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Historians, like most people," Michael Kazin observed in 1992, "are reluctant to sympathize with people whose political opinions they detest." Did Kazin have any particular people in mind? Yes:
Overwhelmingly cosmopolitan in their cultural tastes and liberal or radical in their politics, scholars of modern America have largely eschewed research projects about past movements that seem to them either bastions of a crumbling status quo or the domain of puritanical, pathological yahoos. Thus, over a decade after Ronald Reagan captured the presidency with the active support of the New Right, historians are just beginning to examine the origins of the type of popular conservatism whose standard the disarmingly sanguine president waved so successfully.1
Much has stayed the same in the decade since Kazin wrote those words: the élites of what David Brooks calls "Blue America" continue to regard conservatism with a baffled repugnance. But much has changed—indeed, conservatism and conservatives have become downright fashionable subjects for historians.
Four recent books on postwar conservatism reveal just how different the political landscape looks in 2002. All four are by young scholars and journalists whose political commitments are decidedly left of center: Suburban Warriors, by Harvard professor Lisa McGirr; The Right Moment, by Washington speechwriter Matthew Dallek; A Time for Choosing, by Stanford's Jonathan Schoenwald; and Before the Storm, by journalist Rick Perlstein. All four books center on Ronald Reagan: his gubernatorial election in 1966 and his presidential victory in 1980. How, these books want to know, did Reagan and all he stood for manage to achieve victory?
As recently as December 1964, conservative Republican victories on that scale seemed almost unimaginable to most pundits and political scientists. After LBJ's 1964 landslide, James Reston wrote in The New York Times that Goldwater "has wrecked his party for a long time to come." Presidential historian James McGregor Burns asserted that "by every test we have, this is as surely a liberal epoch as the late nineteenth century was." As Rick Perlstein summarizes, it looked like "the American right had been rendered a political footnote—perhaps for good." But only two years later, conservatives swept into Congress, and ten new conservative Republican governors were elected, including Ronald Reagan. Fourteen years after that, Reagan would win the White House, and his policies continue to cast a long shadow over the Oval Office. Even President Clinton's two terms bear the unmistakable mark of conservative victory; Clinton achieved the presidency by shifting the Democratic Party's center a few notches to the right, as he declared the end of big government and slashed welfare with a vigor and insouciance that would have been unimaginable to LBJ's administration.
What happened? How were the liberal values these four authors hold dear, values that seemed not only ascendant but triumphant merely a generation ago, so decisively cast aside by American voters and American politicians?
The origins of the conservatism that would carry Reagan to office, McGirr and Schoenwald show, are found in 1950s anticommunist activism. Conservative intellectuals like James Burnham challenged the doctrine of "containment," which shaped U.S. policy in the immediate postwar era. Formulated by Truman State Department luminary George F. Kennan in 1947, containment was based on the premise that, since communism was ultimately unsustainable, America needed simply to prevent its spread and then watch it collapse under its own weight. Not so, Burnham and others argued: the United States needed to more boldly and aggressively combat the red threat.
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