importance of this effort
recognized in several flagship journals. The result of all this scholarly effort, Phillips-Fein
notes, has been nothing short of a transformation in our understanding of the post–
World War II American Right and to a lesser degree the longer tradition of American
conservatism. Without a doubt, Alan Brinkley’s influential 1994 call in the American
Historical Review for more attention to conservatism has been answered. Fifteen years
later, Phillips-Fein’s essay prompts us to ask: Were any of the answers surprising?1
Thanks to this effort, postwar conservatism has become, to borrow John Lewis
Gaddis’s formulation, a history “we now know.” As Phillips-Fein notes, this knowledge
has come from many different perspectives. We have rich portraits of the local communities
where postwar conservative culture blossomed. We have comprehensive portrayals of the
women and men who made up the social base of the libertarian and Christian Right. We
have biographies of the leaders of the conservative movement as well as close examinations of major conservative organizations, networks, mobilizing tools, and the relationship of all this activity to the Republican party. We now have a greater understanding
of modern conservative religiosity, including, for example, that evangelicalism—once
thought of as appealing to men and women within rural, backwater, and poor regions—
flourished in the hypermodern, privatized world of postindustrial, affluent suburbs. We
have penetrating portraits of how within our modern era’s vast corporate empires of lowwage, nonunion service industries was born a powerful new grassroots theology of equal
parts free-market capitalism and staunch evangelicalism. Conservative writers too, whose
work was once dismissed as little more than “impulses,” “mental gestures which seek to
resemble ideas,” have been richly elucidated in their multiple strands. Finally, the new
Lisa McGirr is a professor of history at Harvard University.
Readers may contact McGirr at [email protected].
1
Kim Phillips-Fein’s essay is the latest in a series of reviews on conservatism by historians and sociologists. See, for
example, Julian E. Zelizer, “Rethinking the History of American Conservatism,” Reviews in American History, 38
(June 2010), 367–92. For a review of the sociological literature, see Kathleen Blee and Kimberly A. Creasap, “Conservative and Rightwing Movements,” Annual Review of Sociology, 36 (Aug. 2010), 269–86. Alan Brinkley, “The
Problem of American Conservatism,” American Historical Review, 99 (April 1994), 409–29.
doi: 10.1093/jahist/jar478
© The Author 2011. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Organization of American Historians.
All rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail: [email protected].
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studies have illuminated the relationship between the Right and broader shifts in gender
and racial norms since World War II.2
While most of this work has been focused on the post–World War II “conservative
renaissance,” a number of studies have stretched the chronological boundaries of this
conservative mobilization back to the New Deal. Another pioneering group of historians
have begun the analysis of the conservative movement since 1980, and their preliminary
conclusions have focused our attention on the conservative movement’s somewhat marginal accomplishments (in relationship to its far-reaching agenda), its fragmentation, and
a resurgence of liberal organizational efforts after they adjusted to sharing the halls of
power with conservatives in Washington, D.C. As the significance of the movement has
become clear, we have come to appreciate how studies of the Right have enhanced our
understanding of the broader intellectual history, women’s history, and the social and
political history of modern America.
As Phillips-Fein points out, much of this writing has been motivated by one central
question: How did radical free-market ideas, staunch unilateralism, a deeply hawkish
nationalism, and conservative religiosity—all with deep roots in American life but increasingly marginalized by the political economy and political culture of the golden age of
American capitalism—become more prominent in policy and politics toward century’s
end? How, in other words, did a movement—with ideas that were once labeled by Richard
Hofstadter as “bizarre,” “archaic,” “self-confounding,” and “so remote from the basic
American consensus”—succeed in reshaping common wisdom about the proper role of
the federal government in the economy and society?3
That many historians chose to answer this question by focusing on core right-wing
actors—both leaders and rank-and-file cadres—should come as no surprise. At the time
these scholars were writing, these actors were seriously misunderstood. The idea of studying the Right from the bottom up emerged as a corrective to the notion then prevalent
among many liberal commentators and observers that elite funders, Republican strategists, think tanks, and well-funded mass mailings were all that really mattered to explain
the political prowess of the Right. This notion still tends to color journalistic portraits of
recent right-wing incarnations such as the Tea Party movement, which credits its emergence to right-wing funders such as the Koch family and media moguls. (These backers
certainly facilitated the movement’s mobilization and its visibility, but their importance
should not be overblown nor lead us to lose sight of the staunch pockets of popular conservatism within the nation.)
Phillips-Fein applauds the new scholarship on the Right, but she also seeks to push the
literature on the Right to “see conservatism with a new perspective.” Scholars have an
opportunity, she argues, to look beyond conservatism as a merely political movement and
to see it as a broader cultural and economic force throughout the twentieth century. Historians may also have overplayed the marginalized stature of conservatism and the dominance of their liberal opponents in the postwar years—an emphasis that makes seeing the
continuities between pre–World War II antistatism and the modern movement more
2
John Lewis Gaddis used this formulation in relation to the new scholarship on the Cold War. John Lewis
Gaddis, We Now Know: Rethinking Cold War History (New York, 1997). Lionel Trilling, The Liberal Imagination:
Essays on Literature and Society (Garden City, 1953), xv.
3
Richard Hofstadter quoted in Brinkley, “Problem of American Conservatism,” 412.
How Should We Best Approach the Study of Conservatism?
767
difficult to grasp. Finally, she encourages us to think more globally about the conservative
movement, recognize its connections and consequences abroad, and examine the relationship of the Right’s rise to prominence in the United States to economic developments
that had similar repercussions elsewhere.4
I agree with Phillips-Fein’s assertion that to fully understand the making of the politics
of contemporary America, historians must do more than study the Right as a political
movement. The “movement” perspective remains important, with historians richly
describing the process by which the Right mobilized to assert its prominence within the
Republican party. The agency of conservative elite and grassroots actors is, however, as I
argued in Suburban Warriors, just one important factor in explaining the broad transformation in politics, political economy, and political culture over the past forty years. Broad
structural shifts in postwar American life, some (ones that offered conservatives new
opportunities) that historians have only recently begun to study, were also essential to
forging the sea change in American politics. Secular shifts in global capitalism during the
1970s, the actions of newly assertive business elites, the “identity crisis” of the Democratic party and liberal reform groups, and the emergence (in the North and the South)
of centrist suburban middle-class voters who opposed liberal reformers’ social engineering
efforts to remedy past discrimination all have moved into the focus of historians’ investigations.5 These directions in research and writing have contributed in important ways to
understanding the polarized politics of the recent past. That said, we should not lose sight
of the important role that the Right as a political movement played in capturing the
national limelight with its particular constellation of ideas and policies, in recasting the
federal government and the economy toward conservative ends. Despite the very real
fragmentation and failures of the Right to achieve many of their objectives once in power,
conservative policy standards—including deregulation, tax reductions, and reduced federal entitlements for the poor—have indelibly marked the nation.6
Second, Phillips-Fein suggests that narratives of the Right’s rise tend to overemphasize
the extent to which conservatives were outsiders to institutional power in the post–World
War II period. The dominant political movement framework, Phillips-Fein argues, emphasizes
the story of collective action as a critical component in the shift in policy and politics over
the last forty years. It calls attention to the importance of networks, resources, and the
intersection of economic and political elites and the grass roots but in doing so risks overemphasizing the Right’s displacement and marginalization. Yet the work of Phillips-Fein
and others demonstrates that historians who have studied the Right have understood
that conservatives were insiders to substantial economic and institutional power, even
when they did not for a time hold the visible reins of political power. Historians have
called attention to their influence in organizations such as the National Association of
Manufacturers, their strong support among business elites, and their important allies in
4
Kim Phillips-Fein, “Conservatism: A State of the Field,” Journal of American History, 98 (Dec. 2011), esp.
743.
5
See, for example, Judith Stein, Pivotal Decade: How the United States Traded Factories for Finance in the Seventies (New Haven, 2010); Benjamin Cooper Waterhouse, “A Lobby for Capital: Organized Business and the Pursuit
of Pro-market Politics, 1967–1986” (Ph.D. diss., Harvard University, 2009); Matthew D. Lassiter, The Silent Majority: Suburban Politics in the Sunbelt South (Princeton, 2006); and Bruce Miroff, The Liberals’ Moment: The McGovern
Insurgency and the Identity Crisis of the Democratic Party (Lawrence, 2007).
6
On the power of conservative policy standards, see Meg Jacobs and Julian E. Zelizer, Conservatives in Power:
The Reagan Years, 1981–1989; A Brief History with Documents (Boston, 2010).
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December 2011
segments of the military and state agencies such as the Federal Bureau of Investigation.
The extensive literature on the nation’s traumatic experience with McCarthyism, moreover,
also reminds us of the widespread influence of countersubversive conservative forces and
their contribution to the terrain of the narrowed political discourses in the post–World
War II world.7
Ironically, as Phillips-Fein suggests, the recent outpouring of scholarship on movement
activists and leadership may have overshadowed the arguably important institutional arenas where conservatives have long held substantial sway. Studies that recentralize institutions promise to greatly enhance our understanding of conservative power in the
post–New Deal period. Similarly, more attention might be paid to the role of traditional
political parties as powerful institutions in American life and the way procedural reforms
in Congress (and in parties as organizations) pushed by elite institutional actors have
contributed to party polarization. Central to the story of the Right’s policy successes, after
all, has been the transformation of loosely structured parties into our contemporary,
highly organized, ideologically disciplined national parties. Of course, any understanding
of continuity on the Right should look far more closely at strongholds of antiliberal
sentiment in Congress within both the Democratic and Republican parties throughout
the post–New Deal years.8
Finally, I applaud Phillips-Fein’s call to look beyond the borders of the United States.
To date, the literature on the Right has been largely (though not solely) focused on
domestic developments. Relatively few studies have attempted to chart the transnational networks of the Right from the spread of conservative ideas in distinctive national
contexts to the establishment of institutions abroad with significant links to the Right
in the United States. Nonetheless, in focusing on self-identified studies of the New
Right, Phillips-Fein may have overlooked some important work on the international
conservative movement done by scholars working in other national contexts. An excellent and richly detailed study on the Mont Pèlerin Society, for example, has been written by the Swiss scholar Bernard Walpen. Other scholars, such as Martin Durham and
Margaret Power as well as Dieter Plehwe and Philip Mirowksi, have begun to bring
7
Kim Phillips-Fein, Invisible Hands: The Making of the Conservative Movement from the New Deal to Reagan
(New York, 2009). On the influence of the National Association of Manufacturers, see Jonathan Soffer, “The
National Association of Manufacturers and the Militarization of American Conservatism, 1950–1975,” Business
History Review, 75 (Winter 2001), 775–805. On the importance of defense and its links with business in regions
where conservative cultures have flourished, see Ann Markusen, Peter Hall, Scott Campbell, and Sabina Deitrick,
The Rise of the Gunbelt: The Military Remapping of Industrial America (New York, 1991); and John L. Boies, Buying
for Armageddon: Business, Society, and Military Spending since the Cuban Missile Crisis (New Brunswick, 1994). On
the staunch antiradical allies in state agencies, see Steve Rosswurm, The fbi and the Catholic Church, 1935–1962
(Amherst, 2009). On McCarthyism, see Ellen Schrecker, The Age of McCarthyism: A Brief History with Documents
(Boston, 1994); and Ellen Schrecker, Many Are the Crimes: McCarthyism in America (Princeton, 1998). For conservative defenses of Joseph McCarthy, see William F. Buckley Jr. and L. Brent Bozell, McCarthy and His Enemies
(Chicago, 1954); and James Burnham, The Web of Subversion: Underground Networks in the U.S. Government
(New York, 1954).
8
On party polarization in the American political party system, see Sam Rosenfeld, “Fed by Reform: Congressional Politics, Partisan Change, and the Food Stamp Program, 1961–1981,” Journal of Policy History, 22 (no. 4,
2010), 474–507. On conservative Democrats in various geographic regions and periods, see James Tyler Patterson,
Congressional Conservatism and the New Deal: The Growth of the Conservative Coalition in Congress, 1933–1939
(Lexington, 1967); Susan Dunn, Roosevelt’s Purge: How fdr Fought to Change the Democratic Party (Cambridge,
Mass., 2010); and Kari Frederickson, The Dixiecrat Revolt and the End of the Solid South, 1932–1968 (Chapel Hill,
2001). On the increasingly assertive liberalism in the Democratic party during the early 1970s, see Miroff, Liberals’
Moment.
How Should We Best Approach the Study of Conservatism?
769
together work on the global reach of right-wing networks, though clearly much more
remains to be done.9
What about the deeper, longer history of American conservatism—the question, as
Phillips-Fein puts it, of “origins”? In her telling, scholars are tracing, perhaps predictably,
the roots of the ideas of the post–World War II conservative movement ever earlier in
U.S. history. She cites scholarship on the Ku Klux Klan, Beverly Gage’s work on antiradicalism, and Julia Ott’s study of business campaigns in favor of free-market ideals in the
late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. While perhaps they were guilty of not paying enough attention to continuities, few scholars of the post–World War II Right ever
argued that conservatism emerged sui generis in opposition to the New Deal; they consistently
noted the importance of the deeper roots of conservative religiosity, free-market ideas,
isolationism, and antiradicalism “that predated the organization of the movement itself.”10
One difficulty, as Alan Brinkley noted in his 1994 article, is that the constellation of
ideas that came to constitute the post–World War II conservative movement did not
cohere as an organized force until the World War II years, at a moment when a broad
coalition of conservatives identified a common enemy of “liberal collectivism.” New Deal
managerial elites and their labor and liberal allies along with the requirements of fighting
a total war during World War II established a new common wisdom about state regulation, the role of the administrative state, and federal government responsibility for the
welfare of citizens. Of course, progressivism and World War I had laid the groundwork
for a regulatory state, but only during the New Deal, despite its many compromises, did
the terrain of public policy fundamentally shift. As proof, one need only remember the
deeply market-oriented Republican presidencies of the 1920s. The “libertarian” antistatism of the post–World War II Right was an echo of the “classical liberalism” at the very
heart of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century notions of state and economy. As a
political persuasion, this form of conservatism could not survive the triple challenges of
depression, world war, and Cold War. As a result, postwar conservatives would be far
more willing to embrace a strong-armed state for defense and to bolster free markets than
“classical liberals” had been.11
A critical component of the post–World War II Right was a staunch conservative religiosity. Here too it shared much with deep earlier currents of evangelicalism and fundamentalism in American history. Here too, however, almost as much had changed.
Conservative religious believers (and some of their central spokespersons) had in the
decades prior to the New Deal and World War II been far more flexible in their ideas
about the economy. Mass populist tent meetings, for example, drew on the traditions and
9
On the international conservative movement, see Bernard Walpen, Die Offenen Feinde und ihre Gesellschaf:
Eine Hegemonietheoretische Studie zur Mont Pèlerin Society (The open society and its enemies: A theoretical study of
hegemony Mont Pèlerin Society) (Hamburg, 2004); and Philip Plickert, Wandlungen des Neoliberalismus: Eine
Studie zu Entwicklung und Ausstrahlung der “Mont Pèlerin Society” (Transformations of neoliberalism: A study of the
development and impact of the Mont Pèlerin Society) (Stuttgart, 2008). Transnational approaches to conservatism
include Jennifer Butler, Born Again: The Christian Right Globalized (London, 2006); Martin Durham and Margaret
Power, eds., New Perspectives on the Transnational Right (New York, 2010); Philip Mirowski and Dieter Plehwe, eds.,
The Road from Mont Pèlerin: The Making of the Neoliberal Thought Collective (Cambridge, Mass., 2009); and Noam
Gidon, “Reading Hayek in Jerusalem: The Shalem Center as a Case Study of Transnational Conservatism,” unpublished paper, 2011 (in Lisa McGirr’s possession).
10
Beverly Gage, The Day Wall Street Exploded: A Story of America in Its First Age of Terror (New York, 2009); Julia C.
Ott, “‘The Free and Open People’s Market’: Political Ideology and Retail Brokerage at the New York Stock Exchange,
1913–1933,” Journal of American History, 96 (June 2009), 44–71. Phillips-Fein, “Conservatism,” 738.
11
Brinkley, “Problem of American Conservatism,” 418, 422.
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fervor of evangelical Protestant religiosity to call for curbing the tentacles of corporate
power. Agrarian socialists, as Jim Bissett has told us, meshed Jesus, Karl Marx, and Thomas
Jefferson in the early twentieth century. William Jennings Bryan’s deep fundamentalist
traditionalism and staunch Democratic reform ethos is also suggestive of the difficulty of
any simplistic linkages of Christian evangelicalism and “conservatism.” These earlier constellations, however, were reworked in the postwar period, as liberals increasingly became
champions of personal freedom, and regions where staunch Protestantism had traditionally flourished underwent dramatic economic change (thanks in no small part to New
Deal economic policies).12
While the ideas that came under the umbrella of the post–World War II Right can
certainly be traced back to earlier incarnations (deep distrust of the state, libertarian individualism, an emphasis on property as the fundamental basis of freedom, antiradicalism,
and staunch religiosity were all prevalent currents in American history), such echoes do
not amount to a cohesive conservative tradition that the postwar Right was merely carrying forward. The intensity of the soul searching and philosophical debates among conservatives after World War II evince the extent to which conservatism was being constructed
afresh from a new constellation of ideas.
A fitting analogue for understanding how ideologies such as “liberalism” and “conservatism” relate to their prewar lineages might be the much-studied demise of progressivism. Prior to the New Deal, liberal forbears (those progressives such as Jane Addams)
favored utilizing the state not only to reform the economy but also to improve private
behavior. This common wisdom had led to the nation’s embrace of national prohibition.
In no small part due to the traumatic experience of national prohibition in the 1920s,
modern liberals drew a thicker line between private behavior and government regulation
than had early twentieth-century reformers. Indeed, liberals’ increasing emphasis on personal rights and freedoms opened up a space after World War II for conservative claims
to being the champions of “moral virtue.”
Even this brief foray into the shifting currents of ideas that constituted progressivism,
liberalism, and conservatism should suggest the problem of searching for the origins of
the postwar movement earlier in the century. Studying the deep currents of conservative
religiosity, antibolshevism, anti-Catholicism, and the strength of antistatist traditions and
free-market ideas in U.S. history may, however, lead us to view the liberal ascendency
between the New Deal and the 1960s, as Jefferson Cowie and Nick Salvatore have
suggested, as the “long exception”: evidence not of a liberal consensus stretching back to
the American Revolution but a brief interlude when antistatist individualism and the
prerogatives of property were sidelined in favor of a more optimistic liberalism that sought
to distribute power downward and somewhat more equitably in society.13
12
On the links between religion and populism, see Joe Creech, Righteous Indignation: Religion and the Populist
Revolution (Urbana, 2006); and Charles Postel, The Populist Vision (New York, 2009). Jim Bissett, Agrarian Socialism
in America: Marx, Jefferson, and Jesus in the Oklahoma Countryside, 1904–1920 (Norman, 1999). Michael Kazin,
A Godly Hero: The Life of William Jennings Bryan (New York, 2006).
13
Jefferson Cowie and Nick Salvatore, “The Long Exception: Rethinking the Place of the New Deal in American
History,” International Labor and Working-Class History, 74 (Fall 2008), 1–32.