Conservatism and Racism, and Why in America They Are the Same

Notes

Notes Introduction 1. This is the first study to systematically explore this relationship between conservatism and racism. But Gunnar Myrdal hinted at it in a methodological appendix in An American Dilemma, although he was dealing with the problem of ideological biases in social science research on race. Nevertheless he wrote in a footnote, “These ideological tendencies are biased in a static and do-nothing (laissez-faire) conservative direction, which, in the main, works against a disfavored group like the American Negroes,” An American Dilemma: The Negro Problem and Modern Democracy (New York: Harper and Row, 1944, 1962), 1036. Ronald Walters pursues the relationship by defining the “radical aspect” of the conservative movement as “white nationalism” intent on using “both unofficial power and the official power of the state to maintain white supremacy by subordinating blacks and other non-whites.” See White Nationalism , Black Interests: Conservative Public Policy and the Black Community (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2003), 26. 2. Interview with Kevin Phillips, “Forum,” KQED Radio, San Francisco, April 4, 2006. 3. Myrdal, An American Dilemma, pp. 12–13. 4. Kelly Miller, “Radicals and Conservatives,” in Radicals and Conservatives and Other Essays on the Negro in America (New York: Schocken Books, 1908, 1968), 25. 5. Jay Sigler, The Conservative Tradition in American Thought (New York: Putnam, 1969), 4. 6. George H. Nash, The Conservative Intellectual Movement in America (New York: Basic Books, 1976), 199. 7. Eugene Genovese, The Southern Tradition: The Achievements and Limitations of American Conservatism (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1994), 2. 8. Richard Weaver, Ideas Have Consequences (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1948); and his The Southern Tradition at Bay: A History of Postbellum Thought (New Rochelle, NY: Arlington House, 1968). Chapter 1 1. References to conservatism in America as the remnant, an illusion, or a thankless persuasion are in Albert Jay Nock, “Isaiah’s Job,” in William F. Buckley Jr. 195 ed., American Conservative Thought in the Twentieth Century (Indianapolis: Bobbs Merrill, 1970), 509–22; M. Morton Auerbach, The Conservative Illusion (New York: Columbia University Press, 1959); and Clinton Rossiter, Conservatism in America: The Thankless Persuasion (New York: Vintage Books, 1955). 2. Bruce Frohnen, Jeremy Beer, and Jeffrey O. Nelson, eds., American Conservatism : An Encyclopedia (Wilmington, DE: Isis Books, 2006), x. 3. Alan Brinkley, “The Problem of American Conservatism,” The American Historical Review (April 1994): 409, 412, 415. For an argument that scholarship on conservatism is more extensive than Brinkley suggests, see Leo Riboffo, “Why Is There So Much Conservatism in the United States and Why Do So Few Historians Know Anything about It?” American Historical Review 99(1994): 438–79. 4. Phillip Abbot, “Still Louis Hartz, After All These Years: A Defense of the Liberal Society Thesis,” Perspectives on Politics 3 (2005): 93–109. 5. See Auerbach, The Conservative Illusion; Rossiter, Conservatism in America; Bernard Crick, “The Strange Quest for an American Conservatism,” Review of Politics 17(1955): 361–63; and Samuel P. Huntington, “Conservatism as an Ideology,” American Political Science Review 51(1957): 454–73. 6. See Auerbach, The Conservative Illusion, where he traces the “transcendental ” value of conservatism to Plato’s idea of “harmony.” Modern conservatism also attempts to locate the ideology’s core principles in Western political thought prior to the writings of Machiavelli, Hobbes, Locke, and Rousseau. See, for example, Leo Strauss, Liberalism, Ancient and Modern (New York: Basic Books, 1968); John Murley, ed., Lee Strauss, the Straussians and the American Regime (Lanham, MD.: Rowman and Littlefield, 1999); and Shadia Drury, Leo Strauss and the American Right (New York: St. Martin’s, 1997). 7. Huntington, “Conservatism as an Ideology,” p. 457. Brinkley also writes, “Conservatism is not an ‘ideology’ with a secure and consistent internal structure” and that it lacks “consistency and clarity.” See “The Problem of American Conservatism,” p. 414. While Huntington contends that conservatism lacks a substantive ideal, he lists six principles—derived from Burke—where he contends there exists “substantial agreement” among conservative writers. 8. Karl Mannheim, “Conservative Thought,” in Essays on Sociology and Social Psychology, by Karl Mannheim, ed. Paul Kecskemeti (New York: Oxford, 1953). Mannheim distinguishes conservatism from traditionalism. Although traditionalism can become consciously conservative in times of ideological conflict, generally, it is little more then a “tendency to cling to vegetative patterns, to old ways of life which we may consider as fairly ubiquitous and universal. Traditionalism is not therefore necessarily bound up “with political or other sorts of conservatism” (p. 95). On this distinction see also David Allen, “Modern Conservatism: The Problem of Definition,” The...