October 16,
2005 Sunday
Late Edition - Final
NY TIMES
Bush's Ancestors
By Sean Wilentz.
Sean Wilentz is a professor of American
history at
BODY:
Ever since Ronald Reagan's election in 1980, the strength of American
conservatism has largely confounded historians and intellectuals. Before then,
a generation of influential scholars claimed that liberalism was the core of
all American political thinking and suggested that it always would be. Well
into the 1970's, many observers wondered whether a Republican Party that allied
itself with the conservative movement could long survive.
History has, to say the least, disproved these judgments. Yet many prominent
liberals continue to see contemporary conservatism as a rhetorical smoke screen
intended to deceive the masses -- even as conservatives often trace their
movement back no farther than William F. Buckley Jr.'s founding
of National Review in 1955, fusing religious and pro-business-minded voters.
Such thinking, however, slights the coherence and durability of
conservative politics in
The Whigs arose in 1834 to oppose Andrew Jackson's anti-elitist
Democratic Party. Furious at
The Opportunity Society and the Attack on Big Government: Modern conservatism
rests on the proposition that Democrats and liberals thrive on a huge, wasteful
federal bureaucracy that discourages individual initiative and lavishes public
money on the liberals' shiftless political base. In his first Inaugural
Address, Reagan denounced ''government by an elite group,'' by which he
unmistakably meant parasitic liberal Democrats.
In the 1830's and 40's, Whigs said much the same about the Jacksonians. They charged that President Jackson had
established an executive tyranny, while
A century and a half before Reagan's election, the Whigs worked out
the basic ideas of supply-side, trickle-down economics. They acclaimed the
romance
of risk and private investment and a compelling but simplistic view of
Of course, there are significant differences between the Whigs and
today's conservatives. Governing in an age before giant private corporations,
the Whigs saw federal spending on the nation's infrastructure as
imperative to economic development. On this point, modern G.O.P. dogma departs
from Whig principles -- a difference that has recently caused the Bush
administration severe embarrassment.
Conservative Populism: Modern conservatives present themselves as the party
of the oppressed taxpayer and small businessman -- citizens Reagan
lionized as ''hard-working Americans.'' Similarly, leading Whig operatives,
like the
Whig rhetoric departed fundamentally from the aristocratic hauteur and
gloominess that old-line conservatives inherited from the defunct Federalist
Party. On the political stump, the example of the buckskinned Whig congressman
and
Today's Republicans have repeated the makeover. In the 1970's, the conservative
movement's adoption of the sunny-tempered
Moralism, Self-Reform and the Culture War: Today's
Republican Party owes a great deal to its political alliance with resurgent
conservative evangelical Christians, part of a wider conservative attack on
liberals as the enemies of traditional morality. That attack reinforces the
fundamental idea of the ''opportunity society'': personal failure stems not
from economic and social inequalities but from the moral failings of
thriftless, heedless, lawless, libertine and lazy individuals -- precisely
the sorts of people (conservatives charge) liberals want to coddle with needless,
destructive social spending.
The Whigs portrayed the Jacksonians in very
similar terms. ''Wherever you find a bitter, blasphemous Atheist and an enemy
of Marriage, Morality, and Social Order,'' The New-York Daily Tribune under
The Whigs were drawn disproportionately from devotees of the enormous
wave of evangelical revivalism known as the Second Great Awakening.
Evangelicalism quickly led a minority of Northern Whigs into the crusade
against slavery. But mainstream Whigs despised anti-slavery politics
and were preoccupied by evangelically inspired efforts to enforce public morality
with coercive temperance and Sunday blue-law campaigns. Democrats opposed these
efforts, upholding the separation of church and state in order to prevent
Congress, one Kentucky Jacksonian wrote, from
becoming the ''proper tribunal to determine what are the laws
of God.''
Fate was unkind to the Whig Party. Its first president, Harrison, took
sick on his frigid Inauguration Day in 1841, died one month later and was
succeeded by a
The party's sorry demise helps explain why today's Republican conservatives
who study history resist any comparison to the Whigs. If they look back
before the McKinley era to the 1830's, as Karl Rove has done on occasion, they
prefer to liken themselves to the Jacksonians,
sticking up for ''the little guy'' against the federal government. But the Jacksonians, unlike conservatives then and now, also
battled against the country's financial and mercantile elites and sought to
reduce the power of what
By lashing Whig principles to Southern states rights dogma, and updating
them both, modern conservatives have created a new mutation far more tenacious
than the old Whig Party. Invigorating the core Whig tenets about
trickle-down opportunity, the Republicans have enriched a plutocracy of
Americans unimaginable in the early 19th century and won their financial
support as well as their political allegiance. By relying on the Southern
version of evangelicalism, stressing personal holiness more than the do-good
reformism of Northern evangelical Whigs and
enlisting the Christian right in their culture war, they have built a larger
and more loyal political base than the Whigs ever enjoyed.
Of course, today's conservatives shouldn't be complacent about the future of
their movement. Bad luck aside, sectional tensions between Northern
anti-slavery Whigs and Southern Whig slaveholders finally proved
the party's undoing. And even at their high tide, the Whigs had to paper
over conflicts between the party's hard-drinking populists and its teetotaling moralists, its moss-backed bluenoses and its
more flexible officeholders and party managers. Thurlow Weed's
closest political friend, the
And yet modern conservatism has outlived every expectation of its demise. Even
today, unsettled by hurricanes, scandals and an increasingly unpopular war,
the G.O.P. nonetheless stands for conservative principles and speaks a political
language readily understood by voters. Those principles and that language are
venerable and, as proclaimed by today's Republicans, more compelling than the
confused and uncertain message coming from their opponents. As inadequate,
or
worse, as the G.O.P.'s privatizing policies may
appear, the conservatives' often misunderstood connection to the American past
may yet carry them successfully into the future.