Histories of the rise and evolution of American conservatism now dominate the field of twentieth-century US history. Recent books include nuanced portraits of postwar suburban conflicts over education, religious freedom, and taxation;Footnote ¹ long-standing intellectual debates about America's founding, present-day character, and murky future;Footnote ² postindustrial urban imbroglios defined by poverty, crime, and economic decline;Footnote ³ protracted political battles to control Congress, the Supreme Court, and the White House;Footnote ⁴ and fierce twentieth-century struggles over work standards, business regulations, and corporate campaigns.Footnote ⁵ Princeton historian Julian Zelizer recently asserted that this new scholarly era represents a welcome chapter in the post-1980 scholarly renaissance concerning the American right because this next generation of scholars “will have to start developing a historical narrative about the divisions, opposition, struggles, and compromises that conservatives grappled with throughout the postwar period, even when they obtained the highest positions of power.” Yet the books under review in this essay seem to indicate that substantive reconsideration may not accompany the wave of books completed after George W. Bush's presidency, eight years that demand, as Zelizer emphasizes, a careful historiographic recalibration of the complexity and richness of American politics, not just the modern conservative movement.Footnote ⁶

Understandings of American conservatism have still greatly improved. This rich field of inquiry in fact lay fallow for many years. The pioneering historians in the early postwar years had seen fit to chronicle the origins of a supposed liberal consensus, almost deeming the Roosevelt years a kind of end to American history. Indeed, historian Richard Hofstadter dismissed the right, and its standard-bearer Barry Goldwater, as mentally unstable “pseudo-conservatives” unable to grapple with modernity. His famous essays, “The Pseudo-conservative Revolt” and “Pseudo-conservatism Revisited: A Postscript,” appeared in sociologist Daniel Bell's famous edited collection The Radical Right (1963), an update to his 1955 New American Right prepared in the run-up to Goldwater's much-lampooned 1964 presidential run.Footnote ⁷ Yet New Left scholars proved themselves more incensed with Bell and his contemporaries' assertion that the American political tradition had not nurtured a left. Thus upstarts in the fields of American social, intellectual, and labor history spent years proving that there had always been a radical critique of America's liberal tradition.Footnote ⁸

Only a few looked to the right in these years. James T. Patterson stood out among them. His Congressional Conservatism and the New Deal: The Growth of the Conservative Coalition in Congress, 1933–1939 explored the formation of a dedicated block of legislators who stemmed the tide of New Deal legislation moving swiftly through Congress, frustrating liberals even before Republicans regained the majority in 1946. His next book, Mr. Republican: A Biography of Robert A. Taft, profiled a senator who had remained steadfastly opposed to New Deal and postwar liberalism, be it Harry Truman's Fair Deal or Dwight Eisenhower's modern Republicanism, until his death in 1953. In the 1970s, this seven-hundred-page tome stood at odds not only with the concurrent sociocultural turn in the discipline of history, but also with the base assumption of whom could be elected from industrial, blue-collar Ohio.Footnote ⁹

Patterson had an unlikely contemporary in George Nash, who urged historians to take American conservatism seriously. His landmark 1976 The Conservative Intellectual Movement in America since 1945 offered a magisterial survey of postwar figures responsible for the ideas behind the larger conservative movement. He divided this group into three: libertarians, traditionalists, and anticommunists. Some profiled in this book would not call themselves conservatives. Many also had profound differences with others in the movement. Yet a shared revulsion toward modern liberalism and radicalism, Nash maintained, shaped their thinking, spurred them to action, and helped forge a political movement that Nash considered poised to transform American politics.Footnote ¹⁰

Nash effectively provided the rough typology that would guide the study of American conservatism after 1980. The first two major books after Ronald Reagan's election, Leo Ribuffo's The Old Christian Right: The Protestant Far Right from the Great Depression to the Cold War and Alan Brinkley's Voices of Protest: Huey Long, Father Coughlin and the Great Depression, uncovered an elite and popular devotion to principles and figures at odds with the New Deal in its supposed heyday.Footnote ¹¹ A wholesale reconsideration of the strength and reach of postwar liberalism soon followed, a historiographic turn reflected in the essays in Steve Fraser and Gary Gerstle's seminal Rise and Fall of the New Deal Order.Footnote ¹² All of these scholars went on to produce pioneering books on the failure of liberalism with an eye toward the doors New Dealers and Great Society liberals had left open for a counterinsurgency opposed to wholesale economic reform, union insurgency, secularism, left-wing radicalism, racial equality, and a powerful central state.Footnote ¹³ Yet disagreement remained over whether or not there had been an overarching liberal tradition in American politics or a postwar consensus, a dispute at the heart of an American Historical Review round table that pitted Brinkley, who placed the postwar movement within Lockean liberalism, against Ribuffo and Susan Yohn, who denounced this repackaged consensus-school argument.Footnote ¹⁴

This question lost its saliency when the next generation of scholars delved more fully into the power and approach of the conservatives themselves. Historians looked for conservatism's grassroots, a tendency exhibited in Michael Kazin's 1998 Populist Persuasion: An American History and in the works that he covered in his long 1992 review essay for the American Historical Review.Footnote ¹⁵ Indeed, the community studies that characterized much of the post-1994 scholarship on the right deployed the very methodology that New Left historians had developed to chart left-wing struggles from below. This approach, as Lisa McGirr and Becky Nicolaides stressed, promised to move scholarship past the dismissive tracts that the consensus scholars had produced, work that had failed, as Nash's study underscored, to notice the brewing Reagan revolution.Footnote ¹⁶ Still, Nash's most enduring legacy may be in the recent work on the “top-down” insurgency that Kim Phillips-Fein described in Invisible Hands: The Making of the Conservative Movement from the New Deal to Reagan (2008), which has connected the leading critics of postwar liberalism, such as Ayn Rand, William F. Buckley, and the businessmen holding the movement's purse strings, to the suburban warriors who would use their words and dollars to fashion a broad defense of free enterprise, faith, and family values.Footnote ¹⁷

Yet the essays in Kenneth L. Deutsch and Ethan Fishman's The Dilemmas of American Conservatism suggest that scholarship has advanced in some ways but not undergone a wholesale evolution. The editors and the contributors fall squarely into tropes that Nash both pioneered and rebelled against. Deutsch and Fishman offer readers nine discrete essays on individuals whose ideas and actions contributed to the conservative movement, even if these economists, literary critics, philosophers, and political scientists disagreed with one another, detested elements of the larger movement, or did not call themselves conservatives. In some respects, this volume speaks to Nash's intent to show the tenuous, fraught intellectual offensive that would bedevil liberals and left-wing radicals. Gerald J. Rusello, for example, emphasizes that Russell Kirk, the self-described “Tory Bohemian” author of The Conservative Mind: From Burke to Santayana (1953), provided conservatives with an intellectual pedigree at odds with contemporaneous assertions of a solidly Lockean–liberal tradition being put forth by consensus-era historians like Hofstadter. Kirk instead offered readers a conservatism rooted in an overarching belief in a transcendent, mysterious, naturally ordered world where personal freedom was predicated on private property, tradition, and prudence. Yet he did not consider himself a traditionalist but a man who rejected “the sot securities and sham conventionalities of twentieth-century sociability” whilst “abid[ing] by the norms of civilized existence” (125). Kirk was revered by many, including sociologist Robert Nisbet, who, as Brad Lowell Stone explains in his essay, reconsidered his understanding of American political traditions after reading Conservative Mind. Henceforth, Nisbet would cite Kirk when he asserted that America was predisposed to foster conservatism, not liberalism. Yet Kirk was also roundly attacked. For example, Daniel McCarthy explains that Yale political scientist Willmore Kendall, a divisive figure who taught a young Buckley and later served as a senior editor for National Review before he turned on his protégé and his weekly, rejected Tory Bohemianism: “Kirk's teaching on tradition is, on the face of it, an assertion of the very relativism and positivism that, in other contexts, he abhors” (188).

This emphasis on discord is needed to understand the 2008 election and after, when Republican Party leaders, Tea Party activists, and movement conservatives seemed more divided amongst themselves than united against a common enemy. This collection is particularly helpful in teasing out the tension between the conservative groundswell and this elite stratum of right-wing thinkers. Nisbet, for example, opposed abortion yet was more repulsed by the “ranks of aggressive antiabortionists” who insisted “that the origins of life be made a matter of political or constitutional law” without “respectful recognition of the power and necessary role in human existence of privacy, use and wont, tradition and practicality” (86). Indeed, most of the intellectuals covered in Dilemmas of American Conservatism, including economist Friedrich von Hayek and political scientist Leo Strauss, distrusted mass democracy. Kendall stands out amongst these intellectuals in his defense of majority rule and democracy, which he considered well guarded in the Constitution and an affront to the “plebiscitary democracy” that liberals wanted to unleash in the name of reform. Hence Kendall embraced political campaigns and legislative maneuvers much to the frustration of his liberal critics and conservative contemporaries.

Yet Deutsch and Fishman's project, as a whole, seems as dismissive toward conservatives as Hofstadter and Bell once were. The authors, like Nash, share their subjects' general worldview (Fishman even studied with his subject, Duke University professor John Hallowell). Accordingly, the contributors also hold the same disdain and discontent for the larger movement because, as Fishman and Deutsch assert in their introduction, “politicians calling themselves conservative … have been unable to define and practice their beliefs with a tolerable degree of cohesive logic … Their abuses were not merely a product of hypocrisy but failures of both rational clarity and intellectual probity” (7). Their eagerness to separate the intellectuals from the rabble is even apparent in their version of Nash's typology, which deems the three variants to be traditional conservatism, laissez-faire conservatism, and neoconservatism, “a reaction against the advocates of the liberal welfare state, radical liberationist values, idealist foreign policies, and affirmative action” (3). Anticommunism is noticeably absent and likely reflects these scholars' insistence that McCarthyism was the kind of rabble-rousing that all of the covered intellectuals, save for Kendall, disliked. In the end, such dissatisfaction unintentionally answers Zelizer's demand for a more thoughtful consideration of the fissures within postwar conservatism, even as it continues to defame the men and women who voted conservatives into office.

The movement's shock troops also continue to be fodder for liberal scholars grappling with the longer legacy of Reagan conservatism. David T. Courtwright offers what he considers to be a blistering reevaluation of the conservative movement and post-1968 politics in No Right Turn: Conservative Politics in a Liberal America. He asserts that the movement has not yet triumphed. “Conservatives had the satisfaction of seeing liberals turned out of office, the top tax rates decline, and the Soviet Union collapse,” he allows, “But economic conservatives failed in their ultimate objective, to unravel the New Deal and bring federal spending under control. Moral conservatives failed in their ultimate objective, to wring permissiveness from the 1960s-saturated culture.” “Frustrating deadlock” resulted, he concludes, which “soured voters, imprisoned millions, drained the Treasury, stoked partisanship, stymied reform, and besmirched American democracy” (6). Courtwright, like the pantheon of New Left scholars who ignored the right, does prove himself critical of liberals as well, particularly the “Culture War celebrities,” “who became regulars (and sometimes hosts) on the talk show circuit,” where they “exhibited signs of narcissistic, histrionic, borderline, or antisocial behavior” (117). “It was hard to tell the bandits from the counterrevolutionaries,” he opines, when Reverend Bob Harrington “staged Bible-Belt debates” during which he recited the Pledge of Allegiance until “atheist virago” Madalyn Murray O'Hair snatched the microphone away before he could utter “under God” (117). Crowds, of course, went wild, a rage that conservative leaders harnessed without, in Courtwright's opinion, any intention of making substantive reform. Even Reagan “did little for moral conservatives worried about immorality, and set them back years when he named a pro-choice, pro-ERA woman to the Supreme Court” (143).

Courtwright proves himself to be as dismissive of the men and women supposedly duped into supporting conservative politicians as Hofstadter, Bell, and Thomas Frank, who also claimed the contemporary political imbroglio to be a function of maniacal leaders and ill-informed voters in his best-selling, but nonetheless controversial, What's the Matter with Kansas? How Conservatives Won the Heart of America.Footnote ¹⁸ Conspiracy theories are not what Zelizer had in mind when he asked historians to question the successes and failures of the conservative movement. Indeed, the pathbreaking work on this question, which Zelizer reviewed, is noticeably absent from Courtwright's footnotes. Courtwright also seems oblivious to the safeguards against the kind of wholesale revolution that he considers possible within the American system of checks, balances, and bureaucracies, all of which had frustrated the New Dealers in the 1930s.

Indeed, his evidence lends itself to a more nuanced argument about what conservatives were able to achieve. For example, Courtwright lambasts Reagan and George H. W. Bush for not appointing justices who would disavow “social tinkering” or vote to overturn Roe v. Wade but devotes pages to the contentious hearings that pitted more conservative nominees, such as Robert Bork, against liberal Senate Democrats. Likewise, Courtwright proves himself overly sanguine about abortion rights, ignoring the scores of court decisions, laws, and ballot propositions that have greatly limited access across the country. These policies chipped away at choice and were often upheld by lower-court appointees, whom Courtwright describes as “overwhelmingly prosperous white men determined to protect property and punish criminals” who also “helped assure the continued loyalty of the base” (196).

Whitney Strub, in contrast, provides a far more subtle account of conservative antiporn activists, whose victories and frustrations resulted from a mix of political campaigning, bureaucratic maneuvering, and policy enforcement. Perversion for Profit: The Politics of Pornography and the Rise of the New Right highlights the importance of obscenity to the postwar conservative movement, particularly the white, affluent members of the so-called New Right concerned with sociocultural issues. Smut was valuable, as the title suggests, not just for its producers but also for its critics, who tapped into fears about immorality during the 1950s, when juveniles all seemed to be delinquent comic-book readers, and the freewheeling 1960s and 1970s, when a somewhat more permissive society seemed to be legally protecting an evolving “porno chic” aesthetic. Early activists actually struggled to police porn. The Citizens for Decent Literature (CDL), for example, faced charges of censorship when they asked the courts to intervene in the interest of decency in the mid-1950s. Yet members proved effective recruiters, inspiring white suburbanites to start chapters across the country by decade's end.

A rhetorical evolution, which coincided with the sexual revolution and a continued hesitancy on the part of liberal jurists to defend pornography, transformed the issue into a galvanizing force in the movement building that took place after 1964. Antiporn activists decried sexually explicit material as obscene and linked the issue with child abuse. Early Cold War fears of censorship thus gave way to heightened concerns about protecting women and children, a shift that effectively ceded the moral high ground to the Christian right. Many conservative politicians proved themselves less personally invested in this particular cause yet still pressed the issue, if only because they could not ban abortion, the Culture Wars' third rail. Reagan was not the disinterested politician whom Courtwright portrayed him to be. The President was not overly concerned with obscenity but nonetheless condemned smut, strengthened federal laws governing child pornography, and established a commission to study the problem, a taskforce stacked with conservatives who conflated sexual violence and child abuse with consensual adult entertainment, an argument against porn that grassroots activists had been making for decades. Public commentary on the final report divided along ideological lines but the conclusions nonetheless informed how conservative appointees to the Department of Justice pursued cases. Under George W. Bush, attorneys were fired for not pursuing adult obscenity cases (an issue that saw, unlike education, a budget increase alongside fighting terrorism), whilst lawyers in conservative districts were encouraged to file suit against adult-industry firms located in other jurisdictions. The net effect of these and other tactics was a kind of self-policing by porn producers and social-media websites to ensure, as the webmaster for one softcore site explained, that “we are not targeted by the U.S. government's new war on porn” (294).

Strub's well-considered argument about the movement's success is rooted in a scholarly sensitivity to his subjects, a characteristic of the best work on conservatism. He clearly sides with those social scientists and policymakers who dismissed the link between pornography and criminal behavior: “It holds true today, as it did in 1955,” he concludes, that “demagogues can profit from perversion only in the absence of an informed public voice questioning their construction of the very notion of normalcy” (297). Yet the outraged, he emphasizes, were neither the puppets of sinister leaders obsessed with power, nor reactionaries acting without cause. Sexually explicit material did become more mainstream in the 1960s and 1970s and even more prevalent in the dot-com era. Yet conservatives, no matter which branches of government they controlled, could not eradicate porn, or silence critics who dismissed them as twenty-first-century Victorians.

Perversion for Profit hence provides the kind of step forward in the present scholarly renaissance on the history of American conservatism that Nash achieved in the 1970s and Zelizer demanded for the 2010s. Strub situates the New Right within a vibrant political landscape, not dominated by just one sliver of the politically engaged public but inhabited by pro-porn feminists, reluctant liberals, gay rights activists, influential thinkers, and pragmatic judicial appointees. All struggled to enter into an increasingly public debate about morality and obscenity, a linguistic conflict aided by grassroots activism, high-level political maneuvering, and closed-door negotiations between jurists, lawyers, and clients. Such attention to power, opportunity, and implementation explains not only the contemporary islands of permissiveness within a religiously inflected, state-supported sea of heteronormativity but also the kind of political contestation that continues to divide the contemporary conservative movement, the GOP, and the entire American political landscape.