Political History beyond the Red-Blue Divide

Abstract

In her provocative and timely essay Kim Phillips-Fein declares the historiography of modern American conservatism to be “at a crossroads.” From the broader perspective of U.S. political history, I would employ a different metaphor, that of a pendulum that has swung too far in one direction. Academic historians have spent the past several decades dismantling the myth of the liberal consensus in postwar American politics, exploring the contradictions and limits of New Deal and Great Society policy making, and chronicling the parallel rise of the New Right. In Alan Brinkley’s influential formulation, “taking conservatism seriously” is now institutionalized as a guiding principle of U.S. political history—a once necessary though now reflexive corrective to the consensus scholarship that caricatured conservatives as paranoid extremists or ignored them altogether. But in the understandable mission to explain the apparent earthquake caused by Ronald Reagan’s election in 1980, the new political history has inadvertently replicated some of the blind spots of the liberal consensus school that it supplanted, especially through a linear declension/ascension narrative that has conflated the fate of the New Deal with the political triumph of the New Right. A future generation of scholars might well critique our reigning historiographical consensus for tendencies similar to those we identified in our predecessors—that the interpretations of political history have tracked too closely to the red-blue binaries of journalism and punditry; that the literature has taken the contradictions and fragmentation of liberalism as given but smoothed over similar weaknesses and fissures within conservatism; that the recent pendulum swing has overstated the case for a rightward shift in American politics by focusing too narrowly on partisan narratives and specific election cycles rather than on the more complex dynamics of political culture, political economy, and public policy. 1 Phillips-Fein argues that the flourishing literature on conservatism allows us to recon sider how “our new understanding of the movement changes the way that we tell the broader narrative of twentieth-century American history.” I would emphasize the inverse as well, since the broader narrative exposes some of the ways the historiography of the New Right has overreached. Phillips-Fein’s essay raises compelling questions about the standard conceptualization and periodization of conservatism as a social and political