Creation Story

Right Face: Organizing the American Conservative Movement 1945-65, by Niels Bjerre-Poulsen (Museum Tusculanum Press, University of Copenhagen, 333 pp., $29.95)

In the ever-quickening tumult of current political debate, it is easy to forget that American conservatism has become middle-aged. Fifty years ago this spring Russell Kirk published The Conservative Mind. Forty-three years ago next September, Young Americans for Freedom was born. Later this year the Intercollegiate Studies Institute will celebrate its fiftieth anniversary. In two years National Review will do the same.

What happens when a political movement reaches maturity? For those within its ranks, the impulse grows to proclaim success and salute its intrepid founders. For those outside its ranks, passion yields to curiosity: How, they wonder, did such a phenomenon come into prominence and power? In short, present-mindedness gives way slowly to self- consciousness and to the historian's quest for deeper understanding.

So it is with contemporary American conservatism. Long neglected by most serious scholars, conservatism in the last half-decade has suddenly become a historiographical frontier.

Among the new generation of historians who have discovered conservatism from the outside is Niels Bjerre-Poulsen, an associate professor of American studies at Copenhagen Business School. Like most of his confreres, Bjerre-Poulsen is less interested in conservatism's intellectual history than in its "political mobilization." Conservative ideology, that is, is less fascinating to him than the vehicles by which this ideology was carried into the political arena. In Right Face, he tells the story of how, in the first two decades after World War II, a "would-be political elite" of conservatives set out to "institutionalize their political ideas" and create a powerful "network" of influence and advocacy.

And what a story it is. In the late 1940s and 1950s the American Right was a hodgepodge of uncoordinated intellectual and political figures -- religious traditionalists and doctrinaire classical liberals, business tycoons and zealous ex-Communists, leftover isolationists and crusading Cold Warriors, near-anarchists and converts to Catholicism, learned college professors and rambunctious McCarthyites -- united principally in their opposition to Communism and to Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal. How to forge out of such discordant elements an effective resistance to their "collectivist" enemies?

As Bjerre-Poulsen explains, the process unfolded on essentially two fronts. In the 1950s conservative leaders concentrated on developing an infrastructure of journals and related transmission belts for conservative discourse. Here National Review, founded in 1955, was preeminent. In its first decade or so of existence, NR -- under William F. Buckley Jr., James Burnham, Frank Meyer, and William Rusher -- functioned as the general staff of the conservative movement, as its clearinghouse of news and ideas, and increasingly as its gatekeeper and arbiter of respectability. Without the intellectual coherence and camaraderie supplied by its leading journal, the conservative movement would not have become what it aspired to be: a political force determined to put its ideas into action.

Intellectual consolidation was Phase One. Phase Two commenced a few years later. In 1960 Buckley and his allies founded Young Americans for Freedom, an invaluable source of talent for future battles and future conservative leadership. In 1962 came the creation of the New York Conservative party in the very belly of the liberal beast. Above all (and this forms the bulk of Bjerre-Poulsen's story), between 1960 and 1964 enthusiastic and disciplined conservative activists successfully captured the biggest political vehicle of all -- the Republican party - - in their drive to nominate Barry Goldwater for the presidency.

Bjerre-Poulsen clearly has a multifaceted tale to tell. One theme that vividly emerges from it is the many pitfalls that conservatives had to overcome in their struggle to build a viable counter-establishment. Some conflicts were philosophical: the enduring tension between libertarians and traditionalists. Some were geopolitical and strategic: the residual isolationism of the Old Right versus the Cold War interventionism of the New. Some were temperamental and tactical: between elitists who saw themselves as an anti-political Remnant and populists who wanted to rouse the "silent majority."

Time and again these differences of perspective clashed: in polemics at and around National Review; in power struggles at Human Events and The Freeman; in the pitched battle at the Republican national convention of 1952; and in the ambivalent response of conservative intellectuals to Senator Joseph McCarthy. The early attempts to create a conservative community were fraught with strife. Nevertheless, what Bjerre-Poulsen narrates is mainly a success story. As he makes clear in a brief epilogue on conservatism from 1965 to the present, the Goldwater campaign was not the beginning of the end; it was, for embattled conservatives, the end of the beginning.