consequential President in Washington since Calvin Coolidge.”[14]
To make his point, Burnham quoted the French historian and scholar, Amaury de Riencourt, who wrote in 1957 that “the President of the United States [was] not merely the Chief Executive of one of the Western democracies, but one already endowed with powers of truly Caesarian magnitude,” and he feared that the American presidency could result in the destruction of freedom given its “concentration of supreme power in the hands of one man.”[15] Caesarism, of course, is despotism, and Burnham urged conservatives to resist anything that enabled the rise of a potential Caesar, “that is to say, Napoleon, Mussolini, Stalin, Hitler, Peron, Franco, Khrushchev.”
Unlike many of his successors, Burnham did believe that conservatism could be described and defined, and in 1959 he did so, which provides a record of how conservatism was perceived by a well-positioned insider in its early days. “We can define conservatism and liberalism by reference to certain philosophical principles,” Burnham wrote, as he endeavored to bridge intellectual conservatism with real-world politics.[16] To define conservatism in its political context, Burnham drew a point-by-point comparison of conservative and liberal positions on specific issues that he believed distinguish each. With the caveat that “brevity brings a certain amount of distortion,” he reduced his findings to thirteen statements, which he explained “hang together: that is, to occur as a group, not merely at random. Whether the cause of this linkage—which is not absolute, of course—is metaphysical, social or psychological we do not need to decide in order to observe that it exists.”[17] Yet like Kirk’s canons, Burnham’s descriptions of the conservative approach today has little practical application.[*]
The conservatism of Burnham and of an entire generation of conservative intellectuals has virtually disappeared as a functional political force, because it proved unable to stand up to the waves of demagogues, bigots, fanatics, malcontents, and assorted populists who have claimed the label for their own extremist aims. Leaders such as George Wallace, Strom Thurmond, Jesse Helms, and Pat Robertson—along with many more pedestrian politicians, political operatives, and social activists in pursuit of whatever narrow agendas—have easily overwhelmed and pushed aside the principles of conservative’s founders.[18] Had conservatism been entrenched enough to prevent expediency from overtaking critical thinking, it might not have been so easily uprooted. But conservatism was built on an unstable ground, and was not sufficiently fortified to weather such political storms.
Numerous recent studies have traced the evolution of the conservative movement.[19] As these works show (but certainly do not concede), conservatism has too often been perverted by small minds, which has enabled any number of extremist forces to subvert its authentic principles. Unlike classic liberalism, which evolved slowly over centuries, modern conservatism was cobbled together, if not contrived, by a relatively small group of intellectuals during a brief period in the late 1940s and early 1950s. Modern conservatism was soon brought into elective politics in the 1950s; its followers then joined forces with Southern politicians in the 1960s, and began flirting with evangelical Christians in the 1970s. Conservatism’s many factions were consolidated under Ronald Reagan’s Republican Party in the 1980s. Less than satisfied with their lot under Reagan, however, evangelical Christians increased their religiously motivated political zealotry in the late 1980s, throughout the 1990s, and into the new century.
While modern conservatism is a post–World War II political phenomenon, its earliest adherents, sometimes labeled the “old right,” date back to those Republicans who refused to follow former president Theodore Roosevelt and his progressive Bull Moose Party during the 1912 presidential election campaign. This group nonetheless chose to remain within the Republican Party ranks and support the reelection of President William Howard Taft. This, of course, resulted in the ascendance of Woodrow Wilson, who was even more progressive than TR, but in those days, conservative purity was paramount. Between the world wars, conservative Republicans played an obstructionist role, blocking Wilson’s League of Nations, opposing American intervention in foreign affairs, resisting non-European immigration, and pushing laissez-faire economic policies. Republican Party historian Lewis L. Gold notes that when “discussing the failures of the United States to intervene in World War I, or the difficulties of the League of Nations in the 1920s, Republicans rarely point out how much their [own] party did to sustain these now discredited policies.”[20]
Early conservatives were groping for something more than a philosophy of opposing anything that departed from the status quo and giving corporations the freedom they sought from government. They were searching for ideas and found common cause in their opposition to the New Deal. No factor did more to stimulate the growth of modern conservatism than the election of Franklin Roosevelt (with the possible exception of the spread of communism). He is the man conservatives most dislike, for he embodies the big-government ideology they most fear. Opposition to FDR’s policies and programs resulted in people like H. L. Mencken and former Republican president Herbert Hoover’s joining the conservative cause, adding stature to the nascent movement.[21] In time, conservatives found political leadership in President Taft’s son, Robert Taft, of Ohio, who became majority leader of the Senate in 1953, but seven months later died of cancer.
Lionel Trilling, a leading voice of the left, observed in 1950 that in “the United States at this time, liberalism is not only the dominant but the sole intellectual tradition….[T]here are no conservative or reactionary ideas in general circulation.”[22] Trilling, for a while, was correct. Intellectual efforts, rather than political leadership, however, ultimately proved more significant for the initial growth of conservatism. The work of conservative scholars, which had commenced in the late forties, although inconsequential at first, did serve to create a foundation for modern conservatism, and a philosophy was developed from scratch. At first they looked to European thinking and tradition, but this seemed un-American to many of them, and they, accordingly, began developing an authentically American conservative heritage. This was not easy, given the liberal tradition of this country, and in fact, nothing in America’s founding, or the creation of the United States, was of a conservative nature.
George H. Nash, himself a conservative, is the leading authority on this intellectual development, and his work
The conspicuous weakness in Nash’s work is his failure to report any of the inevitable conflicts among these three early schools of thought. Nash also does not establish any real connection between them other than anticommunism, which they all embraced (as did most progressives and liberals). Thus, he provides little historical insight into early fissures within conservatism, although these would develop into the factions which have yet to resolve their differences.
Early conservative scholars sought to establish the conservative tradition in America, often doing so by turning history upside down. They began with the Declaration of Independence, which involved an attempt to co-opt such profoundly liberal concepts of inalienable rights and equality. The Declaration, which formalized the end of colonial American allegiance to the monarchy of George III, has long been considered a classic statement of liberal political theory.[25] Echoing the words of the liberal philosophers like Jean- Jacques Rousseau and John Locke, Jefferson proclaimed as self-evident truths that “all men are created equal” and “are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights,” including “Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” These are concepts that are hardly articles of faith in conservative thought.
Nash admits that the Declaration was “troublesome” for the early conservatives, and reports that one scholar suggested conservatives should claim that, in fact, the Declaration’s egalitarian ethos had not been carried over to the Constitution; rather, that the Declaration was just that, a declaration and not a governing document.[26] Nash explains that it was ultimately decided “to stress the compatibility” of both the Declaration and the Constitution with conservative views, although that compatibility was created by
