Rethinking American Conservatism:
Toward a New Narrative
Donald T. Critchlow
Kim Phillips-Fein provides a model essay in which she assays the current literature, discerns trends, and suggests new areas of research for the field of postwar American conservatism. By their nature, historiographical essays do not lend themselves to proposing new
historical narratives; instead they indicate ways to broaden the existing narrative through
further research. Specifically, Phillips-Fein suggests further research in the intellectual
roots of American conservatism, asserts the importance of placing conservatism within a
larger context that includes American liberalism in the postwar period, and emphasizes
the centrality of understanding the actual politics that shaped conservatism as it gained
power within the Republican party and the government.
Phillips-Fein astutely notes that George H. Nash’s The Conservative Intellectual
Tradition since 1945, published nearly thirty-five years ago, remains unchallenged,
but recent studies on Ayn Rand, southern agrarians, black conservative intellectuals,
neoconservatives, jurisprudence, and supply-side and rational-choice economics
reveal the limitations of Nash’s focus and his “fusionist” interpretation. More importantly, she finds that “the most serious problems that historians face today in thinking
about the Right have to do with its origins,” and she asks whether conservatism did
truly “begin only in the postwar years.” She cites an array of historians who have
found strong antiradical, anticommunist, and antistatist activity in the early twentieth
century.1
Transposing contemporary political labels to earlier periods in history presents obvious
problems. Indeed, conservatives themselves are divided about whether Alexander Hamilton
and Thomas Jefferson were conservatives. In his 1953 book The Conservative Mind: From
Burke to Eliot, Russell Kirk included antebellum apologists for slavery and defenders of
states’ rights within the conservative tradition. More recently, Patrick Allitt located
Theodore Roosevelt within the conservative camp. Nomenclature can be debatable, but
political terms, ideology, and party struggle must be placed historically, and scholars must
guard against imposing contemporary labels on past actors or movements. The discovery
Donald T. Critchlow is the Barry Goldwater Chair in American Institutions at Arizona State University.
Readers may contact Critchlow at [email protected].
1
George H. Nash, The Conservative Intellectual Movement in America since 1945 (New York, 1976).
Kim Phillips-Fein, “Conservatism: A State of the Field,” Journal of American History, 99 (Dec. 2011), esp.
736.
doi: 10.1093/jahist/jar390
© 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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Rethinking American Conservatism: Toward a New Narrative
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of a “conservative temperament” is a poor substitute for rigorous historical analysis that
understands the peculiarities and uniqueness of previous historical eras.2
At issue is the definition of “conservative.” A useful definition might begin with a conceptual understanding that includes the notion, as the medieval historian Robert Stacey
phrased it, that “government power rests on the free consent of its subjects; that governmental powers are inherently limited; and that governments must not intrude upon matters
of private conscience.” The issue is not whether modern American conservatives have
been consistent in their views or application of “limited government”—we know they
have not—but whether the concept of limited government has deep roots in the Western
tradition. In a public lecture delivered at the University of Washington in January 2011,
Stacey posited that the concept of limited government emerged in medieval Europe and
had direct influence on American republican thought in the eighteenth century. He
maintained that the concept of limited government emerged from an Augustinian view
of imperfect civil government, the peculiar consensual relationship of kings to lords in
that period, and conciliarist theory that papal authority rested on church councils.3
Stacey’s argument is too complex to detail here, but it begins with a view that Augustine’s
conception of government exerted great influence on later political theorists. Stacey
observes that Augustine believed that because government is “limited in its aims and
capacities,” it cannot make us good. This perspective of limited government, Stacey maintains, was reinforced in tenth- and eleventh-century Europe by “feudal” relationships
that were “conceived of as quasi-legal contracts, to which both parties were equally and
mutually bound.” Church and state conflicts of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries aided
the emergence of limited government. Moreover, the need for consent was a practical fact
in high medieval politics. Stacey notes that “every medieval European Kingdom and most
European cities of any size, therefore, developed some sort of assembly of notables with
which territorial rulers could negotiate.” As a result, consent to taxation, for example, was
a theoretical and practical requirement in medieval Europe.4
In explaining the emergence of a tradition of constitutionally limited, representative
government, Stacey added the role of conciliarism in the history of the late-medieval
church. Conciliarist theorists held that the supreme authority in the church resided not
in the Pope, not in the Cardinals, but in a general council representing the entire church.
Conciliarist arguments about the structure within the church were applied to state authority.
What is important about these political theorists is that they had direct influence on later
republican thought. There was a direct line of intellectual descent from thinkers of the
late fourteenth through the sixteenth centuries to eighteenth-century political theorists.
Thomas Jefferson read John Locke, who read the sixteenth-century thinker George
Buchanan, who read Jacques Almain, who read Jean Charlier de Gerson and Pierre d’Ailly
(both active participants in the conciliarist/papal struggles of the fifteenth century).
This intellectual conception of limited government authority indicates that the American conservative tradition is deeply rooted in history and should not be seen as simply a
2
On a “conservative temperament,” see Russell Kirk, The Conservative Mind: From Burke to Eliot (London,
1953); and Patrick Allitt, The Conservatives: Ideas and Personalities throughout American History (New Haven,
2009).
3
Robert Stacey, “Limited Government,” paper delivered as part of the lecture series The Medieval Origins of
the Modern Western World, University of Washington, Seattle, Jan. 2011 (in Donald T. Critchlow’s possession).
4
Ibid.
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reaction to New Deal liberalism, although it was that politically. More to the point, this
understanding suggests that we need imaginative scholars to begin to reconceptualize the
place of conservatism and challenge the progressive narrative that developed in the 1950s
and still influences our thinking in subtle ways.
We might begin this process with a little counterfactual thought experiment. Suppose
we start with the idea that modern liberalism is the ideological anomaly of the twentieth
century. Instead of seeing the course of American history as a forward, albeit erratic,
movement toward government expansion, we might turn this premise on its head—that
is, we postulate a dialectic argument that begins with different assumptions. What happens if we assume that modern liberal reform, which most often finds expression during
times of periodic social and economic crisis, is the exception rather than the rule? Such a
counterfactual idea reveals that modern liberalism stands outside a deep and popular
sentiment and long-standing ideology that disdains centralized government, distrusts
politicians (whatever their party), and dislikes social planners. We would discover a JudeoChristian faith that expresses charity and a belief in being thy brother’s and sister’s keeper,
and that looks toward custom and tradition and a transcendent moral order as its social
compasses.
We need not accept, let alone welcome, this antistatist ideology of limited government,
but we do need to think outside the box and challenge easy assumptions about our
history. Such thinking, whatever form it takes, might help develop new and broader
narratives of modern American history, including the story of conservatism during the
twentieth and twenty-first centuries.
Any new narrative of modern American politics also must acknowledge that conservatism and liberalism have changed over time, as Phillips-Fein suggests in her essay, and any
understanding of conservatism needs to be framed within a context of liberal politics. The
conservatism of Barry Goldwater was not the same as that of George W. Bush. Similarly,
liberalism underwent important changes, especially in the late 1960s and 1970s when the
New Deal political coalition began to disintegrate. Any political understanding of conservatism must begin with the leftward shift of the Democratic party that began when
George McGovern won the party’s nomination in 1972. To defeat old-guard New Deal
Democratic senators such as Hubert Humphrey of Minnesota, Edmund Muskie of
Maine, and Henry “Scoop” Jackson of Washington (all anticommunist defense hawks),
McGovern strategically reached out to new voters, mostly young cultural leftists who
were antiwar activists, feminists, and New Left sympathizers. To challenge the Democratic establishment that was based on the urban, blue-collar labor wing of the party,
McGovern mobilized voters outside the traditional base of the party.5
These changes were not only political but also ideological as new progressive activists
challenged liberals within the Democratic party. The older liberal tradition, as it emerged
in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, primarily sought to address the ills of
industrial capitalism. The new progressivism expressed concerns about the problems of an
affluent postindustrial society. The new progressives disparaged consumption and deprecated corporate capitalism. As a result, they condemned both Western industrial democracy and the industrial socialism of the Soviet Union. They espoused community control,
5
Byron R. Shafer, The Quiet Revolution: The Struggle for the Democratic Party and the Shaping of Post-reform
Politics (New York, 1983); Bruce Miroff, The Liberals’ Moment: The McGovern Insurgency and the Identity Crisis of the
Democratic Party (Lawrence, 2007).
Rethinking American Conservatism: Toward a New Narrative
755
direct democracy, and antitechnological and alternative technological solutions. They had
a marked tendency to romanticize nature and to deride affluence and consumption.
This vision was founded not on a coherent philosophical system but on a shared anxiety about postwar America and its wasteful affluence. The wave of activism that emerged
in the 1960s became institutionalized during the 1970s. Activists spoke the language of
social justice and equality, which expressed a long reformist tradition in America, but
their general concerns were less with the problems of production than the problems of
consumerism.
The story of conservatism is one of ideological and political tensions. For example, the
political relationship between Richard M. Nixon and Ronald Reagan needs further exploration. When Reagan ran for governor of California in 1966 he looked toward Goldwater
as a mentor. As governor he continued to write to Goldwater, often jokingly telling the
former presidential candidate that he now understood the travail he had experienced
running for office. When Reagan decided to challenge Gerald R. Ford for the Republican
nomination in 1976, however, relations between Reagan and Goldwater grew tense. The
tensions heightened when, during the North Carolina primary, Reagan acted on the
advice of Senator Jesse Helms and began criticizing Ford about entering into the negotiations that began the process of returning the canal to Panama. Goldwater worried
that Reagan’s statements could “needlessly lead this country into open conflict.”
When Goldwater endorsed Ford for the presidency, Reagan broke completely with
Goldwater. He did not correspond with his former ally and mentor for fifteen months.6
The story of conservatism in postwar America is one of ideological contradiction,
political opportunism, electoral triumph, and of deeply held beliefs about the nature of
the individual and the good society.
6
Goldwater memo, May 4, 1976, Alpha correspondence file, Personal and Political Papers of Senator Barry M.
Goldwater (Arizona Historical Foundation, Arizona State University, Tempe); Barry Goldwater to John Wayne,
May 12, 1976, ibid.; Goldwater to Nancy and Ronald Reagan, May 13, 1976, ibid.; Ronald Reagan to Goldwater,
June 3, 1976, ibid.; Goldwater to Ronald Reagan, Dec. 15, 1977, ibid.; Ronald Reagan to Goldwater, Dec. 30,
1977, ibid.; Ronald Reagan to Goldwater, Feb. 3, 1978, ibid.; Goldwater to Nancy Reagan, Aug. 21, 1978, ibid.