Conservatives Without Conscience

brazenly reinterpreting the founding events and documents.[27] Accordingly, for conservatives the clause “all men are created equal” would be construed to apply merely to equality under the law and not to “some misty ‘pursuit of happiness’ [as] the true foundation of our polity” and certainly not to the brand of egalitarianism favored by liberals. Most conservatives, in fact, oppose equality, and there is ultimately no clearer underlying distinction between conservatives and liberals than their views on this issue.[*] Nash concludes that in “a variety of ways, then, conservatives sought to drain the Declaration of its explosive [liberal] rhetorical potential.”

Removing equality from the American tradition, however, created early divisions within conservative ranks, because deliberate tampering with history simply was not acceptable to everyone. In 1965, for example, conservative political scientist Harry Jaffa, a highly respected Lincoln scholar, concluded that no principle was more fundamental than the Declaration’s assertion that “all men are created equal.” This did not apply merely to equality under law, but to political equality. According to Nash, the gist of Jaffa’s position was that “no man is by nature the ruler of another, that government derives its just powers from consent of the governed— that is from the opinion of the governed.” Thus, majority rule could not be separated from “the principle of the natural equality of political right of all men” (italics in original).[28] Jaffa had no doubt, unlike some conservative scholars, that the “Founding Fathers adhered to the principles of the Declaration of Independence” when writing the Constitution.[29]

Another example of a conservative attempt to rewrite history is in the interpretation of the American Revolution. Because revolution is the antithesis of conservatism, Nash explained, conservatives relied “on the work of such conservative scholars as Daniel Boorstin,” later head of the Library of Congress, who argued in The Genius of American Politics (1953) that the American Revolution was, unlike the French Revolution, not a cataclysmic upheaval, but rather a “limited war for independence” fought by colonialists to obtain the traditional rights of their forefathers. Others have pushed the argument even further, insisting that the American Revolution was merely an effort to place a check on Parliament and the out-of-control king of England. These conservatives “tended to stress that the American Revolution was a moderate and prudent affair—hardly a revolution at all,” Nash reports.[30] Of course, a distinctly different reality is portrayed by almost all legitimate historical accounts of the American Revolution (whether written by conservatives or liberals), from David McCullough’s highly praised 1776 (2005) to Merrill Jensen’s The American Revolution within America (1974) and Bernard Bailyn’s The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution (1967). The war for independence was America’s longest war (lasting eight years) and its deadliest until the Civil War. Especially given its outcome, to call it a “moderate” or “limited” war borders on the absurd.[31] For example, McCullough wrote in 1776, “The war was a longer, far more arduous, and more painful struggle than later generations would understand or sufficiently appreciate.”[32]

In their efforts to present conservatism as an American tradition, conservatives have also reinterpreted the U.S. Constitution. One of the key elements of the Constitution is the establishment of a unique republic, in that a federal system would coexist with state and local governments. Before it was ratified many opponents attacked its progressive and innovative nature, for far from representing the status quo, the Constitution was dramatically liberal. James Madison defended it in The Federalist Papers by explaining that the founders “have not suffered a blind veneration for antiquity, for custom” but rather employed “numerous innovations…in favor of private rights and public happiness.” Madison said that “precedent could not be discovered,” for there was no other government “on the face of the globe” that provided a model.[33] Madison, the father of the Constitution, clearly saw his work as the opposite of conservatism. Far from venerating the principles of the past, or feeling bound by custom, our nation’s founders relied on reason, which is anathema for many of today’s conservatives.

By laying claim to the Constitution as part of their own antiliberal tradition, conservatives have, even Nash seems to believe, gone too far. “In sharp contrast with many (including some of the Founding Fathers) who believed that the Constitution was intended to set up a stronger national government than the one under the Articles of Confederation,” Nash wrote with a tone of apology, “many conservatives stressed the powers of individuals and states under the federal system.” Even more inexcusable is that some conservative thinkers “seemed to infuse an almost anti-Federalist understanding of the Constitution” into its interpretation.[34] Anti-Federalists, of course, opposed its ratification, so to take that line of thought its full distance would have us still operating as European colonies. Absurd? Apparently not, as one influential Southern conservative historian, Clyde Wilson, has argued that the anti-Federalists were the only true American conservatives.[35] Fortunately, such thinking did not carry the day, but it has been prevalent from the outset of the conservative movement.

Had conservative scholars of the 1950s conceded the nation’s liberal legacy, and stated at the time that they were formulating a conservative philosophy based on a century and a half of history since the nation’s founding, a legitimate conservative foundation could have been built on the American tradition. Nash isolated the key question facing the early conservatives: “How could a nation conceived in violence and dedicated to universal rights ever be called ‘conservative’?” Political scientist Clinton Rossiter, considered one of the first neoconservatives, answered this question head-on, and unlike his peers, honestly, in his early study Conservatism in America, stating correctly that America’s political roots were “progressive” and the United States was conceived out of “a Liberal tradition.” [36]

Goldwater Conservatism Is Dead, R.I.P.

Barry Goldwater defined conservatism for my generation and several others. Incongruously, many former Goldwater conservatives have been instrumental in reshaping conservatism, but in doing so they have abandoned the senator’s own philosophy and the sense of conscience that anchored his thinking. The senator explained that much of his own conservative thinking had come from his mother’s “wonderful common sense” as well as his experiences as an Arizona businessman during the period that he and his brother ran their chain of successful department stores. Before Goldwater ran for Congress, Senator Everett Dirksen (R-IL) sent him speeches and background papers of his own, and had the Library of Congress gather a number of speeches by Senator Robert Taft (R-OH) for the candidate to study. Although he had never been much of a student as a young man, the senator became one, and spent the first ten years of his Senate career fascinated by books and reading, not to mention studying the workings of government. Herbert Hoover, who in 1932 was the first president for whom Goldwater had voted, became the senator’s friend and mentor after he arrived in Washington, and he collected all of Hoover’s published works to study them.

Senator Goldwater wrote a thrice-weekly column on conservatism for the Los Angles Times for almost four years.[37] He was frequently asked to define conservatism and did so over the course of several of those columns. The Conscience of a Conservative (1960) attempted to refine that definition, but it was over the next decade that he distilled it into its final form. In The Conscience of a Majority (1970) he defined conservatism as the belief that “the solutions to the problems of today can be found in the proven values of the past.”[38] (He elaborated later, saying that “in its simplest terms, conservatism is economic, social, and political practices based on the successes of the past.”)[39] As for the conscience of the conservative, he wrote that it was “pricked by anyone who would debase the dignity of the individual human being.” [40] When I asked him years later what now “pricked” the conservative conscience, he said that he should have written that the conservative conscience is “pricked by anyone or any action” that debases human dignity. “Doesn’t poverty debase human dignity?” I asked. “Of course it does,” he replied, and went on to say that if family, friends, and private charity cannot handle the job, the government must.[*] When I pressed him on conservatives being opposed to equality, he chuckled. “Those are the intellectual conservatives’, who couldn’t get themselves elected dog-catcher.” [41] (Sadly, this once may have been true, but it is certainly not the case today.)

“Politics is the art of achieving the maximum amount of freedom for individuals that is consistent with the