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29 Chapter 2 The Conservative’s dilemma modern ConservATIsm wAs born in reaction to liberalism, and conservatives ever since have self-consciously felt their central purpose to consist of raising an organized resistance to liberalism. Whereas the term “liberalism” was used as a political shibboleth beginning in the 1820s, the label “conservative” first appeared in its political sense in 1830, in an article in the British Quarterly Review.1 A combination of Tories and some of the more conservative Whig politicians in Britain founded the Conservative Party a few years later. The word then crossed the Atlantic and, by the 1840s, U.S. statesmen such as Daniel Webster and John C. Calhoun began to describe themselves as “conservatives.” Much of what American conservatism has stood for since then can be described in these same terms, as a kind of negation, a resistance to American liberalism: as liberalism has moved increasingly leftward, conservatism has resisted this drift. When William F. Buckley founded the National Review in the mid-1950s, declaring that its animating mission was to “stand athwart history, yelling Stop!” he captured what had always been the essence of American conservatism. Yet the term originally meant very different things in distinct places. On the Continent in the nineteenth century, to be a conservative usually meant that one opposed the liberal and democratic revolutions of the eighteenth century. Conservatives there favored monarchy over republicanism and wanted to preserve an elevated role for the church in political and social matters. For such thinkers as Joseph de Maistre and Louis de Bonald, conservatism was adamantly set against all things modern. Maistre regarded the Enlightenment itself as the harbinger of social decay and political revolution, and speculated that it was the penultimate phase of history before the apocalypse. In Britain, conservatism expressed itself in a milder reaction to the momentum of the liberal and democratic changes of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. More than any other issue, the British Conservative Party was founded to respond to the Reform Bill of 1832, which dramatically expanded suffrage to the middle and lower classes in Britain. British conservatives favored a more limited democratic franchise, with Parliament to share a greater balance of power vis-à-vis the crown. Conservatives then were often split, as modern conservatives are, on economic policies. Many opposed the free-trade policies of classical liberals, sometimes for protectionist reasons (e.g., many were landowners who supported the Corn Laws, which prohibited the importation of cheap corn, a staple of the poor). But others were genuinely concerned about the degenerating social and economic conditions of the working class in Victorian England. In fact, conservatives sometimes sided with the socialist Left later in the century, leading Marxists to chide them as “Tory socialists.” In the United States, on the other hand, the liberal-conservative distinction 30 The Political Centrist has always been less concrete. And it has been less concrete not because liberalism here was more conservative than in Britain or on the Continent, but because U.S. conservatism has usually been more liberal.2 Unlike its purer European variant, U.S. conservatism was not typically opposed to modernity or rooted in an antiEnlightenment philosophy. Liberals and conservatives here shared the same modern democratic traditions, though U.S. conservatives interpreted these principles in ways that bear the indelible influence of an older tradition. U.S. conservatives were small d democrats who believed in individual rights and who frequently defended the free market and generally supported a division of religious and political authority—just as U.S. liberals did. Looking back historically, it is sometimes almost impossible to say who the liberal or the conservative was in particular contexts. Were the Anti-Federalists, who favored a more democratic and egalitarian form of government but who were also states’ righters who feared judicial activism, more liberal or more conservative than the Federalists?3 Was Jefferson, the father of the modern Democratic Party, who favored limited government, who believed in the necessity of civic virtue over more materialistic values, who preferred the agrarian way of life over the corrupting influence of the city, and who argued that the redistribution of wealth was an arbitrary violation of “the first principle of association,” really more the liberal than was Alexander Hamilton? Hamilton, father of the modern Republican Party, was in his time a nationalist who advocated more centralized power, believed in a more expansive government, and argued that government should intervene more freely in the economy—policies which are...

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