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

For many in the academy, conservatism is itself a “Devil term” of sorts, the dreaded harbinger of neoliberal violence, theocratic fascism, and endless war. Similarly, many of the same people wonder if conservatism has not hoisted itself on its own petard: in establishing its modern character as a reactionary movement, have conservatives themselves not evacuated the term’s meaning, moving away from principled conservatism based on a respect for tradition? Recent developments in American politics—such as the rise of a new conservative populism that cannot be bothered to sublimate its reactionary politics in the manner of the Moral Majority—make it easy to wonder if contemporary conservatism has lost its soul, as Mark Lilla (2010) argues.

However, by treating conservative as a flexible conceptual term rather than a coherent philosophy, Michael Lee offers an escape from these irre-solvable debates about American conservatism. His insightful book Creating Conservatism: Postwar Words that Made an American Movement studies key mid-century conservative texts as “reference points, ideological authorities, and argumentative topics” rather than archives of a Platonic conservative philosophy (13). The proliferation of multiple types of conservatism, Lee suggests, does not evidence damning contradictions so much as a vibrant source of political contestation that gives lifeblood to the movement.

In the introduction Lee frames the book as an exposition of the core of some of conservatism’s central mythical modern texts, namely Barry Goldwater’s The Conscience of a Conservative (1960), Friedrich Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom (1944), Whittaker Chambers’s Witness (1952), Richard Weaver’s Ideas Have Consequences (1948), William F. Buckley’s God and Man at Yale (1951), Russell Kirk’s The Conservative Mind (1953), Milton Friedman’s Capitalism and Freedom (1962), and Frank Meyer’s In Defense of Freedom (1962). Lee reads these texts for their main ideas and political— rather than quotidian—contexts and circulation, occasionally flashing forward to moments in modern politics that evidence the conservative canon’s influence.

In chapter 1, Lee makes the case that the canonization of these works managed tensions that were sites of potential fracture for postwar conservatives. By producing a shared investment in key works, conservative intellectuals gave these texts an almost mythical status, ensuring their competing messages engendered debates about conservatism that would not snowball into greater existential crises. Whether stylistically parroting William F. Buckley’s excesses or drawing up lists of influential conservative texts, conservative print culture performed “canonical proficiency” that signified “adroit conceptual familiarity and genuine identity” for conservatives (21–22). In the context of a postwar world where the political consensus only had room for New Deal liberalism or sham “New Republicans” who made common cause with the welfare state, acting “as if” there was a conservative intellectual tradition implicitly refuted claims about conservative irrelevance and marginality. Lee identifies two threads within the canonization process, the genesis narrative and the canonical jeremiad. In the former, the political right in the postwar period was “disconnected, sporadic, and beaten” (28). In the latter, conservatives rehearsed a shared conservative tradition and then attacked those who had veered away from it. Both variants concluded there was a conservative tradition, even if they occasioned disagreements about its content.

The next two chapters focus on the major terms in modern conservative dialectic: traditionalism and libertarianism. Lee maps the argumentative patterns within both, and in the second chapter makes the case that what held together the traditionalist end of the dialectic exemplified by works like Richard Weaver’s Ideas Have Consequences and Russell Kirk’s The Conservative Mind was a certain belief in the transcendental. Despite differences in where Weaver and Kirk found transcendental values and morals, both were skeptical of radicalism and materialism. “Weaver and Kirk decried specific forms of capitalism” in a way that “left little doubt that they viewed the business of sparsely regulated buying and selling as one cause of the modern disease” (71). Lee shows that traditionalism sought to conserve collective...