The Historiography of Twentieth-Century American Conservatism

Abstract

After a period of relative neglect, the study of postwar American conservatism has recently come to preoccupy historians of the United States. It now ranks among the liveliest subjects in the entire field of 20th-century US history. The historiography breaks into four phases. In an early phase, from the 1950s through the 1970s, conservatism being written into the historical narrative was an act of scholarly will at a time when liberalism and radicalism were much closer to the historiographical mainstream. In a second phase, in the 1970s and 1980s, conservatism was deemed a major historical force in modern America and was characterized as a “backlash” against the New Deal, the civil rights movement, the Great Society, the feminist movement, etc. In a third phase, conservatism was presented as more active than reactive. according to these historians, ideas that had crystallized in the 1950s came into their own politically in the 1980s, in the Reagan era. During the fourth and (for the time being) final phase, accent has fallen on the varieties of American conservatism and on its hybrid nature, absorbing and interacting with trends that could be characterized as liberal or radical. In this article, the relevant historiography is separated into seven branches (arranged alphabetically): anticommunism, the conservative movement, foreign policy, libertarianism, media, race-class-gender, and traditionalism. It has been argued that anticommunism, traditionalism, and libertarianism were fused into a “modern” American conservatism, that disparate ideas were fashioned into a workable ideology, and that this ideology was the tool Reagan used to remake American politics. The classic formulation of this argument is The Conservative Intellectual Movement in America since 1945 (Nash 2006 cited under Monographs), to which there are many revisionist alternatives. Media concerns the changing role of communication, from the intellectual magazines of the 1950s to talk radio in the 1990s, and beyond. Foreign policy encompasses conservative debate on the ideals and practice of American foreign policy, moving among isolationism, realism, and neoconservatism. In the future, scholars will work through other arguments and narratives involving these branches, and new branches will surely be added.