Right Nation
by Leonard Liggio

The Right Nation: Conservative Power in America by John Mickletwait and Adrian Wooldridge (New York, Penguin Press, 2004), two editors of The [British] Economist resident in the U.S., might gain the lasting reputation of studies by earlier visitors to America. Unlike the classic studies by Alexis Tocqueville and Lord Bryce, many Europeans do not take America on its own terms and often display a Eurocentric nose-in-the-air attitude toward the American cousins who still believe in the principles of Western civilization. They give the feeling of having discovered a Lost Tribe across the Atlantic. In contrast, Right Nation is very worth reading.

The authors start with the U.S. presidential election of 1964 and the landslide re-election of Lyndon Baines Johnson, who succeeded John Fitzgerald Kennedy on his assassination the year earlier. The authors give their attention to the shift of populations to the South and the West and of these Sun Belt voters to the Republicans after Arizona Senator Barry Goldwater's 1964 presidential campaign. California was the biggest prize and the home of Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan. Even when Goldwater was defeated, George Murphy was elected in 1964 as California 's Republican senator. They emphasize the importance of California 's 1978 anti-tax Proposition 13 leading to Reagan's elections in 1980 and 1984.

The South is the other component of the new political Sun Belt. The shift from the Solid South of the Democratic Party to the Solid South of the Republican Party is best illuminated by George Packer's Blood of the Liberals ( New York, Farrar, Straus and Geroux, 2000). Packer's study highlights the fissures that led to the collapse of the Democratic Party coalition. His grandfather was a US Congressman from Alabama elected in 1914 and defeated in 1936. The Congressman's uncle in the 7 th Tennessee Infantry of the Confederate States of America died at the Battle of Antietam, Maryland (1862), the bloodiest battle on U.S. soil.

The Congressman shared the South's self-image as a Thomas Jefferson Democrat, an individualist. He said: The individualist holds that man has a natural moral right to govern himself, to order his own actions, to live his own life, and that no restrictions should be placed upon the individual except for the protection of the rights of other men." He was a member of the House of Representatives' Foreign Affairs Committee and opposed Woodrow Wilson intervention in World War I, as did most of the Southern Congressmen. Wilson retaliated by seeking the Congressman's defeat in the 1918 primary; Wilson was unsuccessful despite local wartime hysteria. After opposing some New Deal legislation, Franklin Roosevelt opposed his re-nomination and the Congressman was defeated in the 1936 Democratic primary.

The Thomas Jefferson Democrat's daughter married a Yale University-trained law professor. These parents of George Packer were supporters of the welfare state and its ever-growing bureaucracy to regulate or control citizens. Herbert Packer, a disciple of John Stuart Mill and Adlai Stevenson, researched civil liberties for the Ford Foundation, and then was appointed a law professor at Stanford University. There, Herbert Packer became associate provost of one of the six universities in 1963 which received half its budget from the U.S. government for non-instructional research making them part of the welfare state establishment. The late 1960s student radicals concluded that the university mandarinate had compromised itself at the slop bucket of federal grant money."

George Packer continues: In their attacks on liberalism and big government, radicals began to sound like conservatives. The October 1966 issue of Viet-Report, an anti-war paper, made the case in terms that could have come out of William F. Buckley's National Review: The Vietnam war has begun to expose for the first time the New Deal state machine as a huge, effective and tyrannical bureaucracy, inclined to set its own policies and ride rough-shod over those who oppose them. ... The Welfare State is a threat to our free institutions." Packer saw a common Jeffersonianism in their opposition to New Deal bureaucracy among his grandfather and the 1960s student radicals before they declined to a few sects of Stalinists or Maoists. In confrontation with student demonstrators at Stanford, Herbert Packer suffered a stroke and died four years later, symbolizing the tragic fate of the New Deal establishment facing growing opposition.

Lord Skidelsky recently spotlighted the crisis of the Welfare State: Academics, puffed up their specialism, turned their backs on the public culture, and those who inhabit it. The result was a growing gulf between the supplier and users of service, between elites and masses. Market ideology, with its language of producers/providers and customers/clients, offered an alternative model of binding: the invisible hand would make the inefficient and partly corrupt public domain unnecessary."(Lord Skidelsky, The Shrinking State" ( The Times Literary Supplement (June 25, 2004), p. 3-4.)

Right Nation documents the deep ideological traditions behind the movement of American voters against the Welfare State and its establishment. They note: Distrust of government came over to America on the first English ships. The Puritans who settled New England were fugitives from Anglican hegemony--and they were followed by other kinds of religious dissenters, including Catholics. The colonists got used to ignoring rules that were made in London. Sir Robert Walpole, the first British prime minister, described British rule of the thirteen colonies as a system of salutary neglect;" ... [and] Americans repeatedly reasserted their preference for salutary neglect.""

The authors see U.S. conservatism in the tradition of Edmund Burke: loving the country and the countryside, suspicious of state power, favoring liberty over egalitarianism, but favoring equality over elites and hierarchies, and the idea of economic progress. The authors explain: In fact, the American Right takes a resolutely liberal approach to Burke's last three principles: hierarchy, pessimism and elitism. The heroes of American conservatism are not paternalistic squires but rugged individualists who don't know their place: entrepreneurs who build mighty businesses out of nothing, settlers who move out West and, of course, the cowboy. ...

The geography of conservatism also helps to explain its optimism rather than pessimism. In the war between the Dynamo and the Virgin, as Henry Adams characterized the battle between progress and tradition, most American conservatives are on the side of the Dynamo. They think that the world offers all sorts of wonderful possibilities. And they feel that the only thing that is preventing people from attaining these possibilities is the dead liberal hand of the past. ... The American Right exhibits a far deeper hostility toward the state than any other modern conservative party. How many European conservatives would display bumper stickers saying, ‘I love my country but I hate my government'?"

Mickletwait and Wooldridge are very perceptive to connect that attitude to the failure of the socialist party in America. They note: Interestingly, the left-wingers that America did eventually manage to produce clung to individualism, unlike their European equivalents. Prior to the Great Depression the entire gamut of American labor, from the mainstream unions in the American Federation of Labor to the radical Industrial Workers of the World, opposed programs that extended the role of the state. The AFL opposed state provision of old-age pensions, compulsory health insurance, minimum-wage legislation, unemployment compensation, and from 1914 onward it was even against legislating maximum hours for men."

An important question is to explain the shift of voters from the Solid Democratic South to the Solid Republican South. A leading explanation is the movement of the South to a higher level of regional wealth. Before the end of the Second World War, the South remained economically burdened by the consequences of defeat in 1865 and the occupation by federal troops. It was that memory which made for a Solid Democratic South.

In 1947 the historic first Republican Congress since the New Deal passed the Right to Work Act which permitted each state legislature to opt out of national labor legislation in so far as mandating unionization of workplaces. In total 22 state legislatures have preferred to avoid compulsory union membership as a condition of employment. The Southern states were among those that opted for the Right to Work status. Over a half century many new factories opened in the South to avoid the controls and inefficiencies of union rule books, etc. Over time the Right to Work wages have risen to equal or surpass those of non-Right to Work states. Indeed, the prosperous South has been a magnate not only for new factories, including those of German and Japanese automakers, but for immigration to the South by job-seeking white and black workers.

It is the improved living standards of the South that has made it Republican. The American South is a model of a very under-developed region (after the Second World War) being transformed in a half-a-century into an engine of economic growth. Race is not the explanation for Republican voter support where there is equality of voting rights, Black state and federal legislators, and the major Southern cities with black mayors and rural counties with black sheriffs. Virginia had elected a black Democrat, Douglas Wilder, as governor, and he was elected mayor of the state capital, Richmond, on November 2, 2004.

The Democratic Party was victorious when it turned toward the South: in the 1930's when Texas' John Nance Garner (former House speaker) was vice-president with FDR and again when President Truman of Missouri was paired with vice-president Alban Barkley of Kentucky, both from Border States. Lyndon Johnson was from Texas. Jimmy Carter, governor of Georgia, was elected in 1976, and Bill Clinton, governor of Arkansas, was elected in 1992 and 1996. Carter and Clinton were able to portray themselves as in the South's tradition, and definitely did not include any racism in defeating the Republicans in the South.

The Right Nation recalls the politics of the 1990s in which the authors consider Bill Clinton's New Democrats as actually Eisenhower Republicans. The authors state: The 1990s were a decade of extraordinary political turmoil: in 1992, George H. W. Bush's implosion left the GOP with its smallest share of the popular vote in eighty years. Two years later Bill Clinton presided over the worst performance of any incumbent party in nearly half a century. ... Yet after all this turmoil the fifty-fifty nation finally rediscovered its balance -- in the form of a New Democratic president hemmed in on all sides by a Republican Congress. This was not so much Tory men with Whig measures" – Disraeli's formula for an ideal government -- as Democratic men with Republican measures. ... The first two-term Democrat for a generation seemed happy that his principal administrative legacy would be putting the federal government's books in order -- something that would have amazed FDR and LBJ ... ."

The fifty-fifty status of American politics is exemplified by such facts as four solidly Democratic states in presidential elections elect Republican governors – Massachusetts, Maryland, New York and California. Two other Democratic states -- Illinois and Pennsylvania – had Republican governors until 2002. The authors quote Al Gore: I don't believe there is a government solution to every problem. I don't believe any government program can replace the responsibility of parents, the hard work of families, or the innovation of industry." They comment: Had Gore stuck to that message from the outset, he could have continued the Eisenhower Republicanism of Bill Clinton. But he did not."

Micklethwait and Wooldridge emphasize that the losing Barry Goldwater presidential campaign of 1964 had a huge influence on the Republican Party. Sun Belt Republicans have dominated the party ever since. The intellectual level of the party moved up from cocktails at country clubs to reading of F.A. Hayek, Milton Friedman and National Review. They note that it was George H. W. Bush who recommended to George W. Bush Barry Goldwater's best-selling The Conscience of a Conservative. Goldwater did as much as anyone to redefine Republicanism as an anti-government philosophy: I fear Washington and centralized government more than I do Moscow."" Goldwater's campaign featured Ronald Reagan and led to Reagan's elections to California governorships in 1966 and 1970.

In speaking of the impact of F. A. Hayek's The Road to Serfdom (1944) in the U. S., the authors note: One early convert was a middle-aged Hollywood actor, Ronald Reagan. When Lee Edwards, one of the leading chroniclers of the conservative movement, visited the new governor of California in 1967, he was amazed to find that Ronald Reagan's bookshelves contained heavily annotated copies of books by Hayek and von Mises." One of Reagan's favorite sources was Frederic Bastiat's The Law (which has sold a million copies in the U. S.) Evans and Novak indicated when Reagan became president that he listed the following as the economics writers who influenced him the most: Frederic Bastiat, Richard Cobden, John Morley, Ludwig von Mises, and F. A. Hayek.

The 1970s, with increased regulation and inflation, witnessed the birth of several think tanks: The Heritage Foundation, Cato Institute, The Manhattan Institute, and the Pacific Research Institute. They were inspired by Hayek's The Intellectuals and Socialism. The authors note of Hayek: American conservatives did not so much make strategic concessions to individualism as embrace it with the lust of a young lover. Hayek, the John Calvin of the American conservative reformation, wrote an essay entitled Why I am not a conservative," cursing the creed for worshiping the state and trying to constrain individuals."

One of the most perceptive historians of the U.S., Alan Brinkley of Columbia University, is viewed as on the left of center, but wrote The Problem of American Conservatism," in the American Historical Review (April, 1994). This concluded that secular elites find it difficult to accept the reality that fundamentalists can be rational, stable, intelligent people with a world view radically different from their own. For to accept that is to concede that they may have been wrong in some of their most basic assumptions about America in our time." (428). In fact, many of the people associated with fundamentalism, and more broadly with conservatism, are engineers, technicians, business managers, or accountants whose training in certainty leads them to expect certainty in social and cultural norms. Left and right may be divisions along the lines of C.P. Snow's Two Cultures; artists and novelists being relativist secularists, engineers and managers being concerned for moral certitude.

Brinkley perceptively showed that American conservatism is a continuation of the 19 th Century liberal tradition. Louis Hartz in The Liberal Tradition in America (1955) said that all major American political thought is based on democratic capitalism and Lockean liberty. Recent American conservatives were the asserters of liberalism: defenders of individual freedom. Herbert Hoover and Robert A. Taft called themselves liberals as the enemies of New Deal statism, the defenders of individual rights against the social engineering" and paternalism" of the left." (416) Brinkley says that the single most influential statement of conservative" opposition to the New Deal came from a man who always insisted he was a liberal," Friedrich A. Hayek.

The Road to Serfdom was, at its heart, a strenuous polemic against the New Deal on what Hayek insisted were liberal grounds."(416) Hayek's famous short essay," Why I am not a Conservative", the conclusion to his The Constitution of Liberty (1960), justifies Brinkley's concern to show the liberal foundations of American conservatism. The centrality to modern conservatism of the essentially liberal concerns that Hayek raised – the fear of the state, the elevation of individual liberty above all other values, the insistence that personal freedom is inseparable from economic freedom" seems uninteresting to left academics.

American conservatism represents a revolt against relativism, such as in the philosophy of John Dewey. Its challenge to relativism centered on restoring traditional philosophy, especially natural rights. The University of Chicago from the 1930s was a center for natural rights philosophy as it was for market economics of Frank Knight, Aaron Director, Milton Friedman, F. A. Hayek and Ronald Coase (the last three Nobel Prize winners). The writings on natural rights by Jacques Maritan and John Courtney Murray, S. J. had an impact on the growing educated Catholic population, including at the top, William F. Buckley, Jr.' and his God and Man at Yale (1951).)

Fundamentalists couched their essentially normative demands in libertarian language: denouncing a coercive state or an alien cultural elite" for intruding on the lives of individuals and communities." (424) Cultural elites rarely read the scholarship about fundamentalists, such as by George Marsden (Notre Dame University), Martin Marty (University of Chicago) or Scott Appleby (Notre Dame University), the last two directing the volumes of the Fundamentalist Project published by University of Chicago Press. That much of this individualistic conservatism has had a strong regional base has only added to the tendency of historians to dismiss it."(417) Brinkley pointed to the South and the West as centers of libertarian conservatism. Richard Weaver, Ideas Have Consequences (1948) and Russell Kirk, Randolph of Roanoke have Southern associations. After World War II as Keynesianism became dominant in the Northern universities, the students of the economics of Milton Friedman and F. A. Hayek found faculty appointments in the Southern universities which were spurned by Keynesians as too far from the centers of elite power and culture.

It was the Southern Economic Association and later the Western Economic Association where the market economics which succeeded the failure of Keynesianism was incubated. Brinkley saw the American West as the true center of conservatism's libertarian, anti-statist ethos. Given the migratory habits of the children of the immigrants who make up America, the West, and particularly, California, has been a magnet. Brinkley noted Stanford University, along with other California universities, as centers of these ideas. Similarly, it was Stanford that became the source of the revolution of Information Technology that we associate with its neighbor, Silicon Valley. IT is the epitome of libertarian, anti-statist ethos.

Brinkley drew on the concept of America as a Segmented Society, as much a cluster of distinct cultures with divergent world views as it is a centralized, consolidated nation." Stability in America had succeeded due to the mutual autonomy of the different segments. This autonomy has been challenged and order disrupted by elites attempting to impose a centralized culture, often by unelected judges. Americans who did not bother to vote have been mobilized to defend their cultural autonomy from the aggressions of the cultural elites. Brinkley concluded: Much of the history of the postwar United States has been the story of two intersecting developments. One is the survival of fundamentalist private values among people who have in other ways adapted themselves to the modern public world. The second is the unprecedentedly vigorous assault on those values by liberal, secularist Americans." (427).

It is the unprecedentedly vigorous assault on those values" by the secularists that has awakened the religious from their disinterest in politics. Each secularist assault on values has mobilized the religious to take an increasingly active role in electoral politics. The religious tend to be persons who seek their personal improvement. They have steady and sober habits that are focused on their work and their family. They have been regular in pursuing their education and regular and upwardly mobile in their employment. They have migrated to the better job opportunities in the South and West. It is the secular assault on their values even more than tax-cuts that motivated their electoral choices and changed the face of American politics.

Leonard Liggio is Executive Vice President of Atlas Economic Research Foundation.

Email the Editor