Conservatism: The Rise Of Conservative Ideology

The rise of conservative ideology during the mid-20th century has been the biggest political development in modern American history. The Republican party was dead and buried in the aftermath of the Great Depression and the rise of liberal governance under Roosevelt and Johnson – for nearly fifty years the Democrats controlled the House and it appeared that their stranglehold over the government would never end. However, over several decades, the Republicans and the conservative movement slowly gathered strength until finally breaking the Democratic majority and taking the mantle as the permanent party in power. Conservatism, by its very nature, must stand in opposition to differing forms of governance. As William F. Buckley said in his introduction to the National Review, conservatism “stands athwart history, yelling Stop, at a time when no one is inclined to do so, or to have much patience with those who so urge it.” (Buckley 1) But, as Samuel Huntington points out in Conservatism as an Ideology, the conservatives of his era appeared uncertain as to what they were trying to conserve – he argues that often these conservatives wish to return to an antiquated past rather than defending the Constitution.

(471) This begs the question: what are we asking to stop?

As Buckley states, “Instead of covetously consolidating its premises, the United States seems tormented by its tradition of fixed postulates having to do with the meaning of existence, with the relationship of the state to the individual, of the individual to his neighbor, so clearly enunciated in the enabling documents of our Republic.” (1) Both Buckley and Huntington would posit conservatism as a reactionary ideology, ostensibly for the same reason – to protect and uphold the Constitution. However, the conception of conservatism in the mid-20th century would not stop at

Stop. The rise of conservatism would have as much to do with the rounding out of its ideological tenets as much as its upholding of the social order – this is what has allowed conservatism to prosper and become the dominant ideology of the late 20th century and beyond. Buckley and Huntington may have given conservatism its skeleton, but others such as Rand, Reagan, and the Young Americans for Freedom gave it its flesh.
The beginnings of modern conservatism are found in the need for individualism. Zora Neale Hurston, a daughter of slaves, would be one of the first prominent African Americans to subscribe to this individualist philosophy. Standing in contrast to her forebearer Frederic Douglass and her contemporary Martin Luther King, Hurston took her strife as an African American in stride. Regarding her lot in life, Hurston would say in How It Feels to Be Colored Me, “But I am not tragically colored. There is no great sorrow dammed up in my soul, nor lurking behind my eyes. I do not mind at all. I do not belong to the sobbing school of Negrohood who hold that nature somehow has given them a low-down dirty deal and whose feelings are all hurt about it. Even in the helter-skelter skirmish that is my life, I have seen that the world is to the strong regardless of a little pigmentation more or less. No, I do not weep at the world—I am too busy sharpening my oyster knife.” (497) This admirable resiliency would speak to an inner strength that Hurston thought that her fellow African Americans lacked – a common strain of thought amongst conservative African Americans even today – but more importantly an example of the individualist philosophy that Hurston and future conservatives would espouse.
Before Buckley and Huntington, conservatism needed an intellectual backbone upon which its political philosophy could be built. If conservatism was a reactionary ideology at first, one could argue then that modern conservatism did not start in America; while Huntington points to four previous bouts of conservatism occurring throughout history, one only needs to look to the Russian Revolution to see the origins of modern, American conservative thought. The abdication of Tsar Nicholas II and he and his family’s subsequent deaths had ended the Romanov aristocracy that had ruled over Russia for the last few centuries. Lenin and the Bolsheviks had succeeded in overthrowing not just the Tsar, but the Kerensky government as well on their way to establishing a new, Marxist republic. Alissa Zinovievna Rosenbaum, a Jewish student from Petrograd, had seen her and her family lose all their material wealth to the socialist state, and had nearly starved. She moved to the United States without her family and adopted the name Ayn Rand and began her writing career. Her objectivist philosophy, derived as a response to how the Bolsheviks had treated her and her family, advocated for near-absolute individual freedom and a loathing for government in any form. Her philosophy is best described by the character John Galt in her most influential work, Atlas Shrugged: “I swear – by my life and my love of it – that I will never live for the sake of another man, nor ask another man to live for mine.” (Rand 669-70) To this end, Rand says in The Virtue of Selfishness, “An irrational society is a society of moral cowards—of men paralyzed by the loss of moral standards, principles and goals. But since men have to act, so long as they live, such a society is ready to be taken over by anyone willing to set its direction. The initiative can come from only two types of men: either from the man who is willing to assume the responsibility of asserting rational values—or from the thug who is not troubled by questions of responsibility.” (577-8) Along with Hurston, Rand emphasized an individualism free of society’s influences – that ultimately one’s self is the greatest judge – and the one must be self-reliant. Rand would make become an undeniable influence on later conservatives – her objectivist views would serve as templates for their own governing – and the idea of individual responsibility remains one of the core conservative ideals.