C© 2012 The Historical Society and Wiley Periodicals, Inc.

Hyrum Lew i s

Historians and the Mythof American Conservatism

OVER THE LAST four decades, historians have increasingly turned their at-

tention to the analysis of such categories as race, gender, ethnicity, and

nation to show the degree to which these identifiers have meaning contin-

gent upon time and place. Unfortunately, historians have yet to apply this

same approach to conservatism and, consequently, the field is dominated

by an essentialist myth—the false notion that a single set of characteristics,

beliefs, tendencies, or attitudes unites conservatives of all eras and places.1

It is time that historians recognize that while the term “conservative” may

serve as a useful heuristic device with which to navigate the historical land-

scape, it is nonetheless a protean, socially constructed category which takes

on new connotations and sheds old ones over time without retaining any

definitional core that transcends historical context. The meanings attached

to conservative institutions and beliefs have changed radically according to

1See, for example, Nell Irvin Painter, The History of White People (New York: W.W.Norton, 2010); Gail Bederman, Manliness and Civilization: A Cultural History of Gender andRace in the United States, 1880–1917 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996); MatthewFrye Jacobson, Whiteness of a Different Color: European Immigrants and the Alchemy of Race(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999); and Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities:Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 1983). Anderson ex-plores the emergence of national identities as imagined communities, and yet the conservativemovement is as much an imagined community as any nation. The idea of race as a “social andconventional” concept has been around at least since Gunnar Myrdal’s 1944 work, An Amer-ican Dilemma: The Negro Problem and Modern Democracy (New York: Harper & Brothers,1944).

The Journal of The Historical Society XII:1 March 2012 27

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electoral expedience, interest group pressure, the emergence of new issues,

and changes in the positions of conservative leaders. Thus, the term “con-

servative” does not have an essence, only a history, and it is only by looking

across time that we can see how the only constant in conservatism is its

evolution. Conservative essentialism is, indeed, a myth.

The following article will show the degree to which the Myth of American

Conservatism has pervaded the historiography of the field thus far and has

created barriers to understanding that stifle and make repetitive the scholar-

ship of the political right. But it will also suggest a way forward through a

new, evolutionary paradigm that would not only make our histories of con-

servatism more accurate, but also open up the field to more fruitful avenues

of inquiry.

The Myth of American Conservatism first took hold when conservatism

became the subject of widespread historical attention in the 1980s. Previ-

ously, only a handful of scholars, such as George Nash, Jack Diggins, and

Russell Kirk,2 had addressed the topic, but after the election of Ronald

Reagan these lone voices crying in the wilderness were joined by historians

who entered the field in droves hoping to explain how this small, eccentric

intellectual movement at the margins of society had become a major force in

American politics. Unfortunately, these scholars established an essentialist

narrative that framed all subsequent histories of the American right.

The narrative can be summarized as follows: the American conserva-

tive movement was born in the 1950s when the young William F. Buckley

Jr. united conservatives as a coherent intellectual force at his magazine, Na-

tional Review. However, the movement remained a political orphan until the

mid-1960s when conservatives wrested control of the Republican Party from

its moderate Eisenhower-Rockefeller wing and nominated Senator Barry

Goldwater for the presidency. The 1964 Goldwater campaign, although un-

successful, established an institutional base for conservative political action

that allowed the movement finally to achieve political power when Reagan

2George Nash, The Conservative Intellectual Movement in America, since 1945 (New York:Basic Books, 1976); John P. Diggins, Up from Communism: Conservative Odysseys in Ameri-can Intellectual History (New York: Harper & Row, 1975); and Russell Kirk, The ConservativeMind: From Burke to Santayana (Chicago: H. Regnery Co., 1953).

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Historians and the Myth of American Conservatism

won the presidency in 1980. Conservatives cemented and extended their

dominance of American politics with the Gingrich Revolution of 1994 and,

more especially, with the election of Reagan’s ideological heir, George W.

Bush, in 2000. I call this standard account, which is told in various ways in

virtually all conservative histories, the “Triumphalist Narrative.”

The Triumphalist Narrative originated with conservatives themselves

who, during the Reagan years and shortly after, took a celebratory tone

in relating the historical “rise” of the movement they identified with. Typ-

ical of the genre are Paul Gottfried and Thomas Fleming’s The Conser-

vative Movement, John P. East’s The American Conservative Movement:

The Philosophical Founders, and J. David Hoeveler’s Watch on the Right.

Meanwhile participants in the movement, such as William Rusher, Al-

fred Regnery, J. William Middendorf, and Richard Viguerie, also chimed

in by relating the “rise of the right” from a first-person point of view.3

Later, scholars at right-wing think tanks, such as Lee Edwards and Steven

Hayward, further reinforced the Triumphalist Narrative with works of their

own.4

But the field rose to a new level in the 1990s, when academic historians

(including many liberals) joined in. While they still operated within the

limitations of the Triumphalist Narrative, they brought scholarly balance

and tone to what had been mostly cheerleading up to that point. These

historians were not only willing to take a critical look at conservatism, but

they also probed deeper into locating the roots of the political movement

in the 1960s, when the Goldwater campaign laid the foundations on which

3Paul Gottfried and Thomas Fleming, The Conservative Movement (Boston: Twayne Publish-ers, 1988); John P. East, The American Conservative Movement: The Philosophical Founders(Chicago: Regnery Books, 1986); J. David Hoeveler, Watch on the Right: Conservative Intel-lectuals in the Reagan Era (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1991); William Rusher,The Rise of the Right (New York: William Morrow, 1984); Alfred Regnery, Upstream: TheAscendance of American Conservatism (New York: Threshold Editions, 2008); J. WilliamMiddendorf II, A Glorious Disaster: Barry Goldwater’s Presidential Campaign and the Ori-gins of the Conservative Movement (New York: Basic Books, 2006); and Richard Viguerie andDavid Franke, America’s Right Turn: How Conservatives Used New and Alternative Media toTake Power (Chicago: Bonus Books, 2004).

4Lee Edwards, The Conservative Revolution: The Movement that Remade America(New York: Free Press, 1999); and Steven F. Hayward, The Age of Reagan: The Fall ofthe Old Liberal Order, 1964–1980 (Roseville, CA: Forum, 2001).

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Reagan, Gingrich, and Bush would later build. Mary Brennan analyzed

the conservative capture of the GOP in her book Turning Right in the

Sixties, while William Berman looked to the Nixon administration as the

moment when America began its rightward lurch.5 In their books on Young

Americans for Freedom, John Andrew and Gregory Schneider chronicled

the much-overlooked conservative youth movement that mirrored (but was

in many ways just as strong as) the much more famous and notable left-

youth movements like Students for a Democratic Society.6 Journalist Rick

Perlstein gave a popular, readable account of the importance of Goldwater

in his widely read Before the Storm: Barry Goldwater and the Unmaking

of the American Consensus.7 While many scholars focused on the elites of

the conservative movement, scholars like Harvard’s Lisa McGirr looked at

the grassroots activists of the 1960s right in Suburban Warriors, her social

history of the Goldwater run.8

Even more scholars were drawn to the field in the first decade of

the twenty-first century when conservatives gained control over all three

branches of government during the George W. Bush presidency. Jonathan

Schoenwald’s A Time For Choosing: The Rise of Modern American Con-

servatism (2001) offered the century’s first comprehensive history of con-

servatism, but was shortly followed by Donald Critchlow’s The Conser-

vative Ascendancy (2007), Gregory Schneider’s The Conservative Century:

From Reaction to Revolution (2009), and Michael Schaller’s, Right Turn:

American Life in the Reagan-Bush Era (2007).9 Libertarian journalist Brian

5Mary C. Brennan, Turning Right in the Sixties: The Conservative Capture of the GOP(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1995); and William C. Berman, America’sRight Turn: From Nixon to Bush (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994).

6John Andrew, The Other Side of the Sixties: Young Americans for Freedom and the Riseof Conservative Politics (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1997); and GregorySchneider, Cadres for Conservatism: Young Americans for Freedom and the Rise of the Con-temporary Right (New York: New York University Press, 1999).

7Rick Perlstein, Before the Storm: Barry Goldwater and the Unmaking of the AmericanConsensus (New York: Hill and Wang, 2001).

8Lisa McGirr, Suburban Warriors: The Origins of the New American Right (Princeton:Princeton University Press, 2001). For another scholarly account of the rise of the right from the1990s, see Godfrey Hodgson, The World Turned Right Side Up: A History of the ConservativeAscendancy in America (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1996).

9Jonathan M. Schoenwald, A Time for Choosing: The Rise of Modern American Con-servatism (Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press, 2001); Donald T. Critchlow, The

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Historians and the Myth of American Conservatism

Doherty aptly summarized the growing state of conservative historiography

when he wrote, “In a little more than a decade, the field of conservative his-

tory has gone from neglected to overcrowded—especially given how often

the books tell more or less the same story.”10

Despite their differing emphases or perspectives, all of these histories

have upheld and perpetuated the essentialism inherent in the Triumphalist

Narrative. If, indeed, conservatives had “captured” America, then America

itself had changed by gravitating towards a fixed conservative polestar. As

the amount of historical work on conservatism grew after 1980, so did the

prevalence of the Myth.

While the Triumphalist Narrative seemed convincing through Bush’s first

term, it began to unravel in his second term as conservatives lost the political

dominance that had seemed so permanent just a few years earlier. After

conservatives suffered major electoral defeats in 2006 and 2008, the moment

was ripe for scholars to rethink the essentialism and triumphalism that

defined the field; instead, they dug in their heels and tacked another chapter

on to the same story by turning the “rise of conservatism” into the “the

rise and fall of conservatism.” While scholars of the previous three decades

had attempted to explain why conservatism rose, new scholars emerged

to say the same, but also to add an explanation as to why the triumph,

which looked enduring during the George W. Bush years, had collapsed so

suddenly. Triumphalism merely became Declensionism.11

Conservative Ascendancy: How the GOP Right Made Political History (Cambridge: HarvardUniversity Press, 2007); Gregory Schneider, The Conservative Century: From Reaction to Rev-olution (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2009); and Michael Schaller, RightTurn: American Life in the Reagan-Bush Era, 1980–1992 (New York: Oxford University Press,2007).

10Brian Doherty, “Conservatism’s Hollow Defeat,” Reason (March 2009), available at<http://reason.com/archives/2009/02/27/conservatisms-hollow-defeat> accessed Mar 7, 2011.

11Where the Triumphalists had located the origins of conservative political power in theevents of the 1960s (e.g., the Goldwater campaign), the Declensionists saw the 1970s as themore crucial decade since it paved the way for Reagan’s 1980 victory. One sees this focusin Kim Phillips-Fein’s Invisible Hands: The Making of the Conservative Movement from theNew Deal to Reagan (New York: W.W. Norton and Company, 2009), which looks at the rolebusiness played in creating the institutional framework for laissez-faire conservative ideas; andthe essay collection edited by Bruce Schulman and Julian Zelizer, Rightward Bound: MakingAmerica Conservative in the 1970s (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2008), which seeslarger forces, such as demographic shifts and a changing economic landscape, as responsi-ble for turning America rightward in the 1970s. Laura Kalman’s Right Star Rising: A New

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To account for conservative decline, historians turned to one of two expla-

nations: “Fall by Extremism” or “Fall by Apostasy.” In the Fall by Extrem-

ism view, conservatism began to decline under Bush because conservatives

had gone too far with their ideology and, by indulging their radical ten-

dencies, caused their own implosion. Most prominent among the works

offering this explanation was Sean Wilentz’s The Age of Reagan. According

to Wilentz, Reagan, although conservative, had not been an ideologue, but

a pragmatist; George W. Bush, on the other hand, was one of the worst

presidents in U.S. history (perhaps the worst) because, unlike Reagan, he

lacked a moderating, compromising sensibility that would have restrained

his extremist tendencies.12 Bush, in other words, held the same right-wing

views as Reagan, but overplayed the conservative hand with a dogmatic,

uncompromising radicalism.

Unfortunately for Wilentz, the facts do not bear out his Fall by Extrem-

ism interpretation. The truth is that Bush did not extend and radicalize

the Reagan/Goldwater conservative agenda, but rather pursued a differ-

ent conservative agenda. While Reagan and Goldwater held the ideal of

government limitation as their central ideological principle (even if Rea-

gan did not always follow it in practice; see below), Bush’s “compassionate

conservatism” saw a positive role for dramatically expanding government

power.13

For instance, under Bush government spending as a percentage of GDP

increased faster and further than under any other president in history ex-

cept for Franklin Roosevelt and Lyndon Johnson (from about 18 percent to

Politics, 1974–1980 (New York: W.W. Norton, 2010) explicitly argues that the triumphalistswere wrong on their timing: the conservative turn did not begin in the 1960s, but only afterNixon, when Watergate created growing distrust in government, religious issues took on a newimportance in public life, a resurgent Russia led to a new militarism, and stagflation led manyto abandon the liberal consensus on economics.

12Sean Wilentz, The Age of Reagan: A History, 1974–2008 (New York: Harper, 2008); andSean Wilentz, “The Worst President in History? One of America’s leading historians assessesGeorge W. Bush,” Rolling Stone, April 21, 2006.

13Allan Lichtman also subscribes to a variation of the Fall by Extremism view in his claim thatas the right grows more extreme in its dedication to the antithetical ideals of private enterpriseand Christian morality, conservatism is collapsing under the weight of its own contradictions.See Allen Lichtman, White Protestant Nation: The Rise of the American Conservative Move-ment (New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, 2008), 436–455.

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Historians and the Myth of American Conservatism

over 24 percent).14 Domestically, Bush created new government agencies,

expanded the welfare state with his Medicare Prescription Drug bill, sub-

stantially increased discretionary spending, enlarged government powers of

surveillance and detention, and created new government-sponsored “faith

based initiatives.” Of course, by launching two wars in the Middle East and

expanding the American military presence globally, Bush also increased the

size and scope of the U.S. government in those realms as well. By contrast, the

moderate liberal Bill Clinton reduced the size of government slightly during

his presidency (it went from 21 percent to 18 percent of GDP, about what

it had been under Reagan).15 Clearly, Bush’s was not a small-government

conservatism, a la Goldwater, but a transformed conservatism that sought

to use government power to achieve conservative ends (as they had come to

be defined by the 2000s).16

The pre-Bush connection between conservatism and limited government

was also tenuous. Prior to the twentieth century, liberals, not conserva-

tives, were those who wished to expand a conception of individual lib-

erty by reducing government interference in private affairs (hence the term

“classical liberal” to refer to those with libertarian tendencies). Conserva-

tives, by contrast, wished to conserve hereditary privileges of monarchy

and aristocratic mercantilism against free markets and free association.17 In

14For government spending data, see the federal government’s Office of Budget Managementwebsite at http://www.whitehouse.gov/omb/budget/Historicals, accessed Jun 2, 2011.

15Nor are conservatives, by definition, “tax cutters.” Barry Goldwater took an ideolog-ical stand against John F. Kennedy’s proposed tax cuts (that primarily benefited the rich)on the grounds that cutting taxes without commensurate cuts in government spending wasirresponsible. He called such tax cuts “dangerously inflationary” if “there is no correspond-ing cut in government spending.” Hedley Donovan, “The Goldwater Dilemma,” Life 57:12(Sep 18, 1964): 112A (subsection entitled “A tax cut—after ‘the spending spree’”). Reagan,after cutting taxes once early in his presidency, then hiked taxes many times during his twoterms in an attempt to reduce the deficit. Kyle Longley et. al., Deconstructing Reagan: Conser-vative Mythology and America’s Fortieth President (Armonk, NY: M.E. Sharpe, 2007), 47. Inother words, Goldwater conservatism meant limited government even if it allowed high taxes,while Bush conservatism meant low taxes even if it allowed big government. Without question,conservatism changed radically from 1964 to 2004 and, on some fiscal matters, came to meanthe exact opposite of what it once had.

16See Lichtman, White Protestant Nation, 320–330.17Note also that both The Federalist Papers and John Calhoun’s Disquisition on Government

are considered classic conservative texts, even though they advanced opposite arguments—theFederalist authors called for centralizing national government power while Calhoun called fordevolution of power to the states.

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pre-twentieth-century U.S. history, the liberal followers of Presidents Jeffer-

son and Jackson combated the conservative schemes of Hamilton and Biddle

to expand the scope and power of the federal government, while the lead-

ing self-proclaimed liberal of late nineteenth-century America, Nation editor

E. L. Godkin, held freeing the individual from the “vexatious meddling of

government” as the ultimate goal and essence of liberalism.18

Even in the present, the link between conservatism and limited government

is weak. Most current conservatives openly advocate expanding government

power, as long as it is done in the realm of defense, the “war on terrorism,”

crime prevention, or programs supporting “traditional values.”19 Depending

on circumstances, limiting government power is often as much the concern

of the antiwar or civil libertarian left as it is of the right.

Clearly, the liberal-conservative divide is not so much over whether or not

to limit government, but in what ways to limit government—liberals favor

expansion of the welfare state, and conservatives favor expansion of the

military-morality state. It appears, then, that Wilentz has let his ideological

antipathy to Bush cloud his vision and limit his analysis. He does not realize

that Bush did not take antigovernment conservatism to an extreme, but

advanced a wholly new conservative agenda—one largely unconcerned with

limited government.

One also finds the Fall by Extremism paradigm on display in recent

treatments of neoconservatism. Historians such as Len Colodny and Tom

Shachtman argue that the rise of ideological neoconservatives in the Bush

administration pushed aside realists and pragmatists and led Bush towards

an extremist foreign policy which culminated in the 2003 invasion of Iraq.

The neoconservatives, they argue, took conservative foreign policy (i.e.,

hawkishness) too far. This extreme conservative hawkishness alienated the

18E. L. Godkin, “The Eclipse of Liberalism,” 9 August 1900, in David Boaz, ed., TheLibertarian Reader: Classic and Contemporary Writings from Lao-Tzu to Milton Friedman(New York: Free Press, 1997), 324–25. Also see Tom G. Palmer, Realizing Freedom: LibertarianTheory, History, and Practice (Washington, DC: Cato Institute, 2009), 32; and Nancy Cohen,The Reconstruction of American Liberalism, 1865–1914 (Chapel Hill: University of NorthCarolina Press, 2002), 47–50, 56–57.

19George W. Bush’s Faith Based Initiatives, for instance, expanded government power with-out protest from the right since they expanded government for conservative purposes.

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Historians and the Myth of American Conservatism

American mainstream and undid the American right.20 Others, such as dis-

affected neocons like Jacob Heilbrunn and Francis Fukuyama, repeat the

neoconservative-extremist-decline story in works of their own.21

But, as with Wilentz, these historians fail to see that Bush’s neocon-

influenced ideology represented an entirely new mode of conservatism rather

than the same old conservatism taken to extremes. Defining conservatism

in terms of foreign policy hawkishness seems particularly satisfying today

when the conservative movement is so bound up with the “War on Terror”

and the decision to invade Iraq, but as recently as the 1950s, conservatives

(led by isolationist senator and conservative standard-bearer Robert Taft)

frequently lambasted liberals for their “warmongering” and meddling in the

affairs of foreign nations, not vice versa.22 Since conservatives were actually

20Len Colodny and Tom Shachtman, The Forty Years War: The Rise and Fall of the Neocons,from Nixon to Obama (New York: Harper, 2009). Also see C. Bradley Thompson with YaronBrook, Neoconservatism: An Obituary for an Idea (Boulder, CO: Paradigm Publishers, 2010).

21Jacob Heilbrunn, They Knew They Were Right: The Rise of the Neocons (New York:Doubleday, 2008); and Francis Fukuyama, America at the Crossroads: Democracy, Power,and the Neoconservative Legacy (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006).

22James T. Patterson, Mr. Republican: A Biography of Robert A. Taft (Boston: HoughtonMifflin, 1972). Friedrich Hayek’s right-wing 1944 work, The Road to Serfdom, was anti-interventionist in every sense: against government interventions into the economy and gov-ernment interventions in foreign wars. A cartoon version of the road to serfdom was evenmore explicitly antiwar, conceiving of military armament as the foot in the door the gov-ernment uses to regulate all facets of life. See “The Road to Serfdom in Cartoons,” bookletpublished by General Motors, Detroit, in the “Thought Starter” series (no. 118), available at<http://mises.org/books/TRTS/>, accessed Dec 15, 2010. It is indicative of my whole argu-ment here that the “war as a pretext for power grab” charges that the “conservative” Hayeklevied against American liberals of his time are the same charges that American liberals ofthe George W. Bush era levied against conservatives. See Joe Conason, It Can Happen Here:Authoritarian Peril in the Age of Bush (New York: Thomas Dunne Books/St. Martin’s Press,2007); and Naomi Wolf, The End of America: Letter of Warning to a Young Patriot (WhiteRiver Junction, VT: Chelsea Green Publishing, 2007). For more on conservative antiwar sen-timent in the FDR era, see Brian Doherty, Radicals for Capitalism: A Freewheeling History ofthe Modern American Libertarian Movement (New York: PublicAffairs, 2007). Doherty notesthat “most of the antiwar forces ended up opposing Roosevelt fully, not limiting themselves tohis foreign policy” (60–61). In his anthology of pre-World War II conservative writing, RobertCrunden shows that his figures were bound together not only by a distrust of the state, butalso by their anti-interventionism in foreign affairs. Robert M. Crunden, ed., The Superflu-ous Men: Conservative Critics of American Culture, 1900–1945 (Austin: University of TexasPress, 1977). According to the Encyclopedia of Conservatism, “from the 1930s to the early1950s, conservatives were strong in isolationist ranks.” Standard-bearers of the right, such asHerbert Hoover and Senator Taft, even opposed the Cold War doctrine of containment asan overly aggressive foreign policy. See Bruce Frohnen, Jeremy Beer, and Jeffrey O. Nelson,eds., American Conservatism: An Encyclopedia (Wilmington, DE: ISI Books, 2006), 444. EvenBuckley had been an America First supporter before the outbreak of World War II. See Sam

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more dovish than liberals throughout the 1930s and 1940s, it makes no sense

to say that a conservative is simply a foreign policy hawk. The conservative

belief in spreading democracy with military force is something that entered

the conservative coalition only in the twenty-first century. Again, Bush was

not an “extremist” of an old variety of conservatism, but a new kind of

conservative less concerned with limited government and more concerned

with spreading American influence militarily.

The Fall by Apostasy explanation fares no better than the Fall by Extrem-

ism one. Instead of arguing that Bush was too radical with his conservatism,

Fall by Apostasy claims that he was not conservative at all. He was, instead,

an impostor-apostate. So contends Sam Tanenhous in his ominous-sounding

The Death of Conservatism. Tanenhous conceives of “true conservatism” as

Burkean—prudent, cautious, and resistant to change—while “revanchist”

conservatives, like Bush, refused to accommodate liberalism and pushed

radical antigovernment policies which were, by their very radicalism, un-

conservative.23

Like Wilentz, Tanenhaus simply has his facts wrong. He claims that con-

servatives started losing elections because they became too radically antigov-

ernment, but it was only after six years of “big government conservatism”

under Bush that the ostensible “death of conservatism” occurred. Bush’s

actual record soundly falsifies Tanenhaus’s claim.

Historian Gregory Schneider also sees Bush as an apostate, but for rea-

sons contrary to those given by Tanenhaus. In The Conservative Century,

Schneider contends that Bush’s departure from the limited government vision

disqualified him as conservative and the Iraq War, far from being “extreme

conservatism,” was actually just warmed-over Wilsonian liberalism in its

hope to spread democracy and end tyranny in the world. “On the majority

of issues,” Schneider concludes, “it is hard to see Bush as a conservative,

yet the equation of Bush with conservatism echoes in the public’s mind,”

and this association would “hasten the speed” at which “conservatism

Tanenhaus, “Athwart History: How William F. Buckley, Jr. Turned Against the War—AndHis Own Movement,” The New Republic (March 19, 2007): 32.

23Sam Tanenhaus, The Death of Conservatism (New York: Random House, 2009).

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Historians and the Myth of American Conservatism

crumbles.”24 Schneider failed to recognize that what was liberal in 1918

(idealist foreign policy) may have become conservative by 2005 and that

what was conservative in 1964 (limited government) had ceased to be cen-

tral to the right a generation later.

The neoconservatives pop up in the Apostasy explanation as often as they

do in the Extremist one. John Diggins, one of the pioneers of conservative

history, re-entered the field in 2007 to make the charge that neoconservatives

caused the unfortunate departure from the successful, conservative legacy

of Reagan. Diggins claimed that Ronald Reagan was one of the greatest

of American presidents primarily because he ignored his hawkish neocon

advisors, while Bush destroyed his presidency and the Reagan legacy by

doing the opposite.25

Paleoconservative historian Paul Gottfried also returned to level a simi-

lar charge against neocons, claiming that their hawkish foreign policy was

of a piece with the un-conservative, big-government agenda they pursued

at home.26 Similarly, Richard Viguerie, one of the leading conservative in-

stitution builders in the 1970s, had hailed the final triumph of American

conservatism in 2004, only to reverse course two years later to condemn the

big-government direction under the neoconservative-driven Bush adminis-

tration that had “hijacked” the movement.27

But both the Extremist and Apostasy explanations for the decline of the

right err in assuming that conservatism has a fixed meaning that Bush either

took too far or strayed from. They fail to realize that the Bush years were

a time of conservative change. Bush was neither extremist nor apostate—he

simply took conservatism in new directions and furthered its metamorpho-

sis. In the 1990s, few would have associated the promotion of democracy

with conservatism, and yet, because of Bush, democracy promotion in Iraq

had become a central tenet of conservatism by 2005. To charge Bush and the

24Schneider, Conservative Century, 213–15.25John P. Diggins, Ronald Reagan: Fate, Freedom, and the Making of History (New York:

W.W. Norton, 2007), 203–212, 285–87.26Paul Gottfried, Conservatism in America: Making Sense of the American Right (New York:

Palgrave Macmillan, 2007).27Richard Viguerie, Conservatives Betrayed: How George W. Bush and Other Big Govern-

ment Republicans Hijacked the Conservative Cause (Los Angeles: Bonus Books, 2006).

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neocons with apostasy fails to see that they were agents of conservative evo-

lution who did not depart from conservatism, but significantly redefined it.

Those who want fewer U.S. government interventions in foreign and do-

mestic affairs (such as Gottfried) might lament this change in conservatism’s

meaning, but they cannot charge that it is not “true conservatism” any more

than liberals of the 1930s could claim that FDR’s New Deal was not “true

liberalism.” Just as liberalism evolved in the early twentieth century away

from its nineteenth-century meaning, which we now call “classical liberal-

ism,” so conservatism in the early twenty-first century has evolved to take

on new meanings as well.

So if historians are to move beyond the Myth of American Conservatism,

how should they address the topic in the future? I recommend that schol-

ars embrace an evolutionary paradigm that will shift their focus away from

how conservatism changed America and towards how America changed

conservatism. Historians should concentrate not on the role of conservatism

in American history, but on the changes that the meaning of conservatism

itself has undergone. Instead of identifying moments of conservative “tri-

umph” or “decline,” they should locate moments of mutation when dis-

locations, electoral necessities, special interest demands, economic forces,

influential figures, or institutional pressures caused epistemic shifts in the

meaning of conservatism and redirected the movement. Our histories should

stop looking for the history of a single conservatism, and start looking at

the multiplicity of conservatisms that have emerged at different times. Con-

servatism is a fluid term to which different ideals, institutions, persons,

and beliefs have been attached; tracking those changes and whatever new

characteristics come to define conservatism should be the task of future

historians.28

This evolutionary approach would yield a new, more accurate storyline

than that currently offered in the field. For example, while the Triumphalist

28An example is Hyrum Lewis, “The Conservative Capture of Anti-Relativist Discourse inPostwar America,” Canadian Journal of History 43 (Winter 2008): 451–475. This article showshow conservatism evolved to take on new metaphysical and epistemological connotations inthe 1950s, as conservatives grabbed the rhetoric of antirelativism from liberals and paved theway for the capture of the votes of religious Americans in later decades.

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Historians and the Myth of American Conservatism

and Declensionist narratives claim that the conservative movement was born

in the 1950s, captured the Republican Party in the 1960s, and gained na-

tional leadership in the 1980s, the evolutionary model shows that, although

conservatism defined itself in the 1950s as opposition to the moderate Eisen-

hower wing of the Republican Party, by the 1980s conservatism had become

identical to what it had once so stridently opposed.

As evidence, consider that, according to the current historiography, the

pre-Goldwater Republican Party was moderate, accepting of the New Deal

consensus (but still hoping to slow its expansion), and acceded to the liberal

foreign policy of containment. Conservatives, on the other hand, opposed the

mainstream Republican Party and hoped to dismantle the New Deal and roll

back communism. The Triumphalists claim that this exogenous conservative

ideology (strident anticommunism and anti-New Dealism) seized control of

its Republican Party host in the 1960s and brought Reagan to power in

1980.

But, were this narrative true, we would expect to have found Reagan

attempting to roll back both the New Deal and communism after he was

elected. He did neither. Like Eisenhower, he accepted (but slowed) the New

Deal welfare state and eventually compromised with Soviet communism in-

stead of confronting and rolling it back. Conservatives of the 1950s despised

Eisenhower for accepting the New Deal and negotiating with the Soviets;

yet by the 1980s, this is precisely what conservatives themselves were do-

ing. Reagan’s popularity had much to do with his moving from conflict to

accommodation with the Soviets and signing arms-reduction treaties (to the

chagrin of some conservatives, such as columnist George Will). The right

had come a long way from Goldwater’s call for the nuclear bombing of

communist countries.29 In other words, by the 1980s conservatism had be-

come what it was born to provide an alternative to: mainstream Eisenhower

Republicanism.30

29See Hayward, Age of Reagan, 132–33.30Opposition to Eisenhower was one of the major themes of the first issue of National

Review (1955) and continued to be so throughout the decade. See “The Magazine’s Credenda,”National Review 1:1 (Nov 19, 1955): 6.

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No explicitly anti-New Deal presidential candidate could have been

elected in 1952 and this remained true in 1980. The opposition to the

New Deal that was once at the center of conservative discourse is now gone

and has been for over three decades. Since Goldwater, conservatives have

not only made peace with the New Deal, but the most prominent conserva-

tive opinion leaders today openly applaud FDR’s policies and consider him

the greatest American leader of the twentieth century, in part for his role

in making capitalism “more humane” via the New Deal.31 A 2004 Wall

Street Journal poll of presidential greatness showed that conservatives were

just as likely to rank Franklin Roosevelt a “great president” as were liber-

als.32 Conservatives had to evolve to accept the welfare state before having

any electoral success. America had not changed regarding the New Deal,

conservatism had.

Even Reagan, who is generally seen as the paragon of libertarian ten-

dencies on the right, nonetheless expanded the number of cabinet agencies,

reinforced Social Security, failed to dislodge any Great Society programs,

raised taxes several times, and never submitted a balanced budget. While

it is true that government spending as a percentage of GDP went slightly

down during his time in office, Reagan’s “slashing of government” was

more rhetoric than reality. American voters have repeatedly demonstrated

over the last four decades their desire to uphold such programs as Medi-

care and Social Security, and no successful conservative candidate has called

for eliminating these programs in a presidential platform (and conservative

31Neoconservative columnist and Fox News commentator Charles Krauthammer, for in-stance, declared Roosevelt the greatest U.S. President of the twentieth century, not only forhis leadership in World War II, but also for making capitalism “more humane.” CharlesKrauthammer interview with Brian Lamb, C-Span’s Q&A, Apr 22, 2005, video available athttp://www.c-spanvideo.org/program/186409–1, accessed Jul 11, 2011. Conrad Black, a lead-ing neoconservative publishing magnate, wrote a hagiography of FDR entitled Franklin DelanoRoosevelt: Champion of Freedom (New York: PublicAffairs, 2003). A conservative historiancalling FDR a “champion of freedom” would have been unthinkable in the 1930s. The stan-dard narrative says that the neocons were former New Deal liberals who turned rightward asthey were “mugged by reality.” And yet, did they really ever “turn” rightward? Neoconserva-tives still believed in the same principles they had earlier: accepting of FDR’s welfare state andhis muscular foreign policy. That they now find themselves on the political right may be lessbecause they changed and more because conservatism did.

32James Taranto and Leonard Leo, eds., Presidential Leadership: Rating the Best and theWorst in the White House (New York: Wall Street Journal Books, 2004), 249–266.

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Historians and the Myth of American Conservatism

congresses have had no success in doing so either). That George W. Bush

promised in his 2000 campaign to expand Medicare, not scale it back, shows

the degree to which conservatives have acceded to this political reality.

The right also had to accommodate the American consensus on racial

issues. Conservatives in the 1950s had supported segregation and de-

cried Eisenhower’s “liberal” decision to integrate southern schools, while

Goldwater captured the southern vote in 1964 by opposing Johnson’s civil

rights legislation.33 Yet by the 1980s, conservatives had become as accom-

modating on civil rights as Eisenhower had been three decades earlier. Buck-

ley himself later admitted his errors in defending segregation and today no

major conservative politicians are attempting to repeal even the most con-

troversial aspects of the 1964 Civil Rights Act.34 The affirmative action pro-

grams so despised by conservatives have also shown remarkable resiliency.

The Triumphalist Narrative rests on the idea that Americans became more

conservative after Goldwater’s defeat, but those conservatives who have won

elections in recent decades have only done so by accommodating themselves

to both the welfare state and popular opinion on racial equality.35

Conservatism was also transformed in the process of incorporating en-

tirely new political issues. Many see positions such as opposition to abortion,

to gay marriage, and to the secularization of schools as essentially conser-

vative, but they were not issues at all before the 1960s. Conservatism only

became identified with these social views in the late 1970s as conservatives

moved to capture the newly mobilized evangelical vote by providing them

with a comfortable home on the political right. Goldwater himself favored

legalized abortion and supported gay rights, but either of these stances would

33The most infamous example was a 24 August 1957 National Review editorial, in whichBuckley called the “White community” the “advanced race” (pp. 148–49).

34See, for instance, James Carney, “Ten Questions for William F. Buckley Jr.,” Time(April 12, 2004), available at http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,993801,00.html, accessed Nov 16, 2011. Also see David Boaz, “Conservatives and Civil Rights,Then and Now,” Cato Institute Opinion and Commentary, Feb 14, 2011, available athttp://www.cato.org/pub_display.php?pub_id=13525, accessed Nov 16, 2011.

35See, for instance, Julian Zelizer, “Establishment Conservative: The Presidency of GeorgeW. Bush,” in Julian E. Zelizer, ed., The Presidency of George W. Bush: A First HistoricalAssessment (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010), 1–11.

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have disqualified him as a conservative in the early twenty-first century.36

Since Goldwater was, by any estimation, a “true conservative” when he

ran for president, we must conclude that conservatism evolved considerably

from the time of his campaign to Reagan’s presidency.

While the idea that America took a significant turn towards the right

from the 1950s to the 1980s provides an attractive and exciting story, it is,

alas, false. Conservatives did not gain power under Reagan because America

had become more conservative, but because conservatism itself had become

more American (i.e., mainstream). Perlstein was wrong: conservatism did

not unmake the American consensus; conservatism, by 1980, had evolved

into the American consensus.37 Over time, the American right has shifted its

emphases, abandoned old causes, and taken up new ones. The “evolution

of conservatism” paradigm better accounts for this dynamism than does

the overused, dated, and myth-laden “rise of conservatism” outlook that

currently dominates the field.

Not only must historians rethink the “rise” of conservatism that culmi-

nated in Reagan, they must also reconsider the recently appended “fall” of

conservatism that supposedly took place under George W. Bush. Since my

contention here is that an evolutionary approach more accurately describes

conservative history than does the regnant essentialist approach, we can

see that conservatism evolved from 1964 to 1980 in ways that attracted

American voters, but evolved from 2000 to 2006 in ways that repelled

them.38 Under Bush, conservatism moved in the direction of a highly un-

popular Wilsonian foreign policy, a fiscally problematic combination of

high government spending along with significant tax cuts, and a religious

36Former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney knows this better than anyone. His need topitch himself as a conservative to compete for the 2012 Republican nomination required himto do an about face on both of these issues.

37Historians long ago discarded the “consensus” view of American history that Hofstadter,Hartz, and Boorstin made popular in the 1950s, but a study of the evolution of conservatismsuggests that we might be wise to bring it back to some degree in our analysis of ideology,parties, and elections.

38This adaptation is already visible on the right (as of 2011) as conservative politicianshave, by and large, retreated from their militant foreign policy stance, even criticizing PresidentObama for being overly interventionist. Does this mean that a reversion to Senator Taft’sposition is the next step in conservative evolution?

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Historians and the Myth of American Conservatism

rhetoric that offended an America increasingly tolerant of gays and secu-

larism. Bush revived Goldwater’s hawkishness but none of his libertarian

agenda, and by 2005 new social issues and foreign policy interventions had

become linchpins of conservative ideology while Goldwater’s priority of re-

ducing government power had fallen by the wayside. While neoconservatives

may have applauded these evolutions, the American populace as a whole

did not.

That conservatism evolved to embody the American consensus from 1964

to 1980 is just one of many possible lines of inquiry for historians to pursue

under this new paradigm. Fortunately, a few historians of the American right

have already made gestures in the right direction by at least recognizing the

protean nature of their subject. George Nash suggested as early as 1976

that the quest to give a final definition of conservatism was misdirected

and dubious: “I doubt there is any single, satisfactory, all-encompassing

definition of the complex phenomenon called conservatism, the content of

which varies enormously with time and place.”39 But instead of pursuing

the field-changing implications of this insight, Nash set it aside and told the

story of the postwar right as a confluence of libertarian and traditionalist

strains bound together by the adhesive of anticommunism.40

Likewise, Alan Brinkley, in his groundbreaking 1994 article, “The Prob-

lem of American Conservatism,” noted that a wide variety of individuals

and schools of thought fell under the label “conservative” and that histori-

ans used the term simply for lack of a better word to describe those forces

that opposed liberalism. “American conservatism,” he correctly concluded,

“is not easy to characterize,” but he failed to offer any methodological way

out of this difficulty.41

Justin Vaı̈sse aptly sees the neoconservative story as one of evolution.

Neoconservatism began, he maintains, as the empirical conscience of lib-

eralism, then mutated into the voice of dissent in the Democratic Party,

and finally became an ideology of militant foreign policy seeking “national

39Nash, Conservative Intellectual Movement in America, xi.40Ibid., 179.41Alan Brinkley, “The Problem of American Conservatism,” The American Historical Re-

view 99:2 (April 1994): 410, 414.

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greatness.”42 But if neoconservatism can evolve, as Vaı̈sse maintains, then

why not conservatism itself? Scholars would do well to follow his lead in

their examinations of the movement as a whole.

Historians David Farber and Patrick Allitt have both argued in their recent

books that conservatism has changed considerably in the last few decades,

but they nonetheless cling to the notion that, beneath all of this change,

there stands an unchanging conservative essence. For Farber, this essence is

the preservation of hierarchy and elitism, while, for Allitt, it is a “backward-

looking” political orientation.43

42Justin Vaı̈sse, Neoconservatism: The Biography of a Movement, translated by ArthurGoldhammer (Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2010).

43David Farber, The Rise and Fall of Modern American Conservatism: A Short History(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010). If Farber is correct, then what are we to makeof recent conservative populism? In the current day, anti-elitism has moved to the center ofconservative identity as the contemporary political right sees itself as composed of hardwork-ing, Christian middle-Americans under assault from liberal, secular elites in Hollywood, the“mainstream media,” and universities. And this is nothing new: right-wing Senator Joseph Mc-Carthy’s 1950s anticommunist crusade was nothing if not demagogic and aimed against elitesof the “Establishment.” Indeed, Richard Hofstadter famously explained social support for Mc-Carthy as an ugly manifestation of mass resentment towards those of higher status. For more onMcCarthyism as a populist attack on elites, see Michael Kimmage, The Conservative Turn: Li-onel Trilling, Whittaker Chambers, and the Lessons of Anti-Communism (Cambridge: HarvardUniversity Press, 2009), 215, 228–29; and Richard Hofstadter, The Paranoid Style in AmericanPolitics, and Other Essays (New York: Knopf, 1965). Against Farber’s contention, the truthis that anti-elitism finds expression on both sides of the present spectrum: conservatives railagainst cultural and media elites, while liberals rail against economic elites (and both, of course,rail against political elites when the other party is in power). Patrick Allitt, The Conservatives:Ideas and Personalities Throughout American History (New Haven: Yale University Press,2009), 2–3. Allitt’s definition of “conservatism as backward-looking” fails as well. RonaldReagan, the most iconic conservative of the last fifty years, often used the future-orientedlanguage of his hero Thomas Paine (who was also the nemesis of conservative icon EdmundBurke) in promoting his policies, saying, “We have it in our power to begin the world overagain.” Ronald Reagan, “Presidential Nomination Acceptance Speech,” Republican NationalConvention, Detroit, Michigan, July 17, 1980, in The Greatest Speeches of Ronald Reagan(West Palm Beach, FL: NewsMax.com, 2001), 82. Two of the leading futurologists of the latetwentieth century, Herman Kahn and Alvin Toffler, were also leading lights in conservativecircles, as are Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales, a disciple of conservative-inspiring economistFriedrich Hayek, and Paypal founder Peter Thiel, devotee of right-wing novelist Ayn Rand.See Katherine Mangu-Ward, “Wikipedia and Beyond: Jimmy Wales’ sprawling Vision,” Rea-son (June 2007), available at http://reason.com/archives/2007/05/30/wikipedia-and-beyond, ac-cessed June 1, 2011; and Peter Thiel, “The Education of a Libertarian,” Cato Unbound, April13, 2009, available at http://www.cato-unbound.org/2009/04/13/peter-thiel/the-education-of-a-libertarian/, accessed June 1, 2011. Allitt’s view that conservatives are backward-looking,reactive, and against political philosophy would also exclude those on the right who advocatedthe invasion of Iraq—a pre-emptive (rather than reactive), forward-directed approach to foreignpolicy in the Middle East, most strongly advocated by neoconservatives schooled in Straussianpolitical philosophy. See Anne Norton, Leo Strauss and the Politics of American Empire (New

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Historians and the Myth of American Conservatism

Despite these steps in the right direction, historians must do better. As I

hope to have shown above, evolution, not essence, is the story of American

conservatism. If historians can understand that Taft’s conservatism differed

from Goldwater’s, Goldwater’s from Reagan’s, Reagan’s from Bush’s, and

Bush’s from whatever is to come next, they will then be ready to take on

the story of conservatism’s ongoing mutation as it seeks fitness for survival

in a dynamic American democracy. Historians should build on the work of

Brinkley, Nash, Vaı̈sse, Farber, and Allitt, but also realize that since there

is no “true conservatism” beneath the flux, then the changes conservatism

has undergone should be central rather than peripheral to their narratives.

Once unshackled from the Myth of American Conservatism, historians can

then move on to more insightful questions, such as: “How has conser-

vatism evolved?”; “When did these evolutions happen?”; and “what and

who caused them?” These questions and their answers will add greatly to

our understanding of the recent American past.

Haven: Yale University Press, 2004), 182–83. In reality, both liberals and conservatives arebackward or forward as it suits their political agenda at any given moment.

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