Geoffrey Kabaservice is director of political studies at the Niskanen Center and the author of Rule and Ruin: The Downfall of Moderation and the Destruction of the Republican Party.

The growing tendency of late for liberals and conservatives to regard each other as not just opponents, but enemies, has been one of the most alarming in an alarming era. At the root of this fear and loathing is mutual incomprehension: Liberals simply don’t understand conservatives, and vice versa. In years past, the historical profession has done little to improve matters. Liberal historians typically treated conservatives and their ideas with disdain, when they deigned to notice them at all.

The end-of-century victories of Ronald Reagan and Newt Gingrich, however, forced historians to realize that conservatism could no longer be dismissed as a mere road bump on the inexorable progression toward a liberal future. The result, over the past two decades, has been a veritable tsunami of historical literature on conservatism. Virtually all of these works have been written by liberals. Nonetheless, historians of this new generation consider themselves to be unbiased and even sympathetic observers of conservatism. Many believe their collective efforts have produced a profound historical understanding of conservatism as an intellectual and cultural phenomenon, and thus contributed in some measure to bringing politically opposed citizens together.


Color me skeptical. I was a graduate student at the beginning of this new wave of conservative studies and I couldn’t help but notice that it coincided with the historical profession’s purge of any scholars who could be described as Republicans or conservatives. Some of the new works on conservatism have been excellent, others awful. But nearly all reveal the pitfalls for liberals writing about a movement with which they have no personal experience. If you’re a historian who has not a single conservative colleague—and perhaps not even one conservative friend—chances are you’ll approach conservatism as anthropologists once approached tribes they considered remote, exotic, and quite possibly dangerous.

The result is that two decades’ worth of scholarship hasn’t contributed as much as one might have hoped to our understanding of conservatism, especially in the age of Trump. This is particularly true of the works that have been most popular with the broader public. That’s a shame, because historians could provide deeper answers than they have so far to the questions many citizens now wrestle with: How did our political system become so divided and dysfunctional? To what extent is the conservative movement responsible for Trump’s rise? What have been the movement’s greatest successes as well as failures, and what relevance do they have to our understanding of ourselves as a nation and a people?

Those answers aren’t just relevant to our understanding of the past. A more robust, even-tempered account of conservatism is key to understanding what role the political and cultural phenomenon will play in our country’s future—whether liberals want to believe it or not.



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A common flaw of the new political histories is to take the extreme right as representative of conservatism (or the Republican Party) as a whole. Lisa McGirr’s 2001 Suburban Warriors: The Origins of the New American Right was one of the earliest and best of these histories, but many of its readers came away convinced that the rabidly anti-communist John Birch Society dominated the Republican Party in the early 1960s, when it was a marginal element at best.

There’s little in McGirr’s scrupulously nonjudgmental account of the Birchers that alludes to their wild, conspiratorial fantasies, like the notion that the United Nations was training an army of barefoot African cannibals in Georgia to take over the United States, or that a “1313” committee of University of Chicago eggheads was plotting to deprive Americans of their rights to vote and hold property. Bircher-type thinking has had a resurgence on the present-day political right and points toward the enduring appeal of conspiratorial thinking in American life, so the organization merits study. But scholars should keep in mind that National Review founder William F. Buckley Jr., as part of his larger “fusionist” project that eventually led to Reagan’s election, branded the Birchers as “kooks” and was able (for a while) to keep them out of the conservative mainstream.

The success of Buckley and his “movement” conservatives at transforming the GOP into an ideological vessel has led scholars to overlook the internal party warfare between moderates and conservatives that raged throughout the 1960s and 1970s, and continues in a diminished form today. Some scholars also downplay the real differences that separate traditionalists, libertarians, paleo-conservatives and neo-conservatives, among any other number of ideological splinter groups. Like many liberal voters, they assume that the Tuesday Group faction in the House of Representatives is just like the Freedom Caucus, or that Speaker Paul Ryan’s beliefs are more or less interchangeable with those of President Donald Trump or Ohio Governor John Kasich.

In fact, one of the more influential studies of conservatism, Corey Robin’s The Reactionary Mind, insists that such seemingly disparate figures as Edmund Burke, Joseph de Maistre, Milton Friedman and Sarah Palin are all more or less the same, sharing the overarching goal of preserving the ruling order’s power and privilege against liberationist movements from below. In his view, the ideals conservatives tout (greater freedom, robust public morality, economic growth and deference to the Constitution) are nothing but fig-leaf cover for oppression, and anyone outside the elite who thinks otherwise is a victim of false consciousness. Robin—who, full disclosure, helped make my Ph.D. years miserable by leading a grad student unionization effort at my university—advances his argument with considerable force and erudition. But his reductionist thesis is the mirror image of the sloppy right-wing canard that liberalism is no different from socialism, or even communism.

Some scholars bring their present-day political concerns to bear on the past, particularly in relation to the Republican Party’s approach to racial matters, assuming that it’s inherently a party of racial oppression . In this view, African-American demands for racial equality have always entailed a program of economic redistribution—and because such programs are anathema to both moderate and conservative Republicans, then by definition Republicans cannot support civil rights. Of course, this presentist position is at odds with the historical reality, which is that civil rights activists of the 1960s viewed the considerable majority of congressional Republicans as allies, and acknowledged that the movement’s great advances could not have been achieved without their help.

Heather Cox Richardson’s To Make Men Free: A History of the Republican Party actually posits that the current GOP upholds the racist and elitist principles of the pre-Civil War slaveholding class. Richardson’s account is a mélange of liberal errors regarding conservative history. Like Robin, she dismisses Reagan’s populism as a screen for rapacious business interests. She contends that racism was the essence of Buckley’s New Right, and further that the Birch Society spread his ideas to ordinary voters. Buckley’s endorsement of Southern segregation was a moral blot on the conservative movement, and he later acknowledged it as his gravest error. But it’s anti-historical to assume that Buckley was little more than a Klansman with a large vocabulary, or to dismiss the monumental divisions on the right as minor quarrels within a united white supremacist alliance.

Some of the most highly praised scholars of conservatism in recent years have openly acknowledged their political opposition to the movement. Rick Perlstein, whom New York Times columnist Paul Krugman recently pronounced “our leading historian of modern conservatism,” wrote a column a few years ago declaring “There Are No More Honest Conservatives, So Stop Looking for One.” Perlstein made a big splash in 2001 with Before the Storm, a well-researched account of Barry Goldwater’s 1964 presidential campaign that even conservatives praised for its empathy and insight. But Perlstein’s subsequent works, Nixonland and The Invisible Bridge, portray conservatives like Richard Nixon and Reagan as cartoon villains, all but ignoring the progressive parts of Nixon’s record and the pragmatic dimension of Reagan’s.

Perlstein’s treatment of conservatism is positively Solomonic, however, in comparison with Duke University professor Nancy MacLean’s Democracy in Chains, a 2017 National Book Award finalist that focuses on Nobel Prize-winning libertarian economist James Buchanan. In MacLean’s telling, Buchanan’s “public-choice” school of economics provided the intellectual blueprint used by billionaire Charles Koch to advance a “diabolical” and “wicked” plan to suppress democracy by handcuffing government—a crime to which the entire Republican Party is now, apparently, a willing accessory. As numerous critics from across the political spectrum have pointed out, MacLean’s conspiracy theory owes more to her strained interpretations than actual evidence, and her account is replete with errors and distortions.



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It’s true that the era when historians ignored conservatism or dismissed it as a curio is over; many universities now offer entire courses on its history. But a closer look at their syllabi typically reveals a paucity of writings by actual conservatives and a glut of hostile interpretations by writers such as Robin, Cox Richardson, Perlstein and MacLean. One teacher of such a course, Seth Cotlar of Willamette University, who was recently the subject of an admiring piece in Vox, apparently believes that the two major conservative intellectuals of the 1990s were Gingrich and Dinesh D’Souza—an error that no one who was personally involved with the conservative movement would ever make.

Gingrich was interested in ideas—particularly those of futurists Alvin and Heidi Toffler—but he was primarily a political missile aimed at ending four decades of Democratic rule, a goal he would achieve by means both fair and foul. And from what I remember of the culture wars of that era, most conservatives I knew viewed D’Souza as a slippery but useful opportunist. His 1991 book Illiberal Education received wide attention because many people, not just conservatives, were worried about the universities’ drift toward political correctness. Even at the time, however, the leading critiques of higher education came from writers like Jacques Barzun, John Searle, Diane Ravitch, E. D. Hirsch, Alvin Kernan, Frank Kermode, Roger Kimball, Gertrude Himmelfarb, Charlie Sykes, William Bennett, and especially Allan Bloom.

D’Souza’s demagogic instincts were held in check by his desire to appear in such company, and to satisfy gatekeepers like Buckley who wanted the movement to be respectable (and intellectually defensible). The Fox News Channel’s debut in 1996 did much to break down those restraints, with extremism and charlatanry becoming more promising career paths for would-be conservative talking heads.

Still, the serious work of intellectual conservatism at that time came from thinkers who had little to do with the emerging political-media entertainment complex on the right—people like Christopher Lasch, Roger Scruton, Abigail and Stephan Thernstrom, Eugene Genovese, Charles Murray, Thomas Sowell, Shelby Steele and Robert Hughes, to name a few. The ‘90s also brought in new voices on the neoconservative/neoliberal front like David Frum, Michael Lind, Andrew Sullivan, Francis Fukuyama, John McWhorter, Richard Brookhiser, Mickey Kaus, Michael Kelly, William Kristol and John Podhoretz.

Of course, not all the works of that period’s conservative tribunes have aged well. Culture wars tend to produce more heat than light. Bloom’s musings on rock and roll seem as ridiculous now as they did then, and few conservative intellectuals still defend Charles Murray’s 1994 The Bell Curve, with its faulty conclusions on race and intelligence—though even fewer support the campus left’s attempts to prevent him from speaking on any other subject. The escalating polarization of the Gingrich era often overwhelmed any attempt at evenhanded analysis, and it’s hard to read the neoconservatives of the 1990s now without thinking of the Iraq War disaster looming on the horizon.

But the conservatives listed above were for the most part intellectually honest, dedicated to the effort of persuading the unconvinced, and capable of changing their minds in the face of conflicting evidence. Liberals who see the conservative movement as an unchanging monolith of oppression have a hard time understanding why many of the conservative thinkers of the 1990s now oppose Trump and believe the movement has become a shambles.

Liberalism and conservatism have conditioned each other throughout their collisions over the course of American history, the ever-evolving yin and yang of our collective political consciousness. While the present moment may be an exception, American liberals and conservatives have almost always shared the same goals of peace and prosperity, although the means proposed for reaching those goals have usually been very different.

Our current moment of crisis has further strained historians’ attempts to arrive at an impartial, penetrating understanding of American conservatism. Indeed, a growing school of academic thought believes that such a “disinterested” understanding may not be possible, or even desirable. It’s unlikely that a more nuanced history of conservatism will emerge until this latest culture war has run its course.

In the meantime, liberal historians should consider subscribing to the Claremont Review of Books or National Affairs, while conservatives should pick up some copies of the Nation or New Yorker. At least your anger will be better informed.