The American Age
American Conservatives and the Reagan Revolution
The nineteenth-century Italian nationalist Giuseppe Mazzini once remarked,
“Ideas rule the world and its events. A revolution is the passage of an idea
from theory to practice. Whatever men say, material interests never have
caused, and never will cause a revolution.” In 1986 the United States is living
in the era of what some have called the “Reagan Revolution.” Such a
description, of course, is to some extent hyperbole. But the use of that
overworked word “revolution”—in Mazzini’s sense—is, it seems to me,
precisely correct: In America since 1981 we have been witnessing the
passage of an idea from theory to practice. That idea, that philosophy, is
called conservatism.
In this essay I wish to examine the roots of the current conservative
resurgence—the principal configurations of thought and protest which have
arisen to comprise the “Reagan Revolution.” You will notice that I said
“configurations of thought.” My choice of words is deliberate, for
conservatism in America in 1986 is fundamentally a movement of ideas. Like
Mazzini, American conservatives since World War II have believed that
ideas, rule the world and its events. In the much-quoted words of one of the
most influential conservative scholars of the postwar period, Professor
Richard Weaver: “Ideas have consequences.”
Curiously, it is the liberals—so many of whom inhabit academe and other
locales where ideas, or at least words, are the medium of exchange—who in
our recent history have often seemed unwilling to take ideas seriously. This
indisposition helps to explain, I think, their difficulty in taking at face value
the pronouncements of communists, Sandinista revolutionaries, and Islamic
fundamentalists. Surely, liberals often argue, such people do not really
mean what they say. It helps to explain the difficulty some liberals have in
comprehending the nature of American conservatism: their tendency to
, perceive it not as an intellectual movement worthy of intellectual respect
but as merely a front for greed and self-indulgence. It helps also to account
for the astonishment many liberals felt when President Reagan first began
to implement the ideas he enunciated during his 1980 campaign. To their
surprise, the man actually seemed intent upon keeping his promises.
To comprehend contemporary American conservatism, then, we must
consider it as a movement of ideas. And to place this phenomenon in proper
historical perspective, we need to turn not to events in the distant past but
to currents which have developed and coalesced in the past generation.
In 1945 no articulate, coordinated, conservative intellectual force existed in
the United States. There were, at the most, scattered voices of protest,
profoundly pessimistic about the future of their country and convinced that
they were a forlorn, isolated remnant, standing athwart history yelling
“Stop!” Gradually during the first postwar decade these voices multiplied,
acquired an audience, and began to generate an intellectual movement.
In the beginning there was not one right-wing renaissance but three, each
reacting in diverse ways to challenge from the Left. The first of these
groupings consisted of libertarians and classical liberals, resisting the threat
of the ever-expanding State to individual liberty, free market capitalism, and
individual initiative. Convinced in the 1940s that America was rapidly drifting
toward expanded state planning and socialism—toward what Friedrich
Hayek called “the road to serfdom”—these intellectuals offered a powerful
defense of free market economics that achieved some influence by the mid-
1950s. From men like Hayek, Ludwig von Mises, Henry Hazlitt, and John
Chamberlain in the 1940s and 1950s, to Milton Friedman and the Chicago
School economists in the 1960s, to George Gilder, Arthur Laffer, and the
supply-side economists in the 1980s, the libertarian conservatives—mostly
economists—have produced a sophisticated defense of free market
capitalism and have exerted enormous influence over the American Right.
The Reagan administration’s policies of tax rate-cutting, deregulation, and
American Conservatives and the Reagan Revolution
The nineteenth-century Italian nationalist Giuseppe Mazzini once remarked,
“Ideas rule the world and its events. A revolution is the passage of an idea
from theory to practice. Whatever men say, material interests never have
caused, and never will cause a revolution.” In 1986 the United States is living
in the era of what some have called the “Reagan Revolution.” Such a
description, of course, is to some extent hyperbole. But the use of that
overworked word “revolution”—in Mazzini’s sense—is, it seems to me,
precisely correct: In America since 1981 we have been witnessing the
passage of an idea from theory to practice. That idea, that philosophy, is
called conservatism.
In this essay I wish to examine the roots of the current conservative
resurgence—the principal configurations of thought and protest which have
arisen to comprise the “Reagan Revolution.” You will notice that I said
“configurations of thought.” My choice of words is deliberate, for
conservatism in America in 1986 is fundamentally a movement of ideas. Like
Mazzini, American conservatives since World War II have believed that
ideas, rule the world and its events. In the much-quoted words of one of the
most influential conservative scholars of the postwar period, Professor
Richard Weaver: “Ideas have consequences.”
Curiously, it is the liberals—so many of whom inhabit academe and other
locales where ideas, or at least words, are the medium of exchange—who in
our recent history have often seemed unwilling to take ideas seriously. This
indisposition helps to explain, I think, their difficulty in taking at face value
the pronouncements of communists, Sandinista revolutionaries, and Islamic
fundamentalists. Surely, liberals often argue, such people do not really
mean what they say. It helps to explain the difficulty some liberals have in
comprehending the nature of American conservatism: their tendency to
, perceive it not as an intellectual movement worthy of intellectual respect
but as merely a front for greed and self-indulgence. It helps also to account
for the astonishment many liberals felt when President Reagan first began
to implement the ideas he enunciated during his 1980 campaign. To their
surprise, the man actually seemed intent upon keeping his promises.
To comprehend contemporary American conservatism, then, we must
consider it as a movement of ideas. And to place this phenomenon in proper
historical perspective, we need to turn not to events in the distant past but
to currents which have developed and coalesced in the past generation.
In 1945 no articulate, coordinated, conservative intellectual force existed in
the United States. There were, at the most, scattered voices of protest,
profoundly pessimistic about the future of their country and convinced that
they were a forlorn, isolated remnant, standing athwart history yelling
“Stop!” Gradually during the first postwar decade these voices multiplied,
acquired an audience, and began to generate an intellectual movement.
In the beginning there was not one right-wing renaissance but three, each
reacting in diverse ways to challenge from the Left. The first of these
groupings consisted of libertarians and classical liberals, resisting the threat
of the ever-expanding State to individual liberty, free market capitalism, and
individual initiative. Convinced in the 1940s that America was rapidly drifting
toward expanded state planning and socialism—toward what Friedrich
Hayek called “the road to serfdom”—these intellectuals offered a powerful
defense of free market economics that achieved some influence by the mid-
1950s. From men like Hayek, Ludwig von Mises, Henry Hazlitt, and John
Chamberlain in the 1940s and 1950s, to Milton Friedman and the Chicago
School economists in the 1960s, to George Gilder, Arthur Laffer, and the
supply-side economists in the 1980s, the libertarian conservatives—mostly
economists—have produced a sophisticated defense of free market
capitalism and have exerted enormous influence over the American Right.
The Reagan administration’s policies of tax rate-cutting, deregulation, and
