Will the Real Conservative Please Stand Up? or, The Pitfalls Involved in Examining Ideological Sympathies: A Comment on Alan Brinkley's "Problem of American Conservatism"

Abstract

I WOULD IMAGINE that conservatives reading Alan Brinkley's article would take heart from his declaration that historians have been remiss in addressing American conservatism; the article would seem to validate criticisms of academics, that we favor that which is liberal, or even worse, radical. Yet the article must also be a source of frustration. Brinkley is not quite sure what constitutes conservatism. It is not, he asserts, easily characterized; there is no ideology per se but rather a cluster of related ideas. It encompasses a broad range of ideas, impulses, and constituencies, a description that sounds much like Daniel Rodgers' characterization of the Progressive movement, a presumably movement.' Indeed, suggests Brinkley, conservatism has a philosophical base not significantly different from that of liberalism. The two are rooted in the same political impulse: defense of liberty and the preservation of individual freedom. How, then, are we to differentiate between liberal and conservative? The distinction, according to Brinkley, seems to be in the critique of statism and conservatives' growing concern over the erosion of what they see to be a much-needed moral and spiritual core. These two issues, especially, have given conservatives an intellectual and political force that had previously been missing. I must confess to some confusion. As a social historian interested in the development of the welfare state in this century, I had not realized that conservatives (of many different stripes) had not played a continuing and vital role in this process. Rather than respond to Brinkley's article by presenting an alternative synthesis of historical literature in which conservatives do wield power and influence-something that Leo Ribuffo does quite nicely in his comment-I would like to suggest that the problem of historical imagination to which Brinkley alludes requires more than simply doing a kind of compensatory history in which historians are sympathetic to their conservative subjects. What is required is a rethinking of the traditional ideological and political categories used