By Jim Miller
UCSD Professor of Communications Robert Horwitz will be reading from his new book America’s Right: Anti-Establishment Conservatism from Goldwater to the Tea Party on Wednesday, May 29th at 7:00 PM at the Grove bookstore at 3010 Juniper Street . Recently, Professor Horwitz was kind enough to do the following interview with me on his current project.
Why do a book on American Conservatism?
Conservatism has arguably been the most important political doctrine in the United States over the last three decades. It has dominated the intellectual debate and largely set the policy agenda, even during years of Democratic electoral control. But this is a particular kind of conservatism, one focused not just on customary topics of conservative concern as government spending and low taxes, but one anxious and angry about the purported homosexual agenda, the hoax of climate change, the rule by experts and elites. It practices a politics that is disciplined, uncompromising, and in the current Tea Party movement moment, enraged, proclaiming the objective to “take back our country.”
This is “anti-establishment conservatism,” whose origin can be found in the faction of the right wing that battled both the reigning post-World War II liberal consensus and the moderate, establishment Republican Party. This book examines the nature of anti-establishment conservatism, traces its development from the 1950s to the present, and endeavors to understand its political ascendance.
What distinguishes American conservatism in its current incarnation?
Conservatism embodies a venerable, coherent, if sometimes conflicted set of values rooted in an appreciation for the importance of tradition and the social world we inherit, a theory of individual freedom and property, and a deep suspicion of state power. European conservatism has typically been oriented toward the concern with tradition and inheritance. American conservatism, born of classical liberalism’s focus on the individual, has usually gravitated toward theories of freedom and property.
As it emerged in the early postwar period, anti-establishment conservatism, a fusion of traditional and libertarian ideas, embodied a politics of double rollback: of the New Deal and of international communism. Gathered within the hearth of William F. Buckley’s National Review and mobilized through the candidacy of Barry Goldwater, anti-establishment conservatives found in the New Deal and communism a common betrayal of individual freedom and a deification of state power.
The evil of the despotic, bloated American state was absolved, however, when it came to national security. The anti-establishment conservative cause was premised on halting socialist tendencies and restoring the market and traditional values, while expanding the military-industrial-complex and taking the fight to the Soviet foe. It thus advocated what I call a peculiarly anti-statist statism.
What are the historical roots of this?
With Goldwater’s defeat in the 1964 election, anti-establishment conservatives, now removed from GOP centers of power, went into a quiet rebuilding mode, constructing the early intellectual, media, and political institutions – the foundations, the think tanks, and the right-wing media structures – that proved crucial to channeling and shaping discontent first with the postwar liberal consensus and then with the faltering New Deal order. My book examines these institutions and networks. The Tea Party is the latest manifestation of anti-establishment conservatism.
Was there any particular historic moment that was key to the retooling of the American right?
Much of the book is devoted to analyzing the resurgence of anti-establishment conservatism in the 1970s, its ranks enlarged by the new Christian right, neoconservatives, and the bloc of big business that defected from the liberal consensus. The liberal consensus broke down in the 1970s when domestically, Keynesian tools of fiscal and monetary policy were seen as unable to deal with the economic problems of the time: high unemployment, high inflation, and stagnant growth. Anti-establishment conservatives were able to address this turmoil with traditional claims that the state had become too powerful and manipulative.
Through an effective network of think tanks, foundations, and media, they helped galvanize constituencies that had not been much involved in politics – especially evangelical Christians – and brought them into the ambit of a reenergized, very conservative Republican Party.
What has the rise of the anti-establishment conservative movement done to the Republican Party?
Since the Reagan victory the anti-establishment conservative movement has come to challenge the establishment Republican Party, if not mostly displace it. As this process unfolded, the GOP, which historically had been a relatively catholic party ideologically, by the mid 1990s began to look like a bona fide, disciplined, conservative political party and, arguably, a religious party.
As such, it increasingly displayed utopian and dogmatic features. Those features were evident in the attack on expertise and the flight from science characteristic of the current GOP and, crucially, in the 2003 decision to go to war with Iraq. The version of American exceptionalism projected by the Bush administration in foreign policy embodied the millenarian utopianism articulated by both the Christian right and neoconservatism, and the book probes those millenarian tendencies.
Christian right support for the U.S. wars in the Middle East proceeded in some significant measure from the belief in the “end-time,” in which the world’s destruction enables Christ’s return and a new, perfect world to emerge. Neoconservative utopianism lay in an analogous apocalyptic, Jacobin, belief in the United States’ ability to hasten universal democracy and a global free market through the creative fire of violence. The Iraq War was a utopian exercise par excellence.
How does the history your book outlines speak to our current political context? Are there any lessons to be learned?
Obama’s 2012 reelection does not do much to reverse these tendencies on the right. My sense is that the Republican Party is now in the situation it found itself after Barry Goldwater was thrashed in the 1964 election. In the wake of that defeat, the anti-establishment conservatives were drummed out of the party’s leadership.
A similar battle is going on inside the Republican Party now. But I highly doubt that the anti-establishment conservative wing – concentrated in the Tea Party faction – can or will be purged. The money that supports candidates is mostly outside party control, which allows rich, ideological, plutocrats like the Koch brothers much more sway.
Jim Miller
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Sounds like a book we all have to read, especially those who find it too
distasteful and enraging to read the cruel and near aimless fascist and
and racist spam these Apokalypsians are unleashing on the net. Also,
it comes just as Bob Dole has been doing a tour recommending the GOP
put up the “closed for repairs” sign, presumably because he thinks, as
does Horwitz, the party’s lost its traditional center to the wild freaks of
guns and glory.
“Anti-establishment conservatism” strikes me as too mild of a term for the radical, paranoid, reactionary extremism on the right that has been legitimized by the conservative movement itself and gone main stream. The Republican party released the Krakens and can’t decide if it wants to clean up the mess or even can clean it up.
MODERN CONSERVATISM has been a failure because it has been, operationally, de facto, Godless. In the political/civil government realm it has ignored Christ and what Scripture says about the role and purpose of civil government. Thus, it failed. Such secular conservatism will not defeat secular liberalism because to God they are two atheistic peas-in-a-pod and thus predestined to failure. As Stonewall Jackson’s Chief of Staff R.L. Dabney said of such a humanistic belief more than 100 years ago:
”[Secular conservatism] is a party which never conserves anything. Its history has been that it demurs to each aggression of the progressive party, and aims to save its credit by a respectable amount of growling, but always acquiesces at last in the innovation. What was the resisted novelty of yesterday is today one of the accepted principles of conservatism; it is now conservative only in affecting to resist the next innovation, which will tomorrow be forced upon its timidity and will be succeeded by some third revolution; to be denounced and then adopted in its turn.
“American conservatism is merely the shadow that follows Radicalism as it moves forward towards perdition. It remains behind it, but never retards it, and always advances near its leader. This pretended salt hath utterly lost its savor: wherewith shall it be salted? Its impotency is not hard, indeed, to explain. It is worthless because it is the conservatism of expediency only, and not of sturdy principle. It intends to risk nothing serious for the sake of the truth.”
In any event, “politics,” for the most part today, is whoring after false gods. It will not save us. Our country is turning into Hell because the church in America has forgotten God (Psalm 9:17) and refuses to kiss His Son (Psalm 2.) See, please, 2 Chronicles 7:14ff for the way to get our land healed.
John Lofton, Recovering Republican
JohnLofton.com
Editor, Archive.TheAmericanView.com
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John-
I hate to break it to you, but America is by design NOT a Christian nation. We are a secular nation, and the Church officially plays no part in our political system. What you are talking about is imposing YOUR Christian beliefs and values on the whole of society. Sorry, but our system of governance doesn’t work that way.
Conservatism in this country doesn’t work because conservatives, in a nutshell, claim to love America, but they happen to hate Americans–especially poor Americans (why are poor people even allowed to live in our country, right?). They claim that their values are based in Christianity, but in truth their core values amount to “every man for himself.” They claim that they live by the Bible, but favor policies that are in direct conflict with biblical teachings. They have no compassion for the least among us, which is the true meaning of Christianity, if I’m not mistaken (not being a Christian myself, and having no desire to become one).
We are a secular, Godless nation NOW, Andy, but haven’t always been. The document that spells out the philosophy of government of Our Founders — the Declaration of Independence — says plainly that we have unalienable rights, they come from a “Creator” God (the God of the Bible) and the purpose of government is to protect those God-given rights! You need to do your homework or the only thing you expose is your ignorance of the history of our country.
John Lofton, Recovering Republican
Editor, JohnLofton.com
Also: Archive.TheAmericanView.com
Active Facebook Wall
JLof@aol.com
Actually sir, it is you who needs to do his homework:
“Where the preamble declares, that coercion is a departure from the plan of the holy author of our religion, an amendment was proposed by inserting “Jesus Christ,” so that it would read “A departure from the plan of Jesus Christ, the holy author of our religion;” the insertion was rejected by the great majority, in proof that they meant to comprehend, within the mantle of its protection, the Jew and the Gentile, the Christian and Mohammedan, the Hindoo and Infidel of every denomination. ”
–Thomas Jefferson
“Christianity neither is, nor ever was a part of the common law.”
–Thomas Jefferson
“As the Government of the United States of America is not, in any sense, founded on the Christian religion; as it has in itself no character of enmity against the laws, religion, or tranquillity, of Mussulmen; and, as the said States never entered into any war, or act of hostility against any Mahometan nation, it is declared by the parties, that no pretext arising from religious opinions, shall ever produce an interruption of the harmony existing between the two countries.” (emphasis added)
–John Adams, Treaty of Tripoli
“Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof…”
–First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution
Christianity may have been the basis for the belief system of most (perhaps even all) of the Founders, but it most certainly was not the basis for the foundation of the U.S. Constitution, and certainly neither is the Bible. Your characterization is a gross and deliberate, self-serving contortion of the facts.
Notice, please, that Andy TOTALLY IGNORES the wording of the Declaration of Independence, the seminal Founding document that explains in detail the Founder’s view of the purpose and role of government.
John Lofton, Recovering Republican
Editor, JohnLofton.com
Also: Archive.TheAmericanView.com
Active Facebook Wall
JLof@aol.com
What’s noticeable, Sr. Lofton, is that you offer but one phrase that sits on the dollar bill and in the Declaration, while Cohen gives you a load of ’em from the founding fathers and that you have ignored those.
Declaration of Independence is THE seminal Founding document that ALL Founders signed re: their philosophy of government; MUCH MORE important than cherry-picking out-of-context quotes by a few individuals.
I studied biology at a private university in lima peru, and my teachers are evolutionists as me, thank god we never had those discussions about teaching evolution wether is a private or state school in my country john lofton. carlos ramirez lima peru