The Conservative Century

Conservatism studies have been in vogue since at least the mid-1990s, but the vast majority of contributing authors have limited their examinations to the post-1945 period. Within those studies, the South has garnered the lion's share of regional attention. Gregory L. Schneider offers something relatively different in The Conservative Century. Rather than focus exclusively on the origins of conservative Republican political power, usually dated to the period between 1964 and 1980 and most dramatically felt in the South, Schneider traces a longer and broader narrative for American conservatism. Weaving a multifaceted and typically obscured intellectual history with a well-known national political narrative, Schneider argues that conservatism's “protean” nature explains its survival, persistence, and eventual electoral dominance. Dispassionate, systematic, and accessible, Schneider makes an important contribution that will be particularly useful as an introduction for students unfamiliar with one of the central story lines of twentieth-century American politics. Originally designed as a study of the “Old Right,” Schneider's broader assessment of American conservatism begins in the late nineteenth century, when a handful of ideologues stressing the virtues of laissez-faire economics, individual liberty, and—sometimes—social Darwinism, clashed with a political culture imbued with the romance of reform. After tracing various conservatisms through the New Deal and World War II eras, Schneider seeks to explain a critical transformation within conservatism: its shift from distrusting mass democracy to embracing it, at least rhetorically, with a populist flare. Schneider makes clear that William F. Buckley's founding of National Review in 1955 was a pivotal moment in both this transformation and the popular fusion of conservative world views at the grassroots. Established within an anticommunist political culture stark in its qualitative difference from that of the century's first half, National Review is depicted as central to the evolution of modern conservatism. At the same time, many historians will bristle at Schneider's apparent dismissal of race or the South as critical to the long and broad story of American conservatism. Where ideology and the South did intermingle in important ways, conservative Republicans seem to have been outside initiators rather than accidental beneficiaries, motivated not by racial ideologies but by pragmatic political opportunism. Schneider's closing chapters trace the important but usually ignored battle between neoconservatives and paleoconservatives contextualized by a Reagan administration that, perhaps surprising to some, left many conservatives of different stripes unsatisfied. Also receiving attention is the rise of conservative talk radio, the mobilization of the Christian Right, and the failure of conservative Republicans to consistently govern conservatively during the administrations of George W. Bush, Bill Clinton, or George H. W. Bush

Art · Conservatism · Dominance (genetics · Ideology · Literature · Narrative · Political economy · Political science · Politics · Sociology · History · Law · Political and Economic history of UK and US