Liberalism & the Divided Mind of the American Right

The U.S. is without a Burkean tradition of conservatism, and instead, as Louis Hartz and others have said, has a conservatism grounded in Lockean liberalism. The recent revival of political conservatism, marked by the twice successful candidacy of Ronald Reagan for President, points up the dilemmas in this conservatism: it must either reach back to its liberal heritage for intellectual sustenance, or it must reject that past. The first strategy, this article argues, is potentially self-defeating, while the second breeds contradiction by making conservatives into radical innovators. The new conservatives, the essay continues, have tried to have it both ways. They have sought at once to embrace a libertarianism for which the modern state is anathema and a moralism drawn largely from an illiberal religious fundamentalism. In the end, the author concludes, the new conservatism's pursuit of a morally regenerate republic neither transcends nor resolves the dilemma that plagues conservatives in American politics

Classical liberalism · Conservatism · Dilemma · Environmental ethics · Epistemology · Fundamentalism · Individualism · Law and economics · Liberalism · Political philosophy · Political science · Politics · Politics of the United States · Sociology · State (computer science · American Constitutional Law and Politics · Law · Philosophy · Political Philosophy and Ethics

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