American Conservatism: Thinking It, Teaching It

Preface

ix Preface American Conservatism: Thinking It, Teaching It is an attempt to demonstrate what academic scholars characteristically engage in but rarely discuss: the transformation of ideas into both scholarship and curricula. In an interview , the distinguished historian Lawrence W. Levine described the two desks in his office, one for his research, the other for his teaching. He wrote, “There is a very solid, integral connection between teaching and research. They are not separate entities, at least they haven’t been in my life. They are not things that go on in bitter war between each other.” Levine, like so many historians, worked out his thoughts in his classes; “teaching has been essential to me,” he asserted.1 That is the framework within which I have approached this book. I want you, the reader, to understand how I began to be interested in the nature of American conservatism, how that interest translated into initial scholarship, how that developing expertise shaped my teaching in a variety of classes but especially a senior seminar called “American Conservatism,” and how the teaching process, with my students contributing new insights and new questions, enriched my understanding of this subject. This is how many of us work—we go back and forth from ponderings to investigation to testing things out, to reflection and revision and, sometimes, rejection. I want you to get some sense of that process of academic work. If I have a not-so-hidden agenda, it is to emphasize that most academics are, first and foremost, teachers. Even granted that institutions of higher learning, and not just the obvious research universities, reward and punish academics more for their scholarship than for their work in the classroom, I still wish to doggedly insist that we spend most of our time planning our courses, teaching our courses, and evaluating our students’ performance in our courses, whether we teach 25 or 175 students per term, whether our x American Conservatism: Thinking It, Teaching It course load is three a year, mostly graduate seminars, or ten a year at a community college. As such, it is essential to always keep in mind that during that portion of our waking hours devoted to work, we mostly teach. Teaching drives the story lines, the unanticipated questions, and the latent curiosity that characteristically leads to the research. My interests in conservatism, especially its American variations, have deep roots in my intellectual development, much of which I discuss in the final chapter, “Is There an American Conservatism?” My third book, New Left, New Right and the Legacy of the Sixties, published in 1996, marked the first scholarly results of that interest, some of which was sparked by an extraordinary conference on American conservatism sponsored by Princeton University’s history department.2 What struck me was how rare it was for such matters to be incorporated into social science and humanities curricula. At that point, I had been teaching for almost thirty years. As a teacher of the Vietnam War, I had always told my students that the most egregious and unforgivable mistake of American policy makers was their obliviousness to the nature of the enemy—they did not take the time to learn about the Vietnamese, their history, their culture. More recently we see a comparable ignorance regarding the Iraqis. As an unabashed person of the Left, I felt that something similar could be charged regarding American conservatism . I noticed that many of my students knew nothing beyond clichés about conservatism; this was true of those who self-identified as Right, those who claimed to be Left, and, of course, those—the majority—oblivious to politics. So I began my own investigations about American conservatism with this academic vacuum in mind. Let me state, at the outset, what this book is and is not about. Whereas my seminar on American Conservatism covered all of its contributing streams—Burkean traditionalism, libertarianism, fusionism, the religious right, right-wing populism, and neoconservatism—the surrounding essays are more revealing of my point of view. I tend to view conservatism as fundamentally Burkean and, therefore, devote less time to conservatism’s libertarian wing. As such, I am interested in how American conservatism violated its Burkean roots—thus my interest in seemingly marginal figures like Peter Viereck—but also I find conservatism in what has characteristically been defined as liberal—thus my emphasis on thinkers such as Hannah Arendt and Reinhold Niebuhr. I hope that readers are not disappointed by my emphases as they proceed through...