Conservatism in America

This book argues that the American conservative movement, as it now exists, does not have deep roots. It began in the 1950s as the invention of journalists and men of letters reacting to the early Cold War and trying to construct a rallying point for likeminded opponents of international Communism. The resulting movement has exaggerated the permanence of its values; while its militant anti-Communism, instilled in its followers, and periodic suppression of dissent have weakened its capacity for internal debate.  Their movement came to power at least partly by burying an older anti-welfare state Right, one that in fact had enjoyed a social following that was concentrated in a small-town America.  The newcomers played down the merits of those they had replaced; and in the 1980’s the neoconservatives, who took over the postwar conservative movement from an earlier generation, belittled their predecessors in a similar way.  Among the movement’s major accomplishments has been to recreate its own past.  The success of this revised history lies in the fact that even the movement’s critics are now inclined to accept it.

Paul Edward Gottfried is Raffensperger Professor of Humanities at Elizabethtown College in Pennsylvania. A Guggenheim recipient, he is the author of numerous articles in intellectual history, ancient and modern historiography, and the European and American Right.  Gottfried has also published ten books, the last three of them a trilogy on the democratic managerial state, which starts with After Liberalism (1999) and ends with The Strange Death of Marxism (2005).  The German edition of the middle volume, Multiculturalism and the Politics of Guilt was mentioned in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (2005), as one of the year’s most distinguished publications.

“Paul Gottfried provides something–in fact, a lot–to infuriate everyone. But even when Gottfried is judged wrongheaded, he poses the painful questions that others flee from and offers interpretations that compel close attention from all who wish to understand the prospects for a conservative movement.”