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Conservatism and Its Discontents
| Article
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11659 |
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Section : |
MODERN THOUGHT
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| Issue
Date : |
9 / 1986 |
3,205 Words |
| Author
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Edward Shapiro
Edward Shapiro is professor of history emeritus at Seton Hall
University. He is completing a book on the Crown Heights
(Brooklyn, New York) riot of 1991. |
A specter is haunting America - the specter of conservatism. All the powers of the old America have entered into a holy alliance to exorcise this specter: liberals and progressives, Old Leftists and New Leftists, radicals and populists. This, of course, was not supposed to happen. According to the dominant school of American historiography, the school embodied the Louis Hartz, Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., and Allen Guttmann, liberalism was the only legitimate American intellectual tradition, since America lacked the feudal, class-ridden society necessary for conservatism to take root. For American liberals, the paradox of American conservatism was that the only thing it had to conserve was the liberal tradition. The belief that conservative ideas had a place in American life was viewed as bizarre, while “a conservative American intellectual” was oxymoronic. From this perspective, conservatism was an un-American activity.
Ralph Waldo Emerson's 1841 essay "The Conservative" was seemingly the last word on the nature of American conservatism. For Emerson, there was "always a certain meanness in the argument of Conservatism." It "makes no poetry, breathes no prayer, has no invention, it is all memory. It degrades whatever it touches." The extent to which Americanism and liberalism had been fused was illustrated by the refusal even of Robert A. Taft to identify himself as a conservative, preferring to call himself a liberal. Admittedly there were conservatives, but these were simply defenders of big business and white supremacy who did not need to be taken seriously intellectually.
Undoubtedly the most famous recent explication of the role of conservative ideas in American culture was Lionel Trilling's introduction to his 1950 collection of essays appropriately entitled the The Liberal Imagination. Trilling, who two decades later would be recognized as a formative figure in the emergence of neoconservatism, declared:
In the United States at this time liberalism is not only the dominant but even the sole intellectual tradition. For it is the plain fact that nowadays there are no conservative or reactionary ideas in general circulation. This does not mean….there is no impulse to conservatism or to reaction. Such impulses are certainly very strong, perhaps even stronger than most of us know. But the conservative impulse and the reactionary impulse do not, with some isolated and some ecclesiastical exceptions, express themselves in ideas but only the action or in irritable mental gestures which seek to resemble ideas.
These words were
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