DO HISTORIANS UNDERSTAND THE CONSERVATIVE MOVEMENT?

Cliopatria has had a symposium on an article “Bush’s Ancestors“by Princeton historian and sometimes liberal partisan Sean Wilentz. In the article, Wilentz draws a comparison and traces the origin of modern American conservatism to The Whig Party that rose up in the antebellum period to challenge the Democratic Party of Andrew Jackson. The Wilentz article is worth reading even though I think that in numerous instances the author is being rather facile by ignoring some logical historical connections that might be more flattering to George W. Bush and the G.O.P. than the comparison with the Whigs who died an ignoble death equivocating on slavery.

The Cliopatriarchs Ralph Luker, Jonathan Dresner, K.C. Johnson, Caleb McDaniel, Wilson J. Moses and Greg Robinson give an excellent demonstration of how to properly critique a historical argument, probing for weaknesses in reasoning and offering countervailing evidence to the thesis (Moses is the least effective at addressing Wilentz but his argument is nonetheless entertaining in a weirdly provocative way – every symposium needs somebody to be a bombthrower or at a minimum, get outside everyone’s comfort zone).The symposium should be printed and passed around as mandatory reading in seminars for first year graduate students.

Collectively, they offered many cogent criticisms that I myself would make of ” Bush’s Ancestors” including:

• “To begin with, as Eric Foner noted in his review of The Rise of American Democracy, Wilentz is remarkably unsympathetic to Andrew Jackson’s rival, John Quincy Adams. Here, in “Bush’s Ancestors,” Adams gets no credit as a major figure in the Whig Party. The article might actually have been strengthened had Wilentz given Adams some space” – Ralph Luker

• “I’m frankly surprised that Wilentz doesn’t go back at least into the revolutionary period, though perhaps the founders were too deistic and humanistic for their anti-oppressive zeal to fit the conservative mold but their successful revolution clearly set the tone for the movements he tracks forward. ” – Jonathan Dresner

• “There seem to me, however, three significant differences between the two parties. First, as Wilentz notes, the Whigs originated in opposition to what they perceived as the excessive executive authority of Andrew Jackson, and they maintained this vision of a weak presidency for most of their party’s history….And regardless of the merit of his policies, George W. Bush has been a stunningly powerful president—going five years without having to veto one bill, dramatically expanding executive authority after 9/11, and seeming to defy the Supreme Court with his handling of the Guantanamo prisoners issue.” – K.C. Johnson

Where the Cliopatriarchs critiquing Wilentz are weakest – as is Wilentz – is in understanding or explaining the several economic philosophies of conservatism which seem to all get lumped together under the vague label of ” pro-business”. This is a lacuna that seems to affect the historical profession as a whole which collectively believes that modern economics began with John Maynard Keynes The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money and ends with Paul Krugman’s column. Any opposing view of economics from the Right is a priori dismissed outright as scribbling on a cocktail napkin – despite von Mises, von Hayek, Milton Friedman, a boatload of Nobel prize winners at the University of Chicago and a supply-sider Nobel laureate who inspired the Euro.

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