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The Dangers of Conservative Populism Alan Wolfe I Conservatism is at its best when liberalism is at its worst. Fortunately for American conservatives, liberals chose to be at their worst for a considerable portion of the post–World War II period. After uniting most of the country around a national security consensus in the early years of the Cold War, and then carrying forward an ambitious sense of national purpose, including a bipartisan commitment to civil rights, during the Kennedy-Johnson years, liberalism began to put its worst foot forward in the 1970s. Supreme Court decisions that seemed to ›out democratic sentiment, an increasingly arrogant leadership class more familiar with what elite opinion considered correct than what ordinary Americans believed right, and an unwillingness to assign a high enough priority to national security—these were the features that, in discrediting liberalism, enabled conservatism to grow. And conservatism grew indeed. Once a somewhat marginal movement con‹ned to a reluctant South and agrarian Midwest, conservatism recovered from the 1964 Goldwater debacle to become the most vibrant political and intellectual force in the United States. To the great frustration of liberals such as myself, who once believed that the brightest and most talented people would always be attracted to the Left, younger politically engaged intellectuals began to ›ock to the Right, while the academic world, which retained its 1960s sensibilities long after the 1960s exhausted themselves, became buried in jargonistic abstraction and naked careerism. A conservative willingness to innovate with ideas such as school vouchers won support from inner-city minority parents. Conservative criticisms of af‹rmative action resonated with all those who remained attracted to ideas about rewarding individuals for their merit. Commitments to federalism and local96 / ism resonated, not only with those holding right-wing views, but with the temperaments of left-wing activists of the 1960s and 1970s who worried about concentrations of political power at the national level. The ‹rm conviction that communism was incompatible with liberal democratic values, once associated with Democrats such as Harry Truman, became the province of Republicans such as Ronald Reagan, while the isolationism that had once been the singular weakness of the Right found itself inherited by the Left. Conservative ideas took hold throughout the last decades of the twentieth century not only because they were well funded—actually, liberal foundations during this period outspent conservative ones—but because they seemed innovative, even progressive, at a time of liberal exhaustion. As perhaps be‹ts a worldview that insists on responsibility and reward, conservatives had no sooner begun to fashion a compelling critique of liberalism than voters turned to them for a cure for their society’s problems. Democrats, once the default political party of the postwar period, had never retained a ‹rm grip on the presidency throughout those years, but by century’s end, even their once seemingly impregnable control over Congress had been lost. A situation unimaginable in 1964—Republican control of all branches of the national government—became a brute fact of political life forty years later. (Although the midterm elections of 2006 allowed the Democrats back into majority status in both houses of Congress , this Republican ascent remains remarkable.) Rare is a political and intellectual movement that can move from opposition to power in so short a period of time. Fed up with liberal overreach, Americans gave conservatives an unusually free hand to do whatever they wanted. Indeed, after President Bush’s reelection in 2004, no signi‹cant force in American politics —not the Democrats, not so-called moderate Republicans, not governors , and not any major court in the United States, especially the Supreme Court—seemed to be in a position of preventing Mr. Bush from implementing the conservative mandate he believed the voters had given him in that election. Alas, however, if conservatism ›ourishes when liberalism is at its worst, conservatism fails most when liberalism is at its weakest. The 2004 election may have been a triumph for the Republican Party, but it also marked the defeat of the conservative intellectual revolution. This is not because, as some conservatives maintain, the interests of the Republican Party and those of the conservative movement diverged.1 On the contrary, Mr. Bush was as indebted to conservatism as Lyndon Johnson was to liberalism; pothe dangers of conservative populism / 97 litical ideologies exist to be realized through politics, and Republicans and conservatives needed each other desperately, the one to have ideas to put before the voters, the other to have a chance...

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