The Past's Partisans

The Conservatives
By Patrick Allitt
(Yale, 325 pages, $35)





The slant on the reviewer is immediately available in the review's subtitle: A view wary of government programs—and now out of fashion.


Conservatives, at least modern, self-declared conservatives are not wary of government programs; they simply oppose liberal programs and favor their own.




Has American conservatism run its course? To judge by the pronouncements of scolding liberal pundits -- not to mention of conservatives themselves -- it may even be at death's door. Long ago, the worker-philosopher Eric Hoffer remarked that "all great movements start as a cause, evolve into a business, and end up a racket." While conservatism has gained too much intellectual respectability to be dismissed as a racket, it certainly has its problems.

Indeed it does. One of the problems is confusing conservatism with right-wing ideological purity.

Mr. Allitt does not discover a perfect unanimity of conservative outlook or judgment, of course. But certain principles or concerns persist: limiting power, defending a balanced order, securing property and upholding the rule of law -- not least against radical or anarchic elements.

What a bunch of nonsense: Reagan limited power? Bush? Cheney? Justice Roberts? They sought to consolidate power in the president and run around the check and balances of Congress.

Harrison Gray Otis, a Boston Federalist, warned that those who saw a radical spirit in the clash between the American colonies and British crown mistook the Revolution's nature, for the colonists were acting defensively to protect their constitutional rights.

Excellent point, though one could quibble.

American conservatives in later generations returned to this theme. Nicholas Biddle and Rufus Choate viewed Andrew Jackson in the 1830s as a frontier "Napoleon" and Jacksonian democracy as homespun Jacobinism.

Old Hickory a Jacobin radical?

Southern Conservatives like John Randolph (who denounced "King Numbers" -- majoritarian rule -- in 1830) opposed pure democracy no less than their Northern counterparts. Mr. Allitt shows that what may look like elitism to us, or just plain crankiness, actually reflected a concern with the limits necessary for a stable republican order. The same impulse for order can be seen, he says, in John Marshall's insistence on the judicial review and, decades later, in John C. Calhoun's theory of states' rights, a bulwark, as Calhoun saw it, against the potential despotism of central government.

Calhoun's theory included secession. Given that, perhaps Bob E. Lee and Jefferson Davis can be counted as conservatives. Imagine that.

I would say that Justice Marshall's ruling checked the tyranny of the elite, and strenuously object to his being paired with Calhoun.

During the Depression, conservative politicians found themselves on the defensive, but a backlash against the New Deal eventually laid the foundation for a conservative movement.

Anti-liberalism is the foundation for his conservative movement. They opposed Social Security, engagement in Europe, and unemployment insurance.

Its leaders argued that collectivism assaulted cherished traditions and ignored the concerns of Sumner's "forgotten man."

Who forgot the common folk? Hoover? Hoover.

It was anticommunism -- together with a traditionalist reaction to the social turmoil of the 1960s and 1970s -- that finally gave conservatism a wide base of support. The tenets of the movement included a suspicion of government programs and a faith in the wealth-creating capacities of capitalism. Both seem almost quaint in Barack Obama's America.

Ach, it is the hippies, with their free love and drugs that resulted in Obama.