Last month, in a speech to the National Press Club, Sen. Jeff Flake made a charge that has become common among disillusioned Republicans: Donald Trump is corrupting “true conservatism” with his authoritarian style, neo-isolationist foreign policy, lack of fiscal discipline, and opposition to free trade.
What Sen. Flake and other “Never-Trumpers” fail to realize is that Trumpism is only the latest mutation in a long history of conservative evolution that goes back to the early 20th century. As liberalism settled into its New Deal incarnation in the 1930s, the conservative movement arose to challenge it. The primary goal of the leading conservatives of the era, such as Ayn Rand, Albert Jay Nock, H.L. Mencken, Max Eastman, and Rose Wilder Lane, was to roll back President Franklin Roosevelt’s expansion of government power. Conservatism of the time was defined not by religiosity, nationalism, or foreign policy hawkishness, but by one overriding concern: protecting individual liberty from the encroaching state.
Liberals of the time were actually far more hawkish than conservatives were on foreign policy. The expansion of government power to help oppressed peoples at home (through the New Deal) or abroad (through military action) seemed to be of one piece. Conservatives, by contrast, were opposed to all expansions of state power, and right-wing organizations, such as the Liberty League and America First, were staunchly isolationist. Sen. Robert Taft, R-Ohio, the leading conservative of the era, opposed both Roosevelt’s “meddling” in the economy through the New Deal and his “meddling” in Europe with his interventionist foreign policy.
This changed after World War II, when conservatives found a new cause to identify with: anti-Communism. They began by focusing on rooting out domestic communists (as typified by the activities of Sen. Joe McCarthy, R-Wis., and the House Un-American Activites Committee), but soon found themselves advocating a more vigorous foreign policy that would stop Soviet expansion abroad. Thus, conservatism had evolved away from pure anti-statism and towards a more schizophrenic “pro-war, but anti-state” position.
Even then, the evolution of conservatism had only just begun. After conservative standard bearer Barry Goldwater lost to Lyndon Johnson in the 1964 presidential race, religious and social issues began to assume a new importance on the Right. While the founding fathers of conservatism in the 1930s had been notably secular (and sometimes militantly atheist, as in the cases of Rand, Eastman, and Mencken), the late 1960s saw conservatives begin to champion religious causes, such as Bible reading and prayer in public schools. This caused great consternation among old-guard conservatives and their reaction to this “religious turn” in conservatism mirrors the current response of many George W. Bush conservatives to Trump’s “isolationist turn.”
Many have mistakenly assumed that the 1980 election of the avowedly conservative President Ronald Reagan meant that America had shifted “to the Right” after Goldwater’s loss. Actually, it was conservatism itself that had shifted toward America. By changing from a narrow anti-statist economic ideology to a broader anti-Communist and religious one, conservatism had become attractive to demographics that had previously identified with the liberal side. Reagan’s election did not indicate that America had become more conservative, but that conservatism had changed to become more mainstream.
Conservatism continued to evolve after Reagan left office. By the time of the Iraq War in 2003, foreign policy hawkishness had moved to the center of conservatism and limited government had been pushed to the margins. George W. Bush, who expanded the size of the federal government more than any president since FDR, was considered “conservative” while Bill Clinton, who oversaw a slight shrinkage of government, was considered “center-Left.” (Both worked with a putatively conservative Republican Congress.) In 1940, it would have been unthinkable for a president to expand the federal government to the degree Bush did and still be considered “conservative,” but such are the evolutions of conservatism.
Now, in the age of Trump, conservatism has mutated once again. The “neoconservative” supporters of the Iraq War see Trump as an apostate from the “true conservatism” of George W. Bush, just as conservatives in previous generations charged the neocons with being apostates from the “true conservatism” of Robert Taft. So don’t worry, Sen. Flake, conservatism has evolved quite radically in the past. It is evolving in the present, and it will doubtless continue to evolve in the future.
Hyrum Lewis, Ph.D., is a professor of history at BYU-Idaho.
