The Conflicted Roots of Conservatism | Kimberly Phillips-Fein | Big Think

The Conflicted Roots of Conservatism

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Some factions of the right wing wanted drastic change, while others fought for the status quo.

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Kimberly Phillips-Fein:

Kimberly Phillips-Fein is an American historian. Her primary areas of research concern the role of business in the development of the modern conservative movement in the second half of the 20th century and the role of economic ideas in the rise of conservatism. She has written for publications including the Nation, London Review of Books, New Labor Forum, Baffler, and In These Times, to which she has contributed articles and reviews. Her first book, "Invisible Hands: The Making of the Conservative Movement from the New Deal to Reagan," was published in 2009 by W. W. Norton.

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TRANSCRIPT:

Question: What is modern conservatism?

Kim Phillips-Fein: Well, conservatism -- people who write about conservatism know that the idea is a vexed one in some ways, that conservatism as a political ideology contains within itself several different strands that are in some ways really at odds with each other. So one strand flows from I guess you would say the reaction against the French Revolution and Edmund Burke, and the whole idea that it's impossible for people to consciously make efforts to change society; that doing so is dangerous, that it destroys tradition, it destroys organic social relationships, and that it ultimately will lead to violence and social chaos. So in some ways you really shouldn't try to change anything. You should -- the only way that things can change and should change is slowly, through unconscious processes and the working out of organic relationships.

So I think that's kind of one -- one strain is an attempt to conserve things, to keep them the same, to not allow too rapid or radical change. This in some ways is at odds with the other kind of major stream of modern conservatism, which focuses on the market and allowing the market to do its work without interference from the state. And the thing is that even though there's a lot of continuity between these positions in some ways, where the people who **** are pro-market want to prevent the conscious intervention of the state or of collective groups imposing their will on the market. So in that sense, a certain hostility to the use of reason or to any effort, any belief that people really can shape their own history -- a sense you should stand back and let things happen.

At the same time, the market itself brings about radical social transformation. And economic development and capitalism -- the growth of capitalism really radically transforms all of those older social relationships. It changes family life, it changes community life, it changes religious life. So those kind of bulwarks of society that for Burkeans seem so important to protect are actually really threatened by the market. So in this way these two sides of conservatism intellectually seem at odds with each other. At the same time, I think they do have certain underlying similarities; you know, this hostility to rationality, this sense that inequality is acceptable, okay, the necessary way of the world. It's this certain hostility to the state. So it's a funny thing: on the one hand they're different, on the other they have certain tendencies that maybe are not as different as they might seem.

Question: When did the modern conservative movement begin?

Kim Phillips-Fein: Right. The birth point. Right, right. Well, I think the way people see the modern conservative movement in America has gone through several shifts. One kind of -- oftentimes the way it's been seen is that there a kind of dominance of liberalism in the immediate postwar period after World War II. Liberalism was dominant, and it was really only in the late '60s that it began to break down when the liberal order was attacked by the new left and by radical groups, which in turn were attacked by -- the radicalism of these groups prompted a backlash from the people who had previously made up the backbone of the Democratic Party, white, working-class ethnic voters in cities in the north, and also the support of the white south for the Democratic Party. So frequently the way it's been seen is that there was this backlash in the late '60s and early '70s, and that led to Nixon's election and then later on to Reagan's election at the end of the '70s and the decline of the New Deal order.

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