Loading...

Professor Bloom's Delight on the Right: American Conservatism and The Closing of the American Mind

©2014 Textbook 59 Pages

Summary

In 1987 the American philosopher Allan Bloom published his controversial book The Closing of the American Mind, in which he criticized contemporary trends in American academia as well as in the culture at large. The book was largely perceived to be a conservative tract, and many commentators on the political Right praised the work, although Bloom himself rejected the label ‘conservative’. The controversy Bloom unleashed was - and is - a battle between political forces for cultural sovereignty, especially in the universities, and the commanding heights of American intellectual life. This conflict was well captured in Camille Paglia’s famous description of The Closing of the American Mind as the ‘first shot in the culture wars.’<br>The purpose of this study is to inquire into the American Right’s reception and reconstruction of Bloom’s book and to determine the initial impact and lasting influence it had on American conservative thought. To provide the necessary context, the history of American conservatism from 1945 up to the respective points in time is also illuminated in this work.

Excerpt

Table Of Contents


1987 that he gained national attention. The hardcover version of the book, which remained on the
bestseller list for almost a year, had sold 475,000 copies and gone through 20 printings by April
1988, when the paperback version had yet to be released.
5
In Geneva, The Closing was awarded the
renowned Rousseau prize.
6
In the book--adapted from an article he wrote for National Review
7
--Bloom embarked on a
genuine tour de force, documenting the entire history of Western philosophy ­ and where he
thought it went wrong. Among the concepts he rejected in the book are historicism (''the view that
all thought is essentially related to and cannot transcend its own time''
8
), cultural and moral
relativism, and parts of popular culture (such as the ''barbaric appeal'' of rock music
9
). According to
Bloom, the decay of American higher education contributed to fostering ''nihilism, American
style''.
10
Even so, the parts of the work that turned out to be most controversial--and ''as a
passionate trashing of the sixties'' have ''attracted much of the critical praise''
11
--deal with what
Bloom describes as his own disappointing experiences on campus: the glaringly ignorant students,
the misled professors, the decline of the quest for what is true, right, and beautiful. ''Today,
according to Allan Bloom,'' wrote James Seaton and William K. Buckley in 1992, ''American
students are taught that there are finally no matters really worth fighting about or even arguing
about. All choices are equally 'valid,' since all can be reduced to questions of personal preference.
The notorious 'openness' of the American mind is achieved only by 'closing' itself to the possibility
that any principles are truly important, any cause worth dying for, any love worth a lifetime
commitment.''
12
All in all, the tone of the book is anti-egalitarian; Bloom's Platonic outlook was
Thomas Sowell, see Till Kinzel, Platonische Kulturkritik in Amerika. Studien zu Allan Blooms The Closing of the
American Mind, Schriften zur Literaturwissenschaft, vol. 18 (Berlin: Duncker und Humboldt, 2002; also: diss.,
Technische Universität Berlin, 2001), 32, footnote 7. For biographical data on Bloom, see Encyclopædia Britannica
Online, s. v. "Allan Bloom," http://www.britannica.com.proxy.ub.uni-frankfurt.de/EBchecked/topic/69980/Allan-
Bloom.
5
Dennis H. Wrong, "The Paperbacking of the American Mind," New York Times, Apr. 17, 1988.
6
Kinzel,
Platonische Kulturkritik, 12.
7
Andrew Ferguson, ''The Book That Drove Them Crazy,'' The Weekly Standard, Apr. 9, 2012.
http://www.weeklystandard.com/articles/book-drove-them-crazy_634905.html?nopager=1.
8
Allan
Bloom,
The Closing of the American Mind. How Higher Education Has Failed Democracy and Impoverished
the Souls of Today's Students (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1987), 40.
9
Ibid.,
73.
10
Ibid.,
139.
11
Barber,
An Aristocracy, 156. See also Kinzel, Platonische Kulturkritik, 143.
12
Seaton and Buckley, introduction to Beyond Cheering and Bashing, ed. Seaton and Buckley, 3.
8

aptly described by John K. Roth as ''aristocratic rationalism''.
13
It is because of this Platonism that The Closing would seem to make a great book for the
American conservative reader. After all, the tendency to criticize the popular culture as well as the
universities--which contemporary conservatives often deride as ''elitist'' entities from which a great
many non-conservatives emerge--is very much in line with mainstream conservative thought.
Many conservative intellectuals reviewed the book favorably and held it in their hearts ever since it
was published.
14
Bloom himself, however, rejected the label 'conservative,' insisting instead in a
guest lecture at Harvard that ''[i]n the first place, I am not a conservative--neo- or paleo- . . . I just
do not happen to be that animal. Any superficial reading of [The Closing] will show that I differ
from both theoretical and practical conservative positions.''.
15
A former colleague of Bloom's,
Clifford Orwin, recalled of his deceased friend that ''conservative students rarely found him
attractive; there was too much Voltaire in him. He was every bit as hard on 'conservatism' as on
'liberalism.'''
16
Indeed, as Orwin went on to explain, ''[Bloom's] sentimental identification with the
Democrats persisted, even as he found it ever harder to vote for Democratic candidates.''
17
Moreover, Bloom was a homosexual and died of AIDS, which was revealed publicly in his friend
Saul Bellow's roman à clef on Bloom, Ravelstein, published in 2000.
18
This is worth noting, since,
as Christopher Hitchens pointed out at the time, ''Bloom never mentioned the gay movement in his
series of assaults on promiscuous Modernism.''
19
Bellow, who taught alongside Bloom on the
University of Chicago's prestigious Committee on Social Thought, also wrote the foreword to The
13
John K. Roth, ''On Philosophy and History: 'The Truth--the Good, the Bad and the Ugly','' ibid., 19, here 25,
footnote 1.
14
See for example the special issues of eminent conservative publications on various anniversaries of The Closing of
the American Mind's publication, such as The New Criterion, Nov. 2007, or The Weekly Standard, Apr. 9, 2012.
15
Allan
Bloom,
Giants and Dwarfs. Essays 1960-1990 (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1990), 17. After The Closing
became a surprise bestseller, Bloom was quoted as believing that ''the book is conservative insofar as there is
obviously no freedom of mind in the Soviet Union. Aside from that, I am a corrosive force that appeals to liberals. I
am conservative in that I defend the existence of the university. I support the people who are most likely to support
the university. That the book has gone up the center is not an accident.'' This quote can be found in William
Goldstein, ''The Story Behind the Bestseller: Allan Bloom's The Closing of the American Mind,'' Essays on the
Closing of the American Mind, ed. Robert L. Stone (Chicago: Chicago Review Press, 1989), 33, 36; Goldstein's
essay originally appeared in Publishers' Weekly, Jul. 3, 1987.
16
Clifford Orwin, ''Remembering Allan Bloom,'' The American Scholar, Summer 1993, 423, here 425.
17
Ibid., 426. See also Kinzel, Platonische Kulturkritik, 44.
18
John Uhr, ''The Rage over Ravelstein,'' Philosophy and Literature, Oct. 2000, 451, see esp. 454. See also Hitchens,
Unacknowledged Legislation, 259-71. On pg. 269, Hitchens asserts that ''[t]hose who follow these things have long
known that Allan Bloom . . . was a homosexual, and that when he died in 1992 the report about 'liver failure' was a
cover story. He died of AIDS.''
19
Hitchens,
Unacknowledged Legislation, 265-6.
9

Closing.
20
It is of course possible that Bloom's interest in getting his message across made him more
prone to distance himself from any particular political movement and instead present himself as a
non-partisan, independent thinker. In any event, his bestseller on the American mind was largely
perceived to be a conservative tract.
21
In the Right's camp, the perception was different ­ there was
a tendency to cherish Bloom's ideas as non-partisan contributions to problems more philosophical
than political in nature. Conservative columnist George F. Will, for example, hailed The Closing as
''a how-to book for the independent'' (emphasis mine).
22
It is this discrepancy in the reception of
Bloom's book that reflects the inherently political nature of its content. The conflict laid bare here
was--and is--a battle between political forces for cultural sovereignty in the universities, the
commanding heights of American intellectual life. This conflict was well captured in Camille
Paglia's famous description of The Closing as the ''first shot in the culture wars''.
23
The purpose of this study is to inquire into the American Right's reception and reconstruction
of The Closing and to determine the initial impact and lasting influence the book had on American
conservative thought. In order to provide a comprehensive analysis, eminent conservative
publications as well as the writings of notable conservative intellectuals will be examined. These
primary sources will necessarily represent selections based on their significance.
24
Different
responses from different factions of the conservative coalition shall be differentiated and taken into
account, as will the changing perception of Bloom's ideas over time. Therefore this study is divided
into different sections, one of which will cover the time immediately after the publication of The
20
Bloom,
The Closing, 11-18. On the Committee on Social Thought, see Uhr, ''The Rage over Ravelstein,'' 451.
21
To take just one example, in Seaton and Buckley's Beyond Cheering and Bashing, a compilation of academic
responses to The Closing, the editors describe Bloom as wanting the university to be a ''conservative counterweight''
to the larger society (2). In his own contribution Buckley states: ''That [Bloom] is a 'conservative' may be strongly
argued'' (37). Susan Bourgeois references ''Bloom's conservatism'' (66). Margaret C. Jones remarks that ''[Bloom's]
cultural agenda is politically conservative in its implications'' (68) and Peter Siedlecki laments the ''reactionary
posture'' of The Closing (129), while William Thickstun even refers to ''Bloom's radical conservatism'' (141). Gerald
Graff attacks ''Bloom and other Right-wing ideologues'' (161).
22
George F. Will, ''A How-To Book for the Independent,'' The Washington Post, Jul. 30, 1987.
23
Quoted in Bruce Bawer, The Victims' Revolution. The Rise of Identity Studies and the Closing of the Liberal Mind
(New York: HarperCollins, 2012), xv. Catharine R. Stimpson in 2002 defined the term ''culture wars'' in the
following way: ''The culture wars that began in the 1960s in the United States have been fought over four great,
linked issues: the nature of the United States and its role in the world; race and racial discrimination; gender and
gender discrimination; and sexual norms. Although the intensity each issue provokes has fluctuated over four
decades, none has been resolved.'' See Catharine R. Stimpson, ''The Culture Wars Continue,'' Daedalus, Summer
2002, 36.
24
An exhaustive analysis of the reception of The Closing would necessarily go beyond the scope of this paper;
according to one estimate, more than two hundred reviews of the work were eventually published. See Ferguson,
''The Book That Drove Them Crazy.''
10

Closing and another the time between the initial response and the present. These two parts are
complemented by another two sections which will examine the history of American conservatism
from 1945 up to the respective points in time and thereby provide the necessary context.
One of the fundamental problems historians face with respect to American conservatism is the
problem of definition. In today's popular discourse the Right is oftentimes equated with the
Republican party, but it should be noted that the two, while certainly overlapping significantly, are
not one and the same thing and never have been. It should, moreover, be noted that the projection of
present political labels, including ''conservatism'' and ''the Right,'' into the distant past presents a
significant problem of scholarship.
25
For a useful approximation, Kim Phillips-Fein provides the
following:
Generally, scholars of the Right have understood conservatism as a social and political
movement that gained momentum during the post­World War II period. It began among
a small number of committed activists and intellectuals, and ultimately managed to win
a mass following and a great deal of influence over the Republican party. While its
ideology (like all political world views) was not systematic or logically coherent on
every count, its central concerns included anticommunism, a laissez-faire approach to
economics, opposition to the civil rights movement, and commitment to traditional
sexual norms.
26
In recent years scholars have conducted an increasing number of inquiries into American
conservatism and its intellectual roots. A 1994 essay by Alan Brinkley, entitled ''The Problem of
American Conservatism,'' can be regarded as a starting point for a renewed interest among
historians in this part of American history.
27
In the essay, Brinkley stated that ''it would be hard to
argue that the American Right has received anything like the amount of attention from historians
that its role in twentieth-century politics and culture suggests it should.''
28
In this respect, the
problem of historical scholarship, according to Brinkley, is ''the problem of finding a suitable place
for the Right--for its intellectual traditions and its social and political movements--within our
historiographical concerns.''
29
25
Cf. Donald T. Critchlow, ''Rethinking American Conservatism: Toward a New Narrative,'' The Journal of American
History, Dec. 2011, 752. The ambiguous history of the term ''liberalism'' may be considered to be a prime example
of how the meaning of political labels can change over time; what once stood for skepticism of the government now
stands for the belief in the possibilities of government.
26
Kim Phillips-Fein, ''Conservatism: A State of the Field,'' in ibid., 723, quote on pg. 727.
27
Cf. ibid., 723.
28
Alan Brinkley, ''The Problem of American Conservatism,'' The American Historical Review, Apr. 1994, 409. For a
brief assessment of Strauss, Bloom, and what Brinkley calls ''normative conservatism,'' see 420-2.
29
Ibid., 410. The lack of attention that historians have paid to American conservatism may well have resulted from
their disapproving of the Right's political goals. But, as Brinkley writes, ''it is a result, too, of the powerful, if not
always fully recognized, progressive assumptions embedded in most of the leading paradigms with which historians
11

From the 1980s onward, historians focusing on US conservatism tried to seek explanations
for what from their points of view was its surprising comeback. Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal,
Barry Goldwater's clear defeat in the election of 1964, the Civil Rights Movement, feminism,
secularism, and the welfare state had all eclipsed the political Right to the point where it seemed to
be in irreversible decline.
30
Yet the conservative resurgence onto the national stage, which
culminated in Ronald Reagan's victory in the 1980 election, begged the question whether historians
had missed a greater story. Consequently, some tried to account for the Right's comeback by
pointing to ''reactionary populism,'' or ''backlash politics'' ­ in other words: conservative (re-
)mobilization as a reactionary response to the aforementioned achievements of liberalism and the
radicalism of the New Left.
31
From the 1990s to the early 2000s, historiographical attention moved away from assumptions
of purely, or even predominantly, reactionary sentiment and focused more on the organizational
activities of conservative groups and mobilization networks going back as far as the 1950s; from
this fresh perspective, the recent success of the Right could not have been a mere ''sudden backlash''
but a well-planned effort that had been in the works for several decades.
32
As Phillips-Fein explains:
''Instead of interpreting conservatism as the politics of despair and working-class reaction, these
scholars saw it as a forward-looking, sophisticated, and politically creative force in American
life.''
33
She makes a similar point about the Christian Right--defined by Clyde Wilcox as ''a social
movement that seeks to mobilize and represent evangelical Christians in politics''
34
--which,
likewise, is now seen less as a reaction to challenges to traditional Christian morality, such as Roe v.
Wade, and more as the result of a Christian political awareness that grew throughout the twentieth
century.
35
It is important in this context to remember that many conservative movements were and are
genuine grassroots movements rather than top-down (''astro-turf'') concoctions by sinister special
interests. This point is emphasized by Lisa McGirr: ''The idea of studying the Right from the bottom
approach their work.'' See pg. 429
30
Phillips-Fein, ''Conservatism,'' 725-6.
31
Ibid.
32
Ibid.,
726.
33
Ibid.,
727.
34
Clyde Wilcox, ''Laying Up Treasures in Washington and in Heaven: The Christian Right and Evangelical Politics in
the Twentieth Century and Beyond,'' OAH Magazine of History, Jan. 2003, 23.
35
Phillips-Fein, ''Conservatism,'' 733.
12

up emerged as a corrective to the notion . . . prevalent [earlier] among many liberal commentators
and observers that elite funders, Republican strategists, think tanks, and well-funded mass mailings
were all that really mattered to explain the political prowess of the Right.''
36
Conservative or not, Allan Bloom was never part of any ''movement'' (although it should be
noted that he was co-director of the John M. Olin Center).
37
The focus of this paper therefore lies
more on The Closing's impact on the conservative intelligentsia and its development than on its
reception among the mostly short-lived conservative movements that Michael Lienesch once
described as ''the meteors of our political atmosphere'' that ''streak across our skies in a blaze of
right-wing frenzy, only to fall to earth cold and exhausted, consumed by their own passionate
heat.''
38
Bloom's book was of a very different quality, and as we shall see in the following pages, the
frenzy it caused among conservatives neither flared out nor cooled down.
36
Lisa McGirr, ''Now that Historians Know So Much about the Right, How Should We Best Approach the Study of
Conservatism?'' The Journal of American History, Dec. 2011, 765, here 766. While top-down interventions and
manipulations certainly exist, one should not blow them out of proportion. Nor is it evident that they occur more
often or in more significant incarnations in the case of conservatives than in that of their political opponents.
37
William K. Buckley, ''The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly in Amerika's Akad mia,'' Beyond Cheering and Bashing, ed.
Seaton and Buckley, 38. On the John M. Olin Foundation and its conservative stance, see John J. Miller,
''Foundation's End,'' National Review Online, Apr. 6, 2005,
http://www.nationalreview.com/articles/214092/foundations-end/john-j-miller.
38
Michael Lienesch, ''Right-Wing Religion: Christian Conservatism as a Political Movement,'' Political Science
Quarterly, Autumn 1982, 403.
13

I. American Conservatism from the End of the Second World War to
1987
During Franklin D. Roosevelt's time in office his liberalism dominated the political
atmosphere in the United States. Even after the war, conservatives still ''had not climbed out of the
hole they had dug during the New Deal and in their isolationism prior to World War II.''
39
The
Grand Old Party did ultimately manage to win the White House and both houses of Congress in the
election of 1952 but did so largely as a result of ''the sentiment that twenty years of Democratic rule
was enough.''
40
Moreover, the Republican nominee Dwight D. Eisenhower, an immensely popular
war hero, was largely apolitical (and therefore chose right-winger and avowed anti-communist
Richard Nixon as his running mate to signal goodwill to the hard-liners in the GOP).
41
Eisenhower
provided steady, pragmatic and non-ideological stewardship; after the Congress was regained by the
Democrats in 1954, he went on to implement essentially liberal policies.
42
His presidency could
hardly be called that of a convinced conservative.
It was outside of the political arena that conservatives slowly found an intellectual basis on
which to erect their ideological edifice. From 1943 to 1953 conservatives had rallied around
intellectuals like Austrian economist and philosopher F. A. Hayek, who in his famous 1944 book
The Road to Serfdom had argued forcefully against any form of economic and political
''collectivism,'' which he saw as the breeding ground for both Communism and German National
Socialism.
43
In 1953, a number of books were published that would influence generations of
conservatives to come: Leo Strauss's Natural Right and History, Robert Nisbet's The Quest for
Community, Whittaker Chamber's Witness, and, above all, The Conservative Mind by Russell
39
Jonathan M. Schoenwald, A Time for Choosing. The Rise of Modern American Conservatism (New York: Oxford
University Press, 2001), 16.
40
Paul S. Boyer et al., The Enduring Vision. A History of the American People, 7th ed. (Boston: Wadsworth, 2011),
815-6.
41
Ibid.,
816.
42
Ibid.,
817.
43
Dan T. Carter, ''The Rise of Conservatism since World War II,'' OAH Magazine of History, Jan. 2003, 11, here 12. It
should be noted that Hayek, much like Milton Friedman, did not consider himself to be a 'conservative' but preferred
the term '(classical) liberal'. Cf. F. A. Hayek, ''Why I Am Not A Conservative,'' What Is Conservatism?, ed. Frank S.
Meyer (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1964), 88.
14

Kirk.
44
The latter also became an early contributor to another milestone in the intellectual history of
the American Right, namely the opinion journal National Review, which was founded by William F.
Buckley, Jr. in 1955.
45
According to Buckley, the new magazine was directed at intellectuals; its aim
was to ''revitalize the conservative position'' and to ''influence the opinion-makers'' in the US.
46
National Review's emphasis on intellectually respectable conservative opinion proved a winning
concept ­ its circulation had been about 30,000 in 1960 and then jumped to 60,000 in 1963, to over
90,000 in 1964, to around 95,000 in 1965, and finally to more than 100,000 in the late 1960s.
47
The
magazine nevertheless relied--and relies--on donations to stay afloat: Buckley remarked in 2005
that National Review had lost about $25 million over 50 years.
48
While there have been other
conservative publications of considerable reach and importance, National Review's distinction,
according to Martin Durham, was ''that it combined preexisting trends into a self-conscious
conservatism''.
49
Much of post-war conservatism was, perhaps counter-intuitively, based on a great deal of
intellectual innovation. How utterly liberalism dominated American politics is manifest in the
literary and cultural critic Lionel Trilling's devastating verdict on conservatism in his 1950 book
The Liberal Imagination: ''In the United States at this time liberalism is not only the dominant but
even the sole intellectual tradition. For it is the plain fact that nowadays there are no conservative or
reactionary ideas in general circulation.''
50
The ''birth of postwar conservatism''
51
therefore
constituted a formidable task for intellectuals such as Russell Kirk or William F. Buckley and
consisted of invention as much as of renaissance. As Lisa McGirr notes:
While the ideas that came under the umbrella of the post­World War II Right can
certainly be traced back to earlier incarnations (deep distrust of the state, libertarian
44
Cf.
Schoenwald,
A Time for Choosing, 21.
45
George H. Nash, The Conservative Intellectual Movement in America since 1945, 30th anniversary ed. (Wilmington,
DE: ISI Books, 2006), 223-4.
46
Quoted in ibid., 223.
47
Ibid.,
463.
48
Gary Shapiro, ''An 'Encounter' With Conservative Publishing,'' The New York Sun, Dec. 9, 2005.
http://www.nysun.com/on-the-town/encounter-with-conservative-publishing/24259/.
49
Martin Durham, ''On American Conservatism and Kim Phillips-Fein's Survey of the Field,'' The Journal of
American History, Dec. 2011, 756, quote on pg. 757-8. Other notable conservative publications in the post-war
period included Modern Age, Human Events, and The Freeman; see Nash, The Conservative Intellectual Movement
in America, 560.
50
Lionel
Trilling,
The Liberal Imagination (New York: Viking, 1950), ix.
51
Cf.
Schoenwald,
A Time for Choosing, 14.
15

individualism, an emphasis on property as the fundamental basis of freedom,
antiradicalism, and staunch religiosity were all prevalent currents in American history),
such echoes do not amount to a cohesive conservative tradition that the postwar Right
was merely carrying forward. The intensity of the soul searching and philosophical
debates among conservatives after World War II evince the extent to which
conservatism was being constructed afresh from a new constellation of ideas.
52
One of the characteristics of this new conservative movement--and also an impediment to
it--was its constant quarrel with more radical elements like Robert H. W. Welch, Jr.'s John Birch
Society (JBS), which rose to prominence in the early 1960s. Mired in anti-communist conspiracy
theories, the JBS attracted almost 100,000 members and drew to itself significant attention from all
corners of the public sphere.
53
Many respectable conservatives quickly came to believe that
fanaticism in their own ranks could hurt the conservative cause. W. F. Buckley, Jr. in 1961 warned
against a liberal press bent on exploiting the JBS in order to ''anathematize the entire American right
wing,'' and Russell Kirk attacked Welch and other extremists who harmed ''responsible
conservatism'' more than communism.
54
Other conservative grassroots efforts at the time--
frequently with a Christian bent--included the Rev. Carl Mclntire's Twentieth Century
Reformation, Dr. Fred Schwarz's Christian Anti-Communism Crusade, the Rev. Billy James
Hargis's Christian Crusade, Edgar Bundy's League of America, Dean Clarence Manion's American
Forum, and Texas oilman H.L. Hunt's "Life Line" radio broadcasts.
55
The tension between the
extremist Right and the respectable Right continues to be a matter of concern for conservatives until
the present day. Nevertheless, efforts by the likes of Buckley to marginalize and exclude the
extremist elements would not go unrewarded ­ the Dallas Morning News in 2004 noted that ''Mr.
Buckley's first great achievement was to purge the American right of its kooks. He marginalized the
anti-Semites, the John Birchers, the nativists and their sort.''
56
The epitomization of right-wing anti-communism at the height of the ''Second Red Scare'' was
the Republican Senator Joseph R. McCarthy. Running for reelection in 1952, McCarthy accused
public servants in the State Department, ''the bright young men who were born with silver spoons in
their mouths,'' of being ''either card carrying members or certainly loyal to the Communist Party, but
52
McGirr, ''Now that Historians Know So Much about the Right,'' 770.
53
Schoenwald,
A Time for Choosing, 9.
54
Quoted
in
Nash,
The Conservative Intellectual Movement in America, 461-2.
55
Carter, ''The Rise of Conservatism since World War II,'' 12.
56
Quoted in Rich Lowry, ''A Personal Retrospective. NR and its founder,'' National Review, Aug. 9, 2004. Published
online Nov. 17, 2005. http://old.nationalreview.com/flashback/flashback200511170846.asp.
16

who nevertheless are still helping to shape our foreign policy.''
57
After he went on to express more
unsubstantiated allegations, the Senate eventually voted to censure him for contemptuous behavior,
which dealt the final blow to his political career.
58
Though his anti-communism inspired many on
the right, George H. Nash notes that it ''would, of course be a gross error to equate conservatism
with McCarthyism. The intellectual roots of the conservative revival were extremely diverse . . . .
Nevertheless, in the great polarization of the early 1950s, a large segment of conservative
intellectuals found themselves on McCarthy's side of the ideological barricades, and a considerable
number proclaimed themselves his allies. Joseph McCarthy left a visible mark on the American
Right.''
59
Libertarianism, traditionalism, and anti-communism had surfaced in the post-war era to form
the three main branches of modern American conservatism.
60
While libertarianism and
traditionalism emphasized both the adherence to a universal morality and the power of the state as
an antagonist to individual liberty, anti-communism became a new belief system that served as a
bridge between pre-war and post-war conservative ideas.
61
Though not easily visible at the time,
early efforts were made in the organization and mobilization of the Christian Right, which,
according to Susan Harding, ''did not emerge as a self-conscious, organized, national movement
until the late 1970s, but especially in decades after World War II, a great deal of groundwork was
laid and experience accumulated that eventually coalesced into the national movement.''
62
Indeed,
the 1950s were a time of religious flowering in the US, with most of the growth in church
attendance being ascribed to ''evangelical and culturally conservative churchgoers''.
63
Still, what
modern conservatives lacked at this early point was a unifying network that could bring together the
57
Quoted in Boyer et al., The Enduring Vision, 814-5.
58
Ibid.,
816.
59
Nash,
The Conservative Intellectual Movement in America, 165.
60
Cf.
Schoenwald,
A Time for Choosing, 19. Lisa McGirr emphasizes the significant challenge that the New Deal had
been to American libertarianism: ''The 'libertarian' antistatism of the post­World War II Right was an echo of the
'classical liberalism' at the very heart of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century notions of state and economy. As a
political persuasion, this form of conservatism could not survive the triple challenges of depression, world war, and
Cold War. As a result, postwar conservatives would be far more willing to embrace a strong-armed state for defense
and to bolster free markets than 'classical liberals' had been,'' see ''Now that Historians Know So Much about the
Right,'' 769.
61
Cf.
Schoenwald,
A Time for Choosing, 19; see also 31.
62
Susan F. Harding, "American Protestant Moralism and the Secular Imagination: From Temperance to the Moral
Majority," Social Research: An International Quarterly, Winter 2009, 1277, here 1280.
63
Carter, ''The Rise of Conservatism after World War II,'' 13.
17

different branches of conservatism and serve as a vehicle for electoral victories.
64
Many conservatives lamented this fragmentation, yet there were also more appreciative
voices. One such example is W. F. Buckley, Jr.'s contribution to the communist-turned-conservative
Frank S. Meyer's 1964 compilation What is Conservatism?.
65
In his ''Notes Towards an Empirical
Definition of Conservatism,'' Buckley wrote:
The freeway remains large, large enough to accommodate very different players, with
highly different prejudices and techniques: from Frank Meyer, with his metaphysics of
freedom, to Russell Kirk, with his traditionalist preoccupations; from Brent Bozell with
his vision of the church-centered society to Garry Wills and his insuperable wall of
separation; from Willmoore Kendall and Ernest van den Haag with their emphasis on
the consensual society to Milton Friedman and the Open Society--the differences are
now tonal, now substantive; but they do not appear to be choking each other off.
66
In the 1960s, the basis for conservative politics initially was ''[t]raditional antistatism,
muscular anticommunism, a vague uneasiness over accelerating social change, and a hostility to
federally supported civil rights''.
67
The unfolding events of that decade had as much of an impact on
the Right as they had on the Left. After John F. Kennedy's self-confident liberalism, the in many
ways even more liberal Lyndon B. Johnson years, along with the Great Society and Civil Rights
policies that accompanied them, ironically would prove so disruptive that they did a great deal to
unify the right. But first, the presidential campaign of Barry Goldwater served as an opportunity for
conservatives to test the waters of electoral competition.
Unlike Eisenhower, Goldwater was a genuine conservative. A Republican Senator from
Arizona since 1953, he came to national prominence through the publication of his book The
Conscience of a Conservative in 1960. The book, which was actually written by the conservative
activist and author L. Brent Bozell, sold 3,500,000 copies by 1964 and stressed the importance of
limited government in the US; it was also a testimony to how conservative intellectuals--the ''idea
men''--underwrote and supported Goldwater and his later presidential campaign.
68
In fact,
Goldwater's perhaps most famous remark--''Extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice;
moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue''--which he made in his acceptance speech at the
64
Cf.
Schoenwald,
A Time for Choosing, 21.
65
On Meyer's conservatism, see Nash, The Conservative Intellectual Movement in America, 149-50.
66
William F. Buckley, Jr., ''Notes Towards an Empirical Definition of Conservatism,'' What Is Conservatism? ed.
Frank S. Meyer (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1964), 211, here 226.
67
Carter, ''The Rise of Conservatism after World War II,'' 14.
68
Nash,
The Conservative Intellectual Movement in America, 319-20 and 457-8.
18

1964 Republican convention, was likely written by the academician and intellectual Harry V.
Jaffa.
69
Goldwater's electoral coalition in 1964 consisted of economic, social, and religious
conservatives as well as of anti-integrationist whites.
70
The election proved disastrous for
Goldwater, with only 27 million votes cast in his favor, and 43 million in Lyndon B. Johnson's.
71
However, the defeat was only a temporary interruption for an ascending ideology. The extreme
rhetoric that respectable liberals had used to denounce Goldwater served as an ''intensely
educational experience'' for the Right.
72
Anticipating contemporary conservative antipathy to the
mass (''mainstream'') media, often perceived to harbor an ill-concealed liberal bias, Frank S. Meyer
remarked after the election that ''[t]he mass-communication network, solidly in Liberal hands, is
even more formidable an opponent than conservatives had thought''.
73
With lessons learned and
great personnel and intellectual resources to draw from, conservatives came out of the election in a
surprisingly strong position. As George H. Nash notes: ''What seems most noteworthy in retrospect
was not the magnitude of the movement's defeat . . . but the rapidity of its recovery. The
extraordinary resiliency of the Right was apparent in the increasing ties between intellectuals and
politicians''.
74
The Goldwater campaign also introduced to the country a rising star of the
conservative movement, Ronald Reagan, who in support of Goldwater gave his famous ''A Time for
Choosing'' TV speech in 1964.
75
Republican John McCain, who succeeded Goldwater as a Senator
from Arizona, remarked in 1994 that ''[Goldwater] has made his contribution--which transformed
the Republican Party from an Eastern elitist organization to the breeding ground for the election of
Ronald Reagan.''
76
In the 1960s, Lyndon B. Johnson's sweeping Great Society reforms, Civil Rights legislation,
(race) riots, and finally the Vietnam war all contributed to an increasingly heated political
atmosphere; in the end, ''the liberal consensus exploded.''
77
Much attention was paid to the emerging
69
Ibid., 347. On Jaffa, see 344-48.
70
Boyer et al., The Enduring Vision, 869.
71
Ibid.
72
Nash,
The Conservative Intellectual Movement in America, 459.
73
Quoted in ibid., 459-60.
74
Ibid.,
460-61.
75
Boyer et al., The Enduring Vision, 919.
76
Quoted in Lloyd Grove, ''Barry Goldwater's Left Turn,'' The Washington Post, Jul. 28, 1994.
77
Boyer et al., The Enduring Vision, 882.
19

New Left, represented by organizations like the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), but,
below the surface, there was a shift to the right. While in 1966 the SDS, organized four years
earlier, had about 2,000 members, the right-wing Young Americans for Freedom (YAF), which was
founded in 1960 at the home of W. F. Buckley, Jr., had 28,000.
78
The YAF would become ''the
seedbed of a new generation of conservatives who later gained control of the GOP, yet it was
overshadowed in the 1960s by young activists in the New Left.''
79
The rightward shift in US society by the late 1960s has been explained by some historians as
a ''backlash'' among white middle-class voters who shrunk from a liberalism that they increasingly
identified with the radical politics of the New Left, the growing militancy of Black Power and the
anti-war movement, feminism, and gay rights.
80
Supporters of this thesis might point to the
Democratic governor of Alabama, George Wallace, whose ''thinly veiled appeal for white
supremacy''
81
enabled him to garner 12.9 percent of the votes as an Independent candidate in the
presidential election of 1968. Even so, Republican Richard Nixon managed to win the race with
43.4 percent of ballots cast.
82
The approximately 40 million popular votes which went to non-liberal
candidates in that election were also a testimony to the intellectual influence of Buckley and other
conservatives whose steady work seemed to have come to fruition with the election of right-wing
''Dick'' Nixon.
This, however, quickly turned out to be an illusion. Midway through Nixon's first term,
conservatives became increasingly dispirited by his moderate policies, with some even wondering if
a more conservative candidate would have to be nominated for the 1972 presidential election.
83
This
disillusionment stemmed from Nixon's endorsement of a number of liberal causes, such as
environmental protection.
84
An even larger affront to the Right was his foreign policy, which was
shaped primarily by his outreach to China, contributing to what one conservative described as ''the
illusion of détente'' and Nixon's ''failure to call public attention to the deteriorated American military
position''.
85
Consequently, on August 10, 1971, eminent conservatives came together to publish a
78
Nash,
The Conservative Intellectual Movement in America, 456 and 481.
79
Boyer et al., The Enduring Vision, 886.
80
Phillips-Fein, ''Conservatism: A State of the Field,'' 726.
81
Boyer et al., The Enduring Vision, 899.
82
Ibid.,
900.
83
Schoenwald,
A Time for Choosing, 255.
84
Boyer et al., The Enduring Vision, 898 and 902.
85
Both quotes, unattributed, in Nash, The Conservative Intellectual Movement in America, 537-8; emphasis in the
original.
20

Details

Pages
Type of Edition
Erstausgabe
Year
2014
ISBN (eBook)
9783954898039
ISBN (Softcover)
9783954893034
File size
707 KB
Language
English
Publication date
2014 (August)
Keywords
professor bloom delight right american conservatism closing mind
Previous

Title: Professor Bloom's Delight on the Right: American Conservatism and The Closing of the American Mind
book preview page numper 1
book preview page numper 2
book preview page numper 3
book preview page numper 4
book preview page numper 5
book preview page numper 6
book preview page numper 7
book preview page numper 8
book preview page numper 9
book preview page numper 10
book preview page numper 11
book preview page numper 12
59 pages
Cookie-Einstellungen