The Crisis of American Conservatism

Abstract

Abstract The spectacular success of the Right in the 1980s hides a paradoxical development: the social, cultural and political hegemony of conservatism has been accompanied by a hitherto unexamined fragmentation of whatever passed for conservative ideology to date. This may not be fatal — and has not been thus far — in routine political competition with the Left and with a liberalism caught in even more advanced stages of internal disintegration. Yet it has serious consequences: it makes it difficult or even impossible to implement and sustain any kind of coherent right-wing program. Thus tactical success in the last decade has been achieved by forfeiting whatever strategic ambitions the American Right might have had during its “long march” through the New Deal.