The Heat Is On: Cold War Conservatism

Abstract

The Heat Is On: Cold War Conservatism Robert O. Self (bio) Colleen Doody . Detroit’s Cold War: The Origins of Postwar Conservatism. Urbana : University of Illinois Press , 2013 . viii + 175 pp. Works cited, notes, and index. $50.00 . Elizabeth Tandy Shermer . Sunbelt Capitalism: Phoenix and the Transformation of American Politics. Philadelphia : University of Pennsylvania Press , 2013 . viii + 424 pp. Illustrations, notes, and index. $49.95 . Modern conservatism, like success in the old proverb, has many parents. The family tree includes, at the very least, anticommunists, segregationists, the pro-business lobby, anti-labor industrialists, Wall Street financiers, white suburbanites, and religious and moral traditionalists of varying stripes. In distinct regions of the country, and at distinct moments in time, these progenitors partnered in unique ways. Indeed, no other outcome is historically plausible in a continental nation of hundreds of millions of inhabitants with multiple acute regional, religious, class, and racial differences and governed through a profoundly decentralized majoritarian political system with only two competitive parties. American conservatism, not unlike American liberalism, is merely a loose set of ideas and sensibilities until it is given concrete form in specific policies, campaigns, and movements—that is, specific actions in politics and governance at various scales. This might seem rather obvious. But it is worth remembering, because too often historians seem to feel obligated to locate a single takeoff point for modern conservatism somewhere between 1933 and 1980. Reasonable arguments could be made for half a dozen or more such moments. On the other hand, we ought to resist the countervailing temptation to cast the Right, like the bourgeoisie in all of my history courses when I was an undergraduate, as always “rising.” Historians have made remarkable progress in the last two decades in specifying the who, what, where, and why of the Right’s post–New Deal evolution, from the Liberty League to the Moral Majority. Indeed, the historiographical pendulum may have swung so decisively that we now know conservatism better than we know liberalism. Fifty years hence, it is entirely possible—I might venture likely—that what will appear anomalous and will [End Page 513] require additional historical explanation will be liberalism’s mid–twentieth-century sway, not the Right’s late-century triumphs.1 And yet we still have a great deal to learn. The rising tide of historical studies of modern conservatism has not breached every bank. In particular, though a number of fine books on Southern conservatism have appeared in the last decade, we are still left with only partial explanations of how the cry of “segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever” became, in a generation, the demand for “family values.” We’ve yet to see a systematic study of conservatives’ decades-long engagement with and assault on organized labor, from the Taft-Hartley Act to George W. Bush’s National Labor Relations Board (NLRB). And only in the last few years have historians endeavored to explore the Right’s gender and sexual politics in relation to its economic project. As the writing of modern conservatism’s history proceeds, we can profitably jettison the “takeoff” and “rise” frameworks for a more flexible approach attentive to the varying degrees of right-wing consolidation that took place at different local and regional scales at distinct moments in time.2 There is something of this spirit in Elizabeth Shermer’s Sunbelt Capitalism, a local study of conservatism with sweeping ambitions. Borrowing from the sociologist Philip Selznick, Shermer focuses on the “grasstops” of Phoenix, Arizona, between the 1930s and the 1970s. Grasstops were local business elites, Chamber of Commerce and booster types who steered local economic development. Reflexively anti-labor and anti-regulation, they were not, Shermer shows, reflexively “laissez-fair ideologues.” Their opportunistic approach to building the mid-century political economy of Phoenix and its environs was based on the implicit understanding that capitalism is best constructed not of “free markets” but of investment opportunities for private capital facilitated by government action. They sought to build the Southwest not by rejecting the state but by clarifying what they believed the state should do, such as recruit investors, coordinate public-private development projects, and create business-friendly tax and regulatory environments. They also...