5. Conservatism in the United States.
The position
occupied by conservatives among the political view-
points in any given country depends upon
the political
and social conditions obtaining in it. The attitudes and
goals called “conservative” in the United States
appeared to European eyes to be mostly rather
“Whiggish.” Until the 1960's it seemed even less easy
in the United States to find a powerful national “right
wing” of antirevolutionaries, restorationist legitimists,
supporters of romantic and organic social doctrines,
and antidemocrats than
to find a precise counterpart
of European liberalism. A radical left wing,
on the
other hand, has been almost nonexistent. Such facts
made the
dominant American credo look rather mod-
erate;
it may among other things be traced back to
the working of its democratic
machinery and to its
antifeudal past, though its revolutionary break
with
feudal Europe was in a way justified by a restoration
of colonial
rights.
Despite that and despite the influence of Locke on
American political
thinking, political conservatism was
manifested at the inception of the
Union by the fathers
of the Constitution. Their concern was for order
and
security to be attained by limiting the radical demo-
cratic tendencies found in the separate states, and
thereby to strengthen the authority of the new federa-
tion. Suspected during the conflicts with the
South
from Calhoun to Little Rock, the defense of states
rights—formerly the official position of radicals and
liberals
alike (Bill of Rights, Tenth Amendment), and
adapted by Jefferson to the
necessities of an expanding
“empire”—was considered in the
1960's as con-
servative a policy as the
insistence on laissez-faire
economics. Once stock-in-trade of American
capital-
istic democracy it became the
main argument of con-
servatives in the
twenties (Herbert Hoover) against the
modern welfare state.
A similar ambiguous attitude was displayed by the
West. At first often
expressing its outrage at economic
and political supremacy of the East in
terms of a
radical and even egalitarian democracy, the rural West
at
the same time, and increasingly since the 1870's,
displayed a rather
conservative mentality. Strongly
influenced by religious fundamentalism,
its criticism of
the megapolitan industrial East and its harking back
to an authentic Americanism supplied the conservative
cause with emotional
arguments.
In America as well as in Europe liberal and con-
servative arguments often merged. What makes it so
difficult for
Europeans to draw a sharp line between
liberals and conservatives in the
United States is a
missing guideline along strictly liberal or
conservative
terms; there is neither a Burke nor a Locke in the
United
States, which furthermore looked askance at
any influence of the Catholic
Church. The controversy
between Hamilton and Madison seems to be
reversed
though both sides claim Jefferson to be in their camp.
Even
the often described tendency of Americans to
solve their hardly articulated
ideological conflicts
“practically” tends to be
conservative in itself and has
led to almost schizophrenic attitudes toward
social
problems.
As a counterpoise to the social dynamism of a
democratic society,
conservatism in the United States
has from time to time raised its head
(for examples,
Henry and Brooks Adams), just as it has recurred as
the
politics promoting the self-interest of social groups.
While the most
convincing American conservative of
the nineteenth century was perhaps the
Southerner
John C. Calhoun, the development of new forms of
conservatism independent of a certain area can be
traced back to the end of
the century. The social
mobility of the American society at this time
began
to run out into horizontal movements whereas such
ideals as the
American “self-made” man were still
worshipped.
Asking for stability and a social equilib-
rium Americans formed a society with deep distrust
of nonconformist
behavior and change.
Further social and political changes in the last dec-
ades of the nineteenth century and particularly in the
1910's
and 1920's, business reactions to certain New
Deal measures, and above all
antisocialism, the fear
of communism, the “Cold War,”
and the hot ones in
Korea and Vietnam together with latent prejudices
and
antimodernistic tendencies (Irving Babbitt) have
induced a
psychological and political situation which
was being spectacularly exploited by some conservative
and
right-wing American politicians about 1970.
