The Conservative Roots of the Nixon, Ford, and Reagan Administrations

Abstract

The Republican administrations of Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford, and now Ronald Reagan are often identified with a ideology or point of view. What does conservative in this sense mean? The term has been used as a political label for only a little more than a century and a half. Edmund Burke, Samuel Johnson, two Pitts, Alexander Hamilton, and John Adams never thought of themselves as conservatives. In England during 1820s, political defenders of established institutions began to describe their aims as or conservatory. Jn 1830 J. W. Croker, writing in Quarterly Review, applied adjective conservative to Tory party (which, like its great rival, Whigs, had first risen out of controversy over succession of James II to English throne in latter part of seventeenth century). In 1832 Macaulay, a dedicated Whig, derided the new cant word . . . Conservative; and Daniel O'Connell, champion of Irish liberty, spoke of the fashionable, new fangled phrase now used in polite society to designate Tory ascendancy. The term was quickly taken up by Robert Peel and other Tory leaders, who were glad to find a title for their party less identified with landed gentry, already a declining class in British politics. Benjamin Disraeli at first preferred Tory to conservative, but finally was persuaded to accept new term, which made it possible for him to be identified in time as founder of modern British Conservative party.'