{While Yoram Hazony, in his book Conservatism: A Rediscovery, traces "Anglo-American" conservative thought back to the 15th century, Alan Lichtman chose to locate the origin of America's "modern right" in the 1920s.}
Alan Lichtman, from White Protestant Nation (2008):
The modern right arose in the 1920s out of a widespread concern that pluralistic, cosmopolitan forces threatened America’s national identity. Those Americans most inclined to protect what they perceived as embattled traditional values came from all parts of the nation. They lived in every kind of community, worked in numerous occupations, attended many different churches, or even lacked formal affiliation with a church. The vanguard of American conservatism in the 1920s, however, shared a common ethnic identity: they were white and Protestant and they had to fight to retain a once uncontested domination of American life.
At the core of right-wing politics in the 1920s and beyond was an anti-pluralistic ideal of America as a unified, white Protestant nation. Many factors, including race, religion, gender, nationality, and class, shaped America’s anti-pluralist tradition. But the vitality of that tradition flows from an evolving cultural nationalism that combined these factors in different ways at different times.
Positively, conservatives have insisted on upholding the values of America’s Anglo-Saxon pioneers. Negatively, they have kept the country on edge with Cassandra’s warning that pluralism would destroy the civilization that the pioneers had built. Virtually every dispute over radicalism, loyalty, reproduction, race, immigration, sexuality, crime, permissiveness, creationism, and school prayer had its forerunner in the ’20’s. So too did forms of right-wing political mobilization. These included the grassroots organizing of the Ku Klux Klan, the lobbying of patriotic and business associations, the defense of traditional womanhood by the DAR, the ‘scientific’ case for white Anglo-Saxon superiority, and the radio evangelizing of fundamentalist preachers. Support for private enterprise complemented the anti-pluralist tradition in debates during the era over taxation, regulation, welfare, anticommunism, and labor relations.
The Right has held together as a political movement since World War I through its core commitment to preserving white Protestant values and private enterprise (not ‘free’ enterprise). American conservative politics is not about limited government, states’ rights, individual freedom, or free markets. These are all dispensable ideas that the right has adjusted and readjusted to protect core principles. Conservatives have built their own versions of big government, carved out innumerable exceptions to free markets for business subsidies and friendly regulations, and restricted freedom in the interest of security. They have backed states’ rights, for example, on racial issues, but not on alcohol and drug use, pornography, abortion, and gay marriage. In defense of core values, conservatives shifted from isolationists before Pearl Harbor to aggressive warriors against communism and terrorism. They have abandoned protectionism for free trade, public education for private school vouchers, and deficit control for ‘supply-side’ tax cuts.
The moral aspirations of the modern American right have focused on the family. Control over women’s allegedly dangerous sexuality and autonomy is at the center of conservative politics. In this view, a morally ordered society requires a morally ordered family, with clear lines of divinely ordained masculine authority and the containment within it of women’s erotic allure. Salacious, non-motherly displays of female bodies, sex education in schools, abortion rights, easy divorces, and the tolerance of homosexuality and other forms of deviance undercut the reproduction and orderly progress of civilization. Feminist demands since the 1920s have upset manly and womanly distinctions and eroded patriarchy, de-feminizing women and feminizing men, and opening the nation and the family to conquest (rape) and subversion (seduction). The history of failed civilizations, conservative physician Arabella Kenealy wrote in 1922, “shows one striking feature as having been common to most of these great decadences; in nearly every case, the dominance and sexual license of their women were conspicuous.”
Both religion and race have also mattered for conservatives who view nationhood as anchored in white, native-stock peoples and their distinctive culture. Since World War I, conservatives have been cultural, religious, and at times racial nationalists, dedicated to protecting America’s superior civilization from racially or culturally inferior peoples, foreign ideologies, sexual deviance, ecumenical religion, or the encroachment of so-called one-world government.
In the late twentieth century, white Protestants achieved a partial and uneasy rapprochement with white Catholics, with whom they found common ground on pro-family issues, communism, and militant Islam. This reflected both a decline of anti-Catholicism among white Protestant and the rise of a theologically and politically conservative Catholicism that put sexual morality, traditional gender roles, biblical truth, and the protection of Christianity above church teachings on labor, the death penalty, and social welfare.
Conservatism, like liberalism, resides not only in the electorate, political parties, and government, but also in the schools and churches, mass media and the high arts, fraternal groups and corporations, and civic and trade associations. Conservative politics has had an enduring appeal to Americans seeking the clarity and comfort of absolute moral codes, clear standards of right and wrong, swift and certain penalties for transgressors, and established lines of authority in public and family life.
In recent years, conservatives have framed the language of politics to dictate terms of the national debates and to put liberals on the defensive. Ultimately, conservatives have engaged in a struggle for control over American public life against a liberal tradition they see as not just wrong on issues but sinful, un-American, and corrosive of the institutions and traditions that made the nation great. To achieve their ambitious aims, conservatives have had to stay disciplined, mobilize their resources, and wage total war against liberals, with unconditional surrender as the only acceptable result.
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