Trivializing American conservatism.

A Time for Choosing: The Rise of Modern American Conservatism, by Jonathan M. Schoenwald, Oxford, Eng.: Oxford University Press, 2001. 338 pp.

UNTIL QUITE RECENTLY conservatism was the orphan of American historiography. Thus for every work published on William F. Buckley's Young Americans for Freedom, a dozen have appeared on Students for a Democratic Society, although YAF's membership was always far higher than that of SDS, even during the latter's heyday of the late 1960s. Lee Edwards, a biographer of both Barry Goldwater and Ronald Reagan, recently asked, "Why are so many intellectuals, ever ready to write six-hundred-page tomes about the most minute subjects, unwilling to explore a veritable mountain looming before their eyes?" The answer seemed obvious to him. "It is as if they regard the last fifty years of conservative ascendancy as the Dark Ages of American politics and not worthy of comment." As late as 1994, Alan Brinkley, a distinguished American historian at Columbia University, published an article in the prestigious American Historical Review bemoaning this historiographical lacuna and attributing it to the leftist sympathies of the academy.

Academic historians have taken Brinkley's criticism to heart. The past several years have seen an outpouring of books by them on American conservatism, and many have been published by prestigious presses, including Princeton University Press, the Free Press, and Oxford University Press. This is a welcome sign, since, as Edwards observed, the overwhelming majority of historians have not been sympathetic to conservatives and have been contemptuous of the values of religious and cultural conservatives. Believing that American conservatism is worthy of historical research is not, however, the same as taking it seriously or placing it within the mainstream of American history. Most historians of conservatism would probably agree with Ralph Waldo Emerson that "there is always a certain meanness in the argument of conservatism." For them, conservatism is a deviant and primitive phenomenon, and they study it in a manner similar to that of an anthropologist seeking to decipher the uncivilized ways of a South Pacific tribe.

If the 1930s was the watershed decade for twentieth century liberalism, the 1960s was the watershed decade for twentieth-century conservatism, and it is not surprising that many of the recent books on conservatism have focused on these years. Until the sixties, the dominant view of conservatism was indicated by the comments in 1950 of Lionel Trilling, the eminent literary critic, that liberalism was America's "sole intellectual tradition" and that conservatives expressed themselves not through ideas but only in "actions or in irritable mental gestures." By the 1960s, however, conservatism had achieved an unprecedented intellectual respectability, as Milton Friedman, Will Herberg, Gertrude Himmelfarb, Russell Kirk, Robert A. Nisbet, Eric Voegelin, and other conservative intellectuals trenchantly challenged the conventional liberal wisdom. This efflorescence in conservative thinking was reflected in the publishing world as well with the founding of The Public Interest and other conservative magazines, the rightward movement of Commentary magazine, and the founding of conservative publishing houses.

In the realm of politics, too, conservatism came of age during the 1960s. In the 1964 presidential campaign, Barry Goldwater, author of the best-seller The Conscience of a Conservative, unapologetically espoused a right-wing agenda. Although Goldwater and the Republicans suffered a devastating defeat in 1964, the Republican Party and national politics would never be the same. The Goldwater campaign accelerated the political metamorphosis of the South, once the most reliably Democratic region in the nation, into a plentiful source of electoral votes for Republican national and local candidates. Many of the movers and shakers of modern Republican politics became politically active initially through their involvement in what most outside observers perceived to be Goldwater's quixotic campaign. The most important of the Arizona Senator's supporters was Ronald Reagan, who himself was elected governor of California in 1966 and then re-elected in 1970. Reagan would prove to be the most important American political figure of the past three decades. The Goldwaterites were convinced that their 1964 defeat was not due to the public's rejection of conservatives truths but to the way these truths had been packaged. "The Republican Party does not need a new program," one said in 1965, "as much as it needs more salesmen." Reagan became that salesman.

The victories of conservative politicians in the years after 1964 were due in part to events, ideas, movements, and personalities which first surfaced during the 1960s. Six phenomena were largely responsible for the transformation of conservatism into a mass movement. The first was the Vietnam War, a conflict planned and carried out by the best and brightest that liberalism had to offer. The second was the radical enlargement of the welfare state fostered by the Great Frontier and the Great Society and embodied in the War on Poverty. The third was the threat posed to local and personal prerogatives by an increasingly radicalized civil rights movement allied with a vastly more intrusive government. The fourth was the appearance of hosts of radical ideologies opposed to traditional morality, particularly in the areas of family life and sexual identity, and espousing what came to be known as the "counter-culture." The fifth was the collapse of civility and the conventional standards of behavior that previously had governed politics and urban life. And the last was the emergence of racial, cultural, and ethnic movements hostile to any inclusive and traditional definition of American nationality.

One would assume that any history of "the rise of modern American conservatism" centering on the 1960s would examine how Americans in general and American conservatives in particular responded to these and other issues. This is not, however, the emphasis of Jonathan M. Schoenwald's A Time For Choosing, which single-mindedly focuses on national politics. For Schoenwald, the most significant aspect of the history of American conservatism in the sixties was how "responsible" conservatives turned back the challenge of right-wing "extremists," took control of the Republican Party, and created the political dynamics which would win the presidency for Nixon and Reagan. This is analogous to writing a history of liberalism during the 1930s by focusing on the internecine struggle within the Left without dwelling on the Tennessee Valley Authority, Social Security, and the Wagner Act.

The photograph on the front cover of the book indicates the grand theme of A Time for Choosing. The time is 1959 during Nikita Khrushchev's visit to the United States. The photo shows an elderly woman pointing to an upside down flag attached to the side of her house. In her hand and on her house are two bumper stickers stating "Khrushchev Not Welcome Here." This woman personifies the right-wing zealots, mockingly described by Stanley Mosk, the then California attorney-general, as "little old ladies in tennis shoes," who are central to Schoenwald's narrative. But how representative was this troubled woman of the tens of millions of Americans who in the 1960s defined themselves as conservatives? Survey data revealed that such persons comprised a fringe element within American conservatism. The Republicans, after all, nominated Goldwater in 1964, not Robert Welch, the head of the John Birch Society, and when former Major General Edwin A. Walker ran in the 1962 Texas gubernatorial primary he finished last among the six candidates. Even the John Birch Society was not as scary as contemporaries believed. "Few Birchers took Welch's theology seriously," Sam Tanenhaus recently wrote. "For most members the society was a right-wing Rotary Club." What from the perspective of the twenty-first century appears to be a minor rumble within the conservative camp is for Schoenwald the big enchilada.

This trivializing of conservatism is illustrated by Schoenwald's ignoring of conservative ideas and intellectuals. The rise of American conservatism cannot be understood apart from the rise of conservative thought. Yet A Time for Choosing does not mention Friedman, Himmelfarb, Voegelin, or Herberg, or Commentary, Public Interest, and Modern Age, or Frank Chodorov and his Intercollegiate Society of Individualists. This is akin to writing about The Grapes of Wrath without mentioning the Joads. By contrast, two of the eight chapters in A Time for Choosing concern the John Birch Society and the antics of General Walker, while a third discusses William F. Buckley's whimsical 1965 mayoralty campaign in New York City. Schoenwald's emphasis on the ephemeral and odd is reminiscent of H.L. Mencken's response when asked why he continued living in the United States when he was so critical of the nation's culture. "Why do people go to zoos," he answered.

Another problem with A Time for Choosing is that except for its brief concluding chapter, it ignores the economic and social context within which the rise of modern American conservatism took place. There is no mention of, for example, the decline of the labor movement and the embourgeoisement of much of the former working class, the flow of population from the central cities and the Rust Belt to the suburbs and the Sun Belt, the increasing percentage of Americans owning their own homes, and the spread of mass higher education. For Schoenwald, conservatism existed within a hermetically sealed world dominated by internecine political conflict. But no examination of the history of the American Conservative Union, Young Americans for Freedom, and Americans for Constitutional Action can explain why some Americans found the conservative message so appealing, or why others found it so appalling. Certainly American conservatism could not have been successful without neutralizing and isolating the extremists within their ranks. But once this had occurred, there was no guarantee that the conservative message would resonate among some Americans. But it did, and readers of A Time of Choosing are left in the dark as to why this occurred.

Pace Schoenwald, more important things occupied conservatives during the sixties than the struggle between "mainstream or electoral conservatives" and "extremist conservatives" and the creation of the political coalition responsible for the election of Nixon in 1968 and Reagan in 1980. The dissemination of political ideology, the quest for political power, and the recasting of the Republican Party were never the be-all and end-all of American conservatives. Schoenwald believes that the elections of 1968 and 1972 indicated that "conservatism had seemingly triumphed," as if the rise and fall of conservatism was dependent on the fortunes of the ballot box and the fate of the Republican Party. Modern American conservatism certainly has involved politics, but it has involved other things as well, including religion, philosophy, popular culture, education, and, most important, moral values. For conservatives, politics has always been subsidiary to what Burke referred to as the unbought grace of life, and conservatives have continually warned against seeing in politics the route to salvation.

The most troubling thing about A Time for Choosing is its expansive view of conservatism. For Schoenwald, every person or organization claiming to be conservative is given the benefit of the doubt. Antiabortionists, supporters of George Wallace, and the New Right are all included under the conservative rubric. In the process, the word "conservative" slides into incoherence. Thus Schoenwald writes that by the early 1970s, "a new populist conservatism was ascendant." "Populist conservatism" is, of course, an oxymoron. Conservatism abhors zealots of all sorts, whether they be crusaders for a new age of enlightenment or anti-abortion enthusiasts threatening violence and the nullification of court decisions. The term "populist conservatism," however, makes sense if one sees conservatism exclusively in political terms. But to understand the rise of modern American conservatism during the 1960s one must comprehend the ideas that fueled the conservative intellectual renaissance, not merely the political machinations of those who sought to dominate right-wing politics.

EDWARD S. SHAPIRO is Professor Emeritus of History at Seton Hall University.