UP FROM LIBERALISM
SCHULZ, MAX
UP FROM LIBERALISM In These Books, You Know They're Right By Max Schulz By the 1950s, the classical form of liberalism that we call conservatism—enshrined in the Constitution and prevalent...
...Baseball legend Jackie Robinson said, "I believe I now know how it felt to be a Jew in Hitler's Germany...
...Strangely, Edwards does not elevate Buckley to the level of his four key figures, for his treatment of Buckley is among the strongest parts of The Conservative Revolution, explaining the influence of National Review and the importance of Buckley's expulsion of the John Birch Society from the new movement...
...The Conservative Revolution remains an important and worthwhile telling of a story that is among the most compelling imaginable: an ideology, apparently nearing extinction, resurrected within a few decades to transform America and save the world...
...A movement that hardly Max Schulz works at the Competitive Enterprise Institute in Washington, D.C...
...And afraid the organization and manpower that brought about victory have also been forgotten, Gregory L. Schneider has added Cadres for Conservatism: Young Americans for Freedom and the Rise of the Contemporary Right...
...And it has managed as well to construct something that looks like a coherent conservative philosophy for modern times...
...Of course, it took more than ideology to accomplish this...
...If this technique leaves the impression that conservatism owes some of its success to its cults of personality, that may not be entirely wrong...
...UP FROM LIBERALISM In These Books, You Know They're Right By Max Schulz By the 1950s, the classical form of liberalism that we call conservatism—enshrined in the Constitution and prevalent through the 1920s presidency of Calvin Coolidge—was clearly moribund...
...Russell Kirk's The Conservative Mind in 1953, Whittaker Chambers's Witness in 1952, E:A...
...Afraid that the victors are being shortchanged in the history books, Lee Edwards, former aide and biographer of Barry Goldwater, has written The Cons^^a-tiive R^'volution: The Movement that Remade America, a new chronicle of the conservative movement over the last half century...
...Arthur Schlesinger averred that only Henry Cabot Lodge and Jacob Javits—two eastern liberal Republicans—represented "intelligent conservatism...
...Reagan, unlike his predecessors, understood that the United States was at war with the Soviet Union...
...Schneider's Cadres for Conservatism ultimately shows how those extraordinary individuals profiled by Edwards's Conservative Revolution never could have succeeded had it not been for a group of rather ordinary but determined people who were willing to buck the established orthodoxy and translate their ideas into action...
...Yet both were turned into foils which the incumbent presidents, Truman and Clinton, could run against to maintain the presidency...
...After World War II, conservatism, Edwards notes, "was so irrelevant that no major politician would dare call himself a conservative...
...Edwards is surely wrong when he claims that Nixon's "floating currency rates" pleased conservatives...
...Certainly Nixon was no deep conservative as president, expanding the leviathan state and instituting wage and price controls...
...But a powerful new intellectual groundwork was being laid at the time...
...The parallels to the 1994 Republican sweep are striking...
...An analysis of the strengths and liabilities he brought to the conservative movement would have improved Edwards's account...
...But 1946 was a year loaded with portents: John F. Kennedy, Richard Nixon, and Joe McCarthy all joined Congress, and the GOP obtained a congressional majority—a hiccup during a time of general dominance by the Democrats...
...Many analysts of the time could hardly fathom the new conservatism and its proponents...
...Spending increases were the tradeoffs Reagan made to get his military buildup from a skeptical and recalcitrant Congress...
...Both produced activist Republican majorities that got to work quickly and accomplished much...
...But there was a different set of students during the 1960s that has never gotten its due—and it's no exaggeration to say these students engineered the conservative takeover of the Republican party, elected the Republican answer to Roosevelt, and won the Cold War...
...But a funny thing happened on the way to the socialist revolution...
...Both were off-year elections...
...And this is where Gregory L. Schneider's Cadres for Conservatism: Young Americans for Freedom and the Rise of the Contemporary Right sheds light...
...No conservative defended jumping off the gold standard, which only exacerbated the stagflation of the 1970s...
...existed in 1950 has managed to elect presidents and Congresses, prime ministers and parliaments...
...Even Eisenhower's presidency, and the Republicans' brief control of Congress, seemed no great break in the Left's triumphal march...
...And as the members of the Young Americans for Freedom grew older and graduated to more prominent positions, their organization itself grew irrelevant...
...Hayek's The Road to Serfdom in 1944, and William F. Buckley's God and Man at Yale in 1951 provided important ammunition for waging the political battles of the next fifty years...
...But he was a hero in 1952 after bringing down Alger Hiss and had considerable presence among conservatives and anti-Communists...
...And they were the ones who took direction from Buckley's National Review and M. Stanton Evans's Indianapolis News (at age twenty-six, Evans became the youngest editor of a major newspaper in America...
...Conservative notions about capitalism, free markets, and limited government had been indicted by Hoover's Great Depression and sentenced to death by Roosevelt's New Deal...
...They were the ones who read the books of Kirk, Burnham, and Hayek until their dog-eared copies fell to pieces...
...Drew Pearson warned, "The smell of fascism is in the air...
...The improbable Goldwater nomination of 1964 represented the organization's high-water mark, though it slogged on until the mid-1980s, beset by comical bouts of factionalism and infighting and poverty...
...Whenever the 1960s are invoked these days, the picture is always of the radical students at Berkeley, Columbia, Michigan, and Kent State, storming deans' offices, dodging the draft, and being fired upon by the National Guard...
...This was the single most important objective of the Reagan presidency and, it should be noted, of the conservative movement as well...
...Similarly, Edwards is intent on seeing President Reagan's doubling of the national debt in the 1980s as a "conservative failure...
...Presenting a blow-by-blow account of the major political events since 1946, Edwards pins his narrative to four towering figures: Robert Taft, Barry Goldwa-ter, Ronald Reagan, and Newt Gingrich...
...California Governor Edmund G. "Pat" Brown added, "All we needed to hear was 'Heil, Hitler.'" It would take sixteen years after Gold-water's defeat before Reagan would carry their ideas to victory...
...And the economic boom of the 1980s more than offset the increased federal spending...
...The conclusion these books force upon us is that the rebirth of conservatism required not just thinkers, or political leaders, or on-the-ground activists, but a combination of the three—and none of them could have succeeded without the others...
...Schneider, unlike Edwards, doesn't hail from the ranks of the conservative movement, but he nonetheless comes to the conclusion that the students involved in Young Americans for Freedom were concerned, intelligent people "motivated to take action by what they believed were the excesses of American liberalism...
...Not bad for a bunch of kids who rarely had enough money to pay the rent...
...The American public ceased to believe wholeheartedly in the ability of big government to care for its citizens from cradle to grave...
...The New York Herald Tribune editorialized against these "purveyors of hate and the apostles of bigotry...
...Both offered stinging rebukes to the Democrats in the White House...
...And the movement began to find as well a definite philosophical road to follow...
...The Conservative Revolution leaves part of the story untold by mostly ignoring Richard Nixon before he became president in 1968...
...The plans of Roosevelt and Truman, Clement Atlee and Harold Wilson, sputtered and ran aground...
...Yet Schneider also shows that they weren't always unpopular...
...The Communist regimes in Eastern Europe disappeared...
...Supporters ranged from Eva and Zsa Zsa Gabor to baseball Hall-of-Famer Lou Brock...
...Taft's untimely death in 1953 left the nascent movement rudderless, according to Edwards, and unable to rein in the excesses of Joe McCarthy...
...The Supreme Court was increasingly viewing the Constitution as an obstacle to get around, a mild socialism seemed ascendant in America and Great Britain, and various Marxisms appeared on the rise throughout the rest of the world...
...Nonetheless, the Republican successes of 1946 and the growing fear of Soviet militarism helped a conservative movement begin to gel...
...Referring to a demonstration outside San Francisco's Cow Palace, Walter Cronkite told the nation, "They're the Young Americans for Freedom, but I don't know what kind of freedom...
...Its first leader was the mild-mannered Senate Republican leader, Robert Taft of Ohio...
...And the world didn't know what to make of them...
...He also dismissed a study by the conservative intellectual James Burnham as "an absurd book by an absurd man...
...The Young Americans for Freedom staffed the movement to draft Barry Goldwater into the 1964 presidential race, serving warning to the Eastern Establishment of Rockefeller and Lodge...
Vol. 4 • June 1999 • No. 37
