How Should We Study the Right Now that Studying the Right is Trendy?

Organization of American Historians, April 9, 2010 SEVENTEEN SUGGESTIONS FOR STUDYING THE RIGHT NOW THAT STUDYING THE RIGHT IS TRENDY Leo P. Ribuffo George Washington University Obviously there is a boom in the study of the Right, broadly conceived. Subtitles of books now end with “and the rise of conservatism” that not so long ago would have ended with “and the persistence of capitalist hegemony” or “and the pervasiveness of status anxiety.” This is the second such boom since World War II. The first rediscovery of American conservatism involved many of our favorite straw man targets, including Richard Hofstadter, Daniel Bell, and Seymour Martin Lipset. Typically those involved in the first discovery of the Right traced the story back at least to the Constitution. Typically, too, they paid close attention to government, economics. nationalism, foreign policy, and war at the expense of race and gender. Despite their mistakes, the best of these self-consciously centrist “pluralists” were very smart and thus still worthy of serious engagement. Moreover, the intellectual cohort of the first discovery extended beyond the pluralist center to include the radical sociologist C. Wright Mills and sometime conservative political scientist Clinton Rossiter. Most important were the rival grand narratives of American history offered by William Appleman Williams in The Contours of American History and Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., everywhere. When I say this to newly minted experts involved in the second discovery, the usual response, accompanied by a blank look, is something like, “I don’t know what you mean. I’m writing a thick description of 50 Birchers in Binghamton.” The first discovery of the Right petered out during the High Sixties. There was nonetheless an in between cohort of about 40 historians, most now in our sixties, who did terrific work. Names, other than my own and Glen Jeansonne’s, provided on request but I will single out two. This profession should be ashamed that George Nash never received a major academic appointment. On a happier note, Mary Brennan seems to have begun studying conservatism as a toddler and developed into a full fledged expert by third grade. Unlike the rediscovery of American radicalism and working class culture in the ‘60s, which drew on many ideas from the ‘30s, the second discovery of the Right rarely builds on earlier scholarship. Accordingly, there is a focus on race and gender at the expense of government, economics, nationalism, foreign policy, and war. Since only a grumpy old man can say that this involves losses as well as gains, let me say it—again. Furthermore, participants in the second rediscovery of the Right show a remarkable lack of interest in anything that happened before the emergence of so-called “movement conservatism” during the ‘50s. Hence my first and most important suggestion: Pay more attention to events that happened before the ‘50s—even long before. There is simply no other important movement or worldview that historians study in such a truncated fashion. Students of liberalism go back through the New Deal to the so-called Progressive era and sometimes even to Jackson, Jefferson, and John Locke. Students of radicalism go back through the Popular Front, Debsian socialism, and sometimes even to Tom Paine. Conversely, for many participants in the second rediscovery of the Right, Herbert Hoover, Williams’s tragic hero and Glen’s current project, is a distant and barely recognizable figure. Yet standard current anti-statist motifs, including those portraying the Obama administration as socialist, can be traced back to the ’30 and earlier—at least to the late 19th century when, as Rossiter observed in one of my favorite phrases, the conflation of conservatism and laissez faire stood out as the “great train robbery of American intellectual history.” There is much continuity in practical politics too. On Capitol Hill, the current “blue dog” Democrats and the Reagan era “boll weevils” look like latter day versions of the Democratic branch of the congressional conservative coalition formed during the late 1930s. In short, this is a real question of continuity and change, not one of those phony reperiodizations that pushes the so-called Progressive era ever backward until it reaches the day Benjamin Harrison signed the Sherman Antitrust Act. Or, to put the issue in a nutshell: If American conservatism really didn’t get going until the ‘50s, ‘60s, and ‘70s, how come the 80th Congress passed the Taft-Hartley Act instead of national health insurance? In honor of Hofstadter, Lipset, and Bell, let me offer a reductionist social psychological explanation for the prevailing truncated perspective on the history of the Right: liberal and radical academics don’t want to admit how deeply conservatism (by some plausible definition) is rooted in American life. Having offered my premier suggestion, that study of the right needs a longer time frame, I’ll move on to the next sixteen (a number limited by time constraints). Second, Hofstadter’s phrase “paranoid style” should be buried in a deep hole with nuclear waste. Although this term’s conceptual validity has been buried many times, it rises again whenever liberals and radicals panic. If a liberal or radical, try not to panic. Third, Lionel Trilling’s companion remark from 1950 that there were no conservative ideas in America, only irritable gestures, should be buried in a deep hole with nuclear waste. It illustrates the insularity of a New York intellectual who managed never to encounter the neoclassical economists and “neutral principles” law professors at his own university. Fourth, the terms (lower case) “populism” and “populist” should be retired. They simply cannot escape the negative connotations acquired during the ‘50s when all anger and any mobilization outside the “vital center” were deemed disreputable. Try “popular” and “angry”—or, for greater accuracy most of the time, “pissed off.” And don’t expect American society, despite its narrow political spectrum, to exhibit as much ideological uniformity as the Organization of American Historians. Fifth, read some scholarship published before 1980 with an open mind and recognize, no matter what the era of publication, that many pertinent books don’t have subtitles ending with “and the rise of conservatism.” No pertinent domestic issue of the ‘40s and ‘50s has been studied to better effect than the Cold War Red Scare usually called McCarthyism. Sixth, our approach to the relationship between race and the Right needs to be more supple. Sometimes we need to pay more attention to race and sometimes less. On the one hand, George Wallace’s movement has been stunningly under studied. On the other hand, anti-statist attitudes have a long history in this country and even the most peculiar expressions of this worldview cannot be reduced to covert racism. Seventh, although ideas have consequences, to recall the title of Richard Weaver’s famous book, they typically have fewer consequences than intellectuals think. As much as I admire Nash’s Conservative Intellectual Movement, I think that developments in post-world War political conservatism cannot be attributed primarily to the spread of Buckleyite ideas. I suspect that Nash himself is not a Nashist. So, eighth, learn something substantive about how the federal government works. Even the truncated story since the ‘50s would look very different if participants in the second discovery paid as much attention to the National Journal and Congressional Quarterly as to National Review and Commentary. Conservatives affected legislation even when an embattled minority. Their influence helps to explain why Social Security, Medicare, and Obama’s health care legislation look the way they do, why Truman sent troops north of the 38th parallel in Korea, and why LBJ at the peak of liberal power escalated the Vietnam War against his better judgment. Ninth, learn something substantive about foreign policy. For anyone trying to understand a world power, which the United States has been for at least 150 yrs, this is not an optional field like the history of adolescent rebellion. Tenth, learn something substantive about nationalism, a topic related to but not subsumed by foreign policy. It is remarkable how many Americans can be convinced to oppose a social program on the grounds that it exists in other countries, especially France. Eleventh, learn something substantive about war and preparations for war, activities that have engaged Americans more than we like to admit. Historians’ obliviousness a topic that so clearly changed American life, not to mention much of the world, reflects the tastes of our profession rather than the harsh realities of human existence. This being the OAH, my recommendation of a ten year moratorium on local history studies will lack widespread appeal, but if you must, try 50 captains and majors at Fort Benning instead of 50 Birchers in Binghamton. Twelfth, learn something substantive about religion. For instance, the phrase “city upon a hill” comes not from Ronald Reagan or even from Puritan John Winthrop but from Jesus’s Sermon on the Mount. Jesus was endorsing neither American empire nor the free marketeers’ great train robbery of American intellectual history. Thirteenth, despite our profession’s penchant for decade-by-decade transformations, recognize that 10 years is not a long time. Many voters disappointed by Alfred M. Landon’s drubbing in 1936 lived to see Republicans win control of the 80th Congress in 1946. Joseph Martin, speaker of that House and again in 1953-54, had earlier campaigned for William McKinley and befriended Calvin Coolidge in the Massachusetts legislature. Fourteenth, the prevailing left-center-right model remains serviceable—but just barely and with many caveats. Notwithstanding European antecedents, this spectrum only became standard in the United States during the late 1940s. We must be wary of imposing it on earlier eras when, for example, “the people” versus “the interests” was the prevailing scheme; need to abandon the Cold War habit of portraying symmetrically sinister “extremes” on the far left and far right; and should appreciate that “the center,” whether vital or comatose, is not a fixed point assigned by the Naval Observatory or David Gergen, but rather a location that varies as the spectrum narrows (as in the ‘50s) or expands (as in the ‘60s). Fifteenth, an international perspective is helpful. For those of us who began work with the 30s, it was unavoidable given the prominence of analogies with European Nazism and Fascism. From Father Coughlin and Benito Mussolini to George W. Bush and Silvio Berlusconi, judicious comparisons can help to explain what makes the United States different. Among those few making a systematic effort to compare trans-Atlantic Rights, Centers, and Lefts, only E. H. Hobsbawm really understands. Sixteenth, keep your self-righteousness under control. If I were addressing the conservative website C-net, I would stress the need to learn about socialism before calling Obama a socialist. This being the OAH, that is not the problem. Rather, demonizing the Right, however emotionally satisfying or professionally advantageous, distorts our understanding of the past. If you think that only conservative presidents lie about wars, learn more about FDR and LBJ, and if you think George W. Bush’s management of the Iraq War was uniquely inept, learn more about Truman’s conduct of the Korean War, which was much less competent and much more lethal. Finally, whether or not you are interested in the Right, read Williams’s Contours of American History. $25.15 at Amazon.com.