Recent studies of conservatism bear an element of surprise in their narratives. There seems to be a new and urgent need to explain conservatives generally, or a rise in conservatism in the postwar period more specifically. Many historians of this era view their subject as a foreign element in an otherwise sane, liberal country. After all, as historian of conservatism Kim Phillips-Fein allowed, “many of the younger historians writing about the right are actually left of center, children of the Reagan era who came of age as scholars during the Bush years.” Some of these scholars query the rise of a conservative movement while accepting the general discourse of American capitalism and the norms of neoliberal privatization. Scholars today rarely discuss the conservative nation which begat twentieth century conservatism.
Binaries such as black/white, agency/oppression, and North/South are increasingly unsatisfactory. Historians have offered more nuanced studies of the contentious, shifting sites that rest between false dichotomies. Analyses of liberalism/conservatism have similarly been overly-simplified. Steve Fraser and Gary Gerstle begin their book on wealthy elites and power, Ruling America, with a defining paradox of American history. They wonder how the United States can be a land of freedom and equality yet “give rise to great hierarchies” and unequal wealth distribution. They state the paradox as follows: “The country is a democracy. The people rule. And yet the people do not rule; elites, patriciates, castes, classes have ruled in their stead.” American history is a complex dialectic between conservatism and liberalism contained within the unavoidable determinants of global capitalism. Historians need not only study the relationships between the two positions as they shape American history. They must also analyze the dominant social and economic structures in which political struggles occur.
As ideologies and movements, American liberalism and conservatism share similarities. At times the two exist within single individuals. In order to understand this, it is crucial to appreciate two concepts. First, that liberalism, even while rising and falling and rising again, must always be considered in the context of capitalist structures. In other words, its historical arc, its map of change over time, is best narrated with an understanding of conservative economics. However, and more importantly, the converse is also true. Conservatism, and its mappable historical arc, must be understood in conversation within what historian Howard Brick has called “the progressive framework of a modern society.” This essay examines how conservatives live, work and agitate for their agenda within the inextricable web of massive, bureaucratic state structures. These mega-structures of state power – of institutions, legal and economic networks, and relationships with other states and multinational corporations – themselves manipulate markets and engage in capitalist activities.
Many new histories of the conservative movement claim their vitality by hoping to explain Ronald Reagan. But we need to realize how they do not explain Jimmy Carter, Bill Clinton’s “Third Way” alliance with Britain’s Tony Blair, or even Ralph Nader. Perhaps more fundamentally, these studies, as worthy as they are, do not explain how America – supposedly Conservative, Christian, white, racist, middle-class reactionary – could elect a mixed-race, foreign-American-islander-community activist in (Americans call him black) president Barack Obama. Exploring the historiography of conservatism -- and noticing how these studies intersect, contradict, and converse with liberalism -- can construct an image of possibility in twentieth-century American history. This essay does not attempt to explain away Ronald Reagan, but rather to absorb him and his political backers in a larger American dialogue.
Section One: the New Conservative Historiography
Recent scholarship on conservatism has roughly covered three generational waves. I do not refute the claims nor the worth of the “Rightness Studies” turn, nor discredit the distinct line many of them trace through the postwar period. But I do insist that future studies in the historiography of the right increase the vitalistic nuance between liberalism and conservatism set in a context of global late capitalism. In Section One, I offer a glimpse of the field as it currently stands. Section Two advances a competing understanding of conservatism and liberalism in the United States according to the field’s own historiography.
The first wave of resurgent scholarship on the right approached their subjects from a white backlash perspective. For these historians, white flight and the right turn could be explained by middle- and working-class disaffection with 1960s racial liberalism, Black Power, urban decay, and the Democratic Party. According to these scholars, radicals, welfare queens and Roe v. Wade sealed the political shift. Dan Carter’s The Politics of Rage (1995) and Ronald Formisano’s Boston Against Busing (1991) were histories of reactionaries like George Wallace and local Bostonians protesting desegregation in dramatic fashion. Carter presented a compelling case for remembering George Wallace, because of his importance for understanding the “anti-Washington groundswell” attributed to him, and to the “ideological debt” late twentieth-century conservatives owed the former Alabama governor. These were solid liberal histories hoping to decode the mysteries of racism and demagoguery, and thus explain a supposedly unique strand of American conservatism and a backlash against the benignities of the liberal project.
The second wave of new rightness studies moved away from backlash resentments toward attempts to locate a conservative movement – a carefully constructed ideology and culture behind the madness. Scholars like Lisa McGirr and Rick Perlstein added to conservative scholar George Nash’s The Conservative Intellectual Movement in America (1976) by mastering the ideological and intellectual developments within twentieth-century conservatism. McGirr’s Suburban Warriors (2001) depicted the rise of well-off, modernized suburbanites mostly working in the Orange Country defense complex. Perlstein’s Before the Storm: Barry Goldwater and the Unmaking of the American Consensus (2001) – with its smashing photograph of cowboy-Goldwater with ten-gallon hat and rifle on its cover – illustrates the impressive coming of the Sunbelt conservatives. But his assumption of a destroyed American consensus remains problematic.
Perlstein evinces shock at the political shift in American politics from liberal “consensus” to bedrock conservative dominance. According to him, it is barely possible to comprehend “just how profoundly the tectonic plates of American politics have shifted between 1964 and today.” The problem with this perspective, though not false, is that it assumes a vast separation between liberals and conservatives and keeps those American binaries as rigid as possible. Furthermore, it does not explain the structural pressures of global capitalism. One element that many of these liberal-produced histories of conservatives share is the Marxist premise that the working class somehow automatically identifies with progressive causes. Writers hoping to explain the capitalist stranglehold often ignore workers as conservatives.
The third generation of right turn scholars aims to deepen the study of conservatism and rightly produces more nuanced accounts. Yet these historians still create a static world of immovable binaries. Kim Phillips-Fein’s Invisible Hands: The Making of the Conservative Movement from the New Deal to Reagan (2009) pushes the subject even further into history, presenting its origins as 1930s reactions to the New Deal. But her language in a recent Nation article – where she calls the conservative movement “that baroque strangeness of the American right” – highlights a common liberal misinterpretation. Namely, that the conservatives are so weird that they have to be explained, and that they are the anomaly of the twentieth century. In fact, conservatives are not anomalous, but are a dominant strain of ideological and material human being in the United States since its founding generation. Phillips-Fein misses this point, and though she speaks of businessmen activists and wealthy elites, she neglects an analysis of capitalism or foreign policy.
Bethany Moreton’s To Serve God and Wal-Mart: The Making of Christian Free Enterprise (2009), is a useful contribution to rightness studies, illustrating a new direction. She shows how Christian evangelicalism and Sunbelt conservatism countermanded the industrial North’s vision. Her discussion is deeply rooted in global economics and religion, and offers a convincing account of the rise of Wal-Mart and the new economic paradigm. Shane Hamilton’s Trucking Country: The Road to America’s Wal-Mart Economy (2009) offers a social history of rural truckers and their contribution to grassroots conservatism. But he frames his narrative arc as a counterrevolution to the New Deal, a perspective that is disputable, makes large assumptions, and implies a total separation of liberals and conservatives in American history.
These books complement scholarship on other conservative modes. Ellen Schrecker’s Many Are the Crimes (1999) and No Ivory Tower (1986) cover McCarthyism’s sordid legacy in American history. They evoke familiar scenes of Senator Joseph McCarthy rising and falling, Congressional hearings, and tenured professors fired from their positions during the anticommunist wave. David Johnson’s Lavender Scare identifies the “hysteria over homosexuals in government” and compares these repressions to the “second Red Scare.” He pushes his study “beyond McCarthy” to demonstrate how the particular climate in the United States could support such a demagogue. McCarthyism and Dwight Eisenhower’s supposedly “moderate” conservatism of the 1950s, with his foreign policy initiatives and CIA incursions into Iran and Guatemala, get pushed aside by the new rightness studies scholars.
Section Two: Conservatism as Mainstream and the Spaces Between
Conservatism has existed throughout American history, in different kinds of people, in always-contingent, dynamic motion. David Kennedy’s Over Here exhibited how Progressives in Woodrow Wilson’s administration supported World War I. Men like George Creel, Walter Lippman and Harold Ickes hoped the war would usher in a progressive era. Kennedy quotes a letter from fellow historian Arthur Schlesinger, Sr., who unknowingly highlighted the American liberal/conservative paradox. He wrote to a former Socialist that American liberals should focus on “making the war an instrument for the promotion of social justice and public ownership.” Kennedy’s study of the homefront during World War I should have finalized a historical rewrite of the Progressive Era begun by Gabriel Kolko in 1963. Kolko’s The Triumph of Conservatism: A Reinterpretation of American History, 1900-1916 savages sentimental accounts of trust busters or urban reformers. According to Kolko, “the period from approximately 1900 until the United States’ intervention in the war, labeled the ‘progressive’ era by virtually all historians, was really an era of conservatism.” He asserts that businessmen sought federal protection and rationalization in an increasingly competitive global environment. But even Kolko seems surprised – or thinks that readers in 1963 should have been – that the national government would take an active interest in economic affairs.
Kolko’s analysis of the Progressive Era reminds one of C. L. R. James’s theory of state capitalism. State capitalism is an interpretation which highlights the bureaucratization of massive social structures and the play of the state, bureaucratic regulation, and global markets to create a complex capitalist society. James’s theory was an attempt to come to grips with twentieth-century gigantisms and the play of world capitalism. According to James, “the function of the capitalist state was to defend the interests of capital.” Kolko posits that American “political capitalism” was structured in such a way as to master the economy, dominate global competition, and maintain social order in a “manner that will allow corporations to function in a predictable and secure environment permitting reasonable profits over the long run.” American history in the twentieth century has not deviated from this central fulcrum, no matter the ebbs and flows along the liberalism-conservatism dichotomy. When one adds the military industrial complex of highly advanced modern societies, “state capitalism” and “political capitalism” make more sense as theories, and as structures for a better appreciation of recent historiography on conservatism.
Kolko and Kennedy have produced evidence that the Progressive Era was conservative, warmongering and friendly to corporate business. Kolko, though, can be read with recent scholars who detail conservative themes in American economy and society since the Constitution. Historians like Patrick Allitt and his The Conservatives: Ideas and Personalities Throughout American History (2009) locates similarities between twentieth-century conservative ideas and the nineteenth and eighteenth centuries. Allitt agrees with Kolko that if we want to understand modern conservatives, we need to begin with Alexander Hamilton. Allitt shifts from the Federalists to southern conservatism; to the Whigs and their love of banks and “internal improvements”; through the Civil War, Jim Crow, Teddy Roosevelt and Senator Henry Cabot Lodge, the “dominant conservative figure in the Senate”; and up to George W. Bush. This tradition of scholarship arguably begins with Charles Beard’s An Economic Interpretation of the Constitution of the United States (1913), which asserted that conservative, economic considerations drove the construction of and voting for the new Constitution. This need not be such a radical enterprise, given that slaveholding merchant capitalists carved out their own sphere of influence and then labored to protect their interests.
Tom Sugrue's material analysis of postwar Detroit offers the most convincing and realistic account of conservatism. According to Sugrue, the automobile not only made Detroit, it also made America. Coupled with World War II industrial production, the middle of the American century experienced staggering economic growth. Indeed, the war ushered in a new age. Sugrue writes that “mid-twentieth-century Detroit embodied the melding of human labor and technology that together had made the United States the apotheosis of world capitalism.” The automobile was “the twentieth century’s premier consumer object,” and America the premier consuming society. Lizabeth Cohen’s insightful A Consumer’s Republic (2003) details the buying end of American political economy, and foregrounds the development of a consumer ethos that fundamentally altered the structure of America’s political scene. For the most part, the histories of the right do not embed their stories in this economic reality. Sugrue’s does.
Sugrue musters evidence to explain the urban crisis, and he places that origin earlier than most historians – right at the end of the war, in the 1940s. He illuminates scenes of total segregation, the second great migration to the North, and the familiar story of whites not selling and banks not loaning. To comprehend “black occupancy, impoverishment and disinvestment” – the surface reasons for the urban crisis – Sugrue digs into the “housing patters of segregated Detroit.” This kind of material embeddedness retains more explanatory power than many of the other studies of conservatism. Black veterans returning from the war expected economic citizenship, and found it not readily forthcoming. Only 1731 of 14,446 black applicants for housing were placed in public housing, a milieu in which whites readily found housing and access to economic benefits. Sugrue traces the material results of the Federal Housing Administration and the Servicemen’s Readjustment Act of 1944 (the GI Bill), which helped people with resources and mostly ignored those without. He uncovers the fascinating history of “Blockbusting,” whereby real estate agents manipulated white fears and black homeownership dreams to buy from whites cheaply and sell dear to blacks. White flight and corporate flight, coupled with federal policies, real estate segregation and a shifting tax base led to increasingly segmented, racialized and impoverished neighborhoods in Detroit.
The riots and looting of the late 1960s and America’s conservative landscape makes more sense after reading Sugrue’s The Origins of the Urban Crisis. Add Robert Self’s American Babylon (2003) and the complexities in the liberalism/ conservatism dialectic – and the shifting spaces between suburban/urban, black/white, tax revolt whites/Black Panthers, labor/capital, “rebellion and backlash” – come into sharper focus. Self makes it clear in American Babylon that scholars must move away from “separate stories” and work to find the “analytical language for thinking of them relationally.” The fundamental point is to unite the binaries and the shifting spaces between them into one story – to provide a more realistic history of real places and the friction that results from dynamic conflict. Self moves us closer to well-rounded history and an honest rendering of social change.
Colin Gordon’s New Deals also adds to studies of the liberal-conservative dilemma more broadly, and is a remarkable contribution to New Deal historiography. His research queries both liberal and radical understandings of the New Deal by repositioning business agitation and interest at the center of the account. But it is not a simple conversation. Gordon maps the extreme difficulties in studying and making generalizations about business involvement in the New Deal. He hopes to “move the debate beyond simple questions of whether the New Deal was liberal or conservative, or of whether the New Deal can be called in as evidence of a certain kind of ‘state.’” He accomplishes this revision by boldly claiming that any aspect of the New Deal, from private corporate welfare in the 1920s, to “the regulatory innovations of 1929-1933, and the labor and welfare law of 1935,” were driven by conservative corporate interests. Even the “progressive turn of the ‘second New Deal,’” -- which yielded the Wagner Act, reaffirmed labor’s participation in industrial processes, and created the Social Security Act and the Fair Labor Standards Act -- resulted from “two decades of business strategy and two years of business-driven recovery politics.” But “business” is not a unified bloc in Gordon’s account, and the dialectic between labor and corporate interests is central to his thesis. Gordon proposes a “disorganizational synthesis,” basically a history that captures the variegated, motive, complex dynamics between economic self-interest, corporate and political competition, shifting relationships between business and government. The disorganizational synthesis includes the diffusion of power and politics in a federal system – something he calls “competitive federalism,” all contained with “democratic capitalism.” Competitive federalism and varying (and competitive) state tax regimes encouraged businesses to relocate in the perpetual search for the cheapest land and labor. This bewildering interplay of forces is captured with exceptional aplomb by Sugrue’s Origin of the Urban Crisis and Jefferson Cowie’s Capital Moves: RCA’s Seventy-Year Quest for Cheap Labor (1999).
The real problem with “Rightness Studies” is the conception of a right turn, as a new development in American culture, or, as Lisa McGirr states in Suburban Warriors, “the conservative insurgency of the recent past.” The historiography of conservatism in the twentieth century does not truly show an insurgency, but instead a historical seepage. There is ebb and flow, to be sure – and multiple conservatisms – but not surprising insurgency that needs to be narrated. Suburban Warriors illustrates the development of grassroots conservatism in Orange County, California after World War II. So-called “populist conservatism” gestated in the new suburban communities of the Sunbelt – in the South, Southwest and California. McGirr examples what she calls “kitchen table” activists who lived in the shadows of better known movements like civil rights or the counter-culture. Her study provides a necessary counternarrative to popular images of the 1960s – of antiwar protests and longhaired hippies. And Suburban Warriors precisely details how postwar liberal scholars distorted understanding of conservatives, labeling Robert Welch, founder of the far-right John Birch Society as “kooks,” or, in Hofstadter’s famous account, conservatives practiced a “paranoid style.” McGirr shows how these scholars labeled The Right as extremist, and that image stuck in the popular and historical imagination. To that end, the new histories of the conservative movement are absolutely necessary correctives. But even the best of them, like McGirr’s, contribute their own distortions.
Michael Lind, in “Conservatives and the Counterrevolution against the New Deal” demonstrates the shift from northeastern manufacturing centers to globalization. Sugrue presented a history of the urban crisis, from white resentment in the 1940s to businesses leaving the rustbelt for friendlier labor and tax climates. Lind places this trajectory in a global context. He details competition from Europe and Asia, as traditional struggles between northern manufacturing and southern commodity producers “lost its relevance with the growth of transnational manufacturing in the final third of the twentieth century.” Making goods in cheap labor markets overseas and then selling them in the West drives the conservative story. According to Lind, global capitalism’s imperatives, not the John Birch Society or William Buckley’s National Review, explains the conservative moment. Lind persuasively argues that conservatives percolate to the cultural surface because of shifts in the logic of capitalism and the historic, fundamentally interwoven nature of America’s conservatism. Lind writes that “globalization finally ended the long civil war between the two wings of American capitalism,” united under the rhetorical auspices of a “free-trade” agenda, scouting the world for more markets, cheap labor and materials. These global dynamics bring the Rightness Studies scholarship into a more focused light, and ultimately a deeper analysis.
The laissez-fair ideologies, blasts about free enterprise, and the institution building that Phillips-Fein outlines are limited compared to Lind’s understanding of this capitalist merger. Northeastern manufactures and Sunbelt capitalists joined to finance “university chairs of economics and subsidizing the business press and pro-business think tanks.” Lobbying for domestic manufacturing along the old welfare state model, born by businessmen in the New Deal, was not the way political economy worked after 1970. Lind’s article takes another turn toward bothering conservative rhetoric and ideology. He traces the globalizing tendencies of American capital to the (second) war in Iraq, and shows how Halliburton’s famous mega-contracts for reconstructing Iraq were “paid for with American tax revenues.” He calls this kind of money-making a form of mercantilism, and allows that this business style clashes with libertarian conservatism and free-market spiels of the Republican Party. But from Reagan to Cheney, the approach “from the state-capitalist defense-energy-construction sector, for whom the military and military-linked firms were scarcely distinguishable,” has driven the American war machine and its economy for liberals and conservatives alike. Lind demonstrates how the New Deal made the South even more powerful, enriching the region “without revolutionizing” it. Southern racialized social structures, evangelical religion, and brand of economic paternalism remained unchanged. Through an economic lens, the rest of America “increasingly resembled the traditional South: a low-wage society with weak parties, weak unions, and a political culture based on demagogic appeals to racial and ethnic anxieties, religious conservatism, and militaristic patriotism.” This stark view complicates the racial scene after Brown v. Board of Education. Charles Payne discusses this perspective in his “'The Whole United States is Southern!': Brown v. Board and the Mystification of Race,” an interpretation that converses with Sugrue. For example, Payne wrote that “class-segregated residential patterns . . . afforded middle- and upper-class whites significant protection from desegregation.”
Detailing an over-specific line through the twentieth century contributes to the ossification of the Reagan myth. The populist former actor patriot becomes governor of California during the rise of Sunbelt conservatism embodied by himself, Barry Goldwater and Richard Nixon, and then emerges victorious from the obscure political battles in 1980. Reagan’s victory is seen as somehow different than other Republican victories. He is the anti-New Deal deregulator, who will dismantle state socialism and collectivism. Yet these stories do little to help us understand the vital nuances in national or local politics, or the persuasions of people on the ground. These histories shed little light on the political phenomena of Jimmy Carter or Bill Clinton. Where are those twelve years in the new conservative studies? More than that, Reagan is supposed to represent the anti-elitist resurgence of Republican conservatives, the man who will win blue-collar workers and disaffected members of the middle class – the Reagan Democrats. Now-orthodox narratives of postwar conservatives capture some truth, but do nothing to explain twelve years of blue-blooded Bushes – George Herbert Walker Bush and his son George W. Bush. In “The Foreign Policy Establishment,” Godfrey Hodgson discusses W.s great-grandfather George Herbert Walker, founder of the W.A. Harriman & Co. bank, which eventually “merged with the long-established Anglo-American bank Brown Brothers.” He details similar connections between business elites and government throughout his study. Most American cabinet members – pick any administration – have possessed deep family and business connections to wealth, power and influence. On their own, these are not striking revelations, but they help show how scholars of the right have forgotten the nation’s founding, and sustaining, conservative capitalist impulses.
CONCLUSION
There exists a total commitment in American society – liberal and conservative – to private property and private accumulation. Explaining the rise of conservatism with businessman activists, or beginning in the New Deal instead of after World War II, does not elucidate this fundamental truth. It seems naive to discuss a conservative movement and its ideologies without studying how they contravene their own rhetoric at every turn, and structurally and discursively cannot help doing so. Western irrigation projects, the defense industry in Orange County, a federal highway system, and Ronald Reagan’s military buildup all hinge on state power and resources. Conservatives fighting to keep military bases in their states are in effect battling for a “socialistic” institution. Perhaps it is not remarkable to show evidence of a long-running conservative America. But less noticed is the way conservatives have had to deal with the massive, bureaucratic, well-entrenched progressive state. Even Reagan labored within the state and paradoxically strengthened the state, working the sinews of liberalism and conservatism ever deeper into the fiber of big government, big business and a statist world.
Ronald Reagan and “small government” ideologues say one thing and do another. That Republicans use the federal government to shrink the government paradoxically increased the importance of the state, substantiated its role in culture and economics (up or down, increase or decrease), and utilized the New Deal liberal notion that the state exists to regulate (or deregulate) the economy. Ironically, Republican governments, especially Reagan’s administration, increased the size, moral role and cultural logic of the government, not the opposite. Ronald Reagan is better explained by globalization, or the “cultural logic of late capitalism.” The conservative movement cannot be adequately disentangled by a study of incremental ideological change. Nor can it be explicated by a discussion of postwar institution building in the United States without a penetrating focus on global pressures. These world tensions include globalization, capital movement, hidden labor regimes and the dynamics of the Cold War. One cannot hope to understand Reagan without exploring questions like: why free-market ideology, where did it come from and how did it gain acceptance? And why deregulation and the rhetoric of small government? These questions are answered by examining transnational economies and markets, and by understanding the global interconnections which define the fiction of the nation and the role of the state.