by Rick Perlstein:
IN PERLSTEIN'S telling, two groups, roughly defined by generation, brought conservatism to life in the late 1950s. The first was a group of mostly self-made men born in the last years of the nineteenth century. Several, such as Clarence Manion, an Indiana native and law professor at the University of Notre Dame, started out in liberal circles in the Progressive-New Deal era but experienced a betrayal that transformed them politically and psychologically. Others in this group were small- to mid-sized businessmen and manufacturers who, in the 1940s and 1950s, were drawn to conservatism by their negative experience with the New Deal state. For them, the most visible manifestations of this state were the government-empowered unions that appeared at their workplaces and dared to tell them how to manage their enterprises. Toilet manufacturer Herbert V. Kohler of Sheboygan, Wisconsin, was an example of this kind; another was Robert Welch, a Massachusetts candy manufacturer who founded the John Birch Society in 1958; a third was Walter Knott, an Orange County restauranteur who made a fortune cultivating and selling “boysenberries,” and turning Knott’s Berry Farm into the region’s second largest amusement park. It seems plausible to suggest, though Perlstein himself does not, that these businessmen lacked the influence on state policy that went to the General Motors-sized firms, so that they felt the heel of the state far more than its embrace. These men used their money to fund political campaigns, to purchase radio and television time, and to subsidize the costs of publishing conservative books and journals.Go read the whole article. It is time well spent.
Ideologically, these conservatives can be described best as unilateralists: no one was going to tell them how to run their businesses (in relationship to workers), how to dispose of their wealth (in relationship to government taxes), whom to serve in their hotels and restaurants (in relationship to race), just as no one was going to tell America how to behave in the world, certainly not the Soviet Union, or some Southeast Asian band of guerrillas, or the United Nations. They saw themselves as individualists cut from the best American grain. Their individualism was so strong that it allowed them to ignore the profound interdependencies that governed their own lives. The westerners in their ranks, for example, seemed oblivious to the fact that their West would never have existed but for a large federal government pouring billions into western development. Many of them drew a straight line from unions to big government to collectivism to communism and the Soviet Union. They really believed that Walter Reuther and Franklin Delano Roosevelt were communists intent on destroying the United States and the freedom for which it stood.
Young, college-educated men (and an occasional woman) born in the 1920s and 1930s who had found their way to conservatism in the 1940s and 1950s made up the second pioneering group of conservatives. Some gathered around William F. Buckley and William Rusher at the National Review, founded in 1955, while others swarmed into Young Americans for Freedom (YAF), already twenty-four thousand strong in 1961 when Students for a Democratic Society was still only a glimmer in Tom Hayden’s eye. They had had no firsthand encounters with unions or union leaders similar to those of the older group of conservative pioneers, but they had grown up surrounded by a New Deal Order of big government, bureaucracies, and extensive regulation of private activities that they did not like. Perlstein does not tell us enough about the ideas that motivated these young people—what they were reading about and talking about in universities in the 1940s and 1950s—but we can surmise that Friedrich A. Hayek’s writings were high on their list as well as those by thinkers who criticized all sorts of collective regimes, ranging from the totalitarian to the social democratic, that allegedly suffocated individuality and strangled the human spirit.
In this sense, these young conservatives were animated by impulses similar to those that would soon energize a New Left, an affinity Perlstein shrewdly recognizes. Youth on both the left and right were rebelling against large institutions that seemed to want to program their lives and over which they had little or no control. Perlstein writes about one young Birchite whose “conversion to conservative politics came in a flash, when he realized that ‘the man in the gray flannel suit was a devil in disguise.’” Many radicals, right and left, seem to have been influenced as well by existential patterns of thought, an influence discernible in their impatience with compromise, containment, and negotiation, and in their desire to live fully, authentically, even impulsively without external restraint. Sometimes this meant breaking away from political party organizations for the sake of standing up for the principle they held dear or of supporting the candidates that truly deserved their support. Other times this entailed taking on risks that most Americans found unacceptable. For the left, this came to mean putting one’s “body on the line” through Freedom Rides, sit-ins at southern restaurants, and voting registration drives in Klan-dominated southern towns. For some among the youthful right, this engendered a rejection of a foreign policy that, in the hands of Dwight D. Eisenhower and John F. Kennedy, appeared to them characterized by vacillation, uncertainty, and compromise. If the Soviets were as evil as Americans had been led to believe, then they had to be attacked and defeated, even if that meant using tactical nuclear missiles and risking a widespread nuclear war that might kill millions.
In his 1960 manifesto, Conscience of a Conservative, Barry Goldwater castigated the “craven fear of death” that had entered American consciousness. Such a stance, he argued, “repudiates everything that is courageous and honorable and dignified in the human being.” Americans, instead, must be willing to embrace death and to declare to the world that “we would rather die than lose our freedom.” It took the Cuban missile crisis of 1962 and the assassination of JFK in 1963 to awaken Americans to the dangers of such death talk. Enough of it survived into the election year of 1964 to be used by the Democrats with devastating effectiveness against Goldwater, which is why Republican strategists banished it from their public discourse shortly thereafter.
I can attest to the strange intwinement of the far left and far right in the 1960s. We know that many of the left radicals became right radicals in the late 1970s and early 1980s. My own personal experience was with many libertarians who would show up for discussions among anarchists. The two groups shared a distrust for government but they diverged on social policy. The social anarchists trusted collective actions. The individualist anarchists (the libertarians) distrusted all social obligations beyond the enforcement of contract law. Both visions are extreme and unworkable. I always found the left anarchists more appealing for their social vision of a bottom-up society. I found the libertarians difficult because of their rejection of any social entanglements and their claim to "property rights". I always puzzled about how you have a "right", especially a "property" right, when you denied all social relations.
Back to the review article...
This part reminds me of the sense of those times. The "existentialism" that intellectuals bandied about, the restless sense of change in the air, and the sharp divergence between right and left:
Many radicals, right and left, seem to have been influenced as well by existential patterns of thought, an influence discernible in their impatience with compromise, containment, and negotiation, and in their desire to live fully, authentically, even impulsively without external restraint. Sometimes this meant breaking away from political party organizations for the sake of standing up for the principle they held dear or of supporting the candidates that truly deserved their support. Other times this entailed taking on risks that most Americans found unacceptable. For the left, this came to mean putting one’s “body on the line” through Freedom Rides, sit-ins at southern restaurants, and voting registration drives in Klan-dominated southern towns. For some among the youthful right, this engendered a rejection of a foreign policy that, in the hands of Dwight D. Eisenhower and John F. Kennedy, appeared to them characterized by vacillation, uncertainty, and compromise. If the Soviets were as evil as Americans had been led to believe, then they had to be attacked and defeated, even if that meant using tactical nuclear missiles and risking a widespread nuclear war that might kill millions.This part is especially telling. It has echoes of the Muslim fanaticism and cult of death of today:
In his 1960 manifesto, Conscience of a Conservative, Barry Goldwater castigated the “craven fear of death” that had entered American consciousness. Such a stance, he argued, “repudiates everything that is courageous and honorable and dignified in the human being.” Americans, instead, must be willing to embrace death and to declare to the world that “we would rather die than lose our freedom.” It took the Cuban missile crisis of 1962 and the assassination of JFK in 1963 to awaken Americans to the dangers of such death talk. Enough of it survived into the election year of 1964 to be used by the Democrats with devastating effectiveness against Goldwater, which is why Republican strategists banished it from their public discourse shortly thereafter.This bit is incisive in its analysis of the roots of the modern Republican party:
The White-Goldwater insurrection in the Republican Party would have amounted to little in the end had it not been for the upheaval in race relations that Brown v. Board of Education had unleashed in 1954. White southerners began leaving the party, their rate of exit accelerating in 1964 as a result of the Democrats’ passage of the landmark Civil Rights Act. In 1960, significant groups within the Republican Party still prided themselves on being the party of Lincoln. By 1964, the party had all but severed itself from Lincoln’s legacy, embracing the Dixiecrat creed of states’ rights and Jim Crow instead.
This did not mean that all conservatives had begun to define themselves in terms of maintaining white supremacy. Many on the right continued to locate the principal evil in the world not in terms of the drive for racial equality but in terms of communism, unions, and collectivist ideologies (including American liberalism). Some who opposed the Civil Rights Act of 1964 declared that they didn’t want to keep blacks down; rather, they just did not want some big government in Washington telling ordinary white people in small southern towns whom they had to employ, whom they had to serve in restaurants, and who was going to sit next to their kids at school. But even if we grant legitimacy to such a stance (which is hard to do), it is still sobering to observe how unmoved most conservatives were by the evil that racial prejudice had unleashed in America and Europe.
As conservatives surveyed the twentieth century, they saw only one world-shattering event, and that was the Bolshevik Revolution. The century’s other world-shattering event, Hitler’s rise to power and the destruction of European Jewry that accompanied it, didn’t seem to register in their consciousness at all. Were I (or anyone else) to write a book about liberalism and the left to parallel Perlstein’s for the years 1958-1964, significant parts of it would have to be devoted to how a reckoning with Nazism and the racial genocide that it had unleashed impelled American progressives to mobilize against religious prejudice and racism in the United States. Yet, almost nowhere in Perlstein’s more than six hundred well-researched pages do we encounter a conservative visibly upset about Nazi atrocities or determined to do something about American racial injustice. These issues simply did not move the right, which may explain why the cast of conservative hundreds that marches across Perlstein’s pages includes, by my count, one black and three-and-a-half Jews (more on the half-Jew in a moment).
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