American Conservatism:

...As man of status and substance, generally satisfied with things as they are, he is easily disturbed by those who criticize his actions, challenge his position, and propose changes in the rules of a game in which he has been a heavy winner...

...In any case, it is safe to say that precious few Americans are now adherents of fascism in any precise sense of this word...

...This—the alienation of the conservatives from Conservatism—is a distressing truth of American intellectual history...

...In the end, the conservative is left with only a handful of faithful friends in the ranks of intellectuals, for his materialism and primitivism alienate natural allies as well as natural foes...

...With radicalism out of fashion and liberalism out of office, the political and ideological Right bear close examination American Conservatism By Clinton Rossiter ONE of the wonders of the postwar decade in America has been the revival of conservatism in politics and culture...

...Liberal conservatives support the UN with scarcely abated enthusiasm, are prepared to maintain a high level of foreign spending, consider the Bricker Amendment a "dangerous innovation," and would like to see the McCarran Acts softened if not repealed in the interests of international good will and American dignity...

...R. A. Nisbet of California...

...Who are the American conservatives and what do they think...

...the equilibrium of rights and responsibilities...

...This brief account of the ideals and anxieties of the American conservatives goes far toward explaining a startling fact: A majority of this minority lines up in "the Roosevelt coalition" in opposition to the great body of conservatives...

...Many of this third group feel closer to moderates of the Left than to ultra-conservatives of the Right...

...the final dignity and inviolability of the human personality...

...Agrarians are gratefully aware of what the New Deal did for Southern agriculture...

...Although some of them are slightly infected with sentimental reaction, the millions of self-styled "middle-of-the-roaders" come closer to genuine conservatism than any group in contemporary America...

...the inseparability of liberty and property...

...In the area of domestic policy, ultra-conservatives not only oppose any further social legislation but call for the scrapping of many agencies and programs, especially those that do them no specific service...

...Second, there are the Catholic political theorists, not all of them priests, whose writings provide a philosophical basis for the social pronouncements of the American hierarchy...

...Most men on the contemporary Right may be placed in one of three major categories, each of which counts its occupants in millions: 1. The late Senator Wherry of Nebraska liked to describe himself as a "fundamentalist," and were this word not used generally to identify certain Protestant sects, it might well serve as the most accurate one-word description of the ultra-conservatives, those several million Americans whose political outlook is a rare mix-lure of sober conservatism, timid standpattism, and angry reaction...

...He was recently appointed to direct a study of Communist penetration of American life for the Fund for the Republic...

...Thus: Ultra-conservatives are ready, at least by their own testimony, to dissolve the TVA, reduce the scope and generosity of Social Security, ignore the problem of civil rights for Negroes, and fight any proposal to improve the nation's health as "socialized medicine...

...Liberal conservatives make counter-proposals to the promises of the Left and accept the new dimensions in government with little rancor or regret...

...Some Conservatives are convinced that, from the long view of history, the attitude toward government of the New and Fair Deals is actually more Conservative than the simple anti-slatism of the old guard...

...Other Conservatives will not accept the businessman as the key figure of American civilization...

...As man of action, in hot pursuit of present profit, he has been too heavily engaged to read or reflect, and thus looks with misgiving on those who do...

...The best-known contemporary exponents of pure individualism are John Chamberlain, who likes to write introductions to ultra-conservative tracts...

...In the center stood—and for our purposes still stands—the very model of the American conservative, the late Senator Taft...

...And I have heard conservatives of all kinds express profound mistrust of the capacity of the Republican party to prosecute a sound foreign policy...

...I have heard many reasons advanced to explain the breach between conservatism and Conservatism...

...Liberal conservatives are not uniformly loved for their attempts to strike a balance between stability and progress...

...Is this resurgent American conservatism all of a piece, or is it, like American liberalism, marked by diversity...

...They, too, would like lower taxes and harder money but do not fayor schemes to return our tax structure and monetary policy to the patterns of happier days...

...Clinton Rossiter, author of Seedtime of the Republic and other works, is Professor of Government at Cornell University...

...Conservatives will discuss social legislation, if not make broad proposals...

...Although any American conservative may stray off the reservation on an issue like China or free trade or civil rights, it is possible, I am convinced, to predict specific attitudes on current issues in four cases out of five...

...Former President Hoover and Senator Millikin of Colorado are located somewhere near one boundary of this category, President Eisenhower and Bernard Baruch somewhere near the other...

...America, too, has its authoritarians of the Right, its citizens who are not merely careless critics but confessed enemies of constitutional democracy...

...in the Committee for Economic Development, with an educational agency quite unique in objectivity...

...Conservatives are willing to tolerate the TVA while slashing its appropriations, leave Social Security untouched except for "more businesslike methods of operation," consider gingerly—and only under immense political pressure?a toothless bill for improving civil rights, and let the dead dog of "socialized medicine" lie dead in the street...

...The signs of this conservatism are everywhere...

...If hardly, as startling in immediate impact as the triumph of television, the development of the H-bomb, or the outlawing of segregation in education, the reappearance of conservatism may yet be judged an equally momentous event in the history of the Republic...

...In the final reckoning, agrarian, Catholic and intellectual Conservatives are together distinguished from other conservatives by their obstinate refusal to delight in the "progress" of industrialism or to make peace with the "shallow optimism," "selfish individualism" and "hedonistic materialism" of the scheme of values this progress has sustained...

...The attempt to be taxonomic about the political attitudes of half—or is it rather two-thirds?—of a nation is a dangerous undertaking...

...But these "professional haters" do exist, they have made Mr...

...the conservative mission of education...

...Having issued this warning, I suggest these rough and empirical categories, which proceed from the right extremity toward the center of the American political spectrum...

...Its intellectual forebears, whom it interprets to suit itself, are Thomas Jefferson and Herbert Spencer, and its principles can only be described, paradoxically, as "laissez-faire conservatism...

...A final word on the ultra-conservatives: Although most of them are unquestionably conservative in their urges and ends, they have now become so indignant over the trends of the past twenty years, so alarmed by reform at home and weary of adventure overseas, that they are fighting for preservation with methods that reek of radicalism...

...At the other, they are so harsh and malevolent as to be fellow-travelers of fascism...

...Having waded hip-deep through the political literature of the past ten years, I would assert without hesitation that the conservatism of the American Right is essentially a posture of anti-radicalism or anti-liberalism—a many-sided yet integral reaction to the New Deal, its leader, and his political heirs...

...Ayn Rand, whose novel The Foun-tainhead (1943) is a great favorite among young men who seek to soar on pinions free...

...insistence that "what America needs is a healthy dose of true conservatism...

...a peculiar affection for Burke...

...The incidence of pure traditionalists among the Sons and Daughters of the American Revolution is especially high...

...Russell Kirk, formerly of Michigan State College...

...If there is any line to be drawn down the middle of the intellectual conservatives, it is between those who are most concerned at present about the pseudo-conservatism of the extreme Right and those who persist in crying havoc at the purposeful progressiv-ism of the Left...

...the necessity of diffusing power...

...He is, like his father and grandfather, too much of an individualist, an optimist and a materialist, too indifferent to the ironies and tragedies of history, too confident of his ability to make the world over, ever to be classed as a conservative...

...The American Right remains today, as it has been for more than a hundred years, the willing prisoner of the American tradition, of the liberalisms of Monticello and Manchester...

...he has scorned them, bullied them and not seldom despised them...

...The chief reason, of course, for this rift between Conservatism and conservatism is the historic anti-intellectualism of American conservatives, an attitude of mistrust and contempt that goes far beyond the quizzical suspicion most conservatives seem to have for men whose business is thinking rather than doing...

...Most of them live in a state of acute cultural schizophrenia: They enjoy the fruits of the twentieth century but are shocked by the orchards that have brought them forth...

...I would add only this comment: They are not really conservatives at all, but either reactionaries shot full of radicalism, reactionaries pure and simple, or opportunists in an age and country where anti-radicalism seems to offer the best opportunities...

...in Sumner Slichter of Harvard and David McCord of Virginia, with equally able economists...

...I have heard more than one Catholic conservative express the thought that the New Deal, whatever its excesses, re-established the sense of community and rekindled the fires of social justice...

...There are special reasons, too...

...Francis G. Wilson of Illinois...

...In short, while the American Right is conservative in mood and practice and purpose, it remains liberal in ideal and oratory...

...What separates all these men clearly from most American conservatives is an outspoken distaste for the excesses, vulgarities and dislocations of the industrial way of life...

...They love America with that special intensity with which one loves the wayward parent and are full of well-meaning advice about methods for our achieving social and cultural maturity...

...An astounding number of them are eager to repeal or delimit the Sixteenth (income-tax) Amendment and return, no matter what the cost, to the Gold Standard...

...2. The largest of these categories contains the middling conservatives...

...a consequent emphasis on our European and English heritage...

...Finally, there are the self-styled conservative intellectuals, almost all professors, who draw more openly on thinkers like Burke than on the American tradition...

...The American conservative has not merely distrusted the poet, professor, philosopher and political theorist...

...They declare their allegiance to the whole American creed and rarely permit themselves to think consciously along authoritarian lines...

...Until the Conservative in the tower can be persuaded to think for his brother in the market place, and until the latter can be persuaded to accept his advice or at least respect his judgment, there will be no improvement in the confused state of conservative thought and unsure pace of conservative action...

...the limited reach of reason and the consequent importance of traditions and institutions...

...John T. Flynn is their Milton, oilman H. L. Hunt of Texas their Maecenas, Dean Acheson and Governor Thomas E. Dewey their hated Lucifers, Senator McCarthy their slightly tarnished Galahad...

...the superiority of the conservative mind...

...They are less inclined to weep tears over the last two decades, more inclined to recognize professors and union leaders as useful fellow-citizens...

...The men I am thinking of in particular are Peter Viereck of Mt...

...the campuses run over with poets and professors who yield to no one, not even the editors of Life and the Saturday Evening Post, in their...

...Politicians, columnists, businessmen and editors shout the slogans of the great revival...

...He and the intellectual are trapped in a vicious circle: The more savagely one of them baits, the more savagely he is baited...

...Whether they should be classed as fascists is as much a problem in semantics as in political science, especially since most of them are as quick with the slogans of liberalism as any orator at a national convention...

...To ultra-conservatives they appear as "just another bunch of New Dealers," to hard-bitten liberals as "Wall Streeters with brains...

...the pleasures of the conservative mood...

...They are represented in the Senate by John Bricker of Ohio and George Malone of Nevada, in the daily press by the Chicago Tribune and the Hearst papers, among periodicals by the Freeman and the American Mercury, and on the radio by George Sokolsky and Fulton Lewis Jr...

...In any case, despite misgivings and confusions, despite all that has happened in this century, the average American conservative continues to assume human perfectibility, cherish progress, proclaim liberty, put his faith in democracy, preach equality, and reduce all problems to terms of the individual and his rights...

...These are the pure traditionalists, the sentimental reactionaries, the men who are sick with what one critic has called "political necrophilia...

...Southern agrarians and Catholic Conservatives are likely to be Democrats by inheritance, and they continue to prove by word and vote that in their father's house are many mansions...

...The reader is therefore begged to remember that the line between any two of the categories that follow is not a line but an imperceptible gradation, and that there are any number of variations within each category...

...the excellence of aristocracy, or at least of the aristocratic spirit...

...and a willingness to think and write in the spirit of conscious conservatism...

...he beauties of stability and order...

...In Walter Lipp-mann and August Heckscher of the New York Herald Tribune they are blessed with able publicists...

...It is equally certain that most of those implicated in the coup will believe what they say...

...Conservatives are unhappy about the UN but think there is no choice but to stay in, would like to reduce foreign spending sharply, support the Bricker Amendment but are willing to see it diluted, and think the two McCarran Acts generally worthy protections of our way of life...

...The principles of American conservatism are not thoughts or reflections or hypotheses...

...A third handful of men are taking special delight in another aspect of the present climate: nostalgia...

...There are, to be sure, variations in mood and inspiration among the conservative intellectuals, but the differences that divide, say, the Tory conservatism of Kirk from the Catholic conservatism of Ross Hoffman (of Fordham) or the Aristotelian conservatism of Hallowell from the Burkean conservatism of Viereck are shallow ditches compared with the deep gulf that divides them all from the laissez-faire conservatism of a Hoover or Bricker...

...To linger over these groups would be a fascinating but misleading exercise, for, taken all together, they cannot number much more than 2 or 3 per cent of the American people...

...In the area of foreign policy, most ultra-conservatives are ultra-nationalists, most conservatives are nationalists torn between conflicting desires, most liberal conservatives are nationalists with internationalist leanings...

...One approaches the likes of Gerald L. K. Smith with mingled feelings of revulsion and bewilderment...

...The continuing hostility to Mr...

...Thus: Ultra-conservatives are outspokenly hostile to the UN, would like to put an end to "squandering our treasure abroad," consider the Bricker Amendment "a matter of life and death for the Republic," and think the two McCarran Acts an excellent beginning toward purifying American politics and society...

...While the position of men like Taft, Hoover and Eisenhower on the American political spectrum may certainly be labeled "conservative," they defend this position with the bright words of liberalism...

...After generations of exile from respectability, the word itself has been welcomed home with cheers by men who, a few short years ago, would sooner have been called arsonists than conservatives...

...the primacy of the community...

...In addition, they accuse ultra-conservatives of holding "radical" views about many institutions and arrangements—for example, trade unions and maternity benefits and public-power developments—that are now integral parts of the American way of life...

...I would suggest that there is today, in Congress and among the people, an "anti-Roosevelt coalition," and that it may be labeled for what it is: the American Right...

...I will, however, say this: The key intellectual fact about the American Right is that it is conservative without being Conservative...

...I begin my tentative answer to these hard questions with a review of those men and groups who constitute the active Right in American politics...

...At one extreme, the ultra-conservatives merge effortlessly into the great middle group of conservatives...

...Several of their central ideas are also heard from men as distinguished and dissimilar as Herbert Agar, Harry Gideonse, George Kennan, Robert M. Hutchins, Walter Lippmann, Peter Drucker, Mortimer Adler and Reinhold Niebuhr...

...Liberal conservatives are prepared to defend the TVA, expand the coverage of Social Security, enact civil-rights legislation with at least a few teeth, and sponsor bills that encourage voluntary health-insurance programs or sustain the medical schools...

...Oddly enough, considering their numbers, conviction and...

...Proposals to repeal or amend the Sixteenth Amendment and return to the Gold Standard they regard as irresponsible pipe dreams...

...This group merges into that noisy minority best described as "the lunatic Right...

...wealth, there are few newspapers, magazines, commentators or books that do their cause justice...

...These men are not irresponsible critics of the American way of life, nor can more than one or two of them be classed as sentimental reactionaries...

...It can most accurately be called pseudo-conservative because its exponents, although they believe themselves to be conservatives and usually employ the rhetoric of conservatism, show signs of a serious and restless dissatisfaction with American life, traditions and institutions...

...In the grand showdown of 1952, most of these men voted the way they had voted for years?for the party and at least some of the principles of Franklin D. Roosevelt—and thereby dramatized one of the persistent problems of American life: the flight of sensitive intellectuals away from the active Right...

...The constant themes in their writings are: the universal moral order supported and sanctioned by organized religion...

...Their ideas are a constant goad to the conscience of the Right, a benchmark against which to measure its deviations from conservatism, and a reminder that some conservative Americans are as troubled by the harsh dogmas of individualism as by the false promises of collectivism...

...in Fortune, the New York Times and the New York Herald Tribune, with organs that hold the respect of most of the nation...

...For this reason, I forebear to state the principles of modern American conservatism...

...and Frank Chodorov, whose One Is a Crowd (1952) is a near-anarchistic tract against the income tax and Social Security...

...Lacking a battery of columnists who express their middle-of-the-road opinions, sufficiently angry at the New Deal to take delight in hearing it smitten hip and thigh, hardly knowing their own moderate, minds, they are as likely to applaud John T. Flynn as Walter Lippmann, as willing to he instructed by Sokolsky of the Hearst papers as by John K. Jessup of Life...

...3. The last species of citizen on the contemporary Right finds his natural habitat on the Atlantic seaboard and in the left wing of the Republican party, though he may also be found scattered throughout the country and the Democratic ranks...

...the imperfect nature of man...

...My anatomy of modern American conservatism is still not complete, for there lives among us a minority of intellectuals, few but steadily growing in members and influence, who speak in the fullness of the conservative tradition...

...Their brand of dissent, Richard Hofstadter has remarked, "is not as powerful as the liberal dissent of the New Deal era, but it is powerful enough to set the tone of our political life...

...Catholic philosophers agree with old-guard Republicans that economic individualism took a beating in "the twenty long years"—but are pleased rather than distressed...

...a deep-seated antipathy toward the undiluted Jeffersonian tradition...

...Liberalism and progressivism are built into the tradition these eminent men are bent on conserving, and in this country, too, a man may still call himself what he wishes...

...and though they are likely to react as angrily as ever at any mention of the New Deal, they seem willing to leave the New Deal agencies in operation on reduced budgets...

...With the exception of a few professors and publicists, who are looked upon with suspicion for their pains, the men on the American Right are not given to hard thinking about man, society and government...

...Roosevelt were he alive and running...

...and the gravity of the conservative mission...

...The decisive factor in the shaping of modern American conservatism was Franklin D. Roosevelt...

...B. I. Bell and Richard Weaver of Chicago...

...There is a good deal of wisdom in Robert A. Brady's comment: "It is practically certain that, if a coup d'etat ever comes in America from the Right, it will be advertised as a defense of democratic freedoms and a blow at fascism...

...Hoover is not to be laughed at for his dogged insistence that he is a "true liberal," nor President Eisenhower for proclaiming himself "basically a progressive...

...Although most inhabitants of the contemporary Right are committed to the general philosophy of individualism, only a few are willing to drive this doctrine straight through to its logical conclusion: philosophical anarchy...

...in the great foundations, with powerful instruments for constructive conservatism...

...They long in vain for the days of Webster and Washington, and indulge with emotion in ritualistic remembrance of things past...

...John Hallowell of Duke, and Thomas I. Cook of Johns Hopkins...

...His latest book, Conservatism in America (Knopf), will be reviewed here shortly by Will Herberg...

...It seeks with all its powers to defend and preserve an established way of life, but it does this with the aid of ideas and slogans that are calculated to disturb rather than to stabilize the social order, to accelerate rather than to retard the social process...

...Roosevelt the Satan of their theology, they act like fascists but talk like liberals, and they have done more than their share to create the present moral and emotional climate in America...

...If its present faith is somewhat less laissez-faire than that proclaimed by Andrew Carnegie, it has nevertheless changed surprisingly little in this changing world...

...Three small groups of modern Americans appear to be genuine conservatives: First, there are the Southern agrarians like Stark Young, Allen Tate, Robert Penn Warren and John Crowe Ransom, who seek to maintain "a Southern way of life against what may be called the American or prevailing way," and who do it with the aid of a political and social theory in which aristocracy, social harmony, community, property, religion, contentment, reverence, order and tradition are warmly praised, and egalitarianism, industrial progress, majority rule, rugged individualism and materialism are searchingly questioned or roundly damned...

...Holyoke...

...It is this group of conservatives, a small but ear-splitting fraction of the American people, who have been providing "the dynamic of dissent" in America in the last couple of years...

...The contemporary Right, in my opinion, includes those who now admit to distaste for the dominant political theory and practice of the twenty years between Hoover and Eisenhower—for New Deal and Fair Deal, Roosevelt and Truman, service state and welfare state, reform at home and adventure abroad...

...I would add quickly that, thanks to the traditionalism and professionalism of much of our party politics, several million members of the anti-Roosevelt coalition would still be voting for Mr...

...The Conservatives, with few exceptions, are far from comfortable in "the Roosevelt coalition," but there they will remain, usually as voters rather than active workers, until the leopard of conservatism changes a few of his spots...

...Roosevelt and his works ranges from gnawing, unforgiving hatred to the tolerant suspicion that, while much of what he did was probably necessary, he did all things rather sloppily and some things he had no business doing at all...

...in Chief Justice Earl Warren, Senator Ralph Flanders of Vermont, Senator Clifford Case of New Jersey, John McCloy, Lewis W. Douglas, Paul Hoffman, Charles P. Taft of Ohio and Thomas E. Dewey, with impressive public figures...

...It is hard to say exactly what sets off liberal conservatives from middling conservatives, but certainly their actions and ideas seem more flexible, thoughtful and charitable than those of other men on the Right...

...and it rejects angrily the suggestion of well-meaning intellectuals that it embrace the conservative principles of Burke, Coleridge and Disraeli, or even of John Adams, John C. Calhoun and Elihu Root...

...This article is, of course, based on the material Professor Rossiter has developed in his book...

...Indeed, men like Kirk and Viereck yield to no one in England or Europe in their devotion to the full conservative tradition...

...The father of this hardy band was Albert Jay Nock, whose Our Enemy, the State (1935) and Memoirs of a Superfluous Man (1943) preached a gospel of laissez-faire that was really laissez-faire...

...Senator Taft himself, when pressed for a statement of his philosophy, is said to have replied: "There are some questions that I haven't thought very much about...

...Still others confess that they took the anti-intellectualism of the Eisenhower campaign at face value...

...they are assumptions, prejudices, myths, vague longings and slogans—above all slogans...

...and in Charles Evans Hughes and Henry L. Stimson, with two demigods of upright conservatism...

...However pure their motives and sound their purposes, they are dabbling dangerously in a form of radicalism in their mania for amending the Constitution, their reckless assaults on the Presidency, their wistful plans for a new party, their disregard for the American traditions of fair play and freedom of dissent, their enthusiastic support of the new demagoguery, and their cult of extreme individualism...