Rethinking American Conservatism: Toward a New Narrative

Abstract

Kim Phillips-Fein provides a model essay in which she assays the current literature, discerns trends, and suggests new areas of research for the field of postwar American conser vatism. By their nature, historiographical essays do not lend themselves to proposing new historical narratives; instead they indicate ways to broaden the existing narrative through further research. Specifically, Phillips-Fein suggests further research in the intellectual roots of American conservatism, asserts the importance of placing conservatism within a larger context that includes American liberalism in the postwar period, and emphasizes the centrality of understanding the actual politics that shaped conservatism as it gained power within the Republican party and the government. Phillips-Fein astutely notes that George H. Nash’s The Conservative Intellectual Tradition since 1945, published nearly thirty-five years ago, remains unchallenged, but recent studies on Ayn Rand, southern agrarians, black conservative intellectuals, neoconservatives, jurisprudence, and supply-side and rational-choice economics reveal the limitations of Nash’s focus and his “fusionist” interpretation. More importantly, she finds that “the most serious problems that historians face today in thinking about the Right have to do with its origins,” and she asks whether conservatism did truly “begin only in the postwar years.” She cites an array of historians who have found strong antiradical, anticommunist, and antistatist activity in the early twentieth century. 1 Transposing contemporary political labels to earlier periods in history presents obvious problems. Indeed, conservatives themselves are divided about whether Alexander Hamilton and Thomas Jefferson were conservatives. In his 1953 book The Conservative Mind: From Burke to Eliot, Russell Kirk included antebellum apologists for slavery and defenders of states’ rights within the conservative tradition. More recently, Patrick Allitt located Theodore Roosevelt within the conservative camp. Nomenclature can be debatable, but political terms, ideology, and party struggle must be placed historically, and scholars must guard against imposing contemporary labels on past actors or movements. The discovery