1953: A Critical Year

1953 the year of The Conservative Mind was a critical year in American politics and conservatism. Dwight Eisenhower was inaugurated as President, signaling an end to the New Deal era. Conservatives such as Russell Kirk, Robert Nisbet, Richard Weaver, Clinton Rossiter, and Leo Strauss published works that could not be ignored. It was the year that conservatives began to coalesce, arguing and disputing all the while, into a political movement.

Over the next 50 years, a succession of Conservative philosophers, popularizers, philanthropists, and politicians marched across the American political stage. First came the philosophers, who presented their ideas usually in an academic forum. Next came the popularizers, journalists and the like, who translated the often obscure language of the philosophers into a common idiom. Finally came the politicians, whose attention was caught and whose imaginations were fired by the popularizers and who introduced public policies and campaign platforms based on Conservative ideas. Throughout this period, prescient philanthropists underwrote the thinking of the philosophers, the journals of the popularizers, and the campaigns of the politicians.

The history of American politics suggests that a political movement must experience these successive waves of ideas, interpretation, and action along with sufficient financial resources to be successful.

The rise of conservatism was also helped significantly by the decline and fall of American liberalism, which lost its way between the New Deal of Franklin D. Roosevelt and the Great Society of Lyndon B. Johnson, between the anticommunist Korean War, which it supported, and the Sandinistas' Marxist takeover of Nicaragua, which it also supported, and between the earthy populism of Harry Truman and the cerebral elitism of Al Gore.

In large measure, the success of the American conservative movement rests on its role in two epic events one foreign, one domestic that have shaped much of modern American history. The first was the waging and the winning of the Cold War. The second was the American public's rejection of the idea that the federal government should be the primary solver of major economic and social problems.

Conservatives declared that communism was evil and had to be defeated, not just contained. And they said that the federal government had grown dangerously large and had to be rolled back, not just managed more efficiently.

Because conservatives played a decisive part in ending the Cold War and alerting the nation to the perils of a leviathan state, they reaped enormous political rewards, such as Ronald Reagan's sweeping presidential victories in 1980 and 1984, the Republicans' historic capture of Congress in 1994, and George Bush's capture of the White House in 2000.

But the Conservative revolution that remade American politics was a long time in the making. In the mid1950s, Conservative ideas did not seem to be taking hold in many Americans' minds. Similarly, Conservative politicians found themselves far from the center of the public square.

Senator Robert Taft of Ohio died in the summer of 1953, and Senator Joseph McCarthy of Wisconsin, after his Senate censure in December 1954, was as good as dead. President Eisenhower was offering a "dime-store" New Deal at home while Secretary of State John Foster Dulles was accused by some conservatives of failing to pursue an aggressive enough anticommunist foreign policy.

Posted via email from Global Politics