On “radical” conservatism.
When William F. Buckley Jr. and his allies launched the post-war conservative movement in the 1950s, they were bombarded with attacks from critics who claimed that their goals could never be achieved. The United States is a liberal nation, naysayers shouted, devoted to equality and restless change—conservatism can never gain a foothold here. Besides, the new conservatives were outsiders attacking the post-war status quo; in this sense, they looked more like radicals than traditional conservatives. They aimed to build a popular movement in support of their ideas, and so they were populists of the kind that “real” conservatives would never support. Conservatism could never prosper, the doubters said, because if it did, it would no longer deserve to be called conservatism.
These were some of the dilemmas that conservatives faced in that era as they worked toward a popular conservatism that might displace liberals from power while paring back the reach of government and confronting communists at home and abroad. Buckley and his fellow writers at National Review gave as much as they got in debates with liberals in that period. Nevertheless, the liberal advances in the 1960s, both in the form of Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society programs and the cultural revolutions launched by the youth movement, seemed for many to prove the case against conservatism. Liberals would forever set the public agenda in America. Conservatives could never overcome their internal contradictions, along with their alienation from America’s liberal heritage.
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James Piereson is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute.
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