Creating Conservatism: Postwar Words that Made an American Movement by Michael J. Lee (review)

Michael J. Lee has written one of the most important books about the creation of the conservative movement in the United States to date. Creating Conservatism is a work that seeks to understand conservatism from the perspective of the canonical texts that defined it. In order to accomplish this task the author unpacks the profundity of key books that influenced conservatives from the Second World War until the 1960s. Lee’s most valuable contribution to the growing literature on conservative intellectuals is the recognition of the significance of print culture to the vitality of the American Right.

In order to connect the importance of print culture to conservatism, Lee conceptualizes what he calls the canonical jeremiad that argued for the implementation of “past principles” in the present (33–34). However, these canonical jeremiads were different in kind because of the shibboleths each writer saw as the evil destroying modern society.

At his best, Lee is prodigious at revealing how competing conservative dialects conflicted regarding their views on the sins plaguing the West. In the second chapter, Lee covers the traditionalist dialect found in the works of historian/theoretician Eric Voegelin and conservative culture critic Richard Weaver. Weaver and Voegelin began their jeremiads in different places in Western history. Weaver found his source of cultural decline in the empiricist nominalism of medieval thinker, William of Ockham, and Voegelin (a frequent conversant with Leo Strauss) in Gnosticism (60–61). Lee’s revelations about the uneasy pairing of libertarians with the traditionalist wing of conservatism are located in chapters three and four. In this regard, the author shows the difficulties of including the likes of Friedrich Hayek, Barry Goldwater, and Brent Bozell (the ghostwriter of The Conscience of a Conservative), along with the religious conservatives such as Russell Kirk, because they disagreed on key philosophical assumptions.

National Review editor William F. Buckley, Jr. does not play an integral role in Creating Conservatism. Lee appropriately sees Buckley as more of a ringleader and spokesman than a crucial thinker in the movement. “Although Buckley used gladiatorial tactics to cut an ideological image, his role within an expanding post-World War II conservatism was that of a peacekeeper and coalition builder” (152). Lee follows his cavaliering Buckley with the willing martyr Whitaker Chambers. For Lee, Chambers held the most important role of a Christ-like figure and “twice-born” individual—once a Communist, reborn a conservative. Instead of following the fusionist narrative that shows Buckley corralling all conservatives together and therefore providing a launching pad for the eventual Reagan presidency of the 1980s, Lee sees Chambers as being more important than Buckley as both a strategic and philosophical link for conservatism. Lee writes that Chambers fused international communism, the liberal media, and Alger Hiss’ defenders into a coherent rhetorical device for conservatives arguing for their place in American politics (187). The Chamberian narrative taught “[conservatives] that evil anywhere was a threat everywhere” (191).

Detractors may complain that Creating Conservatism puts too much emphasis on texts and ideas as opposed to moneyed interests behind conservatism. Nevertheless, Lee correctly realizes that conservatism was deeply ideational before it earned political influence. The author does not claim that conservative was apolitical in its infancy, but he does show the primacy of ideas and texts in creating a movement with a recognizable political voice. For this reason and many others, Lee has made a valuable contribution to the literature on conservatism.