A Modest Proposal

HOW TIMES HAVE CHANGED. In a 1956 review of “The Republicans: A History of Their Party” by Malcolm Moos (Random House. 564 pp. $5.95) published in Commentary Magazine, the recently deceased sociologist Martin Seymour Lipset observed that Moos was “a representative of that new tendency in American life: the conservative intellectual.” Since that bygone era, (and along with the rise in the price of books) has come the rise of a “vast right-wing conspiracy” of conservative intellectuals. No longer does anyone doubt the existence of the conservative intellectual. Instead the question has become: Where is the liberal American Enterprise Institute? The Democratic Party, which in 1956 was in the beginning of its decades-long unchallenged control of Congress, one half century later discovered that its newly gained majority is as fragile as one man’s (Sen. Tim Johnson’s) brain condition. What has happened?
Some see the beginning of the rise of the modern conservative movement in another event that took place just over a half century ago: the founding of National Review, in 1955. Founding Editor William F. Buckley’s declaration of the magazine’s purpose, “standing athwart history, yelling ‘Stop!’” in the magazine’s first issue, became a rallying cry for conservatives perpetually pessimistic about the onslaught of statism and socialism and their more sinister sister, totalitarianism. But whatever impact Buckley’s magazine may have had on the organization of formerly disparate conservatives, the cultural revolution just over the horizon gave the movement a cause to fight for or, more accurately, to fight against. The 1960’s is not a decade usually associated with conservatism, but it is the decade that probably had the most influence on the formation of modern conservatism’s strongest, and now infamous force: “neo-conservatism”.
Another thing that has changed since fifty years ago, again, to quote 1956 Lipset:
“Conservative political parties have always been unattractive subjects for modern scholars and intellectuals. There are many more books dealing with leftist parties and labor movements than with parties of the center or the right or with business organizations.” Now, not only has there been an increase of conservatives writing about their movement, but a new genre of liberals asking, as in the title of one recent book, “What’s the matter with Kansas?” meaning: why would any state be so silly as to vote Republican? As a postscript, Lipset himself, once a Trotskyite, increasingly found himself out of step with the New Left, and although according to his colleague Nathan Glazer, he continued to identify as a liberal, he invariably associated more with the neoconservative publications. He also probably never voted Republican.