The Problem of American Conservatism

Abstract

IT WILL NOT, I SUSPECT, BE A VERY CONTROVERSIAL CLAIM to say that twentiethcentury American conservatism has been something of an orphan in historical scholarship. Historians have written books and articles about modern conservatism, of course, some of them quite good. In recent years, moreover, both the quantity and the quality of scholarship on the subject has markedly increased. Even so, it would be hard to argue that the American Right has received anything like the affiount of attention from historians that its role in twentieth-century politics and culture suggests it should.' Given the history of the last twenty years, that is coming to seem an ever more curious omission. This essay is an effort to understand why that omission has occurred. These observations are not the product of any personal scholarly research on conservatism (or of any personal engagement with or sympathy for conservative politics). On the contrary, my own recent work has focused on the history of American liberalism at mid-century. But this is not so abrupt a departure from such concerns as it might sound. I came to my study of American liberalism out of, among other things, a skepticism about some of the scholarly assumptions that have governed the study of American political culture in this century. Most historians have told the story of twentieth-century American political and cultural development by emphasizing the triumph of the progressive-liberal state and of the modern, cosmopolitan sensibility that has accompanied and to a large degree supported it. They have argued about the timing of this triumph and about