Jackson Lears: The Waxing and Waning of America’s Political Right
[Jackson Lears is editor in chief of Raritan: A Quarterly Review and the author, most recently, of “Rebirth of a Nation: The Making of Modern America, 1877-1920.”]
One puzzling feature of American politics is that the people who call themselves conservatives seldom want to conserve anything. The modern conservative movement promotes radical transformation while ignoring classical conservative ideas — for example, Edmund Burke’s respect for established institutions and customs, for continuity with tradition and for incremental change.
The recent history of the American right, writes Sam Tanenhaus, involves the triumph of “movement conservatism” over the Burkean version. In his view “the paradox of the modern Right” is that “its drive for power has steered it onto a path that has become profoundly and defiantly un-conservative,” and that has finally led to electoral disaster, political irrelevance and “rigor mortis.”
This obituary is premature, but the story leading up to it is deftly told. “The Death of Conservatism” is an expanded version of an essay that originally ran in The New Republic. It traverses several decades of complex political change, so inevitably it neglects some important topics. What remains is an elegant brief history of the modern conservative movement, as unsparing in its critique of liberal hubris as of revanchist resentment.
Mr. Tanenhaus, editor of both The New York Times Book Review and the Week in Review, traces the origins of modern conservatism to revulsion against the policy intellectuals who came to power during the New Deal. While ideologues on the right worried about this mandarin “new class,” moderate Republicans made their peace with it and cheered Eisenhower to victory in 1952. “When at last conservatives gained a foothold within the establishment, political and intellectual,” Mr. Tanenhaus writes, “it was because they had earned their way.”
Agreeing to play the game by New Deal rules, they accepted progressive taxation, some government regulation of business and the rudimentary welfare state created by the Democrats.
But the right-wing ideologues sensed a sellout. The young William F. Buckley raged against “atheistic socialists” at Yale, defended Joseph McCarthy and argued — with some justification — that the “liberal consensus” functioned as a closed system rather than as an arena for open debate. The mandarins of the center scoffed. The historian Richard Hofstadter characterized the “pseudo-conservative revolt” of McCarthyism as the unleashed irrationality of “mass man.”...
Read entire article at NYT
One puzzling feature of American politics is that the people who call themselves conservatives seldom want to conserve anything. The modern conservative movement promotes radical transformation while ignoring classical conservative ideas — for example, Edmund Burke’s respect for established institutions and customs, for continuity with tradition and for incremental change.
The recent history of the American right, writes Sam Tanenhaus, involves the triumph of “movement conservatism” over the Burkean version. In his view “the paradox of the modern Right” is that “its drive for power has steered it onto a path that has become profoundly and defiantly un-conservative,” and that has finally led to electoral disaster, political irrelevance and “rigor mortis.”
This obituary is premature, but the story leading up to it is deftly told. “The Death of Conservatism” is an expanded version of an essay that originally ran in The New Republic. It traverses several decades of complex political change, so inevitably it neglects some important topics. What remains is an elegant brief history of the modern conservative movement, as unsparing in its critique of liberal hubris as of revanchist resentment.
Mr. Tanenhaus, editor of both The New York Times Book Review and the Week in Review, traces the origins of modern conservatism to revulsion against the policy intellectuals who came to power during the New Deal. While ideologues on the right worried about this mandarin “new class,” moderate Republicans made their peace with it and cheered Eisenhower to victory in 1952. “When at last conservatives gained a foothold within the establishment, political and intellectual,” Mr. Tanenhaus writes, “it was because they had earned their way.”
Agreeing to play the game by New Deal rules, they accepted progressive taxation, some government regulation of business and the rudimentary welfare state created by the Democrats.
But the right-wing ideologues sensed a sellout. The young William F. Buckley raged against “atheistic socialists” at Yale, defended Joseph McCarthy and argued — with some justification — that the “liberal consensus” functioned as a closed system rather than as an arena for open debate. The mandarins of the center scoffed. The historian Richard Hofstadter characterized the “pseudo-conservative revolt” of McCarthyism as the unleashed irrationality of “mass man.”...