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5. Is There an American Conservatism?
- Vanderbilt University Press
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147 chapter 5 Is There an American Conservatism? In the October 24, 2005, issue of the New Yorker, Tom Reiss argued that “the first conservative,” the historian and poet Peter Viereck, deserved to be lifted out of the relative obscurity that has been his experience since the mid-1950s. Viereck has always been credited in the literature with framing the revival of an American conservatism with his 1949 Conservatism Revisited. Yet Viereck’s contributions to conservatism remain strangely understated; in most accounts, he is viewed as, in effect, a closet liberal who was out of sync with the conservatism associated with William F. Buckley Jr.’s National Review.1 Reiss attempted to rekindle interest in the Pulitzer Prize–winning Viereck by highlighting his Burkean approach, which framed his defense of the New Deal and his opposition to McCarthyism. Perhaps the last straw for the fusionists of the National Review was Viereck’s conservative defense of his endorsement of Democratic presidential candidate Adlai Stevenson in 1956.2 It did not take long for today’s conservatives to respond to Reiss’s efforts at resurrection and revision. John J. Miller, national political reporter for National Review, suggested that Reiss was engaged in “a transparent attempt to attack ‘the radicalism of the George W. Bush Presidency’ by suggesting that the conservative movement, in its infancy, betrayed its founding father.” Miller claimed that the “fundamental weakness of Viereck’s conservatism . . . was its disdain of capitalism,” which seems to translate as a repudiation of its laissez-faire version.3 In denying Reiss’s claim that Viereck’s adversaries were incensed by his criticisms of Joseph McCarthy, Miller defends as Buckley’s “most significant accomplishments” the driving out of the conservative movement a variety of extremists, including the John Birch Society, pro-Nazis, and 148 American Conservatism: Thinking It, Teaching It anti-Semites. And he concludes that liberals such as Viereck exaggerated the damage done by McCarthy, a mere “blowhard.”4 Finally, Miller takes issue with Viereck’s 1962 claim that conservatism had become “a movement infiltrated by religious fundamentalists , paranoid patriotic groups, and big business leaders, united in their loathing of the cosmopolitan elites on the nation’s coasts.” In his closing line, Miller, perhaps unintentionally evoking the ugliest spirit of the Second Red Scare, castigated “the liberals at The New Yorker” for using “a crude tactic that would do any Bolshevik proud.”5 Miller’s responses reinforce my own sense that there is value in reconsidering the nature and emergence of conservatism within the American polity and culture over the past half century. What is American conservatism ? How did it come to be defined in certain ways to the exclusion of others? What are the implications and consequences of these categorizations ? Are there ways in which the framing of American conservatism obscures and distorts political and cultural realities more than offering illumination and clarity? Would it be fruitful to engage in an interrogation of what historian Leo P. Ribuffo calls “the certification narrative” of American conservatism? Ribuffo offers one path toward a revised history of American conservatism through a reconsideration of the ways in which supposedly liberal administrations rested on seemingly conservative premises and vice versa.6 During the 1960s, those labeled as revisionists of what was characteristically called the consensus school of American historiography developed the notion of “corporate liberalism” to anchor a narrative that was oblivious to a seemingly weak and archaic conservatism and that sought to discover a radical tradition of participatory democracy and the beloved community. This New Left school was inspired by scholars such as William Appleman Williams, Gabriel Kolko, and Robert Wiebe, all of whom saw conservative ideas and consequences within the liberalism associated with the Progressive Era, the New Deal, and post–New Deal liberalism. Indeed some of the New Left historians, such as Williams and Eugene V. Genovese, offered surprisingly empathetic accounts of what was characterized as conservatism, for instance, Southern proslavery apologists and the administration of Herbert Hoover.7 Although the revisions of New Left historians are marred by their disparagement of this more conservative, corporate liberalism, it may be useful to reconsider their approach, in part stimulated by the revived interest in Peter Viereck. Lionel Trilling’s much-cited laments that “liberalism is not only the dominant but even the sole intellectual tradition” [54.157.35.140] Project MUSE (2024-03-29 14:23 GMT) Is There an American Conservatism? 149 and that “there are no conservative or reactionary ideas in general circulation ” but...