Conservatism A State of Field

Conservatism: A State of the Field
Kim Phillips-Fein
Kim Phillips-Fein is an assistant professor in the Gallatin School of Individualized Study at New York University.
Many colleagues and friends discussed ideas, shared their work, and helped develop this essay. In particular, I
would like to thank Mark Silk, Edward T. Linenthal, Gregory Schneider, Catherine Rymph, Cynthia Gwynne
Yaudes, the anonymous reviewers for the JAH, and especially Greg Vargo and Beverly Gage.
Readers may contact Phillips-Fein at kpf2@nyu.edu.
1
How Should Historians Study Conservatism Now That Studying the Right Is Trendy? round table discussion at the annual meeting of the Organization of American Historians, Washington, D.C., April 2010. Alan
Brinkley, The Problem of American Conservatism, American Historical Review, 99 (April 1994), 40929, esp. 409.
Leo P. Ribuo, Why Is There So Much Conservatism in the United States and Why Do So Few Historians Know
Anything about It?, ibid., 43849; Susan Yohn, Will the Real Conservative Please Stand Up? Or, the Pitfalls
Involved in Examining Ideological Sympathies: A Comment on Alan Brinkleys Problem of American Conservatism, ibid., 43037; Michael Kazin, The Grass-Roots Right: New Histories of U.S. Conservatism in the Twentieth Century, ibid., 97 (Feb. 1992), 13655.
doi: 10.1093/jahist/jar430
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The historical literature of American conservatism is at a crossroads. Over the past two
decades it has been one of the most dynamic subfields in American history, the subject of
dozens of journal articles, books, and dissertations. In contrast to the many polemical
works on conservatism that populate bookstores, this body of scholarship is wide-ranging,
ecumenical, and grounded in serious archival research. The catalogs of major university
and commercial presses from the past few years reveal titles on subjects ranging from
libertarianism to the southern agrarians to the development of Christian conservatism.
Recent meetings of the Organization of American Historians (OAH) and the American
Historical Association have seen panels on the intellectual history of conservatism, teaching
the Right, the Right in the 1960s, military history and conservatism, and the conservative
movement in the 1970s. The 2010 meeting of the OAH even featured a metapanel on the
expansion of the subfield: How Should Historians Study Conservatism Now That Studying
the Right Is Trendy? In 1994 Alan Brinkley wrote an oft-cited essay for a forum published in the American Historical Review arguing that historians had ignored conservatism
to the point that it was an orphan of American political history. Today, instead of decrying
the absence of scholarship on conservatism, historians might be forgiven for asking
whether there is anything left to study in the history of the Right.1
The answer is yes. The new work on conservatism has illuminated the history of a
powerful and diverse political movement that organized throughout the postwar era
alongside other social movements that received much more attention. Written during a
time when conservatism often seemed to be the dominant force in American politics,
this new scholarship has reversed the earlier vision of the Right as a marginal part
of American life. The literature has described a range of dierent constituencies for the
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2
Essays that review historical writing on the Right include Leonard J. Moore, Good Old-Fashioned New Social
History and the Twentieth-Century American Right, Reviews in American History, 24 (Dec. 1996), 55573; Leonard
Moore, Approaching Conservatism, OAH Magazine of History, 17 (Jan. 2003), 34; and Leo P. Ribuo, The
Discovery and Rediscovery of American Conservatism Broadly Conceived, ibid., 510. David L. Chappell, The
Triumph of Conservatives in a Liberal Age, in A Companion to Post-1945 America, ed. Jean-Christophe Agnew and
Roy Rosenzweig (Malden, 2002), 30327; Darren Dochuk, Revival on the Right: Making Sense of the Conservative
Moment in PostWorld War II American History, History Compass, 4 (Sept. 2006), 97599; Bethany Moreton,
Why Is There So Much Sex in Christian Conservatism and Why Do So Few Historians Care Anything about It?,
Journal of Southern History, 75 (Aug. 2009), 71738; Kim Phillips-Fein, Right On, Nation, Sept. 28, 2009,
http://www.thenation.com/issue/article/right; Donald T. Critchlow and Nancy K. MacLean, Debating the American
Conservative Movement: 1945 to the Present (Lanham, 2009); Julian E. Zelizer, Rethinking the History of American
Conservatism, Reviews in American History, 38 (June 2010), 36792.
3
Examples of conservatives telling their own stories include William A. Rusher, The Rise of the Right (New York,
1984); and Lee Edwards, The Conservative Revolution: The Movement That Remade America (New York, 1999). The
most influential popular account from the Left is Thomas Frank, Whats the Matter with Kansas? How Conservatives
Won the Heart of America (New York, 2004).
conservative movement, from aggrieved working-class white people living in cities such
as Boston to prosperous sun belt suburbanites. It has explored a variety of dierent reasons for the growing power of the Right, ranging from anticommunism to civil rights
opposition to the reaction against labor unions to discomfort with changing sexual norms.
The questions that this new work on the conservative movement raises should be of great
concern to any scholar working in twentieth-century American history and to anyone
who cares about contemporary American politics. In the early 1990s it was still possible
to see the story of the twentieth century in terms of the triumph and expansion of liberalism, from the New Deal through the civil rights movement, feminism, the gay rights
movement, and environmentalism. Today, most historians accept that significant parts of
the American population always dissented from the liberalism of the mid-twentieth
century, and that the countrys rightward turn after 1980 had been building throughout
the postwar period. In our survey classes on postwar America we now talk as much about
the decline of liberalism as we do about its rise.2
With this work done, the field has arrived at a new maturity. As a result, we now have
the opportunity to move beyond the closely focused studies of movement history that
have dominated the scholarship thus far and to reconsider our ideas about the relationship of the Right to the broader trends of American political history. While we now know
a great deal more than we once did about the internal history of the conservative movement, we are just beginning to rethink the broad sweep of the twentieth century in light
of what we have learned. This essay provides an overview of the recent developments in
the scholarship on American conservatism, suggests a few of the lessons this growing
literature oers about the history of America in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries,
and highlights some of the important questions that remain.
The past two decades have been marked not only by the growth of scholarly literature
on conservatism but also by the publication of many books by conservative activists seeking
to tell the story of their movement. Theirs were generally heroic narratives of committed
activists and farsighted intellectuals overcoming overwhelming odds in a struggle against
liberal consensus to realize political victory in the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980.
There are also many works of journalism and many polemical pieces from the Left
that address the same questions, albeit much more skeptically: Why have conservatives
dominated American politics since the 1980s? Where did the conservative movement
come from?3
Conservatism: A Round Table
725
This article will not focus on these popular works, even though their interpretations
borrow from and have at times influenced those of scholarly historians. Instead, the
emphasis here will be on the spectrum of reconsiderations that has emerged among historians, which will ultimately shape the way the story is told in the public arena.
4
Brinkley, Problem of American Conservatism, 415. Progressive interpretations of conservatism include
Charles A. Beard, An Economic Interpretation of the Constitution of the United States (New York, 1913); Louis Hartz,
The Liberal Tradition in America: An Interpretation of American Political Thought since the Revolution (New York,
1955); James Weinstein, The Corporate Ideal in the Liberal State, 19001918 (Boston, 1968); William Appleman
Williams, The Contours of American History (Cleveland, 1961); and Gabriel Kolko, The Triumph of Conservatism:
A Reinterpretation of American History, 19001916 (Chicago, 1963). On the importance of returning to early scholars broader definition of conservatism, see Ribuo, Discovery and Rediscovery of American Conservatism Broadly
Conceived.
5
Richard Hofstadter, The Psuedo-Conservative Revolt, American Scholar, 24 (Winter 19541955), 1117.
On consensus scholars, see Daniel Bell, ed., The New American Right (New York, 1955); Daniel Bell, The Dispossessed, in The Radical Right, ed. Daniel Bell (New York, 1964), 145. Various popular and journalistic studies of
the Right during the 1950s and early 1960s borrowed their framework from Richard Hofstadters and Daniel Bells
work. See, for example, Arnold Forster and Benjamin R. Epstein, Danger on the Right (New York, 1964).
Political history is always written in response to the demands of the present, but there are
few fields for which this is more clearly the case than the scholarship of conservatism.
Historians began to turn their attention to writing about the postwar Right in the 1980s,
motivated by a desire to explain why the social movements of the 1960s had suddenly
been eclipsed by a conservative politics that only a few years before had been deemed too
radical and too extreme to succeed. For many liberal and leftist historians, Ronald
Reagans political popularity seemed an alarming mystery. After Barry Goldwaters
resounding loss in the 1964 presidential election, most commentators had believed that
his brand of conservatism was dead. Yet sixteen years later, it had been revived. How did
this happen?
The historiography of modern America could not shed light on the conservative shift.
As Alan Brinkley observed in his 1994 article, progressive historians in the early twentieth
century had denounced the eorts of wealthy elites who sought to prevent democratic
economic and social reforms. But that observation did not capture the populist dimension of modern conservatism. Scholars associated with the New Left, meanwhile, had
argued that progressivism and the New Deal had been so shaped by business interests that
liberalism itself was a conservative political force. They did not, however, write about the
Right as a distinct, specific political mobilization, in part because from the vantage point
of the 1960s it seemed so clearly in decline.4
The most influential interpretations of the Right, therefore, both within the academy
and in the wider political culture, remained the psychological ones advanced by the
consensus historians of the 1950s. According to Richard Hofstadter, the pseudoconservatives who joined the John Birch Society and voted for Barry Goldwater were
motivated by a fierce anxiety about their position in the prosperous, mobile consumer
society of the postwar period. Their rigid, harsh, and morally absolutist politics was driven
by their insecurity and resentment, and especially by fear of their declining status
within American society. These midcentury scholars and cultural critics saw the pseudoconservative revolt as the province of fanatics and cranks rather than of serious politicians.5
For historians addressing the subject of conservatism in the 1980s, the critical problem
was developing an analysis that could account for the revival of the Right during that
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6
Ronald P. Formisano, Boston against Busing: Race, Class, and Ethnicity in the 1960s and 1970s (Chapel Hill,
1991), 3. On populist conservatism and the backlash against civil rights, see Thomas Byrne Edsall and Mary D.
Edsall, Chain Reaction: The Impact of Race, Rights, and Taxes on American Politics (New York, 1991); Dan T. Carter,
The Politics of Rage: George Wallace, the Origins of the New Conservatism, and the Transformation of American Politics
(New York, 1995); Dan T. Carter, From George Wallace to Newt Gingrich: Race in the Conservative Counterrevolution,
19631994 (Baton Rouge, 1996); and Jonathan Rieder, Canarsie: The Jews and Italians of Brooklyn against Liberalism
(Cambridge, Mass., 1985). Early syntheses of the development of conservatism include Jerome L. Himmelstein, To
the Right: The Transformation of American Conservatism (Berkeley, 1990); Godfrey Hodgson, The World Turned Right
Side Up: A History of the Conservative Ascendancy in America (New York, 1996); and the essays in Steve Fraser and
Gary Gerstle, eds., The Rise and Fall of the New Deal Order, 19301980 (Princeton, 1989).
decade and the previous one. These scholars rejected the dismissive and condescending
attitudes of the consensus historians, seeking to write about conservatism with a measure
of sympathy, although few of them actually identified as conservatives themselves. But in
other ways they borrowed from the insights of the consensus thinkers, especially in their
emphasis on conservatism as a species of populism. These first accounts of the rise of the
Right sought to account for its support among white working-class voters, once thought
to be the stalwart supporters of liberalism. In this narrative, the widespread support that
liberalism had once enjoyed foundered in the late 1960s in response to the radicalism of
the New Left. The rise of black power, the growing militancy of the antiwar movement,
and the challenges of feminism and gay rights all provoked a sharp backlash from the
mainstream of American society. The result was a shift to the right.
These scholars of backlash politics diered in the relative weight that they assigned to
its coordination from above. Some told a top-down story in which national politicians
from George Wallace to Ronald Reagan to Newt Gingrich used thinly coded racial
rhetoric to appeal to white voters who had been alienated by black radicalism and by the
victories of the civil rights movement more generally. In this narrative, conservative movement leaders played on racial prejudice to win a broad popular following for economic
policies promoting deregulation and lower taxes. What began in the South as resistance
to desegregation moved to the North and the rest of the country as opposition to busing,
integration of neighborhoods, and ultimately to the welfare state itself, which was depicted
as benefiting primarily people of color. Other historians focused less on the ways that
national politicians crafted a message around race, rights and taxes and more on the
grassroots emergence of what Ronald P. Formisano called reactionary populism, a fierce
defense of racial privilege that was motivated by deep fears about the deterioration of
white working-class institutionssuch as local schoolsduring a time of economic
decline. From either perspective, the key developments in the rise of conservatism were
the crumbling of the old New Deal electoral coalition, the fragmenting of the Democratic
party around racial politics, and the reaction against 1960s radicalism.6
Over the course of the 1990s and early 2000s, as it became clear that conservative
success was no electoral accident, a distinctive new perspective on the rise of the conservative movement began to take hold. Instead of focusing on the Reagan Democrats and
backlash voters of the late 1960s and 1970s, the new historiography took a longer view,
emphasizing the growing strength of the conservative mobilization in the 1940s, 1950s,
and 1960s. The victories of Reagan and other conservative politicians in the 1970s and
1980s were possible because conservative institutions, networks, and ideas had been
developing for decades. Recognizing the longevity of the movement cut against the idea
of a sudden backlash. This work also emerged out of debates over the 1960s, especially as
727
One of the dilemmas of writing about conservatism might seem, at first glance, to be the
problem of definition. What is conservatism? Is it a political ideology, a social movement,
a general philosophical stance toward the world? As many people have observed, conservative thought contains elements that might seem inconsistent on the surface, most notably its simultaneous embrace of the free market and its professed commitment to the
maintenance of tradition. These ideological tensions are mirrored in the diverse constituencies of the Right. How have southern segregationists and northern businessmen, or libertarians and Christian fundamentalists, managed to make common political cause? There
are also questions about the political boundaries of conservatism. Does the movement
include the extremists of the John Birch Society and the terrorists of the Ku Klux Klan
alongside the mainstream politicians of the Republican party? Are there philosophical or
political connections that link these dierent groups? Should historians exploring conservatism write about committed activists or swing voters to understand the reasons for its
electoral successes? How to account for conservative Democrats or neoliberals? Who are
the true conservatives, and what do they really believe?
Historians writing about conservatism have generally dealt with these problems of
definition by agreeing, tacitly if not always explicitly, on a particular definition of conservatism. Generally, scholars of the Right have understood conservatism as a social and
political movement that gained momentum during the postWorld War II period. It
began among a small number of committed activists and intellectuals, and ultimately
managed to win a mass following and a great deal of influence over the Republican party.
While its ideology (like all political world views) was not systematic or logically coherent
on every count, its central concerns included anticommunism, a laissez-faire approach
to economics, opposition to the civil rights movement, and commitment to traditional
sexual norms. Earlier scholars had depicted the rightward movement of American politics
as an angry reaction epitomized by the outbursts of the 1970s. The more recent body of
7
On the conservative movement as a grassroots mobilization of the 1960s, see, for example, Rick Perlstein,
Who Owns the Sixties? The Opening of a Scholarly Generation Gap, Lingua Franca, 6 (MayJune 1996), 3037;
David Farber and Je Roche, The Conservative Sixties (New York, 2003); and Rebecca E. Klatch, A Generation
Divided: The New Left, the New Right, and the 1960s (New York, 1999).
a new, younger generation of scholars who had not lived through the decade began to tell
its story. Unlike the older generation, they were struck by the conservative movement as
a grassroots mobilization with parallels to the movements of the Left during those years.7
These new histories of the Right focused on suburbanites of the sun belt states
especially the upper South and southern Californiaas the catalysts of the conservative
shift, rather than the working-class whites of the rust belt and the Northeast or the lowerclass whites of Mississippi and Alabama. Reagan, not George Wallace, was their leader.
Instead of interpreting conservatism as the politics of despair and working-class reaction,
these scholars saw it as a forward-looking, sophisticated, and politically creative force in
American life. This was so even though most historians working in the field were not selfdefined conservatives; often it seemed they were writing about the Right to know their
opponents better. This eort to understand the political strategies, ideas, and organizations of the conservative movement over the whole sweep of the postwar years has defined
the main themes of the literature in the years since Brinkley wrote his article calling for
the revival of scholarly interest in conservatism.
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8
On changes in the field of political history and their connection to the subfield of conservatism studies, see
Julian E. Zelizer, What Political Science Can Learn from the New Political History, Annual Review of Political
Science, 13 (May 2010), 2536; and Meg Jacobs, William J. Novak, and Julian E. Zelizer, eds., The Democratic
Experiment: New Directions in American Political History (Princeton, 2003).
9
Examples of literature on conservative political activism and organizing include Sara Diamond, Roads to
Dominion: Right-Wing Movements and Political Power in the United States (New York, 1995); John A. Andrew III,
The Other Side of the Sixties: Young Americans for Freedom and the Rise of Conservative Politics (New Brunswick,
1997); Kurt Schuparra, Triumph of the Right: The Rise of the California Conservative Movement, 19451966
(Armonk, 1998); Gregory L. Schneider, Cadres for Conservatism: Young Americans for Freedom and the Rise of the
Contemporary Right (New York, 1999); Jonathan M. Schoenwald, A Time for Choosing: The Rise of Modern American
Conservatism (New York, 2001); and Niels Bjerre-Poulsen, Right Face: Organizing the American Conservative Movement, 19451965 (Copenhagen, 2002). Scholarship that focuses on the Republican party and electoral campaigns
includes Mary C. Brennan, Turning Right in the Sixties: The Conservative Capture of the GOP (Chapel Hill, 1995);
Rick Perlstein, Before the Storm: Barry Goldwater and the Unmaking of the American Consensus (New York, 2001);
Matthew Dallek, The Right Moment: Ronald Reagans First Victory and the Decisive Turning Point in American Politics
(New York, 2000); Donald T. Critchlow, The Conservative Ascendancy: How the GOP Right Made Political History
(Cambridge, Mass., 2007); and Laura Jane Giord, The Center Cannot Hold: The 1960 Presidential Election and the
Rise of Modern Conservatism (DeKalb, 2009).
work has challenged the idea of a backlash, instead emphasizing the extent to which
conservatives organized a sustained, long-term attempt to realize their particular vision of
American society.
This new literature on the conservative movement took shape at the same moment that
the discipline of political history broadened its focus to incorporate greater attention to
culture, grassroots historical actors, and formal legislative battles.8 It is not surprising,
therefore, that much of the scholarly literature on conservatism has emphasized the role
of political organizations and activist groups in building a network of people devoted to
achieving a broad rollback of liberalism. Historians such as John A. Andrew III, Jonathan
Schoenwald, and Gregory L. Schneider have described the roles of organizations such as
Young Americans for Freedom and the John Birch Society in training the early generations of conservative activists. They have sought to break down the older distinctions
between moderate and extreme conservatives, emphasizing the overlapping concerns
and personae that linked the organizations once seen as radical to the more respectable
and electorally oriented Right. Moving outside of the grassroots groups and into electoral
politics, historians such as Mary C. Brennan and Donald T. Critchlow have emphasized
the rightward move of the Republican party and the ways that conservative movement
activists were able to exert increasing power within the GOP. Rick Perlstein has reevaluated
the career of Barry Goldwater, suggesting that while his 1964 defeat looked like a spectacular failure at the time, it actually helped catalyze a generation of young conservatives.
In these accounts, conservatism appears to be a thriving grassroots movement, vibrant
and lively at a time when liberalism was becoming a form of top-down politics.9
While these works emphasize the political strategies of the movement in its early years,
scholars have also devoted attention to the communities that helped nurture conservatism.
Lisa McGirrs study of Orange County, California, is perhaps the most influential of these
analyses of the dynamic social base that propelled the movement and gave it its endurance and strength. McGirr explicitly rejected the framework of status anxiety and the
image of conservatives as irrational or paranoid. Instead, she argued that conservatism
thrived throughout the 1950s, the 1960s, and into the 1970s among auent suburbanites
whose jobs were closely tied to the Cold War defense industry. Anticommunism, in her view,
was able to unify a variety of dierent political concerns, bringing together antistatists,
729
Lisa McGirr, Suburban Warriors: The Origins of the New American Right (Princeton, 2001), 11, 219.
For early analyses of antifeminism, see Jane Sherron De Hart, Gender on the Right: Meanings behind
the Existential Scream, Gender and History, 3 (Fall 1991), 24667; Rosalind Pollack Petchesky, Antiabortion,
Antifeminism, and the Rise of the New Right, Feminist Studies, 7 (Summer 1981), 20646; and Kristin Luker,
Abortion and the Politics of Motherhood (Berkeley, 1984). Treatments of the activism of conservative women and its
contributions to the movement include McGirr, Suburban Warriors; Michelle Nickerson, Women, Domesticity,
and Postwar Conservatism, OAH Magazine of History, 17 (Jan. 2003), 1721; and Ronnee Schreiber, Righting
Feminism: Conservative Women and American Politics (New York, 2008). A historiographical essay that looks at
gender and the Right is Kim E. Nielsen, Doing the Right Right, Journal of Womens History, 16 (Fall 2004), 16872.
Donald T. Critchlow, Phyllis Schlafly and Grassroots Conservatism: A Womans Crusade (Princeton, 2005), 9; Catherine
E. Rymph, Republican Women: Feminism and Conservatism from Surage to the New Right (Chapel Hill, 2006).
12
George H. Nash, The Conservative Intellectual Movement in America since 1945 (New York, 1976).
10
11
advocates of a free market, and believers in traditional morality. These anticommunist

activists were able to capitalize on the eras discomfort about challenges to sexual norms
and the racial hierarchy. Ultimately, they made political alliances with conservative
Christian groups.10
Although many of the leaders of the conservative movement were men, McGirr and
others have documented the major role played by women in the movement. Here, too,
the trend has been toward shifting the focus away from the passionate backlash against
feminism in the 1970s to analyze the activism of conservative women throughout the
entire postwar period. Earlier work on antifeminism emphasized opposition to the equal
rights amendment and struggles over abortion rights, suggesting that these issues became
so explosive because they touched on deep understandings of gender that were tantamount to sacred beliefs. Other scholarship, however, has sought to connect the antifeminism of the 1970s to a broader political framework to suggest that ideas about gender
shaped visions of the state, economic regulation, anticommunism, and the proper role of
government. Both McGirr and Michelle Nickerson have considered the central role
women played in developing anticommunist activism in southern California. Critchlows
work on Phyllis Schlafly places her campaign against the equal rights amendment in a
postwar tradition of grassroots activism by female conservatives, grounded in a moral
republicanism that linked antipathy to government with a strong belief in traditional
values and sexual roles. Catherine E. Rymph has looked at the central role of women in
the Republican party since women won the right to vote. In this sense, the rise of conservatism is best seen as a movement that grew out of the grassroots political eorts of people
such as the midwestern women who were drawn to Schlafly and the suburban housewives
who lived in Orange County.11
The emphasis on political activism and education in the conservative movement has
also led scholars to rethink conservative intellectual history. The most influential synthesis
of the subject remains George H. Nashs The Conservative Intellectual Tradition since 1945,
first published in 1976. Nash sought to counter the condescension of the consensus
scholars who assumed that conservatives had no serious intellectual life. He argued that
postwar conservatism brought together three powerful and partially contradictory intellectual currents that previously had largely been independent of each other: libertarianism, traditionalism, and anticommunism. Each particular strain of thought had
predecessors earlier in the twentieth (and even nineteenth) centuries, but they were joined
in their distinctive postwar formulation through the leadership of William F. Buckley Jr.
and National Review. The fusion of these dierent, competing, and not easily reconciled
schools of thought led to the creation, Nash argued, of a coherent modern Right.12
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13
Jennifer Burns, In Retrospect: George Nashs The Conservative Intellectual Movement in America since 1945,
Reviews in American History, 32 (Sept. 2004), 44762; Paul V. Murphy, The Rebuke of History: The Southern Agrarians
and American Conservative Thought (Chapel Hill, 2001). Work that foregrounds the contributions of libertarians and
free-market thinkers in the development of conservatism includes Brian Doherty, Radicals for Capitalism: A Freewheeling History of the Modern American Libertarian Movement (New York, 2007); Gregory Eow, Fighting a New
Deal: Classical Liberal Thought in the Depression Years (Ph.D. diss., Rice University, 2007); Philip Mirowski and
Dieter Plehwe, eds., The Road from Mont Plerin: The Making of the Neoliberal Thought Collective (Cambridge, Mass.,
2009); Jennifer Burns, Goddess of the Market: Ayn Rand and the American Right (New York, 2009); and Angus Burgin,
The Return of Laissez-Faire (Ph.D. diss., Harvard University, 2009).
14
Intellectual histories that emphasize ideas as part of a social movement include Burns, Goddess of the Market;
and Steven M. Teles, The Rise of the Conservative Legal Movement: The Battle for Control of the Law (Princeton,
2008). Histories of economics include S. M. Amadae, Rationalizing Capitalist Democracy: The Cold War Origins of
There is, as yet, no work of intellectual history that challenges Nashs synthesis, and it
is dicult to overstate the impact that it still has on the field. But the recent work on the
Right does suggest a subtly dierent approach, one that moves away from the idea of
fusion. As Jennifer Burns has observed, by emphasizing the synthetic coherence of conservatism Nash gave the traditionalist voices greater weight than they deserved. He wrote
out of the narrative of modern conservatism thinkers who vigorously rejected religion and
traditionsuch as Ayn Randdespite their manifest importance in shaping the Right.
By contrast, while there have been important studies that revisit the traditionalist thinkers, much of the recent scholarship (such as Burnss own) has focused on libertarianism as
a central preoccupation for conservative activists. Work on the traditionalistsfor example,
Paul Murphys study of the southern agrarians and their legacyhas emphasized the ways
they represented an alternative path not taken by the conservative movement, with their
skepticism about capitalism standing in sharp contrast to the enthusiastic laissez-faire of
the Right.13
Part of the reason for the change in perspective has to do with methodology. The new
intellectual history of conservatism has focused on treating conservative intellectuals as
part of a social movement, looking at how their ideas contributed to activism and vice
versa, at the political and institutional context for conservative ideas, and at conservatives
attempts to build an alternative intellectual infrastructure. Steven M. Teless examination
of the conservative legal movement, for example, brings together intellectual and political
history to look at legal scholars who worked with business funders to build the Federalist
Society for Law and Public Policy Studies and other groups that challenge legal liberalism.
Burnss work on Ayn Rand places Rand firmly in the context of the conservative milieu.
Historians such as Angus Burgin and S. M. Amadae have moved away from the conservative movement magazines and institutions that were Nashs primary focus to analyze
the contributions of academic economists and the theory of rational choice to a broader
backlash against Keynesianism and liberalism. There have also been studies of black conservative intellectuals and of multicultural conservatism that pay close attention to the
relationship between ideas, activism, and policy. Finally, intellectual historians of conservatism are considering the ways that liberal thinkers responded to conservative ideas. For
example, Michael Kimmages 2009 study of Whittaker Chambers and Lionel Trilling
seeks to show how anticommunism transformed liberalism and conservatism in the 1940s
and 1950s, anticipating the neoconservative shift of later years, while Justin Vasse has
written about neoconservatism as a movement that began among disillusioned liberals
whose legacy remained evident even as it became entrenched among foreign policy hawks
within the Republican party.14
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Rational Choice Liberalism (Chicago, 2003); and Burgin, Return of Laissez-Faire. On neoconservative intellectuals
and the interaction between liberal and conservative thinkers, see Gary J. Dorrien, The Neoconservative Mind: Politics, Culture, and the War of Ideology (Philadelphia, 1993); John E. Moser, Right Turn: John T. Flynn and the Transformation of American Liberalism (New York, 2005); Michael Kimmage, The Conservative Turn: Lionel Trilling,
Whittaker Chambers, and the Lessons of Anti-communism (Cambridge, Mass., 2009); and Justin Vasse, Neoconservatism: The Biography of a Movement, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (Cambridge, Mass., 2010). On other conservative
intellectuals, see Patrick Allitt, The Conservatives: Ideas and Personalities throughout American History (New Haven,
2009); Patrick Allitt, Catholic Intellectuals and Conservative Politics in America, 19501985 (Ithaca, 1993); and
Michael L. Ondaatje, Black Conservative Intellectuals in Modern America (Philadelphia, 2010). On multicultural
conservatism, see Angela D. Dillard, Guess Whos Coming to Dinner Now? Multicultural Conservatism in America
(New York, 2001).
15
Thomas J. Sugrue, The Origins of the Urban Crisis: Race and Inequality in Postwar Detroit (Princeton, 1996);
Robert O. Self, American Babylon: Race and the Struggle for Postwar Oakland (Princeton, 2003). On the urban
backlash, see Kenneth D. Durr, Behind the Backlash: White Working-Class Politics in Baltimore, 19401980 (Chapel
Hill, 2003); Becky M. Nicolaides, My Blue Heaven: Life and Politics in the Working-Class Suburbs of Los Angeles,
19201965 (Chicago, 2002); and Michael W. Flamm, Law and Order: Street Crime, Civil Unrest, and the Crisis of
Liberalism in the 1960s (New York, 2005).
Echoing the new focus of intellectual historians on the free market and libertarian
sources of conservative activism, the framework of suburban studies has contributed to
a reevaluation of the idea of backlash politics as the crucible of the Right in both the
North and the South. Several accounts of white backlash in cities outside of the
Southsuch as Thomas J. Sugrues on Detroit and Robert O. Self s on Oakland
have emphasized that the racial conflicts that grabbed national headlines in the late
1960s actually had much earlier origins, rooted in white homeowners attempts to
maintain racially segregated neighborhoods. The implication is that white commitment to civil rights and desegregation was tenuous at best throughout the postwar
years; it did not take the radicalism of black power to alienate whites from the struggle
for racial justice.15
At the same time, scholars focusing on the South have reframed the story to argue that
the suburban sun belt, not the Deep South, was the birthplace of modern conservatism.
In this new interpretation, southern politicians did not defend a dying order simply to
maintain local control. Rather, they sought a pragmatic, flexible conservatism that
could find common ground with the rest of the nation. Suburban homeowners living
outside of cities such as Charlotte, North Carolina, and Atlanta, Georgia, often did resist
the integration of their neighborhoods and schools, but they also rejected the open white
supremacy of an earlier generation of southerners. Instead, they advocated a homeowners
philosophy of individual rights, meritocracy, and property ownership. Even Mississippi,
Joseph Crespino has argued, should not be parodied as backward: Mississippians in the
1960s saw themselves as active participants in a conservative counterrevolution with
national reach. The new suburban history suggests that homeowners found themselves
drawn to the small-government, free-market approach to social policy embodied by the
conservative movement. Ironically, postwar federal government support for highways and
mass homeownership helped create communities that would ultimately prove deeply hostile to New Deal liberalism. This scholarship on the rise of a rights-based language for
fighting racial justice is echoed in new work on the opposition to environmentalism; James
Morton Turner has argued that in the 1970s and 1980s, Western antienvironmentalists
increasingly rejected a broad reactionary criticism of state power, instead framing their
case in the rhetoric of individualism and property ownership. Political developments in
732
December 2011
16
Joseph Crespino, In Search of Another Country: Mississippi and the Conservative Counterrevolution (Princeton,
2007). On the sun belt, the South, and the West, see Matthew D. Lassiter, The Silent Majority: Suburban Politics in
the Sunbelt South (Princeton, 2006); Kevin M. Kruse, White Flight: Atlanta and the Making of Modern Conservatism
(Princeton, 2005); Joseph E. Lowndes, From the New Deal to the New Right: Race and the Southern Origins of
Modern Conservatism (New Haven, 2008); and Kari Frederickson, The Dixiecrat Revolt and the End of the Solid
South, 19321968 (Chapel Hill, 2001). James Morton Turner, The Specter of Environmentalism: Wilderness,
Environmental Politics, and the Evolution of the New Right, Journal of American History, 96 (June 2009), 12348;
David M. P. Freund, Marketing the Free Market: State Intervention and the Politics of Prosperity in Metropolitan
America, in The New Suburban History, ed. Kevin M. Kruse and Thomas J. Sugrue (Chicago, 2006), 1132; Nancy
MacLean, Neo-Confederacy versus the New Deal: The Regional Utopia of the Modern American Right, in The
Myth of Southern Exceptionalism, ed. Matthew D. Lassiter and Joseph Crespino (New York, 2009), 30830.
17
Histories of business conservatism include Elizabeth A. Fones-Wolf, Selling Free Enterprise: The Business
Assault on Labor and Liberalism, 194560 (Urbana, 1994); Jeerson R. Cowie, Capital Moves: RCAs Seventy-Year
Quest for Cheap Labor (Ithaca, 1999); Thomas W. Evans, The Education of Ronald Reagan: The General Electric Years
and the Untold Story of His Conversion to Conservatism (New York, 2006); Tami J. Friedman, Exploiting the NorthSouth Dierential: Corporate Power, Southern Politics, and the Decline of Organized Labor after World War II,
Journal of American History, 95 (Sept. 2008), 32348; Kim Phillips-Fein, Invisible Hands: The Making of the Conservative Movement from the New Deal to Reagan (New York, 2009); Todd Holmes, The Economic Roots of Reaganism: Corporate Conservatives, Political Economy, and the United Farm Workers Movement, 19651970, Western
Historical Quarterly, 41 (Spring 2010), 5580; and Benjamin Cooper Waterhouse, A Lobby for Capital: Organized
Business and the Pursuit of Pro-market Politics, 19671986 (Ph.D. diss., Harvard University, 2009). Histories of
antiunionism and the Right include David Witwer, Westbrook Pegler and the Anti-union Movement, Journal of
American History, 92 (Sept. 2005), 52752; Elizabeth Tandy Shermer, Origins of the Conservative Ascendancy:
Barry Goldwaters Early Senate Career and the De-legitimization of Organized Labor, ibid., 95 (Dec. 2008),
678709; Lawrence Richards, Union-Free America: Workers and Antiunion Culture (Urbana, 2008); and Nelson
Lichtenstein and Elizabeth Tandy Shermer, eds., The Right and Labor in America: Politics, Ideology, and Imagination
(Philadelphia, forthcoming). On popular ideas about the free market, see Shane Hamilton, Trucking Country: The
Road to Americas Wal-Mart Economy (Princeton, 2008); and Bethany Moreton, To Serve God and Wal-Mart: The
Making of Christian Free Enterprise (Cambridge, Mass., 2009).
the South, in other words, aected the way conservative activists around the country
approached the question of state power.16
Some recent scholarship has emphasized the economic dimension of the conservative
revolt from a variety of perspectives. Here, too, the implicit comparison is with earlier
work that focused on the backlash. Instead of seeing conservatism as a revolt from below
that was motivated by the racial and sexual politics of the 1960s, these scholars have
focused on the role of businesspeople and the economic elite in building conservative
institutions and developing anti-union strategies. Business opposition to labor and liberalism helped generate financial support for many of the movements institutions and
organizations in its early years while business campaigns in defense of market ideas helped
shift the terms of public debate. Historians such as Elizabeth A. Fones-Wolf and David
Witwer have treated the centrality of conservatives antilabor ideas during the 1940s,
1950s, and 1960s. My own work has suggested the importance of business support for
conservative institutions and initiatives throughout the postwar period. Jeerson Cowie
and Tami Friedman have shown that the decline of manufacturing in the North and the
Midwest was influenced by political ideology, as companies sought to relocate away from
unionized centers and toward the rural, nonunion South (and ultimately over the border to
Mexico). A forthcoming collection on labor and the Right edited by Nelson Lichtenstein
and Elizabeth Tandy Shermer examines the ways that opposition to unions became part
of postwar conservatism. Meanwhile, Bethany Moreton and Shane Hamilton have started
to dissect popular ideas about the market, analyzing the reasons why working-class
peoplesuch as rural Wal-Mart employees or long-haul truckersmight come to believe
that deregulation served their best interests.17
733
18
Scholarship on American Christianity and politics throughout the twentieth century includes George M. Marsden,
Fundamentalism and American Culture: The Shaping of Twentieth-Century Evangelicalism, 18701925 (New York, 1982);
Mark Silk, Spiritual Politics: Religion and America since World War II (New York, 1988); Paul S. Boyer, When Time Shall Be
No More: Prophecy Belief in Modern American Culture (Cambridge, Mass., 1992); Joel A. Carpenter, Revive Us Again:
The Reawakening of American Fundamentalism (New York, 1997); Grant Wacker, Heaven Below: Early Pentecostals
and American Culture (Cambridge, Mass., 2001); Mark A. Noll and Luke E. Harlow, Religion and American Politics: From
the Colonial Period to the Present (New York, 2007); and Mark Silk and Andrew Walsh, One Nation, Divisible: How
Regional Religious Dierences Shape American Politics (Lanham, 2008). Roe v. Wade, 410 U.S. 113 (1973).
There has, finally, been increasing attention to the role of religion in the development
of conservatism. While religion still receives more lip service than sustained engagement
from political historians, the evident importance of conservative churches in the development of grassroots conservatism and the growing role of religion in late twentieth-century
American society more generally have made a focus on conservative religious institutions
and ideologies crucial to contemporary analysis of the Right. More than in many other
fields of political history, scholars of conservatism are seeking to place analysis of religious
ideas, debates, and practices at the heart of the story. From one perspective, the central
story of the development of the Right since the 1970s is that of the creation of a politicized base of conservative congregations mobilized to support the Republican party. As
with the revision of the backlash narrative, new scholarship suggests that the history of
the Christian Right can be traced back into the postwar period. Building on the work of
historians of religion such as George M. Marsden, Grant Wacker, Joel A. Carpenter, Mark
A. Noll, and Mark Silk, scholars of conservatism have argued that the contemporary
Christian Right did not emerge simply in response to Roe v. Wade or the various 1970s
challenges to social and sexual mores. On the contrary, evangelical Christians had
embraced ideas of stewardship and Christian responsibility for the larger society throughout the twentieth century. The explicit politicization of their churches in the 1970s and
1980s was not a sudden response to the upheaval of the late 1960s; it grew out of a longstanding engagement with political life.18
This work on Christian conservatism has been closely tied to scholarship that emphasizes the political economy of the sun belt regions of the country. Much of the recent
work rejects the image of fundamentalists as backward, reactionary, or antimodern, and
instead depicts many Christian conservatives as upper middle-class people who saw belief
in business principles and market ideals as a natural extension of their religious faith. Darren Dochuk suggests that the religious people who migrated from the South to the West
in the middle of the twentieth century were committed to building a moral geography
in their new suburban homes, creating communities that reflected their views about the
market and about Christ. Daniel K. Williams has emphasized that the membership of the
burgeoning evangelical churches in the postwar years was largely suburbanpeople who
were prospering in the sprawling cities of the New South and Southwest. Bethany Moreton
and Dochuk both look at the Christian institutions of higher education (such
as Pepperdine University and Harding College) that helped educate a generation of
managers for companies such as Wal-Mart. Gender roles, of course, remained one of the
major preoccupations of these southern Christians, but they did not see the issue as being
at odds with their commitment to free-market ideas or the business world. (Paul Harvey,
for example, has suggested that the emphasis of southern Christians on a strict hierarchy
between men and women grew out of an older vision of the world as organized according
to a rigid racial order; as this open racism became less acceptable, its old adherents
734
December 2011
19
Darren Dochuk, From Bible Belt to Sunbelt: Plain-Folk Religion, Grassroots Politics, and the Rise of Evangelical
Conservatism (New York, 2011), 162. Essays on the role of religion in twentieth-century American historical scholarship include Leo P. Ribuo, God and Contemporary Politics, Journal of American History, 79 (March 1993),
151533; and Jon Butler, Jack-in-the-Box Faith: The Religion Problem in Modern American History, ibid., 90
(March 2004), 135778. Histories of Christian conservatism include William Martin, With God on Our Side: The
Rise of the Religious Right in America (New York, 1996); Anne C. Loveland, American Evangelicals and the U.S.
Military, 19421993 (Baton Rouge, 1996); Kenneth J. Heineman, God Is a Conservative: Religion, Politics, and
Morality in Contemporary America (New York, 1998); Susan Friend Harding, The Book of Jerry Falwell: Fundamentalist
Language and Politics (Princeton, 2000); Paul Harvey, At Ease in Zion, Uneasy in Babylon: White Evangelicals, in
Religion and Public Life in the South: In the Evangelical Mode, ed. Charles Reagan Wilson and Mark Silk (Walnut
Creek, 2005), 6378; Heather Hendershot, Gods Angriest Man: Carl McIntire, Cold War Fundamentalism, and
Right-Wing Broadcasting, American Quarterly, 59 (June 2007), 37396; Axel R. Schfer, The Cold War State and
the Resurgence of Evangelicalism: A Study of the Public Funding of Religion since 1945, Radical History Review,
99 (Fall 2007), 1950; Steven P. Miller, Billy Graham and the Rise of the Republican South (Philadelphia, 2009);
Kevin M. Kruse, Beyond the Southern Cross: The National Origins of the Religious Right, in Myth of Southern
Exceptionalism, ed. Lassiter and Crespino, 286307; Dochuk, From Bible Belt to Sunbelt; Daniel K. Williams, Gods
Own Party: The Making of the Christian Right (New York, 2010); Daniel K. Williams, Jerry Falwells Sunbelt Politics: The Regional Origins of the Moral Majority, Journal of Policy History, 22 (Summer 2010), 12547; and Bethany
Moreton, To Serve God and Wal-Mart. On Jewish, Catholic, and Mormon conservatism, see Allitt, Catholic Intellectuals and Conservative Politics in America; Benjamin Balint, Running Commentary: The Contentious Magazine That
Transformed the Jewish Left into the Neoconservative Right (New York, 2010); Neil J. Young, We Gather Together:
Catholics, Mormons, Southern Baptists, and the Question of Interfaith Politics, 19721984 (Ph.D. diss.,
Columbia University, 2008); and Neil J. Young, The ERA Is a Moral Issue: The Mormon Church, LDS Women,
and the Defeat of the Equal Rights Amendment, American Quarterly, 59 (Sept. 2007), 62344. Some political
histories make special eorts to integrate analysis of conservative churches and conservative religious ideas into their
narratives. See, for example, McGirr, Suburban Warriors; Phillips-Fein, Invisible Hands; and Crespino, In Search of
Another Country.
continued to profess a world separated by sharp divisionsnow between men and women
rather than blacks and whites.) For these conservative Christians, there was no tension
between believing in Christ and believing in the free market. Their religion reinforced
their commitment to small government, local autonomy, and the primacy of business
in public life. It should be noted that Protestant congregations are not the only important places to understand the role of religion in the development of conservatism, even
though they have received the bulk of historical attention. Patrick Allitt has written about
Catholic intellectuals, Benjamin Balints history of Commentary looks at the evolution of
the magazine from an organ of Jewish liberalism to one of neoconservatism, and Neil J.
Youngs examination of the tenuous coalition built by Catholics, Mormons, and Baptists
serves as an important corrective. Even so, much more still must be done to broaden the
field of inquiry.19
In this literature, conservative activism appears to emerge from the successful, prosperous heart of the countrynot from disaected or marginal people but from those who
are firmly within the American center. The movement has not been driven by populist
working-class resentment and anger as much as by the self-confident complacency of the
well-to-do and their desire to protect their vision of the good society from the myriad
threats they fear that it might face. The scholarship has described a political movement
that promotes free-market individualism as well as Christian community. It has analyzed
the movements connection to the long national reaction against African Americans
struggles for civil rights. The literature has explored the lives and motivations of the movements committed activists while also seeking to show how their ideas and concerns ultimately came to speak to a wider group of people over time.
Historians of the Right have long been concerned with the question of how conservatives were able to craft a belief system out of dissonant first principles. They have also
wondered how to think about the conservative coalition. How did a range of dierent
735
20
On Friedrich Hayeks skepticism about rationalism, see, for example, Bruce Caldwell, ed., The Collected Works
of F. A. Hayek (19 vols., Chicago, 1988), II, 21112.
21
MacLean, Neo-Confederacy versus the New Deal; Lowndes, From the New Deal to the New Right, 68.
social groups manage to come together under the umbrella of opposition to communism
and liberalism? This work suggests that perhaps these alliances were less dicult than
sometimes imagined. If many Christian conservatives, for example, were always committed
to small government and the free market, why should it have been dicult for them to
find common cause with libertarians or business conservatives? On the other hand, the
same suburbanites who wanted lower taxes also believed in the maintenance of traditional
family roles. For conservative intellectuals such as Friedrich Hayek, the belief in the
market went along with a kind of antirationalism that had close cousins in conservative
religious circles. These kinds of connections might help explain why the conservative
movement has proved more durable than some on the Left have suggestedwhy the
conservative crack-up so often predicted has not occurred.20
At the same time, historians need to keep thinking about the connections between
racial and sexual politics and conservative economic ideas. Some work that is critical of
the idea of the backlash may come too close to setting up an opposition between cultural
and economic politics, when in reality the two can never be fully separated. The work of
the historian Nancy K. MacLean and that of the political scientist Joseph Lowndes oer
examples of approaches that seek to integrate the narrative of the long backlash against
civil rights with the emergence of critiques of the welfare state. MacLean has argued that
conservatives in the 1950s and 1960s celebrated an idealized vision of the American
South as a bulwark against the centralized power of the federal government. Lowndes
suggests that the idea of a southern strategy that could join northern businessmen with
white southerners has its roots early in the postwar period. Both scholars make the case
that in midcentury America, expanding the federal government was easily linked to ideas
about racial equality in ways that ultimately tied the struggle to maintain racial divisions
to the fight against the welfare state. Historians may be moving beyond a straightforward
vision of conservatism as a coalition by looking at the underlying themes and ideas that
link seemingly separate parts of the movement. On the one hand, this means seeing the
ways that conservatives were able to reconcile what might seem to be contradictory ideas
about tradition and capitalism. But it also requires thinking anew about how ideas
about the economy are connected to those about sexual roles and racial hierarchies.21
There are still many areas in the field of conservatism studies that warrant further
attention. Little work has been done on ideas about war, nationalism, and patriotism and
the rise of the Right, or on the contributions of veterans organizations and the American
Legion to conservative organizing. There is a real need for more scholarship on antifeminism and opposition to gay rights, especially since the 1970s, and in particular on the
links between cultural politics and the economic Right. The role of mass media in the
creation of the Right also has not yet received full attention from historiansespecially
important given the centrality of conservative talk radio, television programs, and leaders
such as Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck to the movement today. We know a lot about
the national Republican party, but more work should be done on local party organizations
and especially on the conflicts between moderate and conservative Republicans. Despite
the large amount of research on racism and the Right, the strong streak of anti-immigrant
736
December 2011
Scholarship on conservatism flourished during the 1990s and 2000s, decades when
the Right seemed to be an ascendant force in American politics. The underlying question motivating the literature was simple: How had conservatives recovered from
defeats during the first half of the twentieth century to arrive at the position of preeminence they held by centurys end? Today, two years through the presidency of
Barack Obama, the position of conservatism is far less clear. The eruption of deep
tensions within the Republican party, the revival of aggressive grassroots antistatist
politics in the Tea Party movement, and the ambiguous nature of Democratic liberalism in the age of Obama all raise new and more complex questions about the conservative shift of the past thirty years. Fortunately, the field has developed to the
point where we can step back and reassess our understanding of the conservative
mobilization and ask how this new literature should make us see American history
dierently. In his 1994 essay, Alan Brinkley suggested that historians confidence
about the progressive direction of American history had made it impossible for them
to understand the reasons for the revival of conservatism, the rebirth of religious fervor, and the reinvigoration of laissez-faire ideas. Does recognizing the importance of
conservatism throughout the twentieth century make us see the arc of American history in a new way?23
The most serious problems that historians face today in thinking about the Right have
to do with its origins and its legacy. In some ways, they stem from the basic framework
22
On the role of the media in building the Right, see Heather Hendershot, Whats Fair on the Air? Cold War
Right-Wing Broadcasting and the Public Interest (Chicago, 2011); and Nicole Hemmer, Messengers of the Right:
Media and the Modern Conservative Movement (Ph.D. diss., Columbia University, 2010).
23
Brinkley, Problem of American Conservatism.
and nativist sentiment in the conservative movementwhich seems especially present

todayhas not been as well studied.22
Finally, more work is needed on conservatives who are seen as extremists, especially
the John Birch Society. Because so much of the recent work has been written with the
condescending ideas of the consensus historians as a foil, there is a tendency to normalize
the political world view of the Right, to treat even its most outlandish and radical ideas
with patience. Scholars have, at times, felt the need to make the argument that conservatives are just ordinary citizens who happen to hold ideas that are dierent from those of
liberals or leftists. While this is true, it also seems to be an overly defensive position. Historians who write about the Right should find ways to do so with a sense of the dignity of
their subjects, but they should not hesitate to keep an eye out for the bizarre, the unusual,
or the unsettling. In some ways, the emerging vision of conservatism as part of the political mainstream fails to capture the emotional tone of the movementthe animating
spirit of disappointment and fury that seems to motivate at least some of its participants.
These comments aside, there is no doubt that we have learned a great deal about
the history of conservatism as a social and political movement over the past fifteen years,
since the calls in the early 1990s to write the history of the Right. We still must think
about how to conceptualize that mobilization and how our new understanding of the
movement changes the way that we relate the broader narrative of twentieth-century
American history.
737
24
Scholarship on the second Ku Klux Klan includes Kathleen M. Blee, Women of the Klan: Racism and Gender
in the 1920s (Berkeley, 1991); Nancy MacLean, Behind the Mask of Chivalry: The Making of the Second Ku Klux Klan
(New York, 1994); and Leonard J. Moore, Citizen Klansmen: The Ku Klux Klan in Indiana, 19211928 (Chapel
Hill, 1997). On various forms of conservatism in the 1930s, see George Wolfskill, The Revolt of the Conservatives: A
History of the American Liberty League, 19341940 (Boston, 1962); James T. Patterson, Congressional Conservatism
and the New Deal: The Growth of the Conservative Coalition in Congress, 19331939 (Lexington, Ky., 1967); Alan
Brinkley, Voices of Protest: Huey Long, Father Coughlin, and the Great Depression (New York, 1982); and Leo P.
Ribuo, The Old Christian Right: The Protestant Far Right from the Great Depression to the Cold War (Philadelphia,
1983).
of thinking about conservatism as a social and political movement. Is the model of an

insurgent movement rising from a small band of faithful supporters to the pinnacle of
power the best way to understand the rightward shift of American politics? Did conservatism begin only in the postwar yearshow distinctive are its concerns when seen in the
broader sweep of American history? Were conservatives eectively able to establish the
contemporary political agenda? How should we evaluate the obstacles and failures that
conservatives faced? The vast majority of the new histories of conservatism trace its development over the course of the postwar period to 1980 and the election of Ronald Reagan.
There are important questions on both sides of this chronology and even about the
definition of the timeline itself.
For those who have approached conservatism as a political movement, the point of
origin is usually the immediate postwar period or perhaps the New Deal. The idea is that
modern conservatism formed in opposition to the dominance of the liberal vision that
was born in the Great Depression and World War II. There is no question that the rise of
the liberal state, the expansion of labor unions, and the general rejection of pure laissezfaire principles in the wake of the economic collapse of the 1930s transformed the political
landscape and placed those who were critical of these developments on the defensive. But
historians also have traced some of the most distinctive features of postwar conservatism
back to the 1920s and 1930s. Scholarship on the Ku Klux Klan in the 1920s is suggestive
of how the Ku Klux Klan foreshadowed the development of the modern Right. Alan
Brinkley and Leo P. Ribuo wrote about the populist opposition to liberalism in the
1930s, which may have received less attention than it warrants in the recent wave of histories of the Right.24
Now scholars are beginning to suggest that many of the defining features of the postwar Right go back even earlier than the interwar period. For example, Julia Ott has
argued that the business campaigns for the market that have been studied in postwar
America can be found even before World War I, in the advocacy of the New York Stock
Exchange on behalf of free-market ideas and widespread stock ownership. Rosemary
Feurer, William Millikan, and Chad Pearson, among others, have looked at employer
resistance to unions in the early years of the twentieth century, indicating its deeply politicized nature long before the New Deal. Beverly Gage has written about antiradicalism
and anticommunism in the early years of the twentieth century, suggesting that this strain
of conservative politics cannot be analyzed only since the Joseph McCarthy era. Kim
Nielsens study of antifeminism during the first Red Scare shows how ideas about
gender were bound up with a broader antiradicalism. Allan Lichtman argues that the
primary concern of conservatives has been that pluralistic, cosmopolitan forces
threatened Americas national identity, and he traces this fear back to the 1920s. Jefferson Cowie and Nick Salvatore have taken these insights further, suggesting that
738
December 2011
25
Scholarship that is suggestive of the connections between themes in postwar conservatism to the conservatism
of the 1920s or earlier includes Kim E. Nielsen, Un-American Womanhood: Antiradicalism, Antifeminism, and the
First Red Scare (Columbus, 2001); William Millikan, A Union against Unions: The Minneapolis Citizens Alliance and
Its Fight against Organized Labor, 19031947 (St. Paul, 2001); Rosemary Feurer, Radical Unionism in the Midwest,
19001950 (Urbana, 2006); Chad Pearson, Organize and Fight: Communities, Employers, and Open-Shop
Movements, 18901920 (Ph.D. diss., State University of New York, Albany, 2008); Beverly Gage, The Day Wall
Street Exploded: A Story of America in Its First Age of Terror (New York, 2009); Chad Pearson, Whats So New about
the New Right? Rethinking the Origins of Postwar Anti-unionism, paper delivered at the annual meeting of the
Organization of American Historians, Washington, D.C., April 2010; and Julia C. Ott, The Free and Open Peoples Market: Political Ideology and Retail Brokerage at the New York Stock Exchange, 19131933, Journal of
American History, 96 (June 2009), 4471. Allan J. Lichtman, White Protestant Nation: The Rise of the American Conservative Movement (New York, 2008), 2. An essay that makes the case for the strength of conservatism throughout the
twentieth century is Jeerson 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), 332, esp. 15.
26
Beverly Gage, Rethinking J. Edgar Hoover: Conservative Power in a Liberal Age, paper delivered at the
Miller Center for Public Aairs, University of Virginia, Feb. 2009; Bethany Moreton, To Serve God and Wal-Mart,
3235; Elizabeth Tandy Shermer, Creating the Sunbelt: The Political and Economic Transformation of Phoenix,
Arizona (Ph.D. diss., University of California, Santa Barbara, 2009); Brian J. Glenn and Steven M. Teles, Conservatism and American Political Development (New York, 2009), 5.
the postwar era was a long exception to the norm of American politics and that
liberalism never laid the cultural foundation for an alternative to the conservative
individualism that characterized the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries as
much as it does our own day.25
At the same time, although conservatives saw themselves as antigovernment crusaders,
they wielded more political power during the liberal age than historians have fully
acknowledged. Beverly Gage, for example, addresses the ways that J. Edgar Hoovers conservative politics shaped the Federal Bureau of Investigation, and she analyzes the significance for the conservative movement of having such a powerful government bureaucrat
as an ally. In her work on Wal-Mart, Bethany Moreton touches on Jesse Jones, the evangelical millionaire real estate developer who headed the Reconstruction Finance Corporation under Franklin D. Roosevelt. Elizabeth Tandy Shermers work on local boosters in
Phoenix, Arizona, and their use of city government to appeal to industry to relocate to the
southwestern city oers another way of thinking about conservative uses of government
at the local level. The conservative self-image as principled libertarian should not keep us
from seeing the ways that the state has helped shape American conservatism, and conservatism helped shape the state, as the political scientists Brian J. Glenn and Steven M.
Teles put it.26
What is the significance of recognizing the power of the conservative strain in American
politics throughout the twentieth century? For one thing, if conservatism was not newly
born in the postwar periodif its intellectual, social, and even some of its organizational
lineages can be traced back to the beginnings of the centuryit becomes more dicult
to see the dominance of postwar liberalism in the same way. The suggestion is that conservative politics and the communities that sustained it always formed a strong counterweight to liberalism. The successes of the modern Right can be attributed, then, to the
ways that it tapped into a political tradition that predated the organization of the movement itself. Instead of seeing a conservative movement springing from the ashes of World
War II to counter a powerful liberal state, we might see a long tradition with deep
historical roots, revitalized at dierent points in response to various challenges but nonetheless present throughout the century. The postwar period then appears to be less an era
739
This set of questions about conservatism suggests that its roots in American politics have
been stronger throughout the twentieth century than much of the literature to this point
suggests. Even so, historians have also started to raise another set of questions that are
somewhat at odds with the vision of conservative power. They emphasize the fragility of
the movement in its era of apparent victory and focus on the many hindrances that it has
encountered.
This perspective has come primarily from historians who are examining the 1970s and
1980s, chronicling the years when conservatives came to power and examining the ways
that they governed. Criticizing what some see as the whiggish tendency to read conservatisms successes backward through postwar history, this new scholarship suggests that
the conservative movement in the 1970s and 1980s, despite its obvious victories, was
actually much weaker and less cohesive than historians have generally believed. Its victories in the late 1970s were highly opportunistic. They depended primarily on the crises
within liberalism rather than a genuine deepening commitment of the electorate to conservative principles and ideas. The implication is that studying conservatism may miss the
point, for the triumphs of the Right can only be understood in tandem with the travails
of the years of the Watergate scandal, the Vietnam War, the energy crisis, and economic
recession. Although scholars have treated the conservative movement as the dynamic
force, important changes happened within the mainstream of American politics and
within liberalism, as Democratic politicians, moderate Republicans, and liberal intellectuals became increasingly sympathetic to economic deregulation and to punitive policies
and attitudes regarding crime.27
27
On whiggish, see Judith Stein, Pivotal Decade: How the United States Traded Factories for Finance in the
Seventies (New Haven, 2010). Scholarship on the evolution of the Right in the 1970s includes Julian E. Zelizer and
Bruce J. Schulman, eds., Rightward Bound: Making America Conservative in the 1970s (Cambridge, Mass., 2008);
Rick Perlstein, Nixonland: The Rise of a President and the Fracturing of America (New York, 2008); and Laura
Kalman, Right Star Rising: A New Politics, 19741980 (New York, 2010). Work that focuses on the changes among
liberals and moderate Republicans in the 1970s on issues such as crime, economic regulation, and family life
includes Natasha Zaretsky, No Direction Home: The American Family and the Fear of National Decline, 19681980
of liberal power slowly countered by a resurgent Right, and more an era characterized by
contest and struggle all along.
Looking at the prevalence of conservatism throughout the twentieth century may also
mean altering our view about its rise to power. Most of the new historiography of conservatism tells its story as one of a grassroots social movement, starting among a small number of loyal supporters and slowly working its way outward to achieve victory and a mass
following with Reagans election in 1980much as the abolitionist movement, the civil
rights movement, and the labor movement did. But recognizing the longstanding power
of conservative ideas and beliefs throughout the century raises the question of whether
this is the correct analogy. There were, after all, many members of the political establishment who subscribed to important parts of the conservative program through the middle
years of the twentieth century, and there were many business leaders who shared its
central faiths even more deeply. Conservative claims about individual rights, the virtues
of capitalism, and anticommunism were echoed broadly across the political spectrum.
Conservatives exercised a great deal of economic and institutional power throughout the
postwar years. In many ways, despite their deeply felt sense of themselves as outsiders on
the defensive, they were never the excluded figures they believed themselves to be.
740
December 2011
(Chapel Hill, 2007); Eduardo Canedo, The Rise of the Deregulation Movement in Modern America, 19571980
(Ph.D. diss., Columbia University, 2008); Michael Jo Allen, Until the Last Man Comes Home: POWs, MIAs, and the
Unending Vietnam War (Chapel Hill, 2009); Julilly Kohler-Hausmann, The Attila the Hun Law: New Yorks
Rockefeller Drug Laws and the Making of a Punitive State, Journal of Social History, 44 (Fall 2010), 7195; and
Heather Ann Thompson, Why Mass Incarceration Matters: Rethinking Crisis, Decline, and Transformation in
Postwar American History, Journal of American History, 92 (Dec. 2010), 70334.
28
Jeerson R. Cowie, Stayin Alive: The 1970s and the Last Days of the Working Class (New York, 2010); David
Harvey, A Brief History of Neoliberalism (New York, 2005).
This focus raises the question of whether at that moment there might have been some
deeper shift in American politics, economics, and cultureone that helped frame the
context for the successes of the Right but that was not itself determined by the conservative movement. In this narrative, the 1970s and 1980s seem less the period of ascendance
for conservatism than a time when something in the entire framework of American politics began to change. In his writing on the 1970s, Jeerson Cowie has suggested that the
idea of the working classand in some ways, the idea of class itselfbegan to decline at
the very moment when the factories of the Midwest rusted over and the divisions between
rich and poor began to widen. Theorists of neoliberalism, such as David Harvey, emphasize the failure of Keynesian economic policy and the emergence of a newly aggressive
class politics as the result of the economic crises of the decade. Daniel Rodgers has
described the 1980s as the age of fracture, when the structuralist ideas of society that
had dominated intellectual life in the mid-twentieth century began to give way. Narratives that had stressed society, history, and power were replaced by visions that gave primacy to the agency of the individual. The organizational and electoral victories of
conservatism do not explain these cultural and intellectual shifts that aected the entire
political spectrum and even the very way that politics itself was conceived.28
Even as scholars start to rethink the evolution of liberalism, historians of the 1980s are
beginning to ask whether conservatism during the Reagan years was as powerful and
coherent as it appeared to be. How did conservatives govern? How did they try to translate their broad philosophical and political beliefs into specific pieces of legislation? Why
did they not roll back more of the welfare state than they did? To what extent was the
Right successful in remaking public policy and American society? Meg Jacobs and Julian
Zelizer have argued that liberalism and the regulatory welfare state remained surprisingly
robust in the 1980s and 1990s. Even though certain parts of the conservative project
resonated with the broad public, the rollback of government programs that benefited the
middle class did not. The legal infrastructure and many of the institutions that had been
created during the New Deal and the Great Society eras did not prove so easy to
dismantle, nor did the Left disappear during the 1980s. Veterans of the social movements
of the 1960s organized in the antinuclear movement, the antiapartheid movement, and
joined forces to oppose American foreign policy in Central America. The existence of the
gay rights movement provided the base for Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome
(AIDS) activism and the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power. Feminists continued to organize
for reproductive rights and equal access to the workplace. Finally, David T. Courtwright
has emphasized that the culture of the country did not become more amenable to conservative
values, so traditionalist conservatives found themselves consistently frustrated. In short,
conservatives faced significant obstacles as they attempted to achieve their program. Just as
the Right had not disappeared during the mid-twentieth century, so too did liberalsand
741
29
Treatments of the 1980s that emphasize obstacles encountered by conservatism in power include Meg Jacobs
and Julian E. Zelizer, Conservatives in Power: The Reagan Years, 19811989; A Brief History with Documents (Boston,
2010); and David T. Courtwright, No Right Turn: Conservative Politics in a Liberal America (Cambridge, Mass.,
2010).
30
Zelizer, Rethinking the History of American Conservatism, 37274.
31
On the evolution of conservatism in the 1980s (and especially on tensions within the movement), see Richard
Reeves, President Reagan: The Triumph of Imagination (New York, 2005); Sean Wilentz, The Age of Reagan: A History,
19742008 (New York, 2008); Gregory L. Schneider, The Conservative Century: From Reaction to Revolution
(Lanham, 2009); Waterhouse, Lobby for Capital; and Young, We Gather Together.
even the Lefthelp determine the course of events in a time that often seemed dominated
by the other side.29
The vision of the 1980s as a moment of sustained conflict rather than as an era when
conservatism triumphed means rethinking how historians conceive of conservative governance and policy making during the decade. Where did conservatives win and where did
they lose? How did they translate their antistatist movement ideals into government?
Zelizer argues that conservatives often had to find ways to advance their ideological project
without directly challenging state regulatory structuresgetting conservatives appointed
to the courts, for example, or stang bureaucracies such as the National Labor Relations
Board with people who were hostile to their basic aims. Nor did they take the state apart;
they dramatically expanded government in areas such as defense spending and in the war
on drugs. Often this expansion of government has been seen as inconsistent with the
movements libertarian values. For conservatives, however, it may have been consonant
with a broader approach to the state, and historians need to learn more about how conservatives were able to reconcile the apparent contradiction. Despite the diculties that
conservatives encountered, American policies did shift to the right during the 1980s and
afterward, especially regarding taxes, regulation, welfare, and labor policy. Instead of
assuming that success at the ballot box translated easily into changes in policy, however,
or that ideology maps neatly onto political change, historians should find ways to think
anew about exactly how conservatives sought to achieve their goals once they began to
win electoral victories.30
As the chronological frame broadens past 1980, historians will also start to reconsider
the trajectory of the conservative movement in the Reagan era and after. On one level, the
movement flourished with Reagan in the White House. These years saw the creation of
new think tanks, magazines, radio and television programs, political organizations, and
the expansion of those that existed already. At the same time, these were also years of
fracture and division. Hard-line activists objected to Reagans meetings with Mikhail
Gorbachev. Business activists split over trade and tax policies. On the religious Right,
some of the alliances formed earlier (for example, between Mormons and Baptists or
Protestants and Catholics) came under new pressure as theological disagreements came to
the forefront and as activists grew disappointed with the Reagan administrations record
on abortion. By the end of the presidency of George W. Bush, many conservative intellectuals were backing away from an unpopular president, complaining that he had
increased government spending and that his foreign policy adventures in Iraq and Afghanistan had been failures. These conflicts within the conservative movement have as yet
received relatively little attention from historians, but they will surely be assessed in more
depth as research moves closer to the present.31
742
December 2011
For historians of religious conservatives, the most recent period may be the most
important one. The 1980s and 1990s were years of growing mobilization on the Christian
Right. This may have been because of the fractures and defeats that the movement faced
in these years. Many conservative Christian leaders were often sharply critical of the
Reagan administration for not doing more to advance a conservative social agenda, and
they also felt acutely embattled during the presidency of Bill Clinton. This sense that even
when conservatives won, the religious Right lost may have helped politicize more
churches, leading to the deepening of the relationship between religious conservatives and
the Republican party. Every victory was accompanied by new frustrations. In this way, the
problems that conservatives faced when in power actually became stimuli for the movement to continue to grow.
The most recent literature, then, points in two directions. On the one hand, scholars have
argued that conservatisms roots are thought to have been deeper than the studies that
focused on the postwar years suggested; on the other, conservatisms legacy appears more
conflicted and contingent, less simply triumphant. In a way, this tension is reflected in
our current historical moment. The conservative movement today seems embattled and
fragmented, even after the 2010 midterm elections and the debt crisis of the summer of
2011. Yet many of the central principles that were once promoted by conservatives
aloneespecially about economic matters and the need for austerityseem to have transcended the movement itself and to have become the new common wisdom, so much so
that we appear still to be living in the age that began with Reagans election.
Perhaps to gain a fuller appreciation of what has changed in American politics, it
will be necessary to broaden out from our focus on the conservative movement. After all,
telling the story of conservatism in the 1980s and 1990s raises the question of what
exactly we mean when we talk about the study of the Right. Are we thinking only of the
narrative of the movement itselfits rise, its obstacles, its victories? Or are we thinking of
the broader changes in American politicsa growing uncertainty about the potential of
government, a greater faith in the free market, and a deepening sense of anxiety about
collective action? If the latter, have historians approached the conservative shift in American
politics in too partisan a way? After all, these political transformations may have reflected
a great many dierent thingsfrom the changes within the Democratic party to the
growing influence of economic ideas in politics to the fall of the Soviet Union and the
accompanying sense of the failure of state-run economiesthat are not simply the result
of the organizational victories of the Right. Are we interested primarily in the trajectory
of the conservative movement itself? Or are the stakes larger, in which case looking solely
at conservative institutions and ideas may not provide the answers that we seek?
The point is not to turn away from political history, to abandon the idea that something important changed in American politics circa 1980. It is, rather, to expand its
boundariesto find new ways to illuminate the dynamic between the self-aware creation
of a conservative movement and the changing context within which it organized. The
transnational turn in American historiography may be especially helpful in coming to a
deeper sense of the specific role of the conservative movement in the recent history of
American politics. The move away from welfare-state liberalism that took place in American
politics happened in a similar way across much of the globe, and many countries saw the
rise of far-right movements at about the same time as well. Looking at conservatism from
743
32
Relatively little truly transnational or comparative international historical work on conservatism has been
done thus far. See, for example, Burgin, Return of Laissez-Faire; Harvey, Brief History of Neoliberalism; and Juan
Gabriel Valdes, Pinochets Economists: The Chicago School in Chile (Cambridge, Eng., 1995).
an international perspective might mean analyzing the ways that the movement drew
from intellectual and organizational sources outside the United States. It would involve
looking more deeply at the connections between American conservatism and the conservative intellectual and political tradition in Europe throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. It might mean examining the contributions that American conservatives
made to right-wing movements elsewherefor example, the connections between
Reagans America and Margaret Thatchers Britain, or the influence of the Chicago School
of Economics in Augusto Pinochets Chile. It could also mean thinking about how conservative movements around the world were able to gain strength from the economic and
cultural changes of the late twentieth century. Whether or not conservatives created the
new politics of declining institutions, economic competition, and philosophical individualism, they certainly were able to benefit from it. What are the economic and political
changes that opened up the space for the rise of conservative activists and the entrenchment of their political ideologies, not only in the United States but all over the globe?32
When Alan Brinkley wrote his 1994 essay, it might still have been possible for historians
to minimize the significance of the conservative strain in American history, to overlook
the cultural chasms that separated fundamentalist conservatives from secular society,
and to believe that exposure to modernity naturally led to a more progressive, liberal
politics. Taking conservatism seriously required an act of historical imagination. Today,
despite the current travails and splits within the conservative movement, it is hard to
imagine scholars holding this perspective with confidence. The idea that America is deeply
divided politically and culturally is far more widely accepted, both inside and outside
of the academy. The challenge for scholars of conservatism today is no longer to revive
historical interest in the Right or to convince others of its importance. Rather, the real
project is to see conservatism with a new perspectiveto understand its tenacity through
the liberal years, its longstanding relationship to the state and to economic elites, and how
its history is intertwined with that of liberalism, as well as the ways its ascendance reflected
not only its own political dynamism but also broader changes in American society.
Historical literature on American conservatism flourished during the first eight years
of the twenty-first century, an era of conservative ascendancy that was impossible to
ignore. As scholars were writing, the daily headlines made it easy to envision the relevance of their work. In a way, what we need now is the distance to think anew about the
nature of conservative power in the twentieth century. This is the act that requires the real
leap of historical imagination today.

Conservatism A State of Field

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Conservatism: A State of the Field

The Journal of American History

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The Journal of American History

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Conservatism: A Round Table

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The Journal of American History

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Conservatism: A Round Table

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advocates of a free market, and believers in traditional morality. These anticommunist

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Conservatism: A Round Table

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Conservatism: A Round Table

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and nativist sentiment in the conservative movementwhich seems especially present

Conservatism: A Round Table

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of thinking about conservatism as a social and political movement. Is the model of an

The Journal of American History

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Conservatism: A Round Table

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The Journal of American History

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Conservatism: A Round Table

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The Journal of American History

Conservatism: A Round Table

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