RALEIGH – I’ve been thinking a lot lately about why people in public life – politicians, activists, intellectuals – come to believe what they believe, and how they manage, when they do, to understand how political rivals may have arrived at a different conclusion. In part, my inquiry is part of the process of developing a new book project on the history of the modern conservative movement. But it is also simply a topic in which I have long had an interest.
Many popular theories attempting to explain the formation of personal political beliefs leave me cold. Not being a determinist, I don’t buy simplistic explanations based on race or class. Experience, exposure, and education seem critical. In particular, I am struck by how the “scripts” that people constantly recite in their heads about political history, and thus about the political present and future, differ so markedly.
To most on the modern Left, for example, America’s political institutions took dramatic leaps forward during the Progressive era of the early 20th century, the New Deal era of the 1930s and early 1940s, and the Great Society of the mid-1960s. To most on the modern Right, of course, these are periods of regression, of denigrating the country’s founding principles and aggrandizing the coercive state at the expense of individual liberty and dignity.
The latter have fewer distinct periods in history to which they look for inspiration. The 1920s were a time of some resurgence in free-market thinking, especially in federal tax policy, but the Republican administrations of Warren Harding and Calvin Coolidge were tainted by excessive protectionism, and Herbert Hoover’s disastrous, interventionist tenure was an early taste of New Dealism (he made for a much better former president than he was a president, turning increasing rightward and later inspiring the laudable Hoover Institution at Stanford University).
The Eisenhower years during the 1950s were a time of government growth, not shrinkage, though the rate of deterioration was probably slower than it would have been under Truman or Stevenson. Interestingly, while the 1960s are often considered a high-water mark for leftist activism, it also was a time of ideological ferment and organizational innovation on the Right – starting with the run-up to the Goldwater campaign in 1964 and including the formation or expansion of Young Americans for Freedom and several other groups.
The Reagan years are, I suppose, the best example of a touchstone for modern conservatives. But the period is obviously problematic. Reagan wonderfully articulated the fusion of free-market ideas and conservative values that lies at the core of the movement, and instigated important changes in tax and regulatory policy. He confronted the Soviet Empire and helped force the end of the Cold War. The federal budget continued to grow, however. No major federal agencies were abolished. Little real federal power devolved to the states. His judicial appointments turned out to be mixed from the perspective of fealty to the Constitution.
Notice how the very terminology here reveals and reinforces an underlying bias? There was little progressive about Progressivism, not really much new in the New Deal (it was warmed-over European collectivism), and certainly nothing great about the Great Society.
As I continue to ponder these matters, I’d welcome comments, suggestions, and arguments from CJO readers.
Hood is president of the John Locke Foundation.