Of Ideas and Politics

The Conservative Ascendancy: How the GOP Right Made Political History
by Donald Critchlow. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007).

Rightward Bound: Making America Conservative in the 1970s, ed. Bruce J. Schulman and
Julian E. Zelizer. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008).

Upstream: The Ascendance of American Conservatism
by Alfred S. Regnery. (New York: Threshold Editions, 2008).

TED V. MCALLISTER is the Edward L. Gaylord Professor of Public Policy at Pepperdine University and the author of Revolt Against Modernity: Leo Strauss, Eric Voegelin, and the Search for a Post-Liberal Order.

Perhaps contemporary conservatives
misunderstand their own movement
because conservative philosophy distorts
conservative history. Ideas, not material
conditions, drive history, conservatives
aver. Richard Weaver’s Ideas Have Consequences
(an editor’s title much disliked by
Weaver) established a powerful model for
tracing moral and civilizational change—
often decline—to rather small alterations
in beliefs, such as medieval nominalism.
Importantly, most of the sweeping historical
narratives produced by conservatives in
the early days of the conservative awakening
emerged from the typewriters of nonhistorians—
men of letters whose training
and intellectual dispositions were more
literary than empirical. Often works of
genius (one thinks of Russell Kirk’s Roots
of American Order, for instance), the most
powerful books at the dawn of the movement
provided such a compelling case for
understanding history as idea-driven that
conservatives have inherited an overly
simplistic historical imagination—one excessively
philosophical and insufficiently
empirical.

The tendency to understand historical
causality in this way, and to understand
the history of the conservative movement
in terms of the fight over ideas, is greatest
among those who are more traditionalist
and who think of American civilization
as the latest and imperiled bastion
of Western civilization (people like me).
But thinkers from those other streams of
conservatism that emerged in the 1940s
and 1950s also tend to think in terms of
a clash of ideas, a struggle over cherished
beliefs. This is true of those who point to
Hayek as their inspiration or to Buckley
or Strauss or even Meyer’s later fusionism.
All of these schools of thought deemphasize
material conditions at the expense of
lofty ideals. Moreover, these same people
often chastise the materialist arguments
of the leading academics as not only in
error but also as expressions of the kind
of bad ideas that threaten to undermine
our civilization.

The brilliant book by Nash, The
Conservative Intellectual Movement,
provided a paradigmatic narrative of
the conservative movement through the
Sixties. Nash’s command of the wideranging
materials of the diffuse movement
and his ability to note connections,
to articulate an intellectual movement
that had coherence despite enormous
ideological tensions, made it possible for
almost all self-conscious conservatives of
the 1970s and 1980s to think of themselves
as heirs to an intellectual flowering,
even as they focused their energies on
politics and policy. Of course Nash never
intended his first book to define conservatism
in America as such, and a careful
survey of his body of work reveals that
no scholar has a better grasp of the subtle
complexities of the history of conservatism.
But the success of Nash’s book gave
his subject—conservative intellectuals—
a primacy in the larger narrative that
Nash never intended. And so the excellent
telling of history contributed to our
distorted view of history.

The rise of a political conservatism
in the 1970s and the dominance of selfidentifi
ed conservative political figures
since the early Eighties have created
interesting difficulties in defining
conservatism and in understanding the
relationship between the intellectual
movement and the political movement,
and it has tested greatly the view of
history as simply ideas-driven. Conservative
scholars have written often on the
relationship between ideas and politics,
of the connections between the literary
scholar or the political theorist and the
politics of tax policy, of liberationist
foreign policy, of almost all the policies
now associated with the Republican
Party. Some find in the story an evolution—
ideas have consequences and good
philosophy leads to good policy. Others
find the rise to political power of rightwing
elements to have so disconnected
the movement from its philosophical
origins as to represent a betrayal.

These narratives are all flawed. They
are not flawed because ideas don’t have
consequences but rather because the
intellectual movement was essentially a
rebellion against disordered times. When
Weaver and Kirk defended the historical,
literary, and moral imagination, they did
so because the modern era had nearly lost
contact with this central part of human
reality. The distortion developed when
their literary acts of rebellion substituted
for the more empirical work of historians.

Some of us have attempted to redress
this imbalance with ever-more complex
taxonomies, trying to discover the
connections among the many different
groups of political actors who file a claim
to the label “conservative.” The problems
with trying to connect all the claimants
on some taxonomical grid are numerous
because one finally discovers that no
philosophical principle, no matter how
elastic, truly threads its way through
this political family tree. The problem,
perhaps, is that some of us (and no one is
more guilty than I) have tried to approach
historical narrative with a desire to find
philosophical coherence.

A new day is dawning in the historiography
of conservatism. During the past
decade a number of fine and narrower
empirical histories have begun to clarify
details and to complicate larger narratives.
Now it appears that we are about
to break free of the obsession with both
the founding generation and the political
earthquake of the Eighties and focus
on the neglected Seventies. Even more
important, historians are now placing
the history of American conservatism
within the larger structural changes in
the economy, culture, and politics. We
will not discover in this process an intellectually
coherent movement, but we
will be rewarded with a most fascinating
story that reminds those of us who have
grown tired of slogans (which is what
ideas sometimes become when they lose
their subtlety) that humans are complex,
and that democratic politics is beyond
the reductive tools of political scientists
to comprehend.

Exhibit A of the maturing of historiography
in this field is Donald
Critchlow’s The Conservative Ascendancy:
How the GOP Right Made Political History.
Critchlow is one of the best conservative
historians of the past few decades
because of his combination of excellent
research and his scrupulous fidelity to
evidence. In his newest book Critchlow
seeks to tell “the story of how conservative
beliefs were translated into political
power, and how, through ideological and
political compromise, the GOP Right
made history in its ascent to power.” He
warns the reader that he did not write
a “cautionary tale of how principle is
betrayed by practice” nor did he write
a polemic in defense of the conservative
victors. The author tells the story rather
than leads a cheer.

In both the introduction and in
the concluding pages, The Conservative
Ascendancy promises to be a history
of American conservatism that is decentered
from ideas, or rather, it promises
a story that contextualizes ideas and
beliefs within a larger narrative of structural
change from an industrial to a postindustrial
society. The very breadth of this
model is its potential strength because it
promises to blend into the narrative the
economic changes that made the New
Deal coalition less stable, and this model
offers a chance to explain the complex
social changes that attended the decline
of the industrial order and the rise of a
post-industrial order. The rise of a new
form of populism—directed against
the government rather than against
industry—as well as a new configuration
of values, of definitions of freedom, of
strange clusters of liberation movements
and government protections, all might
be explained better within the story of
economic change. This was the promise
of Critchlow’s book, not its product.

In two pages (3–4), the reader espies
the big themes, the fascinating and
unpredictable twists of history that
turned members of the right wing of the
GOP into the agents of both revival and
revolution, conservation and transformation.
We learn that the right wing rode
the crest of historical change rather than
being the rancorous advocates of change
and revolution. We detect the outlines
of a narrative that will shake up the
outdated categories and give us hope that
we can understand the history that better
explains our present situation.

Critchlow is explicit when he explains
that economic changes “fostered” a
changed society and he gives the reader
reason to believe that the story that
follows will trace that complex relationship.
This promising explanatory model
opens up greater possibilities still—to
place recent conservative history in the
context of the broader sweep of liberalism.
Critchlow notes, here and there,
that the New Deal phase of liberalism
placed a special emphasis on security by
using the government to provide protections
for the elderly and subsidies for
farmers, and by partnering with big business
and unions to foster a stable industrial
order that offered steady economic
progress along with a government-sponsored
safety net. However, the larger
impulse of liberalism has always been
toward liberation—freeing people from
all manner of restraints. The first liberation
in the American model was from
tyrannical governments, but in every
age since we witness a new struggle to
liberate some group from some restraint
or limitation. Even as the government
focused more on security and protection,
the liberationist impulse remained
and strengthened in the Sixties and the
Seventies.

By the Seventies the various forms
of government interventions (especially
federal) and the relentless drive for evergreater
liberation produced very strange
constellations of fears and resentments.
The right wing of the GOP—the group
who took power in Critchlow’s narrative—
forged a new model of politics that
incorporated new fears about cultural and
moral decay alongside their own liberationist
vision of America that reflected
the emerging economic conditions.

If this is the story that Critchlow
sought to tell and to document, he failed.
The basic elements are in place in the
book, but almost immediately following
the discussion of the rise of a post-industrial
society, the author delivers a rather
standard chapter about European intellectuals
and home-grown reactionaries.
The chapter is very solid, and it even
pushes beyond most such chapters by
including neglected figures like George
Benson of Harding College. Every
chapter is like this, solid narrative with
new details.

As a standard history of conservatism
in this period, Critchlow’s book is among
the best because it combines an admirable
economy of words with the inclusion
of some neglected parts of the story
to give the reader a solid grasp of the
events, intellectual developments, influential
people, and political maneuverings
of recent American history. Moreover,
Critchlow explores the development of
new institutions in the Seventies as well
as bubbling resentments and fears that
drove so many people to reconsider their
political allegiance. The book includes a
serious and thoughtful examination of
most of the Bush years and here Critchlow
contributes a great deal to our understanding
of the relationship between the
Bush administration and the Republican
Party. He attempts, with some success, to
account for the growing partisanship and
ideological divisiveness of our own age.
In short, Critchlow has written a very
good history of right-wing conservatism,
but it is a story that augments rather than
challenges the older narratives.

Like Critchlow, the editors of Rightward
Bound: Making America Conservative
in the 1970s, Bruce J. Schulman and
Julian E. Zelizer, want to understand
the rise of American conservatism in
the context of deeper movements in
economic, cultural, and political history.
The editors explain that this collection of
essays on American conservatism and the
1970s helps advance our understanding
of this much-neglected decade as well
as explain the more complex interaction
between various populist/conservative/
evangelical reactions with cultural
and political trends. At the heart of the
editors’ analysis of the new history of
the Seventies is the notion that a newly
robust conservatism mobilized not only
in the midst of cultural upheavals but
also because of them. The relationship
between cultural change and conservatism
was not universally reactionary but
often symbiotic. The same cultural shifts
that helped produce the “oppositional
politics” and harsh critiques of American
institutions found in the music of Jackson
Browne, for instance, also provided new
openings for conservatives to push for
market (private) rather than government
(public) solutions.

The editors further argue that, despite
the conservative victories that began in
the Seventies, the way to understand
this movement is to place it in the larger
context of the liberal accomplishments
of the Thirties through the Sixties.
According to Schulman and Zelizer the
great liberal ascendancy of those decades
restructured American institutions,
culture, and values; and the conservative
reaction has forced compromises from,
rather than overturned, the liberal establishment.
The tensions, paradoxes, and
contradictions of the current Republican
establishment are only expressions of
the failure of American conservatism to
reshape America in its image. Thematically,
the “incomplete revolution” of the
conservatives ties this book together, but
it produces a distortion of analysis as it
assumes, to a degree that the authors seem
not fully to recognize, that the “movement”
has a coherent and unified agenda.
This assumption then gives their conclusion
a more political edge than is necessary—
the movement largely failed and
liberalism remains largely triumphant.
But if they had examined conservative
impulses that emerged in the Seventies as
often conflicting reactions to liberalism,
then a more supple theme would have
prevented a triumphalist conclusion.

Both in the editors’ introduction and
in many of the essays—including many
of the finer essays—the reader confronts
the knowing liberal assumptions about
the conservatives explored in the book.
The authors often speak to others of
the historical establishment out of their
shared political assumptions and commitments
rather than out of a genuine understanding
of the conservative “other.” The
problem begins with the unduly firm
definition of conservatism, as though
beyond all their diversity, we all know
who “they” are really. The insider-speak
leads them to assume things that they
believe do not require empirical support.
If this tendency is sometimes irritating,
it is hardly confined to historians or to
liberals, and it shouldn’t get in the way
of acknowledging the often excellent
empirical work found in this book.

Taken as a whole, this is a very helpful
book, contributing significantly to our
understanding of the emergent conservatism
of the Seventies. Very good essays
like Paul Boyer’s on the evangelical
resurgence, Joseph Crespino’s on civil
rights and the religious right, and Bradford
Martin’s on the cultural politics of
singers and songwriters, easily justify this
book. But the essay by Suleiman Osman,
“The Decade of the Neighborhood,”
stands as a model for the kind of close
study of cultural history that promises to
make sense of the Seventies and American
conservatism. “Rather than a shift rightward,”
writes Osman, “the 1970s marked
a shift inward. Neither exclusively Left
nor Right, the politics of the 1970s was
militantly local.” In this way Osman not
only helps us to understand the different
politics of this decade compared to the
Sixties, but he notes that shared frustra
tions pushed people with different political
commitments to eschew national
politics in favor of concrete efforts
to create healthy local communities.
Osman scrambles our categories. The
effort by leftist and conservatives alike
to produce a more intimate, communal
and nurturing community against the
alienation of an aggressive consumerist
and atomistic culture suggests that our
political, cultural, and economic history
has often beautiful patterns to which our
ideological framing has made us blind.

Rightward Bound pushes us to think
of the 1970s and of conservatism in
new ways. Myriad were the reactions
to the ever-larger government of the
Great Society and diverse were the ways
Americans sought to find authenticity
and coherence in a decade of cultural and
economic disorder. New, often populist,
forms of “conservatism” bubbled up
alongside other movements. This book,
for all its flaws, does not allow us to think
of the time before Reagan in terms of
political organization alone, but stretches
us to understand Reagan’s success in
terms of anxieties and needs that were
not necessarily conservative.

Meanwhile, Alfred S. Regnery’s
memoir, Upstream: The Ascendance of
American Conservatism, reaffirms the
very idea-centered understanding of
conservatism that I’ve advocated getting
beyond. But it would be a huge mistake
to assume that Regnery’s book is unimportant,
wrong, or outdated. In many
ways I was charmed by this book and I
believe it points to some very important
threads of modern American history at
a time when many conservative intellectuals
lament the disconnect between
conservative philosophy and “conservative”
politics. Regnery reminds us that,
beyond the seeming ideological incoherence
of our times, conservatism has
a philosophy, an intellectual disposition,
or at least a civilizational taproot that
places the rapid changes of the moment
in the context of a great and threatened
civilizational inheritance.

Regnery, who is now editor of the
American Spectator and who, like his
father before him, was president of one
the great institutions of the movement,
Regnery Publishing, does an admirable
job of reading the history of the movement
and retelling the familiar story of
post-1945 conservatism. His historical
labor provides him with a way of sharing
his personal journey of these years,
connecting his experiences with a wellknown
history and giving the reader a
sense of journey, of discovery that gives
life to the larger story.

“Movements founded on ideas generally
last for a long time,” Regnery notes
in the preface. He outlines briefly the
ideas that gave form to the movement
in the 1950s—individual liberty, free
markets, limited government, strong
national defense. These ideas, and the
institutions formed to promulgate them,
brought intellectuals together with audiences
who were looking for ways of
formulating their own philosophy, their
own reaction to the world they were
experiencing. Nash gave us this essential
story in the 1970s, but Regnery gives
us some sense of why these ideas found
receptive soil and how these core beliefs
found new adherents in changing environments.

Regnery’s book tells the story of ideas
as embodied and helps us to understand
how those who championed
these ideas—through such institutions
as Regnery Press—created, against all
odds, an alternative intellectual culture
to the university and media culture.
Ideas do not promulgate themselves, and
no matter how beautiful, powerful, or
truthful the ideas themselves, they only
change things when people fight for
them, and when institutions disseminate
them.

So, what of the relationship between
ideas and the material conditions that
alter, support, or undermine beliefs? As I
read Upstream I was struck by how much
a movement that began with a small
band of cantankerous and heterogeneous
thinkers, and that still claims that ideas
have consequences, has lost contact with
the great books of a bygone era that,
collectively, reminded a people in an age
of rapid transition that they belonged to
an ancient but living civilization. Regnery’s
book should tell young conservatives
especially that policy and politics do
not form the primary horizon for understanding
conservatism. But we should
also become aware that, after more than
an half-century, American conservatism
is part of a very complex American
history and that ideas do not find life in
abstract purity but rather find particular
expression relative to economic and
cultural resources. A brilliant story of
conservatism as idea-driven tells only
part of the story. What we do not yet
understand properly is the way conservatism
as a cultural form, as an organic
part of the American story, developed or
changed as America changed.

The more abstractly conservatives
construct ideas, the more ideological
they will become. A grounding in the
messy history through which conservative
beliefs, habits, and dispositions
develop will help conservatives understand
themselves as belonging to a living
tradition rather than being devotees of
an abstract doctrine.