Conservative thought in America has deep roots, stretching beyond Buckley’s National Review in the 1940s. That being said, it’s hard to trace a distinct conservative movement prior to the 1940s. (Patrick Allitt, in his excellent book The Conservatives, pinpoints the emergence of this conservatism to the 1950s or so, a periodization I largely accept) It’s not that conservative attitudes did not exist, to give a label to small government, individualism, capitalism. And to add to your description of conservatism, other strands within conservative thought include a skepticism of more abstract, utopian, perfectionist politics, alongside a more reactive faith in the ‘better times’ or ‘human nature’ that the status quo and past that the very word ‘conservative’ suggests. This working definition can of course be contested, given that conservatism has different meanings to different people across different times. This stems in aprt from how conservative thought is more anti-theoretical in reacting to political, ideological and intellectual challenges that threaten the times, be they a collective socialism (later formulated as totalitarianism within a Cold War agenda), a more liberal egalitarianism, or the identity politics of a ‘New Left’.

Prior to the 1940s, the term conservative would rarely, if ever, be used a political affiliation used by Americans to describe themselves (in the way suggested by labels like ‘social democrat’ or ‘nationalist’ today); at best it would have been an adjective for individual issues (a ‘conservative view’ of economic management, religion etc.). Similarly, neither the Democratic nor Republican party was able to monopolize tenets of conservative thought throughout their histories – fears of a disruption to society and civilization at large worked their way through the Southern Democrats or Republicans fearing a conspiracy from slaveholders, while the paradigmatic neoconservative Daniel P. Moynihan was first elected as a Democrat Senator in 1977.

The Southern Agarians of the late 1920s and 1930s are an interesting case of regionally-bound conservative movements in the interwar period – what did it mean for fierce defenses of a Southern way of life and polemics against industrial modernity to be offered by intellectuals rather than farmers? Comprised of social scientists, poets, journalists, and historians, none were farmers (their leader Allen Tate was a tiller in name only, delegating the management of a family-gifted farm to his tenants). In some way, the rhetoric of their 1930 book/collection I’ll Take My Stand: The South and the Agrarian Tradition resembles Cold War-era conservatism – they rally against the “Communist menace” like McCarthy, and argue for intellectual humanism, much like Allan Bloom would in The Closing of the American Mind. Nonetheless, they characterized communism as a menace “not as a Red one”, but because its industrial development would destroy local communities, artistic potential, and a kind of rural wonder to religion that they held dear. And unlike Bloom’s focus on a Platonic form of education and rally against student politics, the Agarians located their critique in modernity in how “genuine humanism was rooted in the agarian life of the older South… not an abstract ‘moral check’ derived from the classics”. Some chapters were overtly racist, with historian Frank Owsley interweaving white supremacy into a picture of nineteenth century conflict as being between “the industrial and commercial civilization of the North and the agrarian civilization of the South”. Yet, this brand of conservative thought differed greatly from a more north(east)ern, intellectually elitist focus on ‘high culture’ represented by figures like Irving Babbitt, in expanding themes in Lost Cause history against industrial and cultural modernity.

What happens after World War II, then? Without erasing the fact regional differences within American conservatism persisted, the term conservative would be self-consciously adopted by these figures, representing a broad banner for various different strands of thought and their political expression. Christian traditionalists, pro-market libertarians, anticommunist crusaders were still divided, but it was in William F. Buckley Jr’s National Review (founded 1955) that many of these ideas began to be anchored. His syndicated newspaper columns, books, and television programmes were widely distributed, bolstered Buckley’s distinct, showy mannerisms - “I don’t stoop to conquer. I merely conquer”, he’d opine. John Judis, historian and Buckley’s biography, describes him as the Conservative’s “Patron Saint”, which has a touch of embellishment to it until we note Ronald Reagan’s glowing praise of Buckley as “perhaps the most influential journalist and intellectual in our era”. And intellectual? While the National Review was a platform for many conservative voices, Buckley’s quasi-manifesto Up from Liberalism (1959) seem more like a publicity campaign rather than strong alternatives to postwar liberalism, as historian Seff Offenbach concludes when examining conservative views of the Vietnam War. The elevation of Capitalism and Christianity, cast in an existential battle with collectivism and atheism, recurred through his writing. He’s a brave bloke, producing what is perhaps the only workable defense of McCarthy when it’s published in 1954; the first issue of National Review that rolls out a year later is consciously intended to reconcile, or at the very least, gather different types of conservatives.

The intellectual heart of this emerging conservative movement lay in names and texts that will largely be familiar today. Both conservatives and neoliberals could cite Hayek’s Road to Serfdom (1944) within an intellectual geneaology of their movements, owing to Hayek’s emphasis on free markets and tradition alike. Hayek’s thought in turn bears the influence of thinkers like Edmund Burke, leading Hayek to regard tradition as both internally evolving within and externally competing to shape notions of society and personal liberty: he insisted only traditions centering family and property will survive. Likewise, markets were spontaneous and voluntarily generated, but also embodied socially integrated tradition that required insulation from political insulation. Reader’s Digest would abridge and serialize Road to Serfdom, immensely popularizing (and butchering, Hayek complained) it. Another neoliberal of the 1940s, von Mises, also cautioned against the dangers of socialist collectivism, while espousing free market capitalism. Take the opening statement of the Mont Pelerin Society, founded in 1947: “The position of the individual and the voluntary groups are progressively undermined by the extension of arbitrary power … fostered by the decline of belief in private property and the competitive market”, and without the “diffused power and initiatives” of property regimes and market mechanisms freedom could not be preserved.

(cont'd)