In 2008, a writer for The New York Times described the five stages of grief after losing a computer file: denial, anger, bargaining, depression and moving to Amish country.
That, says historian George H. Nash, “sounds like a description of the mood gripping many conservatives in the wake of the last presidential election.”
“In early 2021, many American conservatives are in a state of acute anxiety, convinced that they are under siege as never before, and that they are losing,” said Nash, who recently delivered the Russell Kirk Lecture for The Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank based in Washington, D.C.
Conservatives sense that institutions across America — from government, media, and Big Tech to the entertainment industry and the educational system — are dominated by people hostile to their beliefs. “And a censorious, left-wing cancel culture operates with virtual impunity,” Nash said.
Conservatives also find themselves splintered as a political force, having let go of the “fusionism” that for decades united five separate groups within the movement.
In December, Nash told John J. Miller of National Review that conservatives find themselves at a “sobering moment.”
But Nash, author of a three-volume biography of Herbert Hoover and “Reappraising the Right: The Past and Future of American Conservatism,” said this month that the GOP and conservatives of all stripes have reason for hope if they can unite around three shared goals for the country: freedom, security and virtue.
Here are the highlights of that speech, and why he believes reports of the demise of conservatism have been greatly exaggerated by some on the left.
First, the bad news
In his lecture and in “Reappraising the Right,” Nash describes five types of conservatives who have, until recently, dwelled amicably under the conservative tent: libertarians and classical liberals; traditionalists like Russell Kirk, who wrote “The Conservative Mind”; anti-communist cold warriors and security hawks; neoconservatives (disillusioned liberals); and the Religious Right, often described as social conservatives.
William F. Buckley and Ronald Reagan were this coalition’s “ecumenical leaders,” and from 1945 until 2016 these disparate factions held together because of what has been called “fusionism,” a consensus of values that was more important than differences between the groups.
But about five years ago, the fusionist alliance came under attack by populists loyal to former President Donald Trump. “Since then, the conservative movement in America has been a house divided, with contentious factions engaged in an often rancorous tug of war,” Nash said.
At the same time, the country has seen the erosion of what has been called its “civil religion,” the shared origin story that has been questioned by the 1619 Project and other efforts to reframe the country’s founding by focusing more on its legacy of slavery.
“For many years, many American conservatives have believed that the America experience has been, on the whole, a success story,” Nash said, adding, “Today, for many Americans, this story no longer appeals.”
“Instead, large numbers of Americans are being taught that the essence of the American experience has not been freedom, but slavery, and that even now America is mired in systemic racism. Which raises a troubling question: Will a rising generation of young people who have been taught to despise their political heritage be reachable by conservatives who defend it? Is the American belief in American exceptionalism still persuasive?”
‘Wells of regeneration’
While things might look bleak to conservatives who watched President Joe Biden celebrate the passage of a $1.9 trillion COVID-19 spending bill without GOP support, Nash has noted that William F. Buckley believed “the wells of regeneration are infinitely deep.”
He does not foresee a return to the “fusionistic status quo” of past decades. “History does not work that way. What’s more likely to happen is an attempt by mainstream conservative figures to refurbish the house of conservatism with a certain amount of Trumpian furniture, but without Trump himself as the proprietor.”
And conservatives of all stripes, fed up with the constraints of cancel culture and the demands of the “woke,” could coalesce under the banner of individual freedom. “Not just economic freedom, but religious freedom. Freedom of speech. And the freedom to live and let live without harassment.”
They might also find a few liberals who will join them under this banner, since even progressives are now decrying cancel culture and forming groups, such as the newly formed Academic Freedom Alliance, to defend free speech.
But first, conservatives will have to “lose their fear of losing” and take heart in their successes of the past 50 years, to include the creation of a strong counterculture of conservative media, think tanks and homeschooling networks, he said.
“This flowering of applied conservatism is a remarkable development,” Nash said. “Since the 1960s, what has been called a conservative parallel universe has arisen and continued to expand.”
But conservatives also have to redouble their efforts to reach out to Asians, Blacks and Hispanics who are troubled by the excesses of the left, he said. “More than at any other time, they are open to outreach.” And conservatives have to focus on persuasion rather than the “apocalyptic language of war.”
“Militarized rhetoric can repel as well as attract. And successful politics, as Reagan taught, is about addition, not subtraction.”
Finally, conservatives need to step back and ask themselves what they really want. “I believe what they want is what conservatives have wanted since 1945. They want to be free. They want to live meaningful and virtuous lives. And they want to be secure from threats, both beyond and within our borders.”
In those three things — freedom, virtue and safety — a little fusionism still exists in all conservatives, and for their political philosophy to prosper in the public square, conservatives must reject sectarianism. “If conservatives remember this, and look outward to the opportunities around them, I believe better days will come,” he said.
Nash, who also wrote “The Conservative Intellectual Movement in America Since 1945,” published in 1976, is widely considered an objective scholar of conservatism, although in 2019, he told a writer for City Journal, published by the Manhattan Institute for Policy Research, that he considers himself “a fusionist with a traditionalist tilt.”
