Conservative Radicals and Radical Conservatives in the Civil War Era and Today

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• Conservative Radicals and Radical Conservatives in the Civil War Era and Today
• Joseph P. Reidy (bio)

Current events reveal the pervasiveness of conservative influence in virtually every facet of life, from religion and popular culture through public policy debates on topics ranging from global warming to school library books. If today’s conservatives may appear more comfortable with the ideas and tactics of Oath Keepers than of William F. Buckley Jr., it should come as no surprise because conservatism has never been monolithic or static. Yet, for the past six decades, intellectual and political conservatives have presented themselves as the custodians of the received wisdom, as well as the political, economic, and social order, bequeathed from prior generations. Most profess Christianity and champion traditional, biblically derived values—particularly those pertaining to the nuclear family—personal freedom coupled with individual responsibility, and private property. Although conservatives of the past generally boasted privileged, if not downright wealthy, backgrounds, in recent years various pursuers of the American Dream—including aspirants to the professional and entrepreneurial middle class, the economically, socially, or culturally marginalized members of the working class, and recent immigrants—have assumed the label of conservative. The resulting mixture features class, ethnic, racial, and religious diversity.

Today’s conservatives also share the belief that the modern world’s most serious ills are the result of progressive initiatives that, apart from their programmatic flaws, display a moral and cultural relativism that flouts the achievements of Western civilization and the unique place that the United States occupies in the history of nations. By advocating for personal rights in the realm of identity politics—same-sex marriage and transgender rights, for instance—liberals and their progressive allies, conservatives charge, threaten fundamental Christian values if not the [End Page 215] future of humanity itself. Similarly, conservatives argue, liberals’ recent campaigns against the military, the police, and Second Amendment rights, coupled with their leniency toward crime, undermine social order. And, in conservatives’ view, the restrictions that the regulatory, administrative state has imposed on private property imperil the freedoms of individual citizens. Most of all, conservatives fault social welfare programs—the legacy of the New Deal and the Great Society—for speeding the nation toward bankruptcy while rewarding the undeserving. If left unchecked, they fear, such initiatives will culminate in redistributionist practices designed to atone for social injustice perpetrated in the past, the prime exhibit of which is reparations for slavery. In a word, conservatives insist that liberal-minded reform departs fundamentally from the letter and the spirit of the Founders’ Constitution and from the underlying values that have guided the nation from its inception.

The clash between conservatives and progressives is not new. During the Civil War era, self-proclaimed conservatives, most of whom were aligned with the Democratic Party, locked ideological and political horns with Radical Republicans.¹ Unresolvable differences over the future of slavery led to war, which in turn led to emancipation. Abolishing property in humans required redefining the parameters of American citizenship, which the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments to the U.S. Constitution accomplished, freeing the enslaved, declaring all African Americans citizens by birthright, and granting Black men the vote. But asserting the full humanity of erst-while property had even broader implications, which long-running debates over the relationship between the individual and society help explain. Take, for example, John Locke’s famous assertion that men form governments “for the mutual preservation of their Lives, Liberties and Estates,” and that “[t]he great and chief end” of such compacts “is the preservation of their Property.” In the Declaration of Independence, Thomas Jefferson claimed that God had bequeathed to mankind “certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness,” firmly fixing this trilogy in the nation’s founding vocabulary while at the same time highlighting the affinity between happiness and property. Soon after the new nation was established, [End Page 216] James Madison expanded the conversation, proposing that “to obtain or deserve the full praise due to wise and just governments” the United States would be well advised to “equally respect the rights of property, and the property in rights” that citizens enjoyed by virtue of...