Conservatives Without Conscience

While modern conservatism is a post–World War II political phenomenon, its earliest adherents, sometimes labeled the “old right,” date back to those Republicans who refused to follow former president Theodore Roosevelt and his progressive Bull Moose Party during the 1912 presidential election campaign. This group nonetheless chose to remain within the Republican Party ranks and support the reelection of President William Howard Taft. This, of course, resulted in the ascendance of Woodrow Wilson, who was even more progressive than TR, but in those days, conservative purity was paramount. Between the world wars, conservative Republicans played an obstructionist role, blocking Wilson’s League of Nations, opposing American intervention in foreign affairs, resisting non-European immigration, and pushing laissez-faire economic policies. Republican Party historian Lewis L. Gold notes that when “discussing the failures of the United States to intervene in World War I, or the difficulties of the League of Nations in the 1920s, Republicans rarely point out how much their [own] party did to sustain these now discredited policies.”[20]

Early conservatives were groping for something more than a philosophy of opposing anything that departed from the status quo and giving corporations the freedom they sought from government. They were searching for ideas and found common cause in their opposition to the New Deal. No factor did more to stimulate the growth of modern conservatism than the election of Franklin Roosevelt (with the possible exception of the spread of communism). He is the man conservatives most dislike, for he embodies the big-government ideology they most fear. Opposition to FDR’s policies and programs resulted in people like H. L. Mencken and former Republican president Herbert Hoover’s joining the conservative cause, adding stature to the nascent movement.[21] In time, conservatives found political leadership in President Taft’s son, Robert Taft, of Ohio, who became majority leader of the Senate in 1953, but seven months later died of cancer.

Lionel Trilling, a leading voice of the left, observed in 1950 that in “the United States at this time, liberalism is not only the dominant but the sole intellectual tradition….[T]here are no conservative or reactionary ideas in general circulation.”[22] Trilling, for a while, was correct. Intellectual efforts, rather than political leadership, however, ultimately proved more significant for the initial growth of conservatism. The work of conservative scholars, which had commenced in the late forties, although inconsequential at first, did serve to create a foundation for modern conservatism, and a philosophy was developed from scratch. At first they looked to European thinking and tradition, but this seemed un-American to many of them, and they, accordingly, began developing an authentically American conservative heritage. This was not easy, given the liberal tradition of this country, and in fact, nothing in America’s founding, or the creation of the United States, was of a conservative nature.

George H. Nash, himself a conservative, is the leading authority on this intellectual development, and his work The Conservative Intellectual Movement in America is considered a classic.[23] Nash’s study, however, reveals the dubious analysis employed by early conservatives in constructing their philosophy. Nash reports that the post–World War II resurgence of conservatism resulted in three independent schools of thought, all of which developed concurrently. First, Nash explains, “classic liberalism” morphed into “libertarianism,” which held that the expanding powers of the state threatened “liberty, private enterprise, and individualism.” Second, “traditional conservatism” developed in reaction to the secularism among the totalitarian states during the aftermath of World War II. This brand of conservatism called for “a return to traditional religious and ethical absolutes,” and rejected “relativism” as something corroding Western values. Third, Nash reports, there emerged a school of “militant, evangelistic anti-communism.”[24]

The conspicuous weakness in Nash’s work is his failure to report any of the inevitable conflicts among these three early schools of thought. Nash also does not establish any real connection between them other than anticommunism, which they all embraced (as did most progressives and liberals). Thus, he provides little historical insight into early fissures within conservatism, although these would develop into the factions which have yet to resolve their differences.