Today's Republicans call themselves "conservatives," but they are not. They are everything traditional conservatives stood against. Conservatism in America has never been specifically associated with a party; it is a mindset, like liberalism, that shows up in different ways at different times.
Conservatism as a political mindset arrived shortly after liberalism arose in the late 1600s. "Liberals" in the style of John Locke, the English philosopher who is widely acknowledged as the father of liberalism, believed that every man (and by that they meant white men who owned property) was created by God and they were all therefore of equal value. This put paid* to the idea of hereditary political power, and opened the way for American liberals to envision a government in which regular men ruled themselves.
This was the key concept of the American Revolution, and only two years after America's founders wrote the Constitution, patriots in France rebelled against their own monarch using the same principles Americans had. But the revolutionaries in France took these principles to extremes, trying to reorder society quickly, and their fervent beliefs led to instability and violence. Watching the French Revolution, Anglo-Irish statesman Edmund Burke expressed dismay. He began to articulate a world view that later became identified as "conservatism."
Burke recoiled from the leaders of the French Revolution, who tried to make society adhere to an ideology rather than to reality. Burke argued that the role of government was not to advance an ideology, but rather to promote stability by supporting institutions that had proven they worked to advance the well-being of society, institutions like the family, church, schools and so on. Rather than tearing up society to advance radical new ideas, Burke thought leaders should act according to what had been proven to work, conserving the best of past policies.
This was simply a set of ideas, and when those ideas came to America they did not naturally adapt to a single party. But when elite southern slaveholders tried to change the nation, founded in the idea of human equality, to one based in the idea that some men were better than others based upon the color of their skin, Abraham Lincoln claimed that his new political party, the Republican Party, was "conservative" because it stood firm on the position of the founders that "all men are created equal."
That was a long time ago. The roots of today's Republicans lie in the 1950s, when a small group of wealthy businessmen concluded that they must overturn the popular, proven American consensus that the government must regulate business and promote equality for people of color and women. In those days, Republican leaders who embraced conservative ideas pushed desegregation, high taxes on the wealthiest Americans, and reproductive rights for American women to promote family stability,
Although experience had proven that such government activism stabilized society, those furious that they could no longer treat their workers as they wished and accumulate as much money as possible insisted that an active government was, itself, illegitimate. They set out to destroy it. In 1954, William F. Buckley Jr., one of the intellectual leaders of the movement against an active government, insisted that those who wanted government regulation of business to prevent another Depression were "Liberals" who were on a slippery slope toward communism. But Buckley's Liberals were virtually all Americans, Republicans and Democrats both, who believed in a practical government guided by experience to keep the country stable.
Buckley called for true "Conservatives" to stand against these Liberals, rejecting the system that had worked so well in favor of an ideology that Buckley insisted was as inviolable as the Ten Commandments: government should do nothing but promote religion and defend the nation, leaving businessmen to run their businesses however they wished. He planned to overturn the liberal consensus in favor of a system based on his radical ideology. That this radical ideology had been proven disastrous in the 1930s bothered him not at all: it was right on principle, even if it didn't work in reality.
People who thought like Buckley called themselves "conservatives" even though their vision of a world based on an ideology divorced from reality was exactly what Burke and his ilk had opposed when they saw it during the French Revolution. And Americans heard "conservative" and thought of stability, and support for families and church and school, and signed on.
Over time, Movement Conservatives took over the traditional Republican Party and set out to put their extremist ideology into place. They tried to eliminate taxes and any government activism except support for religion and defense. And they have brought us to where we are now, with national leaders destroying all government regulation, inviting evangelical preachers into the White House, and deciding that they will swallow any wrongdoing by their fellow traveler in the White House so long as it means they can keep everyone who does not believe in their ideology out of power.
Heather Cox Richardson
Nov. 2, 2019
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