Where Does the Conservative
Movement Go from Here?
Michael S. Swisher
These remarks were delivered on October 25, 2024 at a panel discussion before the Annual Meeting of Religion and Society, the foundation that publishes the St. Croix Review. Mr. Swisher is Chairman of the foundation’s Board of Directors.
Friends of the St. Croix Review, ladies and gentlemen, honored guests — welcome to the St. Croix Review’s annual panel discussion.
The subject of this year’s discussion is “Where Does the Conservative Movement Go from Here?” In order to answer this question, we must begin by asking from whence we came.
Over the centuries, many persons, and several political factions, have been called “conservative.” I won’t attempt to list or describe them all — in many cases, the original objects of their support (and opposition) can be understood only with reference to historical controversies that are now long past. Suffice it to say that when we now read references to the “conservative movement,” or hear someone described as a “movement conservative,” the movement in question is an American one that arose early in the post-World War II era as a response to the threat of Soviet Communism and the onset of the Cold War.
By the mid-20th century, the Old Right in the United States of America was in severe disarray. It had suffered two decades in the political wilderness, the principles of a free economy having been blamed for the so-called “market failure” behind the crash of 1929. We now know that this was not the real culprit — as Milton Friedman and Anna Schwartz showed in their 1963 work A Monetary History of the United States, overly restrictive monetary policy on the part of the Federal Reserve was responsible — but this did not prevent Franklin Roosevelt and the Democrats from stigmatizing private enterprise and free markets for the result. Following the 1932 election, Democrats held supermajorities in Congress by which they passed the measures collectively summarized as the New Deal. This created a vast administrative bureaucracy, made up of numerous “alphabet agencies,” to oversee regulation of the private sector and to engage in central economic planning.
FDR not only stocked his administration with statists and dirigistes of the kidney of Henry Wallace, Harold Ickes, Harry Hopkins, Thomas Corcoran, and Rexford Tugwell, but at lower echelons, outright Communists and Soviet agents such as Alger Hiss, Harry Dexter White, and Owen Lattimore. Soviet infiltration and espionage were further facilitated with the onset of World War II, when Stalin was a nominal ally of the United States and Great Britain, and an official blind eye was turned to the machinations of his operatives.
So low had this long period of left-wing triumph brought the historic American right that in 1950, the then-prominent literary critic Lionel Trilling was able to write contemptuously that: “The conservative impulse and the reactionary impulse do not . . . express themselves in ideas, but only in action or in irritable mental gestures which seek to resemble ideas.” Yet this apogee of leftist ascendancy was not to last long. The very next year, William F. Buckley, Jr., published his first book, God and Man at Yale, a scathing critique of his alma mater’s largely unchallenged secularist ethos and its preference for economic collectivism and central planning. While many expected the book to fall into obscurity, it instead propelled its young author into the public eye, where he remained for the rest of his life.
At the same time, public attention was increasingly being drawn to the menace of the Soviet Union, and to the extent of domestic subversion. Julius and Ethel Rosenberg had been convicted in 1951 of espionage for having delivered the secrets of the atomic bomb to the Soviet Union, while numerous other instances of Communist activity were explored in Congressional hearings. Not only overt Communists but also sympathizers and supporters of front groups were exposed, leading to great scandal and controversy. These hearings made the reputations of figures like Sen. Joseph McCarthy (R-WI) and then-Congressman Richard Nixon (R-CA), as well as exposing them to the opprobrium heaped upon them by leftists to this day. As the late M. Stanton Evans demonstrated in his books Blacklisted by History (2007) and Stalin’s Secret Agents: The Subversion of Roosevelt’s Government (with Herbert Romerstein, 2012), these staunch anti-communists were correct in their assessments.
In 1954, Buckley and his brother-in-law L. Brent Bozell published McCarthy and His Enemies, defending the anti-communist Senator, and in 1955 Buckley founded National Review, of which he was to remain editor-in-chief until 1990. The foundation of National Review may be marked as the beginning of what still regards and calls itself the American conservative movement. It was differentiated from the pre-WWII right chiefly by its abandonment of the latter’s historic aversion to the entangling alliances against which Washington warned in his Farewell Address, and the similar admonition of John Quincy Adams to “go not abroad in search of monsters to destroy.” In place of these were a robust internationalism dedicated to opposing the Soviet Union and the spread of Communism. Buckley’s associate at National Review, Frank Meyer, proposed that anti-communism, libertarianism, and traditionalism — despite their conflicts — could be fused into a consistent modern Right. It is this “fusionist” view to which the descriptions “conservative movement” and “movement conservative” are commonly applied, whether by its adherents to themselves, or by others.
This new conservative movement advanced fitfully during the 1950s and early 1960s. While Republicans were able to pass the Taft-Hartley act during a brief period of Congressional majority, achieving some balance against the pro-union measures of the 1930s, other New Deal programs remained largely unmitigated, and taxes remained near their wartime high levels (the top personal income tax bracket was 91 percent throughout the Eisenhower administration). Lemuel Boulware, an executive of General Electric, urged relief from the high tax and regulatory burdens of the time, engaging Ronald Reagan as a spokesman. This effort was not to come to fruition for decades.
As the ’50s ended and the ’60s began, the Cold War intensified, with the Cuban missile crisis ending in a narrow escape from a nuclear exchange. The conservative consensus of the day was now strong enough to nominate Barry Goldwater as the Republican presidential nominee for the 1964 election, although his nomination was rejected by many self-styled moderate Republicans. The assassination of John F. Kennedy in November 1963 effectively ended a viable challenge to the Democrats, and JFK’s successor, Lyndon Baines Johnson, won the 1964 election with a comfortable margin. His majority in Congress enabled passage of his Great Society social welfare programs. Successive civil rights acts went beyond the prohibition of racial segregation in government institutions to interference with rights of private property and free association in the private sector. Yet these did not quiet the racial turmoil of the period, and to that disorder was added widespread discontent with the war in Southeast Asia, leading to draft riots on university campuses. Johnson, who had triumphed in 1964, withdrew his candidacy in the 1968 election, and his vice president, Hubert Humphrey, became the Democrats’ nominee and lost to Richard Nixon.
Nixon, although he had been a strong anti-communist in the 1950s, did not govern as a conservative. He took us off the gold standard in 1971, proclaiming “we are all Keynesians now.” Confronted with inflation, and facing a Congress controlled by Democrats, he was unable to control spending. He resorted to wage and price controls, which (as might have been predicted) were an abject failure. He ended by being driven from office at the hands of the selfsame leftist politicians and pundits that had despised him since his campaign against Helen Gahagan Douglas and his investigation of Alger Hiss.
Nixon’s successor, Gerald Ford, achieved nothing of note in advancing the conservative movement, and Jimmy Carter, who campaigned as a moderate Democrat, followed the usual policy in such cases of governing farther to the left once elected. But discontent with the economic results of Carter’s presidency gave movement conservatives their one crucial victory — that of Lemuel Boulware’s old protégé, Ronald Reagan.
There is no point to reviewing here in detail the achievements of this consequential presidency. At last, many of the objectives of the conservative movement begun in the ’50s were within reach. The misbegotten wage and price controls of the Nixon-Carter era were promptly rescinded, and inflation was brought under control by monetary restraint. Marginal tax rates were cut, and yet revenues rose. With Republican control of the Senate during the first six years of Reagan’s two terms, the president was able to appoint conservatives to the Federal courts and to cabinet-level office. Most significantly, he — together with British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher and Pope John Paul II — was able to set the collapse of the Soviet Union in motion, although it was not completed until the following presidency, that of George H.W. Bush.
Yet even at this moment of near-triumph, cracks and flaws began to appear in the fusionist achievement of the movement conservatives. One example, perhaps of minor significance by itself, but exemplary of many other such, occurred in the first year of Reagan’s first term. The President had made it known that he intended to appoint as Chairman of the National Endowment for the Humanities M.E. Bradford, a literary critic and university professor. Bradford was a Texas native, an alumnus of Vanderbilt University (where he earned a Ph.D.) and described himself as a traditional conservative. This proposed appointment bestirred opposition among the so-called neoconservatives, who favored William Bennett, a New Yorker who held a Ph.D. from the University of Texas and a Harvard law degree. After much controversy, including an op-ed piece by George Will attacking him, Bradford withdrew his name from consideration and Bennett received the appointment.
The neoconservatives were characterized as neo- because of their comparatively recent adherence to conservative policies. A common point was that they were former Democrats (Bennett himself remained a Democrat until 1986), and indeed many had originally been farther to the left. They were substantially Jewish (e.g., Norman Podhoretz, Irving Kristol, and William Kristol), though not entirely. Bennett, for example, was Roman Catholic. The fusionist conservatives of the ’50s had included several former Communists, for example Whittaker Chambers and James Burnham. However, the motivations of the neoconservatives differed from those earlier examples. Rather than abandoning leftism in reaction to Stalinist tyranny and domestic subversion, as Chambers and Burnham had, the neoconservatives responded to the ascendancy of the 1960s and ’70s New Left in the universities, to the advent of “affirmative action” and the abandonment of meritocracy, and to the persecution of Jews in the Soviet Union.
Unlike earlier conservatives, the neoconservatives typically had little objection to the Johnson-era Great Society programs, or the administrative state the New Deal and Great Society legislation had engendered. Economics and property rights entered little into their thinking, nor did the moral foundations dear to traditionalists. The neoconservatives brought intellectual firepower to the conservative movement, and soon achieved influence well beyond their numbers.
With the end of the Cold War the fusionism on which movement conservatism was based had less appeal than it had during that period of challenge and stress. Its internal contradictions were accentuated, and it began to disintegrate. We have seen this in successive presidential elections since 1992. George H. W. Bush, a primary opponent of Ronald Reagan, enjoyed his only term as president mainly as a recognition of Reagan’s successes. He was never a Reagan conservative, had characterized Reagan’s supply-side policies as “voodoo economics,” and raised taxes after promising not to do so. He bore the consequences. Bill Clinton, who ran as a moderate Democrat in 1992, did as we’ve seen since, moving left once elected. After the first two years of his presidency, he was checked by a Republican Congress under Newt Gingrich’s “Contract with America.” Cheerfully unprincipled, Clinton “triangulated,” compromising with Congress, and the results were surprisingly good, leading to the only Federal budget surpluses in decades. Unfortunately, the “peace dividend” that was supposed to arise from reductions in military spending as a result of the Cold War’s end was never paid to the American taxpayer. Instead, its proceeds were wasted on further domestic boondoggles. Further, preparedness was hurt by excessive reductions in military spending.
George W. Bush came into office on promises to avoid foreign adventures and “nation-building,” but once in office all bets were off. The attacks of September 11, 2001, brought us into wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, which turned into prime examples of “nation-building.” Neoconservatives were now in charge. Instead of a quick punitive expedition of the sort that the British had mastered in the 19th century — for example, the campaign of Lord Roberts during the Second Anglo-Afghan War — American forces soon were distracted by efforts extraneous to the main task, such as trying to introduce “democracy” into tribal societies that idealized a medieval social order, or attempting to suppress opium poppy cultivation. One might have thought that the way to ruin the poppy farmers was to place them under the jurisdiction of the U.S. Department of Agriculture, which has devastated so many American farmers. That thought apparently never occurred to our nation-builders. Bush left office with a final popularity rating of just 34 percent. The Afghan war, however, long survived his administration, dragging on through three subsequent ones, ending in ignominious retreat in 2021.
The two terms of Barack Obama can only be described as damaging to the country and disastrous for the conservative movement. Promising a “fundamental transformation” of the United States proved to be an attempt to install an European-style social democracy with little, if any, acknowledgment of Constitutional restraints. “Lawfare” was regularly used against opponents — remember Lois Lerner of the IRS?
Republicans chose two lackluster establishment figures to oppose Obama. First was John McCain, who is, now that he is safely dead, treated almost reverentially by Democrats and their servitors in the mass media — but was reviled by them when an active candidate. Sarah Palin, his running mate, was chosen to appeal to the right-wing base, but was treated even worse by the establishment media, and regarded with snobbish disdain even by elements within her own party. Next was Mitt Romney. It has been said that in 2012 the election was between two candidates. One had been a liberal governor of a very liberal state, pro-abortion and pro-gun control, the architect of a socialized medicine scheme. The other was Barack Obama. In any event, Romney was attacked virulently by the Democrats and the media, portrayed as a “vulture capitalist” for his business activities, accused of hazing another student while at prep school, and of maltreating the family dog while going on a driving trip by placing it in a carrier strapped to the rooftop luggage rack of his station wagon. In any event, conservative voters cast ballots without enthusiasm for both McCain and Romney, and both lost.
This brings us to 2016 and the figure that still looms large both in the Republican Party and in national politics — Donald J. Trump. It could be said that candidates like Bush 43, McCain, and Romney were the Republican Party’s crime, and that Trump — whom none of the party establishment wanted — was the punishment. The specifics of the crime were, and continue to be, the party establishment’s failure to put forward candidates appealing to voters on the right. This arises from a deeper failure, that of not understanding how the times have changed, and with them, the issues that concern those voters.
Since the end of the Cold War, the conservative movement that began in the 1950s has been rudderless, because its main goal has been achieved. There is a phenomenon that has been described as “mission creep.” One of its classic illustrations is seen in the well-known charity, the March of Dimes. Conceived as a vehicle to raise funds for the development of a cure for poliomyelitis, it succeeded outstandingly. Jonas Salk developed a successful vaccine against the polio virus. It was widely distributed, and today, polio (which was once truly a dread disease) is now a distant memory. While this is cause for celebration, it left the March of Dimes organization without the great cause it once pursued. What was it to do with itself? Throw a celebratory party and close its doors, or try to re-invent itself?
Movement conservatism finds itself in a similar situation today. What, apart from winning the Cold War, holds it together? What great cause does it now pursue? There is great dissension on the Right. National Review, that fons et origo of fusionism, in 2015 published a famous (or perhaps notorious) “Against Trump” issue. In Buckley’s day, National Review asserted its authority to “excommunicate” certain groups or persons from the “respectable” right, ranging from the John Birch Society to Ayn Rand, Murray Rothbard, and Pat Buchanan. Buckley’s successors attempted to do the same to Donald Trump, with somewhat less success.
The magazine appears to have lost significant circulation. While several of its most virulent NeverTrumpers have left the publication, it still seldom has anything good to say about Donald Trump. Its reasons for this distaste are various. Among these is the neoconservative faction’s advocacy of aggressive projection of force in international affairs, not confined to the defense of our borders, but in the interests of what they call “democracy.” The ongoing conflict in Ukraine is a prime example. Trump’s distaste for aggressive intervention abroad has led to this faction denouncing him as “isolationist.” Other opponents on the right favor open borders, though that has become an even more widely unpopular position since the 2016 election. Trump’s position on tariffs and trade inspires opposition from still different quarters.
Some opponents content themselves just with criticizing or opposing Trump; others have gone over to the other side, notably the neoconservatives William Kristol, who has become a Democrat, and Liz and Dick Cheney, who have endorsed Kamala Harris. At least in the case of the Cheneys, personal animus seems to be involved. Liz Cheney has campaigned for Colin Allred, the Democrat running for Senate against the reliably conservative Ted Cruz (R-TX).
The old maxim of William F. Buckley, Jr., that one should support the rightmost electable candidate seems to have been discarded by the remains of the conservative movement he founded. By what calculation it is deemed better for the Right that Kamala Harris defeat Donald Trump, or that Colin Allred defeat Ted Cruz?
The rudderlessness of the surviving elements of the Buckleyite conservative movement is perhaps explainable by the false conclusion that the end of the Cold War and the collapse of the old Soviet Union meant the end of the Communist threat. This belief seems based on an assumption that if the plant be killed at its root (i.e., in the old Soviet Union) that it must therefore die wherever it has reached.
The truth is that this did not happen. Soviet Communism sent out runners, rather like “creeping Charlie,” and these have set down roots in places remote from its origin, surviving the mother plant. We probably have more doctrinaire Marxists on American university faculties than are left in any of the former Soviet empire, and these people are active participants in subverting American institutions. Moreover, these enemies within are used strategically by our overseas adversaries, in particular Iran and the People’s Republic of China, a Communist state. The economic dependency of America on China that our government has allowed to develop adds a complexity that, at the height of the Cold War, we never experienced with the former Soviet Union.
So — where indeed does the conservative movement go from here? I believe it must recognize the threat that collectivism and kindred enemies of Western Civilization still pose to all our traditions and institutions, and the primacy of defeating them. It is time for us seize the helm of the directionless conservative movement and navigate! *
