Noble - Conservatism in The USA

Conservatism in the USA
Author(s): David W. Noble

Source: Journal of Contemporary History, Vol. 13, No. 4, A Century of Conservatism (Oct.,
1978), pp. 635-652
Published by: Sage Publications, Ltd.
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/260077 .
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David Noble
Conservatism in the USA
The problem of defining conservatism in the United States since

1945 is a complex one. The majority of cultural leaders during this
time have called themselves liberals but have defined liberalism as
the defence of the established institutions in the country. On the
other hand, some of the minority who have called themselves
conservatives define conservatism as the defence of liberal
principles. This strange pattern has its roots in the reform
movement of the early twentieth century. At that time, the major
presidential leaders of the Republicans and Democrats, Theodore
Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson, became spokesmen for a
progressivism which rejected the laissez-faire principles of
nineteenth-century liberalism in favour of an increasing intrusion
of government power into the marketplace to regulate the giant
corporations that had come to dominate the economy since the
1890s. Most academic, press, and religious leaders gave their
support to the 'new' democracy of Roosevelt and Wilson which
promised that greater popular participation in politics could
effectively control the concentration of corporate power. These
progressives captured the name 'liberal' for themselves and
renamed as conservative the minority of intellectuals and business
leaders who continued their loyalty to nineteenth-century
liberalism.
In 1917 the progressives promised to use the war to fulfil the
prophecy of nineteenth-century liberalism that constitutional and
economic liberty would spread throughout the entire world. Armed
force would speed the inevitable victory of progress over the
reactionary empires of Germany and Austria-Hungary. By 1920 the
failure of Wilson's vision of a new world order and the
simultaneous defeat of the hopes for a progressive democracy by
the nomination and election of Harding left progressive liberals
Journal of Contemporary History (SAGE, London and Beverly Hills),
Vol. 13 (1978), 635-52

636
Journal of Contemporary History
confused and defensive. Most became isolationists, convinced that

American democracy could not be successfully exported to the rest
of the world. The historian, Charles A. Beard, an ardent
internationalist and advocate of war in 1917, was representative in
his repentance. In the 1920s, Beard admitted that he had failed to see
how war would strengthen corporate power. He argued that if
popular democracy was ever fully to control corporations, they must
not be allowed another wartime opportunity to increase their
economic strength and political influence. Beard refused to turn to
socialism or communism, both of which he defined as unAmerican,
as ways of overcoming corporate power. Like so many progressive
liberals, Beard had enthusiastically supported the growth of
presidential power before 1920. Presidential power provided a focus,
according to the progressive liberals, for the expression of increased
participatory democracy. But Beard came to fear the power of
President Franklin Roosevelt because he saw Roosevelt using that
power to lead the United States into the second world war.
Losing faith in the presidency as an instrument for the victory of
the public over the corporation, Beard's analysis of the flow of
American history became one of deeper and deeper despair. In the
1890s, Beard had been able to overcome the prophecy of his fellow
historian, Frederick Jackson Turner, that the closing of the
agricultural frontier meant the end of American uniqueness. Turner
had warned that the economic basis for American democracy, the
widespread ownership of land and the means of production, would
now vanish and men would become dependent on each other as they
were in Europe. Beard, however, had separated what he called the
productive force of industrialism from unproductive business leaders
and argued that an expanding industrialism offered a new frontier
for the American people. Through the machinery of political
democracy, the people could take control of industry away from the
parasitical robber barons who ran the corporations. Until 1919,
Beard had believed that industrialism would liberate people
throughout the world. But after 1920, he believed that it had such
power only in the United States because only here was there a
heritage of agrarian democracy to serve as a foundation for
industrial democracy. From 1919 to 1939, Beard had continued to
hope, but with increasing doubts, that the logic of industrialism as a
natural frontier force would undermine the power of corporate
robber barons. Then, from 1939 to his death in 1945, he viewed the
flow of events as the triumph of the conspiracy of the leaders of the

Noble: Conservatism in the USA
637
corporations, acting through President Roosevelt, to lead the United

States into the second world war and thus solidify corporate control
over the people.
Between 1939 and 1945, the years of Beard's total despair, the
Protestant theologian, Reinhold Niebuhr, replaced the historian as
the leading spokesman of progressive liberals. This change in
leadership symbolized the conversion of most progressive liberals to
a conservative liberalism. A young man in 1917, in contrast to the
middle-aged Beard, Niebuhr's expectations for the redemptive
nature of the first world war were completely shattered by 1920.
Unlike the older historian, the younger minister no longer hoped that
the forces of industrialism could operate through the mechanism of
political democracy to liberate the people from domination by the
corporate elites. He now turned to Marxism and its insistence that a
proletarian revolution was the necessary first step to industrial
democracy. In the early 1930s, Niebuhr was a Marxist
'revolutionary' and an isolationist: 'The workers control the vast
machinery of modern civilization', he wrote, 'The future belongs to
the workers', and as the capitalist nations of Europe seemed headed
for what he called another civil war, Niebuhr urged, 'Let America
hold out as an island of sanity in an insane world.'
But in the mid-1930s, Niebuhr lost faith in the ability of a
proletarian revolution to bring simplicity out of complexity and
establish a perfectly just society. He now began to develop his 'neoorthodox' theology that denied the possibility of earthly harmony
for mankind. Niebuhr criticized his former faith, liberal
Protestantism, for believing that history was progressive. And he
criticized communism for holding the same faith. Niebuhr used this
Christian 'realism' as the basis for his criticism of his former
isolationist colleagues. Arguing the need for the United States to
fight the evil represented by Nazi Germany, Niebuhr denied that
America was a virtuous New World that needed to be segregated
from an evil Old World. 'Every nation has its own form of spiritual
pride', he wrote, 'Our version is that our nation turned its back upon
the vices of Europe and made a new beginning.'
If Americans were part of the same sinful brotherhood as
Europeans, Niebuhr continued, then 'the tragic element in a human
situation is the conscious choice of evil for the sake of good.'
Americans must choose the lesser evil of war to defeat the greater evil
of Nazism. For Niebuhr, America had no sacred space to preserve
from European chaos and the defeat of Nazism would not lead

638
Europe and the rest of the world out of a perpetually compromised

human history. The human choice, Niebuhr insisted, is always that
of relative good and relative evil.
Niebuhr was trying, between 1939 and 1941, to influence the
majority of Protestant ministers away from pacifism. Polls taken
during the depression indicated that a majority of Protestant
ministers had lost faith in the capitalist system, and many had turned
to isolationism and pacifism. From 1937 to 1941, however, there
were increasing defections from the isolationist and pacifist
movements. The key factor in this shift was a growing recognition
that industrialism was not liberating the individual from the
corruption of corporate bureaucracies as Beard had prophesied.
President Roosevelt was willing to preserve and work with the large
corporations. And the Russian worker, under Marxism, seemed to
be just as much a captive of corporate bureaucracies run by
capricious and evil men as was the American worker. The erratic and
oppressive role of communists in the Spanish Civil War had
disillusioned many young Americans about communism. Final
disillusionment came in the form of political purges in Russia and the
willingness of Soviet Russia to enter into diplomatic negotiations
with Nazi Germany.
The heart of Niebuhr's new theology was his argument that the
individual was not able to separate his rational mind from his
unconscious mind, that the individual could not escape the biological
cycle of the body, and therefore could not escape death. Given these
necessary conditions of human existence, it seemed that there was no
way for Americans to live only in the realm of rational space. For
Niebuhr in 1940, both the modern capitalist and the Marxist theories
of revolution were based on false and unrealizable principles.
Niebuhr argued that the American Revolution, unlike the French
and Russian Revolutions, was not based on perfectionist ideology. It
was a defence of the status quo and the authentic American
tradition, therefore, was not perfectionist as the isolationists
claimed. The seventeenth-century Puritans and the eighteenthcentury Founding Fathers, according to Niebuhr, were aware of the
sinfulness of man and the need, therefore, for political humility.
These wise elders had wanted 'to preserve some relative decency and
justice in society against the tyranny and injustice into which society
may fall.' Like the great English conservative, Edmund Burke, they
were intent upon developing politics as 'the art of the possible, being
cautious not to fall into worse forms of injustice in the effort to

639
eliminate old ones.'

'The demonic fury of force and politics', for Niebuhr, came from
the dictators' rejection of divine judgment of human actions. In their
cynicism, the dictators denied the existence of any values other than
those they personally created. Having defeated this heresy by 1945,
the United States faced the even more dangerous heresy of Soviet
Russia, which insisted that the human and divine could become one.
'This tendency of playing God to human history', Niebuhr insisted,
'is the cause of communist malignancy.' Niebuhr admitted that the
United States, under the leadership of Woodrow Wilson, had
dreamed of redeeming the world in 1917. But Franklin Roosevelt,
unlike Wilson, was a realist in the tradition of the Founding Fathers.
The patriots of 1776 had defended the liberty of a decentralized
system against the attempts of England to impose an unjust
centralization. And Roosevelt had defended the decentralizedsystem
of the free nations of the West against Hitler's attempts at a
centralized tyranny. Niebuhr now rejected the hope of his former
progressive liberalism that the checks and balances of the Republic
of 1789 could be replaced with a centralized democracy which could
efficiently express the opposition of the people to European
totalitarian theories. Niebuhr celebrated the Founding Fathers for
creating those checks and balances that preserved the liberties of a
pluralistic society from the temptation of centralized power. The
United States, in its pluralism, was like the community of nations in
the Free World. The United States, in 1945, must save that
international pluralism from the threat of communist centralization.
From this position, it was easy for Niebuhr and other neoorthodox theologians to move to a justification of the Cold War
against Soviet Russia because, for them, communism was committed
to the messianic redemption of the world. Unfortunately, with the
expansion of communist influence into Eastern Europe and the
victory of the communists in China, half the world lived under the
control of this 'false religion.' For Niebuhr and many Protestant
leaders, this situation created an unprecedented need for peacetime
military strength to contain communism within its boundaries.
Though the Free World could not destroy communism where it
existed, it could not allow further expansion.
Between 1945 and 1955, a group of historians, political scientists,
and sociologists who were born in the years just before the first
world war and were therefore a generation younger than Niebuhr,
began to establish the political views of the theologian as the

640
dominant academic world view. Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., Oscar

Handlin, Edmund Morgan, Richard Hofstadter, Daniel Boorstin,
Louis Hartz, Daniel Bell, Seymour Martin Lipset, all, as young men at
the end of the 1930s, had been attracted by Beard's progressive
liberalism, by socialism or communism, as they had believed that the
tradition of American political democracy was threatenedby the large
corporation.
By 1952, however, they all agreed with the liberal economist John
Kenneth Galbraith, who argued in his book of that year, American
Capitalism, that individualswere still free in the United States because
the power of big business was balanced by the power of big labour and
big government. Beard's concern for the preservationof liberty in the
1930s could be ignored because the pluralisticinstitutionalstructureof
the nation automaticallyprovided the necessaryconditions for liberty.
They were certain that the acceptance of the economic theories of
John Maynard Keynes guaranteedthe health of a prosperous and expanding capitalist economy. Economic justice, therefore, was
automatic as each individual found an opportunity for upwardmobility.
Given the essential political, social and economic soundness of the
nation, the major concern of these young academics was to avoid a
return to the ideological politics of the 1930s. Richard Hofstadter
wrote:
I belong to a generation which came of age during a period of tremendous conflict
on a world scale and of intense and lively controversy in American domestic
politics. A battle of ideologies, roughly similar to that which took place in a worldwide theatre of action, could be seen at home as well.
The VitalCentre(1949) by Arthur Schlesinger,Jr., was the single most

important statement by this group against 'the terror of ideological
politics' which had plagued their youth. Like Niebuhr, Schlesinger
identified the new, post-war conservative liberalism with the
philosophy of Edmund Burke who had criticized the French Revolution for attempting to create a new world order. And Schlesingercut
his ties with the progressiveliberalismof men like Beard because progressive liberalism shared the utopianism of the French and Russian
Revolutions and had messianic links with Nazism. Schlesingerwrote:
Official liberalismhas long been almost inextricablylinked with a picture of man as
perfectible, as endowed with sufficient wisdom and selflessnessto endure power and
to use it infallibly for the general good. The Soviet experience, on top of the rise of
fascism, remindedmy generation rather forcibly that man was indeed imperfect.

641
Daniel Bell, in his collected essays, The End of Ideology (1960),

rejoiced that American intellectuals were rejecting the influence of
European ideologies and were learning that the authentic American
tradition was anti-ideological and concerned with 'relative standards
of social virtue and political justice instead of abstract absolutes.'
Daniel Boorstin, in his book, The Genius of American Politics
(1953), agreed with Schlesinger and Bell that 'the tendency to
abstract the principles of political life' was a European, not an
American tradition. For Boorstin, 'the characteristic tyrannies of
our age - Nazism, Fascism, Communism' were European, not
American, and it was in the Old World, not the New, that it was
believed that 'Man can better his condition by trying to remake his
institutions in some colossal image.' Boorstin also rejoiced that,
since the second world war, American intellectuals were rejecting
'the unAmerican demand for a philosophy of democracy'. The
consensus among these conservative liberals, who had become
dominant not only within the academic world but also among church
and media leaders, was that they had as their major responsibilitythe
defence of a good institutional status quo against the resurgence of
right-wing or left-wing ideologies of perfectionism which might
tempt the American people into abandoning their safe and sane
society to pursue false promises which could only result in disorder,
chaos, and then totalitarianism.
The use of Burke to argue the impossibility of changing the status
quo caused many of these conservative liberals, however, to feel
uneasy. Were there no absolute principles available to counter the
metaphysics of Marxism or nineteenth-century liberalism? Niebuhr
had written that 'Historical pragmatism exists on the edge of
opportunism, but cannot afford to fall into the abyss.' But what
were the standards which kept one from falling into the abyss?
Morton G. White in Social Thought in America (1949) and Eric
Goldman in Rendezvous With Destiny (1953) expressed this
underlying fear about the inability of conservative liberalism to
define its principles clearly enough to establish its intellectual
respectability. It was this perceived weakness of the inadequacy of a
pragmatic philosophy to counter the propositions of Marxism which
made it possible for a group of intellectuals to establish the
foundations of a movement which called itself conservative. For
these self-conscious conservatives, there was nothing conservative
about conservative liberalism; it was liberalism and it had neither the
spiritual nor intellectual strength to counter Marxism. This 'new

642
conservative' or 'traditionalist' movement led by intellectuals such as

Richard Weaver, Peter Viereck, Russell Kirk, and Robert Nisbet
urged, according to George H. Nash in his recent book, The
Conservative Intellectual Movement in America since 1945 (1976), 'a
return to traditional religious and ethical absolutes and a rejection of
the "relativism" which had allegedly corroded Western values and
produced an intolerable vacuum that was filled by demonic
ideologies.'
Richard M. Weaver of the University of Chicago had been
converted from his leftist leanings in the 1930s by the school of
Southern Agrarians at Vanderbilt University who had contrasted the
rootedness of the South with the rootlessness of the North. In Ideas
Have Consequences (1948), Weaver traced this rootlessness to the
end of the Middle Ages and the coming of nominalism. Weaver was
joined by John Hallowell, a political scientist at Duke University,
and Eliseo Vivas, a philosopher at Northwestern University, in
demanding a return to the medieval sense of spiritual and metaphysical universals if the inner emptiness of the West were to be filled
in time to stop the march of communism. Leo Strauss, a political
scientist at the University of Chicago, challenged pragmatism with
the universals of classical political thought and modern
individualism, with the ancient sense of community. The sociologist
Robert Nisbet also provided a powerful critique of the rootlessness
of modern man and the ease with which moderns fell under the spell
of totalitarianism in The Questfor Community (1953). The writings
of Albert Salomon and J.L. Talmon analyzed the way in which
philosophies of perfectionism became part of the mainstream of
Western political thought during the Renaissance and Reformation.
While much of this analysis agreed with that of Niebuhr about the
nature of totalitarianism, it was critical of the Reformation in a way
that he, as a Protestant theologian, could not be and much of it was
favourable to the Middle Ages in a way that he obviously could not
be. (A number of new conservative writers became converts to
Roman Catholicism as in the case of Russell Kirk.) The most
powerful of these writers was the European emigrant, Eric Voegelin.
His The New Science of Politics (1949) had defined the great modern
intellectual error as gnosticism, the merger of heaven and earth. And
he filled out this thesis in his subsequent multi-volume history of
political thought.
These developing ideas reached wide audiences in Peter Viereck's
Conservatism Revisited: The Revolt Against Revolt (1949) and

643
Russell Kirk's The Conservative Mind (1953). Viereck and Kirk as

new conservatives agreed with the conservative liberals that the
United States had capitulated less to revolutionary theory than
Europe and was in a stronger position to resist communism in the
name of traditional Western values than were the European nations.
But while Viereck and Kirk and most of the other new conservatives
saw the United States defending the universals of classical political
thought and medieval Christianity, the conservative liberals started
American tradition with the puritans and were bitterly critical of the
new conservatives for trying to import Old World theology and
philosophy into the New World environment. While the conservative
liberals could share a respect for Burke with the new conservatives,
they denied the direct influence of Burke's ideas. American leaders
were natural and spontaneous Burkeans. In the same way, they
could agree with the new conservatives that Alexis de Tocqueville
provided a much better analysis of American conditions than did
Marx. But American scholars of the 1950s could use de Tocqueville's
categories because the Frenchman had not imposed his European
preconceptions on the American landscape. He had been willing to
learn from American reality. In 1955, the political scientists, Louis
Hartz and Clinton Rossiter, rebutted the new conservatives in their
books The Liberal Tradition in America and Conservatism in
America. Both agreed that the American tradition was Lockean
liberalism and that true conservatism had to be a defence of that
liberal tradition. Both emphasized that America was born free of any
feudal past and, therefore, had never developed a revolutionary
ideology to overthrow that non-existent past. Both denounced the
use of Old World religious and philosophic categories to criticize the
pragmatic liberal tradition which, for them, represented the
consensus of the American people.
Conservative liberals then found themselves criticized by a
growing number of intellectuals who denied the ability of the
conservative liberals to truly conserve the values of Western
civilization and who proudly called themselves conservative and
pledged themselves to accept the responsibility for saving the West
from inner cultural confusion. Ironically, the conservative liberals
also found themselves attacked by another group of self-defined
conservatives who claimed they were not truly liberal. As the new
conservatives gained much intellectual vigour from emigres such as
Voegelin and Thomas Molnar, so the Americans who wanted a
renaissance of nineteenth-centuryindividualism gained much vitality

644
from the emigre economist, Friedrich A. Hayek, and another

Central European, Ludwig von Mises. Hayek, now at the University
of Chicago, published the surprise best-seller The Road to Serfdom
in 1944. The popularity of Hayek's book proved that the
conservative liberals were mistaken in their argument that no
significant group of Americans was still concerned about the
problem of liberty. The conservative liberals wanted to overcome the
fears of the progressive liberals about the oppressiveness of
corporations. But the libertarianconservatives who found a common
voice in Hayek's book were concerned, like him, with the oppressive
power of big government and big unions. During the 1930s,
libertarians such as Henry Hazlitt, John Chamberlain, Isabel
Paterson, Garet Garnett, and John Flynn had bitterly attacked the
growth of the New Deal government bureaucracyand the increasing
power of labour unions. For them, these massive bureaucracieswere
destroying the free individual by destroying the free marketplace.
Galbraith's logic of countervailing power as a protection for the
individual was completely unacceptable to them. Now the popular
response to Hayek's book encouraged them to renew their struggle
to free the American people from the tyranny created by Franklin D.
Roosevelt.
At first glance, there was nothing to unite the new conservatives,
who despised the nineteenth century as an era of economic laissezfaire and Protestant individualism, and the libertarianconservatives,
who cherished those nineteenth century attributes and hated the
organicism of both the medieval past and the New Deal. Both
agreed, however, that conservative liberals, like progressive liberals
before them, could not provide the leadership to end the communist
threat to either the principles of the free marketplace or the major
religious and philosophic traditions of the West rooted in the
classical and medieval past.
Beginning with the publication of Eugene Lyon's The Red Decade
in 1941, a number of former communists and former communist
sympathizers warned that the communist conspiracy had been able
to establish itself within the New Deal. Magazines such as Plain
Talk, The Free Man, and the American Mercury suggested that there
was something suspicious about the willingness of the Truman
administration to limit the Cold War to the containment of
communism. James Burnham, a leftist intellectual in the 1930s,
emerged as the most powerful theoretical critic of the conservative
liberal position of containment, most strongly expressed by George

645
Kennan. Burnham in his The Struggle for the World (1947), The
Coming Defeat of Communism (1950), Containment or Liberation
(1953) and The Web of Subversion (1954), argued the need for
militant anti-communists to take control of the Cold War. They
must purge the conservative liberals who were either voluntary or
involuntary participantsin the communist conspiracy to conquer the
world.
Burnham, Frank Meyer, Whittaker Chambers, and Ralph de
Toledano saw evidence in the case of Alger Hiss of how much
communist infiltration existed within the ranks of the conservative
liberals, most of whom had been progressive liberals in the 1930s.
Under this analysis, progressive liberals had been as open to
communist influence as were those who had been party members.
A number of libertarian conservatives gave wholehearted support
to the activities of Senator Joseph McCarthy as he talked of
uncovering subversives within the national government. Two young
libertarians, William F. Buckley, Jr. and L. Brent Bozell strongly
defended the senator in their book McCarthy and His Enemies
(1954). McCarthy's grass-roots popularity persuaded many
libertarian conservatives who gathered around the newly founded
journal, the National Review (1955), that they had been mistaken in
defining themselves as a principled elite surrounded by unprincipled
masses. William A. Rusher and the political scientist Willmoore
Kendall answered criticisms by conservative liberals that McCarthy
suppressed the right of free speech and threatened the free
marketplace of ideas. For Rusher and Kendall, however, every
society by definition had an orthodoxy which, when it was healthy, it
upheld. Only when a society was disintegratingdid it lose its sense of
standards and become tolerant of everything false and evil.
Fortunately, Rusher and Kendall reported, only the elite
conservative liberals were decadent and without standards while the
common people, especially in the South and Midwest, were loyal to
standards and, therefore, to the need for censorship of the false and
evil. And this was why the people had supported Senator McCarthy.
It was difficult for many of the new conservatives to overcome the
analysis of the modern masses as rootless, in order to accept
Kendall's argument of the cultural soundness of the common folk
throughout the nation. The leaders of the National Review, which
was becoming the strongest voice of self-defined conservatives, tried
to minimize the philosophic differences between new conservatives
and libertarian conservatives but one of the younger leaders of the

646
former, Peter Viereck, defected to join the denunciation of

McCarthy by conservative liberals. Viereck contributed to a
collection of essays, The New American Right (1955), in which
major conservative liberal intellectuals such as Daniel Bell, Seymour
Martin Lipset, and Richard Hofstadter warned that McCarthyism
was an example of the ideological politics against which they had
been warning for a decade. For them, it was unAmerican because it
violated the central American political tradition of pragmatic
compromise, a tradition which accepted minor changes in an
essentially sound institutional structure.
New conservatives had seen the serious development of
totalitarianism in the West as the result of the increasing rootlessness
of the common man after the decline of the Middle Ages.
Conservative liberals, however, denied that the common man was
rootless in America and this lack of alienation made possible the
continuing respect for constitutional restraint. But they explained
McCarthyism as a minor eruption of totalitarianism because it
shared with the madness in Europe 'the tendency to convert issues
into ideologies, to invest them with moral colour and high emotional
charge.' In the analysis of the conservative liberals, however,
rootlessness in America was peripheral. Provincial evangelical
Protestant cultures in the south and west had rebelled against the
establishment of the modern urban-industrialsociety.
Populism was the major expression of this rebellion and, like
McCarthyism, it was anti-intellectual and favoured a conspiratorial
theory of history. McCarthy, in the estimation of the conservative
liberals, was able to tap the vestiges of this rural resentment. He also
had been able to tap the status anxieties of urban Catholics who were
experiencing upward mobility. Inevitably, these groups, according to
the analysis of the conservative liberals, would be brought within the
non-ideological mainstream of American life and the popular
sources of McCarthyism would vanish. As for the intellectuals in the
new conservative and libertarian conservative movements who
supported McCarthy, the conservative liberals also had an
explanation of their willingness to accept a conspiratorial theory of
history. Since the late nineteenth century, according to this
explanation, the majority of intellectuals had been willing to be of
service as technical experts for the developing urban-industrial
society. In contrast to these well-adjusted and fulfilled intellectuals, a
minority of intellectuals had chosen to hold themselves apart from
the urban-industrial world. Critical of its aesthetic ugliness and the

647
massiveness of its institutional structure, they had become

increasingly alienated, eccentric, and suspicious of the realities of
twentieth-centuryhistory. Now in the 1950s, they were unable to tell
the difference between reality and fantasy and chose to believe that
responsible political leaders were Soviet agents.
Sensitive to this attack by the conservative liberals, the libertarian
conservatives of the National Review denied that Robert Welch and
the members of the John Birch Society were responsible
conservatives. While the National Review was disappointed that the
Eisenhower administrationhad compromised with the New Deal and
accepted the growth of government bureaucracy and the increased
level of government regulation of the marketplace, the editors of the
magazine could not agree with Welch's claim that Eisenhower was a
member of the communist conspiracy. Since the issue of
McCarthyism had threatened whatever alliance had been forged
between the new conservatives and the libertarian conservatives
during the decade 1945 to 1955, it is possible that the leadership of
the National Review, which was strongly libertarian, moved to
placate the new conservatives by also denying that Ayn Rand and her
objectivist followers were respectable conservatives. Another
European emigre, Rand had won a large following among college
students by taking an uncompromising stand that the only acceptable
philosophy for the individual was rational self-interest. She angered
the new conservatives because she was so critical of religious values
as a contradiction of both rationality and self-interest. She may also
have disturbed some of the middle-of-the-road libertarians because
she saw corporations as a major threat to the principles of the free
marketplace. She argued that it was corporate fear of competition
which had caused much of government intervention in the economy.
Most of the libertarian conservatives avoided the issue of corporate
bureacraciesas a threat to individualism, focusing their attention on
government and labour union bureaucracies.
The ability of the National Review at the end of the 1950s to define
Robert Welch and Ayn Rand as conservative heretics was an
indication of the remarkable growth of new conservatism and
libertarian conservatism from 1945 to 1955. During this decade,
conservative liberals had refused to take the conservatives seriously,
arguing that liberalism was the only acceptable American tradition.
But the success of the magazines, the National Review which leaned
towards the libertarian conservatives and Modern Age which leaned
towards the new conservatives at the end of the 1950s, proved that

648
the conservative liberals were wrong.

The 1940s and 1950s were decades of scholarly creativity and synthesis for the conservative liberals as well as for the new conservatives and libertarian conservatives. But scholarly creativity and
synthesis began to shift, in the 1960s, to neo-Marxist intellectuals. A
new left, which became popular among college students in the 1960s,
joined the libertarian conservatives in denying one of the central
tenets of conservative liberalism - that individualism could flourish
within the countervailing power of big government, big business and
big labour. A new generation of radicals, led by Michael Harrington,
denied another central tenet of conservative liberalism: that the New
Deal synthesis of big government, big business and big labour, informed by Keynesian economics, had ended poverty in America. The
theory of the conservative liberals that alienation and resentment existed only on the fringes of urban-industrialsociety was belied by the
alienation and resentment which developed among their own
children during the 1960s. And their belief that dissident intellectuals
were a small group of eccentrics, nostalgic for either nineteenthcentury laissez-faire or the Middle Ages, was undercut by the power
of new left academics to claim that the American future belonged to
them and not to the conservative liberals. Throughout the 1940s and
1950s, conservative liberals had tried to define Marxism as a failing
memory from the past, as irrelevant to the future as Medievalism or
classical liberalism. Now, however, the neo-Marxist intellectuals increasingly put conservative liberals on the defensive. This was
especially true by the end of the 1960s. Most of the conservative
liberals had supported Kennedy in 1960. They believed that he could
fulfil his promise to go beyond containment of communism to forcing it into retreat. Much of their optimism rested on the theories of
the economist W.W. Rostow, who demonstrated in his book The
Stages of Economic Growth (1959), how it was inevitable that the
whole world would move up to the level of American affluence if
communist influence could be restrained. This optimism about the
ability of government planning, operating through refined Keynesian
techniques to lead the capitalist economy, was expressed both in the
Kennedy-Johnson policies in Vietnam and Johnson's Great Society
programme for the cities. By 1968, however, both the foreign and
domestic policies to which most conservative liberals had given their
support were a shambles. Paralleling the way in which these government policies had lost credibility by the end of the 1960s was the way

649
in which interpretations of American history put forward by the

conservative liberals had lost credibility. When William Appleman
Williams had argued against American uniqueness in The Tragedyof
American Diplomacy (1959) and had affirmed that Marxist analysis
could illuminate patterns of imperialism in the history of American
overseas expansion, conservative liberals had defined him as an
isolated eccentric. But by 1970, most young American historians
believed that American imperialism must be compared to the
imperialism of European nations. The most important definition of
American uniqueness made by the conservative liberals - consensus
- was shattered by the appearance of Afro-American and NativeAmerican history and a series of ethnic histories of the many
Catholic and Jewish groups as well as the movement for women's
liberation. Driven from the position they had held in the 1940s and
1950s as the most important group of cultural leaders in the nation,
the conservative liberals were retreating by the end of the 1960s
towards an alliance with the new conservatives but even more so with
the libertarian conservatives.
In 1967, Daniel P. Moynihan told his fellow members of the
Americans for Democratic Action, the single most important
organization of the conservative liberals, that 'Liberals must see
more clearly that their essential interest is in the stability of the social
order; and given the present threats to that stability, they must seek
out and make more effective alliances with political conservatives
who share their interest', and 'Liberals must divest themselves of the
notion that the nation - and especially the cities of the nation - can
be run from agencies in Washington.'
A new magazine, the Public Interest, was begun in 1966 and its
editorial policy, set by Daniel Bell and Irving Kristol, former
conservative liberals, was hostile to a continuation of the Great
Society. There was little difference in the way in which the Public
Interest or the National Review used the analysis by Edward Banfield
in his book The UnHeavenly City (1970) to prove the impotence of
government policies in dealing with urban problems. By the early
1970s, the writings of major conservative liberal figures, Nathan
Glazer, Sidney Hook, Lewis Feuer and Seymour Martin Lipset could
be found in the National Review itself.
The fusion of the conservative liberals with the libertarianand new
conservatives by 1972, however, did not stop the deteriorating social
and economic situation of the nation. The conservative intellectuals
were confused and dismayed by the policies of detente with

650
communism used by the supposedly conservative administrations of

Nixon and Ford and their willingness to create the largest peacetime
budget deficits in American history. They were dismayed that much
of the intellectual vitality among younger academics in the 1970s
seemed to have a neo-Marxist foundation. And they must have been
most dismayed by the development of a new political philosophy in
the 1970s which was built on the ecological principles which emerged
in the 1960s.
Ecologists from the biological sciences had begun to argue that the
modern growth ethic of both capitalism and marxism violated the
laws of nature. For a biologist such as Barry Commoner, in his book
The Closing Circle (1971), nature was a closed system and any effort
at continual growth would destroy the cycles of physical regeneration
which kept the web of nature alive. For the ecologists, the obvious
signs of the pollution of the land, the water and the air were evidence
of the violation of these natural laws. They also related the signs of
social stress, family instability, the increase of crime, drug taking and
suicide, to the consequences of unnatural human behaviour which
did not try to live within the rhythms of nature.
Many of these ecologists defined themselves as conservatives and
were bitterly critical of the tendency of Marxists to define nature in
mechanical rather than biological terms. But their conservatism also
defined capitalism and its philosophy of private property as the
destructive radicalism which had seduced humanity away from
harmony with the seamless web of nature. Some of the ecologists
looked back to the medieval world in search of the last occasion that
Western man had understood that nature was a living and seamless
web. The neo-Medievalism of a particular group of ecologists,
therefore, differed from that of the new conservatives of the 1940s
and 1950s who accepted private property when it operated within a
context of social responsibility. For this group of ecologists,
however, there could be no compromise between private property
and social responsibility. Already Garry Wills had broken from his
new conservatism because he had come to believe that the
commitment to private property inevitably disrupted the social
order. Another Catholic, L. Brent Bozell, broke from his brother-inlaw, William F. Buckley, Jr., because he no longer believed that a
conservative society could be built on modern foundations. His new
journal Triumph read the signs of social stress as evidence that the
secular modern world must die before a new religiously-basedsociety
could emerge.

651
By the end of the 1970s, the principles of ecology were being used
by a growing number of intellectuals, many of them academics, to
develop a position of revolutionary conservatism. The historian L.S.
Stavrianos in his book The Promise of the Coming Dark Age (1976)
compared modern high-energy society with ancient Rome. Both used
their control of surplus physical energy to impose centralization on
localities which wanted to retain their identity. When Roman control
of surplus energy declined, a decentralizedmedieval world appeared.
As modern control of surplus energy inevitably declined, Stavrianos
visualized a new decentralization where individual personality could
be more fully expressed by participation in the making of important
decisions at the local level. A young political scientist, William
Ophuls, also prophesied in his book Ecology and the Politics of
Scarcity (1977) the necessary replacement of all modern political,
social, and economic institutions which were geared to growth by an
institutional structure which expressed a no-growth logic. Most new
conservatives and libertarian conservatives in the 1940s had seen
serious flaws in the world which had developed since the Renaissance
and Reformation but most also had believed that those flaws could
be overcome and that which was good in the establishment could be
conserved. Few could have foreseen in the 1940s that, a generation
later, revolutionary conservatives would build on their critique to
insist that modern flaws were fundamental, that there was nothing
worth conserving in the culture that had its foundation in the
Renaissance and Reformation. A legal scholar at Harvard, Roberto
Unger, in his book Knowledge and Politics (1975) attempted to
demonstrate the falseness of the psychology and the erroneousness
of the theories of knowledge used by the great early modern political
philosophers such as Locke, Hobbes and Descartes, contending also
that Marx shared the bankrupt assumptions of these liberal
theoreticians. The future, Unger argued, needed a political theory
completely disassociated from the major thinkers from the fifteenth
to the twentieth century. He began to offer such an alternative of
decentralized communal associations based on a psychology and
theory of knowledge rooted in the theology of medieval Christianity.
Whether the appearance of revolutionary conservatism is the
expression of new conservatism and libertarian conservatism under
the stress of events and represents nostalgia driven to absurd
extremes or whether it is indeed a radical break from the con-

652
servatisms of the 1940s and 1950s and points toward a future

indeed defined by ecological limits, perhaps time will reveal.
David W. Noble
Professor of History and American Studies at
the University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, is the
author of Historians Against History (1965)
and, with Peter N. Carroll, The Free and the
Unfree: A New History of the United States
(1977).


Noble - Conservatism in The USA

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Conservatism in the USA

Author(s): David W. Noble

This content downloaded from 200.14.85.85 on Mon, 4 Nov 2013 20:05:25 PM

Conservatism in the USA

The problem of defining conservatism in the United States since

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Journal of Contemporary History

confused and defensive. Most became isolationists, convinced that

This content downloaded from 200.14.85.85 on Mon, 4 Nov 2013 20:05:25 PM