Capitolo 1
The Conservative Awakening: America's Intellectual Right Since 1945
In the tumultuous aftermath of World War II, a movement once relegated to the shadows of American intellectual life began an improbable journey toward cultural and political dominance. What started as scattered voices of protest in 1945 would, within a generation, reshape American politics and challenge liberalism's seemingly unassailable position. George Nash's landmark study reveals this remarkable transformation from intellectual wilderness to corridors of power. The book has maintained extraordinary relevance since its publication, with figures like William F. Buckley Jr. and Russell Kirk achieving near-mythical status among conservatives. Even Barack Obama reportedly read it to understand his political opponents, while Ronald Reagan credited the conservative intellectual movement it chronicles as foundational to his presidency. This isn't merely a history of ideas-it's the origin story of a revolution that continues to shape American politics today.
Capitolo 2
The Birth of a Movement: Libertarians Emerge from the Shadows
In 1945, classical liberalism-what we now call libertarianism-appeared to be on history's losing side. The New Deal had fundamentally transformed America's relationship with government, and few voices remained to challenge the seemingly unstoppable march toward centralized power. Yet from this nadir emerged the first strand of postwar conservative thought.
The catalyst came from an unexpected source: an Austrian economist teaching at the London School of Economics. Friedrich Hayek's "The Road to Serfdom" (1944) argued that centralized economic planning inevitably led to totalitarianism, not just economic inefficiency. When Reader's Digest condensed the book for its massive American audience, it struck a nerve with readers who harbored doubts about expanding government power. As Hayek later reflected, the passionate response surprised even him-his scholarly work had touched raw nerves in American political culture.
Another European emigre, Ludwig von Mises, provided equally vital intellectual firepower. More dogmatic than his former student Hayek, Mises insisted that "private property is inextricably linked with civilization" and lasting peace could arise only "under perfect capitalism." His 1949 magnum opus "Human Action" synthesized decades of economic thought into what critics called a "Capitalist Manifesto."
While these European scholars provided theoretical foundations, American journalists like Henry Hazlitt, Isabel Paterson, and John T. Flynn kept libertarian ideas alive in publications like Newsweek and the New York Herald Tribune. Many future conservative intellectuals discovered Albert Jay Nock during this period, drawn to his elitist vision of a small "Remnant" of intelligent people preserving civilization against the encroaching state.
After Nock's death in 1945, his intellectual mantle passed to Frank Chodorov, who launched a four-page monthly called analysis from modest rooms in Manhattan. Working alone with limited resources, Chodorov described his "venture in personal journalism" as "an individualistic publication-the only one of its kind in America." Despite never exceeding 4,000 subscribers, analysis became the intellectual lifeline of what Chodorov himself called "the libertarian underground," influencing figures like William F. Buckley Jr. and Murray Rothbard.
Books alone couldn't create a coherent movement with political impact-the scattered "Remnant" needed organization. In 1946, Leonard Read established the Foundation for Economic Education (FEE) in Irvington-on-Hudson, NY, assembling a distinguished staff including Ludwig von Mises himself. FEE distributed literature of the "freedom philosophy" to nearly 30,000 people by 1952, with bestsellers like Frederic Bastiat's "The Law" and Henry Hazlitt's "Economics in One Lesson" each selling over 500,000 copies.
The following year, Hayek organized the Mont Pelerin Society, gathering nearly forty prominent scholars at a Swiss mountain resort. The conference's somber mood reflected participants' awareness that "central values of civilization are in danger" as planning and socialism seemed ascendant across Europe. As Milton Friedman later observed, the society's immediate impact was showing isolated classical liberals that "we were not alone"-a crucial rallying point for outnumbered intellectual troops.
By 1955, the libertarian revival had reached a new plateau. The Freeman magazine had emerged as a respectable forum for previously dispersed writers. Frank Chodorov had founded the Intercollegiate Society of Individualists (ISI) to combat what he saw as the "transmutation of the American character from individualist to collectivist" on college campuses. Despite internal divisions, libertarians had reason to believe there was indeed "no such thing as a lost cause."
Capitolo 3
The Revolt Against Modernity: Traditionalism and the Recovery of Values
While libertarians focused primarily on economic freedom and state power, a parallel conservative movement emerged with different concerns. These "traditionalists" or "new conservatives" worried about the spiritual and cultural dimensions of modern life-what they saw as the erosion of religious values, community bonds, and cultural standards in an increasingly secular, mass society.
Richard Weaver emerged as a pivotal traditionalist voice. In his influential 1948 work "Ideas Have Consequences," Weaver traced Western decline to the 14th century triumph of nominalism over realism-when Western man abandoned belief in transcendental values. This "evil decision" led to relativism, materialism, and spiritual emptiness. Weaver championed a return to hierarchical order, cultural distinction, and metaphysical dualism, while denouncing mass culture, equalitarianism, and scientific empiricism.
Weaver was not alone in his critique of liberal orthodoxy. August Heckscher lamented how students had been taught cynicism about truths and ideals. John Hallowell condemned positivism in political science, arguing it produced "nihilism in thought and anarchy in practice" and left liberals helpless against totalitarianism: "How can you condemn a tyrant as unjust when you have purged the word justice from your vocabulary?"
Conservative intellectuals particularly disdained the rise of mass society and "the cult of the common man." Bernard Iddings Bell characterized America as a "crowd culture" threatened by its own complacent, vulgar, homogenized comfort-seeking. Anthony Harrigan attacked the "modernist orthodoxy" for developing a code of "immorality" that accepted "pornography as medical science" and "filth as artistic realism."
These critics identified John Dewey's progressive education as a primary culprit in America's cultural decline. Bell's 1949 "Crisis in Education" called for restoring moral philosophy as education's central consideration, insisting that without religious foundations, "free love is entirely defensible, and politics based on force is inevitable." Philosopher Eliseo Vivas delivered a searing indictment of Dewey, claiming his instrumentalism "thinned and trivialized" human dignity and "softened us up for the Red push" by destroying values "constitutive of our humanity."
The decade after Hiroshima witnessed a pervasive renewal of interest in Christian orthodoxy among intellectuals. The Christianity embraced by conservatives wasn't the Social Gospel or liberal Protestantism, but one grounded in the concept of original sin-what many saw as World War II's deepest lesson. Richard Weaver called original sin the concept giving "deeper insight into the enigma that is man," while others insisted "we must restore to our vocabulary a word discarded long ago, namely, sin."
Alongside Christian revival came renewed interest in ancient political philosophy, with Leo Strauss emerging as its most formidable advocate. Strauss drew sharp contrasts between ancients and moderns: where classical thinkers grounded philosophy in natural law and emphasized duties, virtue, and truth-seeking, modern philosophers since Hobbes stressed rights, methodology, and individuality while succumbing to positivism and historicism.
Beyond religious and classical revivals, conservatives sought more modern secular heroes, with Alexis de Tocqueville emerging as a crucial figure. Despite his current prominence, Tocqueville was little read in America during the 1930s and early 1940s. This neglect changed dramatically with the 1945 publication of a widely reviewed new edition of "Democracy in America," which sparked renewed interest in Tocqueville's insights about democracy's tendency toward conformity and centralization.
Russell Kirk's intellectual development prefigured his catalytic role in the conservative movement. His wartime military service provided him valuable time to read extensively-from Nock's Memoirs and Chesterton's Orthodoxy to Irving Babbitt and the classics of English literature. After the war, Kirk divided his time between teaching at Michigan State College and pursuing his doctorate at St. Andrews University in Scotland, where he embraced "the metaphysical principle of continuity given visible reality."
Kirk's dissertation on the Anglo-American conservative tradition evolved into his landmark 1953 book "The Conservative Mind," which defined conservatism through six canons: belief in divine intent ruling society, affection for traditional variety over radical uniformity, conviction that civilized society requires orders and classes, insistence that property and freedom are inseparable, faith in prescription over calculation, and recognition that change and reform are not identical.
The Conservative Mind's impact was extraordinary-receiving favorable reviews in both the New York Times and Time magazine. Kirk's achievement was monumental: he had constructed a respectable intellectual genealogy for conservatism from Burke through figures like Coleridge, Disraeli, the Adams family, Calhoun, and Babbitt. By recovering both European and American conservative traditions, Kirk gave the "amorphous, scattered opposition" to liberalism an "identity" and catalyzed a self-conscious conservative movement.
Capitolo 4
Nightmare in Red: Anti-Communism and the Cold War Right
In 1966, conservative scholar Jeffrey Hart observed that warfare had fundamentally transformed in the twentieth century, shifting from traditional nation-state conflicts to "internationalized civil wars." This sense of civilization torn by an "inner civil war" profoundly influenced American conservative thought after 1945, with the experience of Communism and the Cold War becoming a decisive formative influence.
The post-WWII era witnessed a remarkable transformation of the American Right's foreign policy stance. From Senator Lodge in 1919 to Senator Taft in 1940, conservative leaders had typically maintained skepticism toward extensive foreign involvements. However, in the decade following 1945, this isolationism largely disappeared among right-wing intellectuals as they confronted an age of internationalized ideological conflict.
The intellectual roots of anti-Communist conservatism emerged from responses to the 1930s-what Eugene Lyons termed "The Red Decade." Lyons, a former radical who had witnessed Soviet reality as a Moscow correspondent from 1927-1933, published his scathing critique in 1941, documenting how the Communist "United Front" had permeated American life. He particularly condemned liberals who ignored or apologized for Soviet atrocities like the contrived famines and purge trials.
After 1945, conservative anti-Communism developed along two lines: responses to threats abroad and threats within. The external menace seemed overwhelming-Poland betrayed, Czechoslovakia fallen to a coup, Berlin threatened, France and Italy weakened by domestic Communist parties, China lost to Mao, and Korea engulfed in war. Conservatives demanded answers: Why was America reeling before "Communism on the march"?
James Burnham emerged as the most influential anti-Communist intellectual. After abandoning Trotskyism in the late 1930s, Burnham developed a tough-minded perspective as a "Machiavellian"-a dispassionate analyst of power politics refusing to be deceived by moral platitudes. His influential 1947 book "The Struggle for the World" argued that atomic weapons had created a crisis where civilization could only continue if an absolute monopoly in their control existed through a World Empire. Only two candidates remained: the Soviet Union and the United States.
Burnham insisted the Communist drive for world domination had already begun-the "Third World War" was underway. He advocated aggressive measures: abandoning notions of non-intervention, using worldwide propaganda, supporting allies, suppressing domestic Communism, and initiating a "non-Communist World Federation" led by America. By 1953's "Containment or Liberation?," he had grown pessimistic about America's containment policy, calling it defensive, spiritually deficient, and "a policy of drift."
In the late 1940s and early 1950s, a growing band of former Communist Party members began testifying before congressional committees, adding a dimension of treason to Eugene Lyons's portrayal of the Red Decade as an era of stupidity and hypocrisy. These ex-Communist witnesses received significant attention from the intellectual Right, with their testimonies having an enormous educational impact on conservative thinking.
The Hiss case forged the anti-Communist element in resurgent conservatism more than perhaps any other event. In August 1948, Whittaker Chambers, a senior editor at Time, testified that he had been an underground Communist in the 1930s and had known Alger Hiss, a rising State Department official, as a fellow Communist. When Hiss denied the accusation and sued Chambers for libel, Chambers produced secret government documents implicating both men in Communist espionage. Hiss was ultimately convicted of perjury in 1950.
The case created a jagged fissure in American society. Many prominent liberals-Dean Acheson, Justices Frankfurter and Reed, Adlai Stevenson, Eleanor Roosevelt-defended Hiss, at least initially. Conservatives were outraged by what Chambers called the "pro-Hiss psychosis" among "the best people." The bitter divide led many, like journalist Ralph de Toledano, to abandon liberalism entirely.
Chambers's 1952 autobiography "Witness" became one of the most significant conservative texts of the era. It exerted "tremendous influence" on figures like William Rusher, later publisher of National Review, who called it the "Alpha and Omega" of his understanding of American Communism. The book portrayed the Cold War not merely as a geopolitical struggle but as a profound spiritual conflict between atheistic materialism and Western civilization grounded in faith.
By 1955, the domestic cold war had effectively branded the American Right for a generation, transforming conservatism in the process. Global anti-Communism had largely supplanted isolationism, creating tensions between "Old Right" nationalism and "New Right" internationalism. Many leading conservatives who became militant anti-Communists had previously been isolationists or America First members before Pearl Harbor. William F. Buckley Jr., who attended an America First rally at age 15, later became a forceful advocate for anti-Communist internationalism, reflecting the movement's evolution.
Capitolo 5
Fusion and Fission: The Quest for Conservative Unity
By the mid-1950s, a vibrant though heterogeneous conservative intellectual movement had emerged to challenge what Frank Meyer called "the revolution of the twentieth century." The conservative movement consisted of three loosely related groups: traditionalists alarmed by the erosion of values and emergence of a secular mass society; libertarians concerned about state threats to private enterprise and individualism; and disillusioned ex-radicals focused on fighting international Communism. Though no rigid barriers separated these groups, their impulses remained distinctly diverse, necessitating coordination.
In November 1955, just before William F. Buckley Jr.'s 30th birthday, National Review appeared, similar in format to the pre-1953 Freeman but with a broader mission to consolidate the Right. The magazine successfully united new conservatives, libertarians, and anti-Communists, featuring Russell Kirk, Richard Weaver, and other traditionalists alongside libertarians like John Chamberlain and Frank Chodorov. Particularly notable was the extraordinary concentration of ex-Communists and ex-radicals among the magazine's early editors, including James Burnham, Willmoore Kendall, William Schlamm, Frank Meyer, and Whittaker Chambers.
National Review's inaugural declaration positioned the journal as "irrevocably" at war with "satanic" Communism, with James Burnham writing a regular column called "The Third World War." The editors affirmed the "competitive price system" as "indispensable to liberty" while fighting government growth, and identified themselves as traditionalist "disciples of Truth" defending "organic moral order" against social engineering.
Despite these efforts at unity, the search for a viable conservative philosophy proved difficult as disputes about the nature of responsible conservatism repeatedly erupted in National Review's early years. Frank Meyer criticized Russell Kirk for lacking "clear and distinct principle" and a proper analytical framework for opposing statism. Kirk counterattacked, arguing that "true conservatism rises at the antipodes from individualism" which he considered "social atomism" and ultimately anarchic.
By the early 1960s, William F. Buckley Jr. acknowledged that "the conservative movement in America has got to put its theoretical house in order." Frank Meyer, despite his earlier role in highlighting conservative divisions, became the primary architect of an attempted synthesis. While maintaining his individualist philosophy, he sought to articulate common ground between conservative factions. In his edited volume "What Is Conservatism?" (1964), Meyer claimed the contributors shared fundamental beliefs in an objective moral order, the value of the human person, limited government, and opposition to Communism.
Despite theoretical differences, conservatives collaborated effectively on practical matters, from publishing magazines to supporting specific political issues. If fusionism as an "ism" sometimes seemed artificial, fusion on a personal level succeeded. The conservative movement had achieved an identity, if not unity-an awkward coalition had become a partnership.
By the early 1960s, signs of conservative resurgence were multiplying. M. Stanton Evans discerned a "revolt on the campus" against liberal conformity, while liberals responded with a flood of articles about conservatism, Goldwater, and the "radical Right." The Intercollegiate Society of Individualists (ISI), founded by Frank Chodorov in 1953, served as the crucial link between right-wing scholars and college students, expanding its mailing list from 600 to over 13,000 in eight years.
The climax of conservatism's burst into prominence was Barry Goldwater's 1964 presidential campaign, which represented the first thrust of the postwar New Right into presidential politics. Though ending in overwhelming electoral defeat, the campaign proved an intensely educational experience for conservative intellectuals. Many were deeply embittered by what Buckley called a "vile campaign" of liberal attacks comparing Goldwater to Hitler and Stalin.
Yet conservatives refused to concede intellectual defeat. As Frank Meyer insisted, America had not repudiated conservative philosophy. Ronald Reagan, writing in National Review, argued that only a "false image" of conservatism had been rejected. James Burnham noted that an "idea in a few hundred heads" a decade earlier now had millions of conscious adherents.
Capitolo 6
The Search for American Roots
By the late 1950s, conservative intellectuals faced a new challenge beyond their internal theoretical debates: defining conservatism's relationship to American culture and history. Liberal critics seized upon conservatives' European intellectual orientation to argue that conservatism was fundamentally "un-American." Louis Hartz's influential 1955 work "The Liberal Tradition in America" contended that "Lockean" liberalism was virtually America's only tradition, while conservatism had never been truly indigenous to America, which lacked a feudal social structure.
The liberal critique found echoes among right-wing intellectuals themselves. William Schlamm, a German refugee and "father" of National Review, argued that Kirk was mistaken in his "desperate attempts" to show America had always been conservative, noting that America was uniquely "built by conscious human intent" by Europeans "tired of Europe's ancient commitments."
The conservative quest for American roots stemmed from the nature of conservatism itself. As the word suggests, conservatives wish to conserve something from the present or recoverable past. Unlike those on the Left who can repudiate tradition entirely, conservatives must find value in heritage. Additionally, postwar conservatives occupied an anomalous position: they called themselves conservatives but functioned as dissenters. Many saw themselves as counterrevolutionaries opposing a radical transformation that had already partially succeeded.
By the mid-1950s, conservative intellectuals developed various approaches to address the assertion that America was inherently liberal. One strategy was to minimize institutional differences between America and Europe while asserting a transcendent continuity of principles across the Atlantic. Russell Kirk vigorously defended Burke's relevance to America, arguing that "Burke is not outside the American tradition; rather, he stands in the grander tradition and continuity-the legacy of our civilization-of which American life and character are a part."
The South attracted conservative intellectuals through its sense of tradition, religious piety, family loyalties, suspicion of intellectual presumption, antipathy toward centralized government, devotion to states' rights, military tradition, and attachment to community and rural ways. Russell Kirk's affection for the South manifested in his master's thesis on John Randolph of Roanoke, whom he called "the most eloquent of American conservative thinkers" and "the American Burke."
Richard Weaver, the most impressive postwar disciple of the Agrarian movement, defended the South as a bulwark against modernism's corrosive forces. Weaver argued that the "Southern philosophy" resisted corrosive "analysis" while maintaining humanistic values. Unlike the Northerner, "essentially a child of the Enlightenment," the Southerner piously accepted nature as providential rather than something to manipulate for selfish ends.
However, Weaver and other regionalists couldn't fully satisfy conservatives' needs for an American conservative tradition. Not only was most of the country not Southern, but Weaver's argument conceded what many conservatives desperately wanted to deny: that America was predominantly a liberal country and the conservative Southerner was "anomalous."
The search continued on multiple fronts, particularly in national political institutions. Russell Kirk's work on "the American cause" argued that Americans had always exhibited "a conservative cast of mind" with remarkable stability. He emphasized America's Christian moral foundation, British legal inheritance, the Founders' classical education and realism, and our system of limited government with checks and balances.
By the late 1960s, as power seemed within reach, conservative intellectuals perceived a profound societal crisis beyond liberalism's practical failures. They identified disorder and moral decay as the deeper threat. James Burnham diagnosed the problem as "a collapse of the morale of the governing elite." Will Herberg described it as the "defection" of an uprooted intelligentsia whose "self-extrusion" from ordered society led them to war against their own tradition.
Capitolo 7
From Intellectual Movement to Political Force
By the Reagan era, conservatism had evolved into a compound of five distinct impulses: libertarianism, traditionalism, anti-Communism, neoconservatism (former liberals "mugged by reality"), and the Religious Right. Ronald Reagan successfully embodied all these strands simultaneously, enabling their merger into a powerful political coalition.
The conservative intellectual landscape expanded dramatically, with an avalanche of publications beyond the original journals like National Review and Modern Age. Specialized periodicals emerged for every conservative faction, from libertarian Reason to neoconservative Commentary and religious publications like First Things. Campus conservative newspapers flourished, and magazines like the American Spectator saw their readership explode.
This intellectual ferment was supported by a growing network of conservative foundations, think tanks, and advocacy organizations that extended conservative influence throughout American public life. By the Reagan era, conservatism had developed an extensive institutional infrastructure extending from the Potomac to every corner of the country. This network included established organizations like the Hoover Institution and American Enterprise Institute alongside newer institutions like the Heritage Foundation, Cato Institute, Ethics and Public Policy Center, Manhattan Institute, and scores of others.
As conservatism reached institutional maturity in the 1980s, its intellectual focus shifted from philosophical self-definition toward programmatic policy studies. Conservative intellectuals increasingly collaborated with politicians, exemplified by the rapid rise of "supply-side economics" from Arthur Laffer's academic work to becoming official Republican tax policy under Reagan. By the 1990s, this intellectual-political symbiosis culminated in Newt Gingrich-a history PhD and the first Speaker with a doctorate-leading the Republican House majority with the Contract with America.
Despite its successes, conservatism experienced significant internal tensions in the 1980s and early 1990s. Self-described "paleoconservatives" increasingly attacked "neoconservatives" as "interlopers" and "impostors" who remained essentially secular, Wilsonian, and welfare statist. The paleoconservatives, championed by Patrick Buchanan under the pre-World War II banner of "America First," advocated nationalism, skepticism of global democracy, opposition to Third World immigration, and criticism of free trade-resembling much of the American Right before 1945.
By the mid-1990s, American conservatism had achieved remarkable institutional success compared to its position forty years earlier. Between the conservative intellectual elite and the "silent majority" electorate stood new mediators like Rush Limbaugh, whose 1992 book sold over 2 million copies. Yet a disturbing paradox emerged: while conservative intellectuals were more articulate than ever and conservative politicians more numerous, conservative influence on American culture seemed to be diminishing.
As the conservative intellectual movement reached middle age in the early 21st century, it began commemorating its history with pride. Despite outward success, conservative intellectuals faced growing unease about their political victories. The movement showed signs of fractiousness, reminding conservatives that their coalition contained the potential for dissolution. Some feared the long-foretold "conservative crackup" might be imminent.
Despite these challenges, the conservative movement's disintegration seemed unlikely. Each wing had become thoroughly institutionalized with thriving networks of scholars, sophisticated media outlets, and think tanks. Most importantly, the external stimuli that created conservatism hadn't disappeared. Since the 1960s, America had been moving simultaneously right and left. While conservatives gained political power, elite and popular attitudes on social issues and lifestyles had veered in permissive directions.
This raised a sobering question: Could a nation so deeply divided govern itself effectively? Could a regime flourish where the Right dominated elections while the Left dominated culture? Whether conservatives could thrive without victory in the contest for culture remained the great unanswered question. Yet conservatives could take comfort that their future wasn't predetermined. After all, they were Americans.
