No. 1120Delivered April 1, 2009April 27, 2009

This paper, in its entirety, can be found at:

www.heritage.org/Research/Thought/hl1120.cfm

Produced by the B. Kenneth SimonCenter for American StudiesPublished by The Heritage Foundation214 Massachusetts Avenue, NEWashington, DC 20002–4999(202) 546-4400 • heritage.orgNothing written here is to be construed as necessarily reflect-ing the views of The Heritage Foundation or as an attemptto aid or hinder the passage of any bill before Congress.

Talking Points



Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., wrote in 1947 that“there seems no inherent obstacle to thegradual advance of socialism in the UnitedStates through a series of New Deals.” Five-and-a-half decades later, George Will wrotethat we had experienced “the intellectual col-lapse of socialism” around the world.

•

Through the power of its ideas—linked bythe priceless principle of ordered liberty—andthe successful political application of thoseideas, the conservative movement became amajor and often dominant player in thepolitical and economic realms of our nation.

•

With the right leadership, much of the frus-tration and uncertainty that characterizethe conservative movement at present willfade away as they did when Robert Taft,Barry Goldwater, Ronald Reagan, and NewtGingrich were the acknowledged leaders of conservatism.

The End of Conservatism?

Lee Edwards, Ph.D.

The modern conservative movement began as aRemnant with Albert Jay Nock and Frank Chodorov;grew into an intellectual movement with FriedrichHayek, Richard Weaver, and Russell Kirk; blossomedinto a political movement with William F. Buckley Jr.and Barry Goldwater; burst into full bloom as agoverning movement with Ronald Reagan and TheHeritage Foundation and other organizations; suc-cumbed to hubris with Newt Gingrich and TomDeLay; imploded under George W. Bush and the neo-conservatives; and is now wondering whether it isheaded for the ash heap of history.Let us begin our examination of the state of Amer-ican conservatism with a little history.Forty-five years ago, Lyndon Baines Johnson wonthe presidency in a landslide, receiving 61 percent of the popular vote and carrying 44 states for a total of 486 electoral votes. Johnson’s coattails were long andwide: Democrats wound up with a two-to-one major-ity in the Senate and the House of Representatives—the largest Democratic majority in the House since thehigh point of the New Deal.The political historian Theodore White concludedthat “the elections of 1964 had left the Republicanparty in desperate condition.”

Because Barry Gold-water had run a defiantly conservative campaign frombeginning to end, most political experts were quick tosecond White’s bleak assessment of Republicanismand go him one better with regard to the state of American conservatism.

page 2

No. 1120Delivered April 1, 2009

Walter Lippmann, the preeminent pundit of theday, wrote that the returns disproved “there is a greatlatent majority of ‘conservative’ Republicans.” Author-journalist Robert J. Donovan said that if Republicans are seen to be “the voice of right-wingradicalism,” they “will remain a minority party indef-initely.” The

New York Times’

James Reston summedup that “Barry Goldwater not only lost the presiden-tial election…but the conservative cause as well.”

212

Conservatives dismissed this doomsday analysis.Ronald Reagan, fresh from his widely hailed nationaltelevision address on behalf of Goldwater, wrote thatthe landslide majority did not vote against conserva-tism but against “a false image” of conservatism that“our liberal opponents successfully mounted.”Frank Meyer, the politically astute senior editorof

National Review

, pointed out that despite the car-icature of the conservative cause as “extremist, rad-ical, nihilist, anarchic,” two-fifths of the voters votedfor the conservative alternative to liberalism.

Mey-er’s implication was clear: You can build a powerfulpolitical movement on a foundation of 27 milliontrue believers.So who was proved more correct in theirassessment of the returns—Walter Lippmann orRonald Reagan?

From Goldwater to Reagan

Reviled and rejected in 1964 as no other presi-dential candidate in the 20th century—one maga-zine cover screamed that he was “psychologicallyunfit” to be President—Barry Goldwater was easilyreelected to the U.S. Senate in 1968 while the Pres-ident who buried him in an historic landslide darednot seek reelection.Looking back, we can see that the 1964 electionresults and the 1965 passage of the Great Societyinto law marked the apogee of modern liberalism.In 1966, the Republican Party, led by Goldwaterconservatives, gained 47 seats in the House of Rep-resentatives and three seats in the Senate.Fifteen years after the so-called Goldwater deba-cle, Ronald Reagan announced that he would againseek the Republican nomination for President. Theimmediate reaction of the punditocracy was thatReagan was too old—he was nearly 69—too con-servative, and too dumb to be President. How couldanyone who had hosted a TV program called “Death Valley Days” cope with the multifaceted responsibil-ities of the leader of the free world?

The New Republic

characterized Reagan as an “ex-movie actor, darling of the rabid right…an interna-tional innocent, and an economic extremist.” Soci-ologist Robert Coles called the prospect of Reaganwinning the GOP nomination “preposterous,” while James Conaway wrote in the

Atlantic Monthly

thatamong the news media, the idea of Reagan as Presi-dent “was more than [they] could bear.”

Yet, a decade later, when Ronald Reagan left the White House, historians and politicians pouredforth a stream of encomiums about his presidency,citing the restoration of Americans’ confidence inthemselves, the impressive economic recovery, andthe end of the Cold War at the bargaining table andnot on the battlefield.Summing up his presidency after his death, thePulitzer Prize-winning historian Edmund Morrissaid, “We know his greatness as a president by whatwe don’t see today…. Where is the Soviet Union? Where is the double-digit inflation? Where is thenational malaise?” “On foreign policy,” remarkedDemocratic Senator Edward M. Kennedy, “[Reagan]will be honored as the president who won theCold War.”Still, not everyone sang Reagan’s praises. TheReagan legacy, said Nobel Prize economist JamesTobin, was “a crippled federal government.” “I don’tthink history has any reason to be kind to him,” saidCBS’s Morley Safer.So who was more correct in their assessment,Morley Safer or Edward Kennedy?

1.Theodore White,

The Making of the President—1964

(New York: Signet Books, 1965), p. 453.2.Lee Edwards,

Goldwater: The Man Who Made a Revolution

(Washington, D.C.: Regnery Publishing, 1995), p. 344.3.

Ibid.

, p. 345.4.Steven F. Hayward,

The Age of Reagan: The Fall of the Old Liberal Order 1964–1980

(Rosehill, Cal.: Prima Publishing, 2001), p. 620.

page 3

No. 1120Delivered April 1, 2009

American conservatism has undoubtedly suf-fered steep ups and downs in the post–World War IIperiod. Indeed, it seemed on the edge of extinctionafter the crushing defeat of Goldwater in 1964, afterReagan’s failure to capture the Republican presiden-tial nomination in 1976, and after Bill Clinton’s“Third Way” victory in 1992, but each time conser-vatism rose from the ashes like the fabled phoenix.

A New Era for Conservatives?

Today, liberal pundits and historians are at itagain. Amnesic as ever, they are saying that in thewake of last November’s elections, American con-servatism is headed for the ash heap of history.



The country is no longer “America the conser-vative,” asserted senior editor John Judis of

TheNew Republic

, but “America the liberal.”

•

Barely able to contain herself, the editor of

TheNation

trumpeted that the election of BarackObama marked “the collapse of conservatism.”

•

Barack Obama’s victory signaled more than “theend of an era of Republican presidential domi-nance and conservative ideology,” stated one-time conservative Michael Lind; “it may markthe beginning of a Fourth Republic of theUnited States.”

Lind’s conclusion that the era of conservatismwas ended and America was at the beginning of anera of “Hamiltonian centralization and reform” wasseconded not only by euphoric liberals, but by anx-ious conservatives ready to chart a new course evenif they were uncertain about the destination.

•

Former Republican Congressman MickeyEdwards

has called for a return to the libertar-ian philosophy of Barry Goldwater. The villainbehind the collapse of conservatism, Edwardssays, was the coupling of Big Government con-servatives and the Religious Right.

•

Former Bush speechwriter Michael Gerson statesthat we need compassionate conservatism to con-front global AIDS, combat U.S. poverty, andpromote human rights abroad. Saying that con-servatism without idealism is dead, he lists hisheroes: William Lloyd Garrison, William JenningsBryan, Martin Luther King, Jr., and John PaulII—a quartet that has yet to make an appear-ance at the annual CPAC or the Southern Bap-tist Convention.

•

Commentator Patrick J. Buchanan lambastesarrogant neoconservatives and greedy WallStreeters for leading us astray and sets forth an America First platform.

•

Cato’s David Boaz invokes a plague on both BigGovernment conservatives and liberals and saysthat choice is the key—whether you’re choos-ing a church, a school, or a lifestyle.Let us be clear about one thing: Republicans lostin 2008 and 2006 not because they ran on conser-vative ideas but because they ran

away

from conser-vative ideas.

Needed: An InclusiveConstitutional Conservatism

So what is to be done? I suggest that what is nowneeded is a politics of inclusion, not exclusion—nocasting out of social conservatives or neoconserva-tives or any other kind of conservative, but arenewed fusionism that will unite all the branchesof the now-divided conservative mainstream. Ibelieve that a rejuvenated fusionism can do this byblending the concepts of liberty and order, individ-ual freedom and responsibility, limited governmentand a strong national defense just as the FoundingFathers did with the checks and balances of theConstitution.Frank Meyer, the author of the original fusionismand an avowed libertarian, stated that the core prin-ciple of his theory was that “the freedom of the per-son [is] the central and primary end of politicalsociety.” The state has only three limited functions:national defense, the preservation of domestic order,and the administration of justice between citizens.

But Meyer argued that religious and traditionalprecepts were needed to undergird freedom, whichcould not exist on the relativist-materialistic pre-mises of modern thought. In the American experi-