Some of the ideas in this piece have previously appeared in Front Porch Republic: “Peter Viereck: American Conservatism’s Road Not Traveled.”
It has been a remarkable spectacle. A shameless, unprincipled demagogue has managed to take over the Republican party in the space of a few years. His seizure was facilitated by party leaders who—sometimes reluctantly, often not—handed him the house keys without securing any pledges of good behavior. Along the way, many of these same elites readily discarded core conservative principles such as fiscal responsibility, limited executive authority, free trade, even unconditional support for the postwar Western alliance.
The ease with which these conservative essentials were tossed overboard has led many to reflect on the potent seduction of political power. But students of American politics should dig deeper in explaining the triumph of MAGA. At the very least, some probing questions regarding the historical origins of the conservative movement are in order.
One of the early spokesmen for what became the modern American conservative movement can help here. Historian and Pulitzer-prize winning poet Peter Viereck studied at Harvard, taught briefly at Smith College and subsequently served for decades as Professor of History at Mount Holyoke. Although he was among the first of his generation of American intellectuals to write about the need for a thoughtful conservative voice in American politics, he soon became one of its most perceptive critics.
He expressed his misgivings regarding the emergent movement as early as 1951 in a critical New York Times review of William F. Buckley, Jr.’s influential God and Man at Yale. Nearly a decade later, Viereck paused to assess the movement’s short history in a perceptive, often overlooked essay for The New Republic entitled “The New Conservatism: One of its founders asks what went wrong.” His prescient appraisal can shed considerable light on the Trumpification of the American right and its toxic historical roots.
By1962, it had become painfully clear to Viereck that most of the “new conservatives” who were attracting public attention (many connected with Buckley’s movement organ, National Review) had embraced a decidedly unconservative radicalism that often promoted an intolerant hyper-nationalism. While a few “Burkean new conservatives” (such as political scientist Clinton Rossiter and historian John Lukacs) opposed what Viereck termed “the thought-control nationalists,” the Burkeans represented marginal figures in the movement.
Viereck maintained that Buckley and his allies had prevailed while failing at least two important tests—one involving McCarthyism during the Fifties and the other the John Birch Society during the early Sixties. Viereck argued that they had first “failed the acid test of the McCarthy temptation” by excusing the junior senator’s unethical tactics. They had thereby failed to avoid “the traps of right-wing radicalism” and, further, by defending racial segregation and supporting Massive Resistance, they had also tragically rejected “generous social impulses.”
The following decade, although Buckley and Russell Kirk criticized John Birch Society head Robert Welch, they persisted in defending his conspiracy-obsessed rank-and-file followers. Revealingly, they saw “nothing inherently untraditional or revolutionary in the concept… of a Fascist-style secret society, based on the monolithic Fuhrer principle.” These two trials, Viereck concluded, “were not only tests of integrity; they were also tests of balance and good taste” that leading conservatives had flunked spectacularly.
While Viereck didn’t foresee the political rise of a shady New York real estate developer, he recognized the crucial gate-keeping role that the traditional parties could and should serve. It is “in the cooperative interest of both parties,” he warned ominously, to ensure that they’re “not replaced…[by] some new movement of nationalist demagogy.” The results, he cautioned, could be disastrous if one of the two traditional parties surrendered to a crooked opportunist. Accordingly, genuine conservatives needed to eschew a narrow, tribal partisanship. Indeed, Viereck called for conservatives to cooperate with those principled liberals among their opponents to protect the republic from a radicalized, authoritarian right.
Most conservative Republicans weren’t reading Viereck in 1962. In fact, Buckley and friends would prove to be instrumental in getting their libertarian hero, Senator Barry Goldwater, the Republican presidential nomination just two years later. Goldwater was buried in Lyndon Johnson’s landslide victory in 1964; nevertheless, the Arizonan’s candidacy proved to be a critical turning point in the radicalization of the Republican party. Goldwater was not an unprincipled authoritarian, but he cultivated support from Birchers and appealed to white southerners who opposed the landmark Civil Rights and the Voting Rights Acts. Those extreme positions won him six southern states in the electoral college and provided a blueprint for George Wallace’s independent populist run in 1968, as well as the Republicans’ southern strategy.
Since 2016, much of what Viereck feared has come to pass. Peter Viereck was among the few “new conservatives” that recognized early on the deeply flawed character of the movement and its dangerous trajectory. Ignoring his warnings set the table for the noxious Trumpian feast that is now spread before us.
Gillis Harp served as Professor of History at Grove City College from 1999 to 2024. He is the author, most recently, of Protestants and American Conservatism: A Short History(Oxford University Press, 2019).
Nice.