Now That Historians Know So Much about the Right, How Should We Best Approach the Study of Conservatism

Kim Phillips-Fein’s review is a thoughtful survey of the last fifteen years of historical scholarship on conservatism in the United States. She recounts how a once-marginal set of questions moved to center stage and produced an avalanche of studies. As a contributor of one such study of conservatism, I am gratified to have the importance of this effort recognized in several flagship journals. The result of all this scholarly effort, Phillips-Fein notes, has been nothing short of a transformation in our understanding of the post– World War II American Right and to a lesser degree the longer tradition of American conservatism. Without a doubt, Alan Brinkley’s influential 1994 call in the American Historical Review for more attention to conservatism has been answered. Fifteen years later, Phillips-Fein’s essay prompts us to ask: Were any of the answers surprising? 1 Thanks to this effort, postwar conservatism has become, to borrow John Lewis Gaddis’s formulation, a history “we now know.” As Phillips-Fein notes, this knowledge has come from many different perspectives. We have rich portraits of the local communities where postwar conservative culture blossomed. We have comprehensive portrayals of the women and men who made up the social base of the libertarian and Christian Right. We have biographies of the leaders of the conservative movement as well as close examinations of major conservative organizations, networks, mobilizing tools, and the relationship of all this activity to the Republican party. We now have a greater understanding of modern conservative religiosity, including, for example, that evangelicalism—once thought of as appealing to men and women within rural, backwater, and poor regions— flourished in the hypermodern, privatized world of postindustrial, affluent suburbs. We have penetrating portraits of how within our modern era’s vast corporate empires of lowwage, nonunion service industries was born a powerful new grassroots theology of equal parts free-market capitalism and staunch evangelicalism. Conservative writers too, whose work was once dismissed as little more than “impulses,” “mental gestures which seek to resemble ideas,” have been richly elucidated in their multiple strands. Finally, the new

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