LOOKING WEST AND MOVING RIGHT:
How the National Review and Barry Goldwater
shaped American Conservatism
Ciska Schippers 6339514 June 25, 2018
Thesis MA American Studies Dhr. dr. G.H. (George) Blaustein University of Amsterdam
1
Inhoud
Introduction ... 2
Chapter 1: The vagueness of (pseudo-)conservatism ... 8
Chapter 2: The conservative as underdog ... 25
Chapter 3: The Southern strategy, race and regionalism ... 39
Conclusion ... 56
Bibliography ... 59
Literature ... 59
2
Introduction
‘Here is one time, at least, in which history was written by the losers.’1
Barry Goldwater is the loser Rick Perlstein is referring to in his book Before the storm: Barry
Goldwater and the unmaking of the American consensus. Conservative Republican nominee Barry
Goldwater lost overwhelmingly during the 1964 election against the incumbent president, Lyndon B. Johnson. Goldwater is generally viewed by historians as the first conservative candidate after the Second World War, before which the United States did not have a conservative movement to speak of. But despite losing overwhelmingly, this election proved to be the starting point of the Republican Party as a conservative party, and the South and Southwest as Republican strongholds. What was the role of the conservative senator from Arizona Barry Goldwater in changing American politics until this day?
To understand the significance of Goldwater is to understand the history of conservatism in the United States. In The making of the American conservative mind, Jeffrey Hart writes that before the New Deal era, there was no collective defense or articulation of a coherent stream of
conservative thought. During the Depression and the administration of Franklin D. Roosevelt, ‘the defeat of conservative assumptions seemed complete, their spokesmen few, and universities captured by liberalism’.2 In his book The conservative intellectual movement in America, since 1945 historian George Nash observes: ‘In 1945 no articulate, coordinate, self-consciously conservative intellectual force existed in the United States. There were, at best, scattered voices of protest, profoundly pessimistic about the future of the country.’3 As Nash’s title suggests, this changed after the war, and central to the shift in things is the magazine National Review, founded in 1955 by William F. Buckley Jr. More on the discussion on the birth of the American conservative movement will be discussed in chapter one, but a short biographical passage on the life of Buckley is essential to the understanding of the National Review and the thought behind the magazine that was so
monumental in unifying conservative thought in the United States.
William F. Buckley Jr. was born on November 24, 1925 in New York City. His father William Frank Buckley Sr. practiced law and was a successful oil entrepreneur, a venture that took him around the world. William Sr., his wife and ten children lived abroad, in Mexico, Great Britain, France and in the United States both in the South (South Carolina) and the Northeast (New York State).
1 Rick Perlstein, Before the storm: Barry Goldwater and the unmaking of the American consensus (New York
2009) x.
2 Jeffrey Hart, The making of the American conservative mind (Wilmington 2005) 1.
3 Because of this diverse background the Buckley children were all multilingual, speaking Spanish, French as well as English. They were also practicing Catholics.
Buckley thus did not have a mainstream American upbringing. After graduating from the private Millbrook School, Buckley joined the army for two years and after the war enrolled in Yale University in 1946. His time at Yale shaped Buckley, by the professors and fellow students he met, the journalism and debate experience he gained and by the reigning world view at Yale he constantly challenged. This world view is the topic of Buckley’s first book, God and Man at Yale. In the
foreword, Buckley wrote that when he came to Yale, he brought with him firm beliefs in Christianity, free enterprise and limited government. According to Buckley, the most important duel at the time was between Christianity and atheism, and, on another level, between individualism and
collectivism.4 He looked eagerly to Yale to find allies against secularism and collectivism, but was negatively surprised.5 According to Buckley he thought that it was the responsibility of the trustees of Yale to be committed to: ‘the desirability of fostering both a belief in God, and a recognition of the merits of our economic system.’6 But, he found, that many affiliated with Yale, including President-emeritus Charles Seymour, gave freedom to faculty members to teach what they saw fit, as they called it ‘academic freedom.’7 According to Buckley, the problem: ‘was not that all Yale professors, by any means, were hard-left atheists; it was that Yale refused to say that one set of opinions was better than another.’8
The book became a best seller, but was also widely criticized. Frank Ashburn even linked it to the Ku Klux Klan. He wrote in the Saturday Review: ‘The book is one which has the glow and appeal of a fiery cross on a hillside at night. There will undoubtedly be robed figures who gather to it, but the hoods will not be academic. They will cover the face.’9
After Yale, Buckley was recruited for the CIA by his Yale professor and future editor of the
National Review Willmoore Kendall.10 Two years he worked for the Agency in Mexico City. But during this time God and Man at Yale took off and Buckley was offered a number of editorial positions at right-wing periodicals.11 Buckley and his wife moved from Mexico to New York City and Buckley took
4
William F. Buckley Jr., God and Man at Yale (Chicago 1951) xvi.
5
Buckley, God and Man at Yale, xiii.
6 Ibidem, xiv. 7
Ibidem.
8
Linda Bridges and John R. Coyne, Jr, Strictly right: William F. Buckley Jr. and the American conservative
movement (Hoboken 2007) 18. 9 Ibidem, 23.
10
Niels Bjerre-Poulsen, Right face: organizing the American conservative movement 1945-65 (Copenhagen 2002) 116.
4 a job at The American Mercury. 12 This right-wing radical libertarian publication eventually perished when it was financed by millionaire Russell Maguire, who steered the magazine towards ‘the swamps of anti-Semitism’.13 Buckley had left The American Mercury by 1953, to work on a book on Senator Joe McCarthy with his friend Brent Bozell.
This book by Buckley and Bozell McCarthy and his enemies: the record and its meaning was actually a defense of McCarthy and his policies. According to the writers, McCarthy entered the national stage at a frightening and uncertain time, when nobody knew how to cope with the new threat in their midst, communism.14 Although they concluded that McCarthy’s method should not bring down innocent people, they did define McCarthyism as ‘a weapon in the American arsenal’.15 Americans who opposed to McCarthyism according to Buckley and Bozell were ‘confused, they have misread history (…) there is only one alternative to this explanation: that they are opposed to the decline of Communist influence at home.’16 Buckley kept defending McCarthy later on, and Barry Goldwater did as well.
Meanwhile, former leftist turned fervent anti-leftist William S. Schlamm decided the time was ripe for a new right-wing magazine.17 William Buckley had caught his eye, and Schlamm asked him to spearhead the magazine. After Buckley had finished McCarthy and his enemies, they got together to outline the magazine, recruit editors as well as raise money for its launch. On November 19, 1955, 7500 copies of the first issue of the National Review appeared.18
The tone of the magazine wasn’t scholarly and academic like the magazines before it, like
The Freeman, but rather sarcastic and witty. The magazine featured funny cartoons and other
contributions regularly, like a fake advertisement for the ‘amusement park’ Liberal land, with the attractions ‘Spend a day down on the farm. Get paid for not growing anything’, and ‘Be a U.S. delegate at the United Nations. Vote to have the American people pick up the check.’19 But although this tone meant broadening the scope outside of the academic world, Buckley ‘held on to his
unabashed elitism’, historian Niels Bjerre-Poulsen writes in Right face: organizing the American
conservative movement 1945-65.20 Buckley stressed that the editorial line would ‘reject cultural
12
Ibidem, 29.
13
William A. Rusher, The rise of the right (New York 1984) 42.
14 William F. Buckley and L. Brent Bozell, McCarthy and his enemies: the record and its meaning (Chicago 1954)
4.
15
Buckley and Bozell, McCarthy and his enemies, 335.
16 Ibidem, 334.
17 Bridges and Coyne, Strictly right, 29. 18
Hart, American conservative mind, 9.
19 ‘Liberal land’, National Review, September 24, 1963, 230. 20 Bjerre-Poulsen, Right face, 120
5 concessions to the so-called ‘average man.’’21 Buckley’s dismissal of the average man is interesting to keep in mind when later on, he started to support Goldwater for president, who based a lot of his platform on being the spokesperson of the so-called forgotten average hard-working people.
The goal of the National Review was to ‘reach out toward an educated elite.’22 Still, the magazine flirted with populism by putting Joe McCarthy and William F. Knowland on the first covers.23 Their open flirtation in supporting Knowland over Eisenhower was a step away from the republicanism of the establishment, and a step towards the right. Multiple episodes in the history of the magazine represent the battle between what Hart calls ‘the ideal right-wing Paradigm and the realistic Possibility’.24 This battle is important to remember when we start to look at the Goldwater nomination later on. As Linda Bridges and John R. Coyne Jr – two longtime colleagues of Buckley – phrase it in their book Strictly Right, William F. Buckley Jr. and the American conservative movement: the magazine revolved around the ‘elitist/populist contradiction, but was united in anti-communism, a commitment to Western civilization, and a presumption for the free market.’25
Of course a magazine never has a single, clear direction, especially not when the editors are various strong-willed intellectuals that all have different ideas about the path and outlook of the
National Review. As Bridges and Coyne state about when Buckley and Schlamm started to look for
their editors: ‘there would be room for adherents of every major strand of right-wing thought: libertarians and Burkeans, free-marketeers and Southern Agrarians, Madisonians and European monarchists. The only categories excluded were racists, anti-Semites and ‘kooks’.’26 Nash describes the tone of the magazine: ‘what emerged in 1955 around National Review was not a single ‘voice of conservatism’, but a coalition of often competing intellectuals.’27
The National Review contributed to the fusion of all different schools of thought into the conservative movement, but this was no easy task, Gregory Schneider observes. ‘While William F. Buckley could get both traditionalists and classical liberals to contribute to National Review, the two positions were not readily commutable.’28 While traditionalists valued religious tradition for
example, the classic liberals focused on the individual.
21
Ibidem.
22 Hart, American conservative mind, 14. 23
William F. Knowland was a Senator from California. He briefly flirted with the idea of running for president in 1956, but withdrew as soon as it became apparent that Dwight Eisenhower would seek reelection.
24 Hart, American conservative mind, 12. 25 Bridges and Coyne, Strictly right, 14. 26
Ibidem, 41.
27 Nash, Conservative intellectual movement, 154.
6 The founding of the National Review and especially the prominent positions of Buckley and other editors of the magazine in the political and intellectual arena played an essential role in
launching conservatism at the center of American politics. The movement was growing and attracted voters throughout the country, making both the intellectual elite of the Northeast that Buckley was a part of look more towards the right, as well as giving prominence to the Midwest, West and South. As such it paved the way for future political leaders like Ronald Reagan. In time of first establishment though, the editors felt not heard by the Republican leaders of the late 50s and early 60s and started to look for political representation and leadership. And so Senator Barry Goldwater started to play a crucial role, as we will discover in the next chapters.
This thesis will not be a chronological history of the conservative movement. Instead, I’ve chosen to highlight three essential topics in the shaping of conservatism in post-war America. By using the National Review as the main source of conservative thought at the time, I will try to clarify what important topics helped shape the conservative wing and the political consequences it has until this day. I will do this by highlighting the importance the National Review had, and the significance of Barry Goldwater as the first conservative presidential nominee in the United States. All to shed some light on the main question: how conservatism shaped by the National Review helped to nominate Goldwater and consequently formed the American right to what it has become.
In chapter one I will dive into the first of the three essential parts of conservatism, that is a close read of the term conservatism in the 50s and early 60s. As we will see, at the time there was debate whether or not this conservatism people spoke of was actually conservative at all. Famous historian Richard Hofstadter was a strong advocate of the theory of pseudo-conservatism, stating that it wasn’t authentic conservatism at all. Later historians have rejected this theory, but agreed to some degree that either the conservatism was vague and not based on one set ideology, and/or that the support for the movement was mainly based in fear, for progress for example. The
historiography of conservatism did not really take off until the 90s, as we will discover. After that, Hofstadter was mostly not taken seriously, but one of the leading historians Rick Perlstein admits, after Trump, that he might have been wrong about conservatism entirely. Although not a part of this thesis and it will not be explicitly discussed, the recent political developments are interesting to keep in mind when reading this thesis.
Secondly, I will look at the way conservatives positioned themselves in the existing political playing field. When reading the National Review, but also throughout the Goldwater campaign, we can’t help but notice one common position: they loved to see themselves as the underdog. What brought different groups on the right together was anti-liberalism. They saw themselves as
7 misunderstood minorities in a liberal world, shaped by New Deal-policies and moderate Republicans: the fact that a Republican was running the White House did not represent them, a lot saw Dwight D. Eisenhower as just as bad as Democrats. They positioned themselves as the underdog, mostly as hard-working people that finally rose up against the elite.
And lastly: the topic of geography. The conservative movement and its influence on the Republican Party as a whole has rearranged the political map of the United States to what we know today: with the South as a Republican stronghold. This wasn’t the case before: the South was traditionally Democrat and the North Republican, ever since the Civil War. The conservatives knew that in order to continue to survive they had to appeal to a new group: and they found it in the South. As we will see, this strategy was not without controversy. The changing geography of the political landscape was inextricably linked to race. The South was the part of the country were segregation was everywhere, and the federal attempts to issue civil rights on a national level did not go well with many white Southerners. The conservatives, holding states’ rights and small
government in the highest regard, were a perfect fit for those who did not want the federal government meddling in the segregation issue. How these issues were tackled by the National
Review, Barry Goldwater and his opponents will be central in chapter three.
In conclusion, I will bring together how these three topics shaped the conservative
movement in United States politics to what they are today. This thesis will be focused on the 50s and the 60s, but will make possible further research on political topics throughout the 20th and 21st century, especially when it comes to other moments conservatism played a big part in history, for example with the presidency of Ronald Reagan and the development of the Tea Party movement.
8
Chapter 1: The vagueness of (pseudo-)conservatism
In recent decades, most historians who write about the political developments in the United States firmly place the birth of the conservative movement in the 1950s. They regard the publication of Barry Goldwater’s Conscience of a Conservative and the founding of the National Review as starting points for conservatism that gave the United States its first conservative presidential candidate and Ronald Reagan as the first conservative president. Before the 90s, conservatism was mostly
overlooked by historians as a shaping development in US history. And at the time, in the 50s and 60s, not all scholars agreed on the premise that the movement we are speaking of was truly conservative. In order to research the relationship between the National Review and Barry Goldwater, we need to discover where the conservative movement came from and why it was conservative to begin with. This is why in this chapter we will dive deeper into its cultivation and the establishment of Barry Goldwater as a conservative presidential candidate. While we take into account how conservatism has been ignored by historians for decades, examine how different the voices within this coalition and from its supporters were, and consider the political developments of the last couple of years, at the end of this chapter we will ask ourselves: how does the existing historiography of the birth of conservatism and its linear growth hold up?
Most of the existing historiography focusses on the idea that the growth of conservatism began out of anger about the growing concentration of power in the federal government during the New Deal era. According to this theory, liberal scholars revived the ideas of limited government and individual rights. At the same time the horrors of the Second World War and the atomic threat made traditionalists critical of modern society. The beginning of the Cold War made them unite in anti-communism. According to this historiography, all of these right-wing schools of thought came together and formed the conservative movement.29
In 1950 one of America’s leading intellectuals Lionel Trilling wrote: ‘In the United States at this time liberalism is not only the dominant but even the sole intellectual tradition. For it is the plain fact that there are no conservative or reactionary ideas in general circulation.’30 But it was in 1950 that the nation stood on the threshold of a movement that would forever change the American political landscape. According the William Rusher, the movement began with ‘the Word’, with a central role of the founding of the National Review. ‘Russell Kirk’s The Conservative Mind was published in 1953, William F. Buckley Jr. launched National Review, a weekly (later fortnightly)
29 Schneider, Conservatism in America, 1-2.
9 journal of opinion, in November 1955; and Kirk founded Modern Age, a quarterly, in 1957.’31 In the 1960s, after ‘the Word’, followed the politicians, with the founding of the Young Americans for Freedom and the Conservative Party of New York for example.
Rusher is not the only one to place Buckley and the National Review at the heart of conservatism in the United States. John Chamberlain writes in A Life with the printed word that Buckley: ‘more than any single figure, made conservatism a respectable force in American life.’32 Nash concludes: ‘To a very substantial degree, the history of reflective conservatism in America after 1955 is the history of individuals who collaborated in – or were discovered by – the magazine William F. Buckley founded.’33 Nash also states: ‘If National Review (or something like it) had not been founded, there would probably have been no cohesive intellectual force on the right in the 1960s and 1970s.34
Bridges and Coyne describe the birth of conservatism in the United States as a convergence of existing schools of thought that up until that point did not work together. Most prominent were the libertarians. Within that movement the authors note a difference between the classic
libertarians, who believed in the need for state power to protect ones private property, and radical libertarianism, who called the state the enemy of the people. Classic libertarianism is where the first organizations of ‘premovement conservatism’ sprang, according to Bridges and Coyne.35 Other groups on the right of the political spectrum were traditionalism – ‘a philosophy that celebrated a hierarchical, nonrationalistic social order’36 and anti-communism. Although libertarians and traditionalists were inherently anti-communist, anti-communists were first and foremost against communism and their specific niche on the right came only second to that. They were mostly former communists and Trotskyists themselves.
Is the conservative more than anti-liberal?
So what did the conservatism of the National Review entail? Crucial to its core was anti-liberalism. The ‘Publisher’s statement in the first issue was as Bjerre-Poulsen calls it ‘nothing short of a declaration of war on liberalism’37:
31 William Rusher, ‘Toward a history of the conservative movement’, Journal of political history 3 (2004)
321-322.
32
John Chamberlain, A life with the printed word (Chicago 1982) 147.
33 Nash, Conservative intellectual movement, 153. 34 Ibidem.
35
Bridges and Coyne, Strictly right, 26-27.
36 Ibidem, 27.
10 The nation’s leading opinion-makers for the most part share the Liberal point of view,
try indefatigably to inculcate it in their readers’ minds, and to that end employ the techniques of propaganda… That we may properly speak of them as a huge propaganda
Machina, engaged in a major, sustained assault upon the sanity, and upon the prudence
and the morality of the American people – its sanity, because the political reality of which they speak is a dream world that nowhere exists. Its prudence and morality because their values and goals are in the sharpest conflict with this goals and values appropriate to the American tradition…38
Donald T. Critchlow in Debating the American conservative movement agrees with the perspective that the National Review opened the attack on liberalism and states: ‘Whatever their intellectual differences, conservatives agreed in their opposition to New Deal liberalism and in their anti-Communism’.39 Bjerre-Poulsen notes that the National Review did not only open the attack on liberals, but also and maybe more importantly, on the alleged conservatives who ‘had made their peace with the New Deal’ and therefore also with president Eisenhower’s kind of ‘modern Republicanism’.40
Gregory L. Schneider in his collection of essays and documents titled Conservatism in
America since 1930 opposes the idea that conservatism developed solely as a reaction to the
dominant liberalism. The historian states that the conservative intellectual tradition – being in favor of limited government, a strict interpretation of the Constitution, free-market economics and a traditionalism rooted in Christian traditions – flowed alongside of modern liberalism in the postwar era.41 Schneider does acknowledge that there was no coherent conservative movement before World War II, but rather groups of right-wing schools of thought, like the aforementioned
libertarians, agrarians, individualists, nationalists and many others. The success of FDR and the New Deal were the principal reason for them to come and work together against the reign of big
government, although the forming of a front did not succeed until after the New Deal era was over.42 I believe that Schneider was right in saying that it wasn’t solely in opposition to liberalism, but other historians do not claim that that was the sole reason; only that liberalism was the reason these existing schools of thought came and worked together.
In 1957, Willmoore Kendall delivered an address at Bowdoin College, which was printed in the National Review, to answer the questions ‘What is the conservative approach?’ and ‘Who are
38
‘The editors of National Review believe’, National Review, November 19, 1955, 8.
39 Donald T. Critchlow and Nancy MacLean, Debating the American conservative movement: 1945 to the present (Lanham 2009) 13.
40
Bjerre-Poulsen, Right face, 121.
41 Schneider, Conservatism in America, 3. 42 Ibidem, 5.
11 the Conservatives?’43 Kendall, however, started by listing everything conservatives are not. First, he stated that there is not one moment in the past to point to now as an example, when conservatives ‘showed their true colors’.44 Secondly, conservatives do not oppose change – only change in
undesirable directions – and sometimes even demand drastic change. Thirdly, there is no adequate spokesperson of conservatism in American politics at this time, and lastly, American political tradition is conservative, and does not have liberal content as the liberals claim, according to Kendall. American politics have conservative content and that is why politics tend to be about liberalism – the natural path for American politics is conservatism, so if the liberals try to change something it’s a break with the natural path and thus gets more attention.45 Because politics is conservative at heart, there has been no need for a conservative party, or a conservative voting bloc. At least, up until this point.
So Kendall explained what, according to him, conservatism is not. Interestingly enough, Kendall only knew how to explain what the conservative position was by the reaction against three ‘Liberal attacks on the American tradition.’46 So again, just like we have seen when looking at the founding of National Review, conservatism seems to be mainly about being anti-liberal. For example, conservatism according to Kendall was being against ‘the increasing tendency of Liberals to appeal (…) to the principle of equality in its crudest form.’47 Kendall opposed this idea when it comes to foreign aid, for example, and segregation. He wrote: ‘Rights and privileges are correlative to duties; a man has a right to those rights and privileges that he earns by the performance of his duties.’48
So was the conservative movement mostly libertarian or traditionalist, or mostly anti-liberal? And how did the National Review fit in that picture? We can conclude that the conservative movement of the 50s was a coming together of many factions on the right. They came together, libertarians and traditionalists alike; bonding over their mutual distrust of liberalism, just like many outspoken journalists and scholars did at the National Review. After five years of National Review, editor James Burnham looked back and concluded that the magazine appealed to movements like: ‘Libertarianism, isolationism, hard-line anti-communism, traditionalism, McCarthyism, classic laissez-faire, DARism, States Rightsism, and various semi-crackpotisms – but managed to muddle along reasonably well because all of the tendencies were negatively united in opposition to the prevailing
43
Willmoore Kendall, ‘Three on the line’, National Review, August 31, 1957, 179-181.
44 Kendall, ‘Three on the line’, 179. 45 Ibidem, 179-180.
46
Ibidem, 180.
47 Ibidem, 181. 48 Ibidem, 191.
12 power and ideology.’49 This mix of different right-wing schools of thought was defining for the
National Review, where contributors often clashed on which direction to take, but attracted support
from various corners of the right-wing political spectrum and was therefore a success, united in anti-liberalism and anti-establishment.
So in the fifties multiple conservative schools of thought came together within the
conservative movement. But there was still a lot of debate where this growing coalition should place itself. Should it take back the Republican Party like Goldwater called the conservatives upon during the 1960 convention? Or should the conservatives form their own political party, away from the liberal establishment? Some conservatives did not want to find their place within the existing two party system, but looked for other options outside of the Republican Party. They thought taking back the GOP wasn’t a possibility, or thought by creating an independent party or a bipartisan
conservative coalition, they could reach support from voters that would not go for the Republican Party.50
In 1957, Revilo Oliver wrote in National Review about the state of the conservatives, who he first described as pessimistic, but now hopeful and aggressive, as they had assembled for the first time in a quarter of a century to try to change national policy. The topic that gathered seven hundred delegates from 32 states? Federal income tax, according to the speakers, ‘the root of political evil’.51 Going beyond the convention and looking at the state of the conservative movement, Oliver noted a major division among conservatives: ‘those who welcome the organization of a third party and those who oppose it.’52 ‘The former argue that the Liberal minority has so effectively captured control of both major parties that it will always be able to confront the American people with a choice between the Walrus and the Carpenter.’53 But those who opposed a third party, according to Oliver, claimed that: ‘that not even one per cent of the people would so much as listen to a third party.’54
Pseudo- or authentic conservative
At the time not everyone agreed that this new movement coming together was actually conservative at all. The most well-known scholar to dismiss the authenticity of conservatism was Richard
Hofstadter in his 1955 article ‘The Pseudo-conservative revolt’. In this article he leaned heavily on
49
‘James Burnham, ‘Strategic development of National Review’, memorandum, James Burnham to William F. Buckley Jr., James Burnham papers (undated) 2, in: Bjerre-Poulsen, Right face, 123-124.
50 Bjerre-Poulsen, Right face, 141.
51 Revilo Oliver, ‘The Conservatives bar compromise’, National Review, October 5, 1957, 301-302. 52
Oliver, ‘The Conservatives bar compromise’, 301.
53 Ibidem. 54 Ibidem, 302.
13 the coinage of the term pseudo-conservative by T.W. Adorno, in his book The Authoritarian
personality, which we will take a look at first. In this book, Adorno and his co-authors undertook a
large study into the existence of a potentially fascist personality on the basis of nine traits, through research by questionnaire and interviews.55
On the basis of the interviews Adorno founded the term pseudo-conservatism, as being something other than genuine conservatism. Adorno argued that ideas of conservatism and liberalism both are used to cover up more destructive and repressive wishes for society. ‘The pseudoconservative is a man who, in the name of upholding traditional American values and
institutions and defending them against more or less fictitious dangers, consciously or unconsciously aims at their abolition.’56
Adorno cited one of the interviewees, and his conclusion is an important one to note here. The interviewee does not reject medical insurance for example, but believes it should be in the hands of people he can identify himself with. Adorno: ‘The decisive thing about this man is that he has, in spite of his general reactionism and his all-pervasive ideas of power (…) socialistic leanings.’57 He concluded:
This “socialist,” or rather pseudosocialist, element of pseudoconservatism, actually defined only by antiliberalism, serves as the democratic cloak for antidemocratic wishes. Formal democracy seems to this kind of thinking to be too far away from “the people”, and the people will have their right only if the “inefficient” democratic processes are substituted by some rather ill-defined strong-arm system.58
A tendency that will sound familiar if compared to right-wing or populist political streams this day and age. According to Adorno, anti-liberalism is what made the conservatism not authentic.
Time to go back to Hofstadter’s ‘Pseudo-conservative revolt’, which expanded Adorno’s term further. He stated that although the pseudo-conservative can be found in all classes, it is most common among the less educated of the middle class. The ideology is undefined, since the pseudo-conservative is very incoherent on politics.59 Keywords here are restlessness, suspicion and fear. The description Hofstadter gave is worth quoting in full, since this sentiment is one that is found among voters until this day:
55 Theodor Ludwig Wiesengrund Adorno and Betty Aron, The authoritarian personality (New York 1950) 1-2. 56 Adorno, The authoritarian personality, 676.
57
Ibidem, 677.
58 Ibidem, 677-678.
14 He believes himself to be living in a world in which he is spied upon, plotted against,
betrayed, and very likely destined for total ruin. He feels that his liberties have been arbitrarily and outrageously invaded. He is opposed to almost everything that has happened in American politics for the past twenty years. He hates the very thought of Franklin D. Roosevelt. He is disturbed deeply by American participation in the United Nations, which he can see only as a sinister organization. He sees his own country as being so weak that it is constantly about to fall victim to subversion; and yet he feels that it is so all-powerful that any failure it may experience in getting its way in the world - for instance, in the Orient - cannot possibly be due to its limitations but must be attributed to its having been betrayed. He is the most bitter of all our citizens about our involvement in the wars of the past, but seems the least concerned about avoiding the next one.60
Where does this sentiment come from? The simple answer would be that it’s simply old
conservatism and old isolationism coming together, strengthened by the hardships of modern times. But this answer did not satisfy Hofstadter. He suggested a combination of drastic inflation and heavy taxation, the dissolution of American urban life and the fear of the power of international
communism. But that still left the question: ‘Why do some Americans try to face this threat for what it is, a problem that exists in a world-wide theater of action, while others try to reduce it largely to a matter of domestic conformity?’61 Hofstadter thus arrived at his own hypothesis:
That pseudo- conservatism is in good part a product of the rootlessness and heterogeneity of American life, and above all, of its peculiar scramble for status and its peculiar search for secure identity. Normally there is a world of difference between one's sense of national identity or cultural belonging and one's social status. However, in American historical development, these two things, so easily distinguishable in analysis, have been jumbled together in reality.62
Hofstadter concluded: ‘We boast of the melting pot, but we are not quite sure what it is that will remain when we have been melted down.’63 Hofstadter explained that this hypothesis applies to both well-off Americans, fearing they will lose their status they have built up over generations, as to lower class Americans, seeing as climbing the social ladder seems for them to be a synonym to being truly American. ‘Since their forebears voluntarily left one country and embraced another, they cannot, as people do elsewhere, think of nationality as something that comes with birth; for them it is a matter of choice, and an object of striving.’64 This also explains the presence of prejudice among pseudo-conservatives. They are looking for scapegoats to accuse of disloyalty to the United States in order to affirm their own Americanism. 65 This actually makes more sense than simply pointing at the
60
Hofstadter, ‘Pseudo-conservative revolt’, 12.
61 Ibidem, 16. 62 Ibidem. 63 Ibidem, 17. 64 Ibidem, 22. 65 Ibidem, 24.
15 less educated as being receptive of (pseudo-)communism, as Hofstadter did before. As we will see later on, the idea that conservatism mostly appealed to blue-collar workers is proved to be a myth.
Why at this time, in the 1950s? Hofstadter names four reasons. The era of settlement and constant immigration is over, the growth of mass media, the long tenure in power of the liberal elements to which the pseudo-conservatives are most opposed and the period of constant crisis that has arrived – with the Cold War - without any promise of relief.66
In 1962, Austrian journalist E. v. Kuehnelt-Leddihn wrote an appraisal of American
conservatism, stating that the danger of conservatism in America was that it would become a sort of pseudo-conservatism, to oppose the, in his eyes, existing pseudo-liberalism in the United States. According to Kuehnelt-Leddihn, conservatives in the United States succeeded in rejecting the rise of semi-fascist, semi-Nazi hate-groups.67 But he criticized the American conservatives in a familiar way: he asked himself where the conservatives will steer the nation, since: ‘I have to admit that only too often I had the impression that the conservative movement in your country lacks precise vision, a concrete program, a blueprint, a coherent ideology.’68 He stated that the weakness lies in its
vagueness and concluded: ‘To be anti-Communist and anti-leftist is truly not enough.’69 So according to Kuehnelt-Leddihn, the ‘pseudo’ lies in accepting the support of hate-groups. He did sort of admit that the conservatives mainly came together over being anti-liberal, just like Hofstadter. But unlike Hofstadter, Kuehnelt-Leddihn did not think that made them less conservative.
Richard Hofstadter wrote his article on pseudo-conservatism at the end of 1954, a year before the first issue of the National Review came out and more than five years before Goldwater wrote The conscience of a conservative. Thus this was still at the forming stage of what would become known as the conservative movement. Not many historians to date still take into
consideration that this movement was actually pseudo-conservative and not conservative at all. But with Hofstadter in mind, it is worthwhile to investigate whether or not even a small part wasn’t as much conservative as it held characteristics of pseudo-conservatism as Hofstadter explained it.
The question we need to ask is whether something can be pseudo-conservative and conservative at the same time. If we take conservatism as a single concept, I would say no.
Something cannot be real and fake at the same time. Many historians, like Perlstein, have taken this approach when it comes to dismissing Hofstadter’s theory. But when reading Hofstadter, I thought it
66 Ibidem, 26-27. 67
E. v. Kuehnelt-Leddihn, ‘American conservatives: an appraisal’, National Review, March 13, 1962, 167.
68 Kuehnelt-Leddihn, ‘American conservatives’. 69 Ibidem.
16 would be possible, if we take conservatism not as a singular notion, but something that meant different things to different people. When conservatism is a plural notion, a set of ideas that can differ from person to person, there could be ‘pseudo’ and genuine’ elements. Conservatism meant something different to a Southern blue-collar worker than it did to Buckley, for example. Although driven by the same main principles – states’ rights and individualism – the implementation could be very different. So for some, conservatism could be something others would regard as pseudo-conservatism – but they themselves would of course not. It is debatable whether or not any political stream could be ‘real or fake’, but for the time being, let us consider that Hofstadter could have been correct, when it comes to at least a part of the support for conservatism at this time.
The chosen one: Barry Goldwater
In his book Before the storm, Perlstein gives an extensive overview of the rise of conservatism and places the campaign of Goldwater as the starting point of conservatism as we know it today. ‘America would remember the sixties as a decade of the left. It must be remembered instead as a decade when the polarization began.’70 Perlstein argues that conservatism attracted many students and young Republicans, looking for a new intellectual stream of thought other than liberalism. ‘Restless, lonely teenagers discovering their first intellectual and political high; craggy old
Midwestern foundry men counting their inflation-addled dollars and chasing the unions from their gates; the newly wealthy in a changing South.’71
Bridges and Coyne state that there was already a small, not widely remembered Goldwater-for-president group active for the presidential election of 1960, which found support especially among the younger conservatives.72 The Arizona senator had stepped into a void on the Republican right in the late 1950s. By 1957 he openly attacked President Eisenhower’s pragmatic politics and fiscal policy, calling it a ‘dime-store New Deal.’73 But the Republican Party went for Vice President Richard Nixon to challenge young Democratic senator John F. Kennedy.74 Although Nixon was not seen as a conservative by Buckley and much of the National Review crowd, some conservatives admired his strong anti-communism. And most of all the conservatives despised his liberal opponent, Nelson Rockefeller.75
70
Perlstein, Before the storm, xiii.
71 Ibidem, 75.
72 Bridges and Coyne, Strictly right, 71. 73
Richard Hofstadter, The paranoid style in American politics and other essays (New York 1965) 97.
74 Critchlow and MacLean, American conservative movement, 22. 75 Ibidem, 22.
17 Goldwater did speak at the 1960 Republican National Convention, calling conservatives to action: ‘This country, in its majesty, is too great for any man, be he conservative or liberal, to stay home and not work just because he doesn’t agree. Let’s grow up, conservatives! If we want to take this party back, and I think we can some day, let’s get to work!’76 Before the election, there was talk of the possibility of Goldwater becoming Nixon’s running mate. But instead, Nixon made a pact with Rockefeller and chose the Massachusetts Republican Henry Cabot Lodge to be on the ticket with him, in exchange for Rockefeller’s support, a decision widely criticized amongst the right-wing.77 This gave Goldwater the opportunity to position himself as both a conservative and a Republican
loyalist.78
In 1962, a National Review editor wrote a short editorial ‘The collapse of the GOP.’ The author stated that President Eisenhower had hurt the Republican Party and that the Party had no plan of attack to stop John F. Kennedy and his ‘photogenic stewardship,’ since the Republican Party was divided between the conservative and left wing that both did not seem to be able to win over the entire GOP, let alone the voters they needed.79 The writer suggested the following: the GOP should unite behind Senator Goldwater, but in cooperation with the moderate wing of the party. Together they should adopt ‘a nuclear position of organic opposition to the Kennedy program.’80 These wings should work together and ‘conservatives around the country, while maintaining their identities, should regularly publicize the meditations and accomplishments of this cadre.’81
The conscience of a conservative made the liberal the enemy
1960 was the year that Barry Goldwater won the hearts of the conservatives with his book The
conscience of a conservative. As Critchlow phrases it: ‘Goldwater articulated conservative principles
of individualism, small government, private enterprise, and the foibles of modern liberalism to a popular audience.82 Goldwater accused liberals of ignoring ‘that the Communists’ aim is to conquer the world.’83 He quoted American journalist and former-Communist-turned-critic Eugene Lyons stating ‘the great and inescapable task of our epoch is not to end the Cold War but to win it.’84 And to accomplish that, the United States needed to ‘achieve superiority in all of the weapons – military,
76
Bjerre-Poulsen, Right face, 141.
77 Schneider, Conservatism in America, 208. 78
Bjerre-Poulsen, Right face, 211.
79
‘The collapse of the GOP’, National Review, May 8, 1962, 314-315.
80 ‘The collapse of the GOP’, 315. 81 Ibidem.
82
Critchlow and MacLean, American conservative movement, 23.
83 Barry Goldwater, The conscience of a conservative (New York 1960) 84. 84 Goldwater, Conscience, 87.
18 as well as political and economic.’85 The conscience of a conservative was actually ghostwritten by Brent Bozell, longtime friend of Buckley and co-author of the book on Joe McCarthy, mentioned in the introduction.86
In The conscience of a conservative Goldwater not only wrote about the role of the US in the world, he also explained what it meant to be a conservative and what the role of the US government should be – as opposed to what it was doing at the time. In his definition of being a conservative, there’s a lot of focus on the individual. Goldwater stated that the most important belief as a conservative is that: ‘Man’s most sacred possession is his individual soul.’87 Part of the individual being at the center is that a man can’t be an individual if he is not inherently free. ‘Man’s political freedom is illusory if he is dependent for his economic needs on the State.’88 Linked to that principle is the belief that every man is responsible for its own development. Goldwater stated: ‘the choices that govern his life are choices that he must make: they cannot be made by any other human being, or by a collectivity of human beings.’89 Out of those principles of conservatism, Goldwater concluded it made sense that the conservative views politics as ‘the art of achieving the maximum amount of freedom for individuals that is consistent with the maintenance of social order.’90 We can deduct from this description a strong rejection of the New Deal-policies and domestic liberalism that was present in the United States at the time.
According to Goldwater the government’s main task should be to create an environment where achieving the most freedom by the people is possible, for example by maintaining order, keeping foreign enemies at a distance, and administering justice.91After this statement, Goldwater warned that the United States concentrated the power in the hands of too few people. He
articulated the hope the American people will put someone in office who will proclaim in a campaign speech:
I have little interest in streamlining government or in making it more efficient, for I mean to reduce its size. I do not undertake to promote welfare, for I propose to extend freedom. My aim is not to pass laws, but to repeal them. (…) And if I should later be attacked for neglecting my constituents’ ‘interests’, I shall reply that I was informed their main interest is liberty and that in that cause I am doing the very best I can.92
85 Ibidem, 107. 86
Bridges and Coyne, Strictly right, 71.
87 Goldwater, Conscience, 3. 88 Ibidem, 4. 89 Ibidem. 90 Ibidem, 5. 91 Ibidem, 9. 92 Ibidem, 14-15.
19 Perlstein calls Goldwater – and thus Bozells – ideas in The conscience of a conservative radical, but they would become domesticated by the writing of this book and would soon appeal to college students around the country, worrying about abstract philosophical thoughts like freedom and authenticity.93 States’ rights were central to the appeal of The conscience. Perlstein argues that not many of the readers that did not already have conservative instincts would have been convinced by the book, but what it did was it: ‘had stolen conservatism from the sole possession of old men. (…) Its success, springs in part from the author’s ability to give humanitarian reasons for following policies which usually have been associated with a lust for gain’.94
Early conservatism in the 50s, Perlstein writes, was a conservatism of fear, worrying
communists had infiltrated the government. ‘The conscience of a conservative didn’t blame invisible communists for America’s problems. It blamed all too visible liberals.’95 This was an interesting shift, away from the old enemy, the communist, and to the enemy within, the enemy exclusively American and not corrupted by a foreign power: the liberals. Losing to communism would only happen if the liberals held on to their idea of peaceful coexistence. The enemy must be defeated, according to Goldwater. The only and highest aim was freedom, and it was worth dying for. And this idea brought many groups with very different ideologies together. It had many libertarian characteristics, in that individual freedom and very small governments were essential to conservatives. The only time government should not be limited was when it came to security from domestic and foreign enemies, in this case communism. The conscience of a conservative mostly shaped the movement because it put liberals central as the new enemy. Hereby, Goldwater tried to affirm his own Americanism at the cost of people undeniably as American as he was.
The theory of pseudo-conservatism during Goldwater
Rick Perlstein only mentions Hofstadter’s theory of pseudo-conservatism quickly when he notes in the preface of his book that some scholars and journalists did not take the conservatives seriously in the beginning. The liberal status quo that was established during the New Deal and continued under Eisenhower looked like a permanent political situation to many. Perlstein states that: ‘commentators began to speak of the American “consensus”’.96 Liberalism became a reality, not an ideology, and people did not argue with reality, Perlstein states. This is why commentators did not take the emerging conservative movement seriously: ‘Pundit Stewart Alsop wrote that conservatism was “not really a coherent, rational alternative at all – it is hardly more than an angry
93 Perlstein, Before the storm, 64. 94
Ibidem, 65.
95 Ibidem. 96 Ibidem, xi.
20 cry of protest against things as they are.”’97 And, arriving at one of the three short mentions of Hofstadter in Perlstein’s book: ‘Hofstadter joked that he welcomed the Goldwater-for-President movement when it sprang up because it was providing conservatives “a kind of vocational therapy, without which they might have to be committed.”’98 In October 1964, Frank S. Meyer wrote that Goldwater had once and for all destroyed ‘the myth of an over-all American Liberal consensus.99
It seems worth noting that Perlstein did not explicitly doubt their conservatism like
Hofstadter did, but he did note the incoherence and unclear ideology of the early-day conservatives and he did mentioned the same sort of background of the supporters that is perceived in Hofstadter, namely that the support came from a base of fear, losing their position in the world as well as at home. When looked into further, this could explain political tendencies to this date, with supporters backing a candidate that is not a classic conservative like Goldwater or Reagan, but for reasons that are oddly similar. It is unclear why Perlstein at this point does not support Hofstadter’s theory while he does describe their communism the same way. Does Perlstein believe the conservative
movement did really become conservative later on? Or was it conservative to begin with, even though the supporters came together on a base of fear? If we accept that pseudo-conservative elements could exist within conservatism, we could state that the support Perlstein notes, based on fear, was actually pseudo-conservatism.
According to historian Lisa McGirr, Richard Hofstadter, as well as Daniel Bell and Seymour Martin Lipset, did not view support for the conservatives as coming from any coherent set of ideas, but rather as a result of 'psychological distress'.100 ‘Bell and Lipset, in particular, argued that status anxieties of both an older, dispossessed middle class and an upwardly mobile group of white ethnics explained support for the right. Hofstadter, in turn, borrowing from clinical psychology, suggested that a sense of “persecution” and a “paranoid style” characterized the Right’s adherents.’101 These scholars dismissal of conservatism as fighting a losing battle against progress made sure that the right was not taken seriously for a long time. ‘While they correctly argued for paying attention to the ordinary people who populated the ranks of the Right, their excessively psychological interpretation distorted our understanding of American conservatism.’102 The conservative movement in the 1960s stayed under the radar for decades, since the 60s in the collective memory has been the decade of civil rights, Martin Luther King and the left. Adding to the obscurity was the tendency of scholars to
97
Ibidem.
98 Ibidem.
99 Frank S. Meyer, ‘Principles and Heresies: what consensus?’, National Review, October 20, 1964, 912. 100
Lisa McGirr, Suburban warriors: The origins of the new American Right (Princeton 2001) 7.
101 McGirr, Suburban warriors, 7. 102 Ibidem.
21 put conservative support aside as coming from a bunch of ‘kooks’ that were not to be taken
seriously in the apparent age of liberalism.103 Lisa McGirr disagrees with this image of conservatives, writing in her book that the conservatives weren’t all paranoid kooks, but on the contrary, modern white-collar men and women.
Richard Hofstadter wrote two more essays on the pseudo-conservative movement, around the time that is central to this thesis, the nomination of Goldwater. In ‘Pseudo-conservatism revisited – 1965’, and ‘Goldwater and the Pseudo-conservative politics’, he fitted the rise of Goldwater into his theory of pseudo-conservatism and revised some of his 1955 statements.
Hofstadter did not become any milder on the issue, calling what others named the
conservative movement the extreme right and linking it directly to the John Birch Society in the 60s – more on that in chapter 3. He defined conservatives as follows:
At the grass roots the extreme right now draws its primary support from two basic (and at point overlapping) social types: first, the affluent (perhaps newly affluent) suburban educated middle-class, largely outside the Northeast, which responds to ultra-conservative economic issues as well as to militant nationalism and anti-communism, and which seeks to win a place in the political structure proportionate to the secure place it has won in society; and second, a large lower middle class, somewhat less educated and less charmed than the first group by old-fashioned economic liberalism but even more fearful of communism, which it perceives rather abstractly in the light of a strong evangelical-fundamentalist cast of thought.104 Interestingly he agreed with McGirr and Perlstein that the first group, of white-collar affluent inhabitants of the suburbs is a big part of the conservative movement, but in his eyes they were still not true conservatives since they only joined because of their fear for communism and nationalism. He compared the 1920s and 60s, both being periods of prosperity: ‘We have noticed that whereas in depressions or during great bursts of economic reform people vote for what they think are their economic interests, in times of prosperity they feel free to vote their prejudices.’105
In his next essay, Hofstadter tried to fit the rise of Goldwater in his theory of
pseudo-conservatism, calling his nomination the triumphal moment.106 The historian stated that Goldwater’s ideas involve some genuine conservatism but have more characteristics of the pseudo-conservatism of his extreme-right supporters. His beliefs that social security and public housing had caused ‘the weakening of the individual personality and of self-reliance’, called for the dismantling of the welfare
103 Ibidem, 6. 104
Hofstadter, paranoid style in American politics, 72.
105 Ibidem, 92. 106 Ibidem, 93.
22 state.107 Those statements were typical for pseudo-conservatives, Hofstadter wrote, since they are ‘convinced that they live in a degenerate society and who see their main enemy in the power of their own government.’108 According to Hofstadter, bastions of genuine conservatives like businessmen, old Republican states and newspapers did not back Goldwater.109
Another very interesting conclusion of Hofstadter is worth mentioning here, since it will ring some bells regarding right-wing politicians in the United States this present day: ‘An essential point in the pseudo-conservative world view is that our recent Presidents, being men of wholly evil intent, have conspired against the public good. This does more than discredit them: it calls into question the validity of the political system that keeps putting such men into office.’110 And there is always an enemy, this time it was Lyndon B. Johnson, but in the past it had been Eisenhower, Truman and the Eastern establishment. We see this at this day, with far-right leaders calling previous leaders and their legitimacy into question, with Trump’s theory on the birthplace of Barack Obama for example, or him questioning the results of elections. Hofstadter called this the same devil theory of social ills found in the rhetoric of treason and conspiracy of the pseudo-conservatives.111 In this case,
conservatism would lead to the dismantling of democracy, a flirt with totalitarianism that we see today as well on the far right.
What does the election of Trump say about conservatism?
If we take a leap and look at the present, the election of Donald Trump left many historians studying conservatism shocked and confused. Rick Perlstein revisits everything he has studied on
conservatism; including his book Before the storm in the April 2017 article in The New York Times
Magazine ‘I thought I understood the American Right. Trump proved me wrong.’112
In this article Perlstein says a couple of things worth noting on the subject of the essence of American conservatism. According to historians, the American right has been stable and part of the mainstream, expressed by polite conservatives like Buckley and the National Review. He asks himself: ‘If Donald Trump is the latest chapter of conservatism’s story, might historians have been telling that story wrong?’113 According to Perlstein, Hofstadter was not taken seriously because he 107 Ibidem, 98. 108 Ibidem, 99. 109 Ibidem, 101-102. 110 Ibidem, 100. 111 Ibidem, 124.
112 Rick Perlstein, ‘I thought I understood the American Right. Trump proved me wrong’, The New York Times Magazine, April 11, 2017.
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/11/magazine/i-thought-i-understood-the-american-right-trump-proved-me-wrong.html (accessed May 8, 2018).
23 did not take conservatism seriously with his theory of pseudo-conservatism. But the historiography that rose to the forefront in the late 90s, with Perlstein being an important contributor, played down the hysteria that was in fact a part of conservatism. Perlstein acknowledges his mistake: ‘Writing about the movement that led to Goldwater’s 1964 Republican nomination, for instance, it never occurred to me to pay much attention to McCarthyism, even though McCarthy helped Goldwater win his Senate seat in 1952, and Goldwater supported McCarthy to the end. (As did William F. Buckley.)’114 This is important, since as we said before Goldwater’s book on conservatism came from Bozell, who has also written to defend McCarthy. The fact that the paranoia behind McCarthyism has been left out when writing on Goldwater definitely seems like a flaw in the existing
historiography.
Perlstein notes that some historians took a different path from Perlstein and Hofstadter, like Leo Ribuffo in his 1983 study The old Christian right: the Protestant far right from the Great
Depression to the cold war. According to Perlstein: ‘Ribuffo argued that America’s anti-liberal
traditions were far more deeply rooted in the past, and far angrier, than most historians would acknowledge, citing a long list of examples from “regional suspicions of various metropolitan centers and the snobs who lived there” to “white racism institutionalized in slavery and segregation.”’115
Perlstein now tries to look at the current events with the mindset that it might not have been so new at all and admits: the past is oddly familiar. Racism and fear of decline and the
unknown has always been a part of the history of the American right. And although this might not be the conservatism as Buckley wrote on in the National Review – or the conservatism of Ronald Reagan or Barry Goldwater – it has always been a part of its history on the background. Perlstein verbalizes the need for historians to look past what is ‘polite’: ‘Future historians won’t find all that much of a foundation for Trumpism in the grim essays of William F. Buckley, the scrupulous
constitutionalist principles of Barry Goldwater or the bright-eyed optimism of Ronald Reagan. They’ll need instead to study conservative history’s political surrealists and intellectual embarrassments, its con artists and tribunes of white rage.’116 So Goldwater’s conservatism might be genuine according to Hofstadter’s theory, the conservative support behind it might fit the theory of
pseudo-conservatism perfectly.
We can conclude that placing the birth of the American conservative movement as we know it today in the 1950s and 60s is a rather simplistic view, since it did not have a single clear direction
114
Ibidem.
115 Ibidem. 116 Ibidem.
24 or set of beliefs, but rather a coming together of many different ideas on the right. Because what did it really mean to be a conservative? And did the movement not evolve, change and differ with every spokesperson and supporter? Like any new political ideology, it is not possible to summarize it in one set of ideas. Until this day, the ideology of conservatives in the 50s and 60s meant different things to different people. Hofstadter’s theory of pseudo-conservatism is interesting for different reasons. He claims that the conservatism of the 50s was rooted in fear; for communism, but also for unionizing, ending of segregation, taxation and federal government. And Perlstein agrees to conservatism having its base in fear, as well as to the scattered ideology of conservatives to a large extent. According to Hofstadter people feel free to vote along lines of bigger moral subjects like freedom and identity in times of economic prosperity. Questions that were central to Goldwater’s beliefs, as we have read in his own book. The rise of conservatism could be more defined by the rise of status, identity and morality in politics. There are a lot of lines that could be drawn between this ideology and the political issues that we are facing today – with moral issues and identity politics dominating the political debate. In the next chapter, I will take a look at a very important part of conservative identity, the underdog position, which was promoted in many ways and on many different levels, and thereby shaped the conservative movement as if it was speaking for groups that had been unheard for years.
25
Chapter 2: The conservative as underdog
In the previous chapter we have uncovered that conservatism in post-war America was a new phenomenon that historians and journalists at the time and to this day differ from opinion as to how exactly to describe and explain it. This new conservatism – shaped by the National Review and later its first political nominee on the national level Barry Goldwater – took in a typical underdog position in the existing liberal political reality. This chapter will describe what this underdog role entailed and will question the validity of this role, by following the path of Barry Goldwater towards the election and discovering how the National Review covered and supported the first conservative presidential candidate. We will discuss how the underdog role was used on different levels and argue how that fits in the type of conservatism as discussed in the previous chapter.
That Buckley started the National Review from a perceived underdog position as a
conservative becomes clear when reading the written statement of intentions at the founding of the publication. Buckley wrote: ‘The magazine will begin publication as a minority voice – only in the sense that America’s ‘respectable’ press has ordained that such voices as ours are of the past, and are not worth serious attention.’117 He also noted that there’s a gap between the so-called
establishment and the people: ‘Events in the very recent past positively establish that there is a widening gulf between the ‘respectable’ press and the American people, that they look upon each other, increasingly, as strangers’.118
In the statement of principles Buckley continued to write from this underdog position, stating that: ‘National Review is out of place, in the sense that the United Nations and the League of Women Voters and the New York Times and Henry Steele Commager are in place.’119 He went on to describe a world where liberals decide everything, while conservatives are denounced: ‘Radical conservatives in this country have an interesting time of it, for when they are not being suppressed or mutilated by the Liberals, they are being ignored or humiliated by a great many of those of the well-fed.’120
117
William F. Buckley, ‘National Review. Statement of intentions’ in Gregory L. Schneider ed., Conservatism in
America since 1930 (New York 2003) 195-200, 195. 118 Buckley, ‘Statement of intentions’, 195.
119 William F. Buckley, ‘National Review. Credenda and Statement of principles’ in Gregory L. Schneider ed., Conservatism in America since 1930 (New York 2003) 201-205, 201. Henry Steele Commager was an American
historian and leading liberal intellectual. Well-known for his criticism of Senator Joseph McCarthy.
26
Draft Goldwater movement
The National Review portrayed itself as the conservative dark horse in a liberal world, where moderate Republicans were just as bad as Democrats. In what way did they support Barry Goldwater, the first conservative presidential candidate since the founding of the magazine?
National Review publisher William Rusher was one of the key players in the movement to
draft Goldwater for the presidential ticket in 1964. Niels Bjerre-Poulsen calls the project ‘one of the most successful ventures in American political history.’121 The plan to get Goldwater to run for president came from a group of friends who also happened to be important political players - many of them had been members of the National Young Republicans. They first got together at the Avenue Hotel in Chicago on October 8, 1961 because they did not see a future in Nelson Rockefeller as their nominee. They believed that the Eastern establishment was no longer relevant and did not hold the future for the Republican Party. According to Hart, population and wealth had moved south and west. Hart adds: ‘In addition, most of the conspirators, coming from the Midwest or otherwise outside the metropolitan centers, had a populist tendency, and would be pleased to wallop the Eastern (Liberal) Establishment.122
William Rusher strongly believed in a change of direction for the Republican Party. On February 12 1963, National Review printed an article from his hand called ‘crossroads for the GOP’. In this article, he set out what was wrong with the current strategy of the Republican Party, what they should focus on instead and why Barry Goldwater was the man for that job. Rusher stated in ‘Crossroads for the GOP’ that for the election of 1964 the only relevant question for Republicans was ‘Who has the best chance of winning?’ and the next question Republicans wrongly asked as a result of that was ‘who can carry New York and California?’123 The answer to that question was supposed to be Nelson Rockefeller. But according to Rusher, the question who could carry New York and California was not the right question to ask. Rusher drew three conclusions out of the 1962 midterm elections that are worth quoting in full:
1) that neither Nelson Rockefeller nor any other Republican, real or nominal, has much more prospect of wresting New York and California from John F. Kennedy in 1964 than Mao Tsetung; 2) that the GOP has, nevertheless, an astonishingly good chance of up-ending Kennedy nationally, by taking most of the 165 electoral votes of the southern and border states away from him; and 3) – fasten your seatbelts, please – that the man with the best
121 Bjerre-Poulsen, Right face, 209. 122 Hart, American conservative mind, 140. 123
William A. Rusher, ‘Crossroads for the GOP’, National Review February 12, 1963, 109. In his book The rise of
the Right published in 1984 William Rusher looks back on the impact his article in the National Review had,
