Whither the Right?: Old and New Directions in the History of American Conservatism

Many pundits, both on the left or right, have wondered if the dramatic public fights within the Republican Party at the turn of the millennium might be signaling the unraveling of the conservative movement, which historians of the twentieth-century have dutifully studied for the past twenty years. Scholars have, by and large, focused on the coming together of this right-wing insurgency, usually dated to the New Deal or postwar period (though a few experts have looked at longstanding American intellectual, cultural, social, and political traditions). Three recent origin stories on already well-covered aspects of the Right (its businessmen, Southern strategists, and women activists) suggest that focused accounts of conservatism’s rise now hinders, not advances, historical inquiry. These books, like many others before them, promise to reveal the singular source of this crusade and pinpoint when and where it became a seemingly unstoppable force in U.S. politics. Rarely have such chronicles fundamentally revised the conventional timeline of twentieth-century U.S. politics. That narrative presumes there to have been, as postwar scholars proclaimed, a liberal consensus in place by 1945, which would only be torn apart in the 1960s and 1970s when concerns about foreign, economic, and social policies forged an apparently New Right. Few accounts, these monographs included, considered how the conflicts and compromises that delayed the Right’s solidification always plagued the movement and threatened to tear it apart as conservatives’ increased their power at the federal level in the 1970s and 1980s.¹

Historians, with a few exceptions, marginalized the Right until the mid-1990s. The few works published during the Reagan and first Bush presidencies emphasized that longstanding liberal, blue-collar, and suburban disinterest in redistributing wealth and ensuring equal opportunity became a nationwide (not just Southern) backlash after civil rights, feminist, and antiwar organizations began to advance their agendas in the 1960s and 1970s. The mid-1990s Republican takeover of Congress and the subsequent repeal of New Deal banking and welfare legislation served as the backdrop for the evolution of this scholarship into a full-blown academic obsession with the Right. This research professed to take these maligned Americans’ beliefs and fears seriously, rather than dismiss them as crackpot pseudo-conservatives as the postwar consensus school had done. Historians accordingly produced many thoughtful case studies of Steelbelt, Southern, and Pacific Coast city dwellers and suburbanites revolting against taxation, afraid of communist subversion, or fleeing integrated neighborhoods and schools. Even the most well-regarded community studies, such as Lisa McGirr’s Suburban Warriors and Kevin Kruse’s White Flight, rarely placed a subdivision in a regional, let alone a national, context but instead encouraged arguments that a particular place birthed the entire crusade. Narratives tended to fall back on assertions that liberalism had once been unassailable, even though the growing literature at the time indicated that moderates had always faced powerful right-wing opponents. Scholars also initially presumed these uprisings to be grassroots rebellions. But by the end of the 2000s, when the press increasingly dismissed political movements as Astroturf, a new generation of historians (most notably Kim Phillips-Fein and Angus Burgin) drew attention to the power and importance of executives, managers, and intellectuals in creating the movement that had yielded a new “neo-liberal” world order. These specialists still emphasized, like their scholarly forebearers, that the Right was in fact fused together from many different strands.²

Pinpointing when disparate right-wing factions became an irrepressible movement often came at the expense...