Conservatives Without Conscience

In their efforts to present conservatism as an American tradition, conservatives have also reinterpreted the U.S. Constitution. One of the key elements of the Constitution is the establishment of a unique republic, in that a federal system would coexist with state and local governments. Before it was ratified many opponents attacked its progressive and innovative nature, for far from representing the status quo, the Constitution was dramatically liberal. James Madison defended it in The Federalist Papers by explaining that the founders “have not suffered a blind veneration for antiquity, for custom” but rather employed “numerous innovations…in favor of private rights and public happiness.” Madison said that “precedent could not be discovered,” for there was no other government “on the face of the globe” that provided a model.[33] Madison, the father of the Constitution, clearly saw his work as the opposite of conservatism. Far from venerating the principles of the past, or feeling bound by custom, our nation’s founders relied on reason, which is anathema for many of today’s conservatives.

By laying claim to the Constitution as part of their own antiliberal tradition, conservatives have, even Nash seems to believe, gone too far. “In sharp contrast with many (including some of the Founding Fathers) who believed that the Constitution was intended to set up a stronger national government than the one under the Articles of Confederation,” Nash wrote with a tone of apology, “many conservatives stressed the powers of individuals and states under the federal system.” Even more inexcusable is that some conservative thinkers “seemed to infuse an almost anti-Federalist understanding of the Constitution” into its interpretation.[34] Anti-Federalists, of course, opposed its ratification, so to take that line of thought its full distance would have us still operating as European colonies. Absurd? Apparently not, as one influential Southern conservative historian, Clyde Wilson, has argued that the anti-Federalists were the only true American conservatives.[35] Fortunately, such thinking did not carry the day, but it has been prevalent from the outset of the conservative movement.

Had conservative scholars of the 1950s conceded the nation’s liberal legacy, and stated at the time that they were formulating a conservative philosophy based on a century and a half of history since the nation’s founding, a legitimate conservative foundation could have been built on the American tradition. Nash isolated the key question facing the early conservatives: “How could a nation conceived in violence and dedicated to universal rights ever be called ‘conservative’?” Political scientist Clinton Rossiter, considered one of the first neoconservatives, answered this question head-on, and unlike his peers, honestly, in his early study Conservatism in America, stating correctly that America’s political roots were “progressive” and the United States was conceived out of “a Liberal tradition.”[36]

Goldwater Conservatism Is Dead, R.I.P.

Barry Goldwater defined conservatism for my generation and several others. Incongruously, many former Goldwater conservatives have been instrumental in reshaping conservatism, but in doing so they have abandoned the senator’s own philosophy and the sense of conscience that anchored his thinking. The senator explained that much of his own conservative thinking had come from his mother’s “wonderful common sense” as well as his experiences as an Arizona businessman during the period that he and his brother ran their chain of successful department stores. Before Goldwater ran for Congress, Senator Everett Dirksen (R-IL) sent him speeches and background papers of his own, and had the Library of Congress gather a number of speeches by Senator Robert Taft (R-OH) for the candidate to study. Although he had never been much of a student as a young man, the senator became one, and spent the first ten years of his Senate career fascinated by books and reading, not to mention studying the workings of government. Herbert Hoover, who in 1932 was the first president for whom Goldwater had voted, became the senator’s friend and mentor after he arrived in Washington, and he collected all of Hoover’s published works to study them.