Shaving off the Fringe - A Time for Choosing: The Rise of Modern American Conservatism - Review

National Review, Nov 19, 2001 by Arthur Herman

A Time for Choosing: The Rise of Modern American Conservatism, by Jonathan M. Schoenwald (Oxford, 338 pp., $35)

The great political story of our time is the collapse of American liberalism and its standard-bearer, the New Deal Democratic party. Historians and journalists have generally shied away from this story, and for good reason: It is a complex human tale of tragic, even epic proportions, and telling it requires the skill of a Shakespeare or a Melville. Furthermore, since most people who write about American history are liberals, the task would also pose an excruciating question: "How did the principles and ideals I myself uphold fail America?" Self-examination on this scale is an essentially conservative instinct; liberals, as we have learned, prefer to "move on."

So instead of focusing on why liberalism failed, a new crop of historians has tackled a slightly different, and less existentially challenging, question: How did conservatism suddenly become so successful, rising up from Barry Goldwater's landslide defeat in 1964 to dominate the national political agenda? Just four years after Goldwater's loss, Republicans won the White House, and-with time out for two white southern Democrats masquerading as conservatives-have controlled it ever since. In 1994, they even won control of the House of Representatives-an event that would have been close to unimaginable for an observer in 1964.

Jonathan Schoenwald's book is the latest attempt to explain this phenomenon. It follows closely on the heels of Rick Perlstein's Before the Storm: Barry Goldwater and the Unmaking of the American Consensus; Matthew Dallek's The Right Moment: Ronald Reagan's First Victory and the Decisive Turning Point in American Politics; and Lisa McGirr's Suburban Warriors: The Origins of the New American Right. Like these other books, it treats conservatives and conservatism with respect, if not sympathy; this is certainly flattering to members of the American Right, who are accustomed to being ignored or reviled by this country's academic establishment.

The problem with Schoenwald's presentation is that he leaves out more than half of the story. The true explanation of conservatism's success is the fact that American liberalism came to embrace an unrealizable radical agenda at the cost of its electoral support and its own integrity; and this whole history of liberal collapse appears in Schoenwald's book only intermittently, as muted noises offstage. This is not quite Hamlet without the prince, but it is close.

The book does, however, have considerable merit, because Schoenwald doesn't allow his own liberalism to stand in the way of a reasonable and plausible thesis. He argues that in the 1960s, conservatives gained their foothold in the Republican party-and in the American mainstream- by reining in the fringe groups (such as the John Birch Society) that had defined their movement in the previous decade. The protagonists of this effort, and therefore of Schoenwald's book, are familiar to longtime readers of National Review: William F. Buckley Jr., William Rusher, Goldwater organizer F. Clifton White, M. Stanton Evans of the Young Americans for Freedom, and (of course) Ronald Reagan. Schoenwald's narrative focuses on how these movement leaders exorcised the demons of right-wing extremism, and thus made conservatism fit for prime time and ready to embrace a nation.

Schoenwald is clearly fascinated by the Birchers, including their millionaire founder, Robert Welch, and their charismatic spokesman, General Edwin Walker. One almost detects a note of regret when Schoenwald is forced to leave behind these flamboyant characters, who gave Cold War conservatism its "paranoid style," and allowed generations of liberal journalists to dismiss the supporters of the American Right as-in Richard Rovere's words-"bat-haunted Liberty Women of the U.SA.," running around in tennis shoes with petitions to impeach Earl Warren and to ban fluoride from the water supply. Buckley and his National Review challenged the Birchers head-on, and if Schoenwald tends to exaggerate the significance of Birchers as part of the pre- Reagan conservative movement (totally ignoring, for example, the role played by Joe McCarthy), he does appreciate the steadfastness of Buckley and others in driving off the conservative reservation a movement that, for all its populist appeal, represented a long-term political liability.

Grass-roots activism remains the enduring strength of the conservative movement; without it, no political success would have been possible against a firmly entrenched liberal Democratic establishment. Schoenwald's most interesting chapters tell the story of how conservative intellectuals spawned mass organizations-similar to that of the Birchers-in order to mobilize voters, but without tipping over into paranoid anti-Communism or race-baiting. One of his best sections describes the founding of the Young Americans for Freedom, who drew up their manifesto of conservative principles at the Buckley estate in Sharon, Connecticut. (The so-called Sharon Statement came almost two years before left-wing students issued their more famous Port Huron Statement.) Schoenwald is quite shrewd in describing how YAF steeled young conservatives with the habits of politicking, intellectual combat, and coalition-building.