The Conservative Tradition

The opening lecture explains some definitions of Conservatism and previews Professor Allitt's approach to exploring its rich and varied lineage in both Britain and America and its fund of ideas and principles. Each is explored within the context of contemporaneous historical events and debate.

In gaining a grasp of Tory ideas about politics during the early years of Parliament's supremacy, you learn much about the roots of English Conservatism, including Lord Bolingbroke's comments about what we now call the "loyal opposition." His views would influence generations of subsequent English and American politicians.

Learn about the ideas of Edmund Burke, the Whig politician whose Reflections on the Revolution in France is regarded by many Conservatives as the founding text of their political creed. His book, written after the conflict's early stages, counseled respect for tradition and avoidance of radical change.

Prime Minister William Pitt the Younger was to Conservatism's politics what Burke was to its theory. Learn why he is probably the one man to whom it is easiest to trace the growth of Britain's Conservative Party.

The underpinnings of America's revolution were really as "un-revolutionary" as could be. See how many of its leaders actually looked back to a long British tradition of liberty under limited government and the heritage of the Glorious Revolution, and how large numbers of the populace remained loyal to the crown.

Strongly influenced by the Western political tradition, America's Constitution can be seen as a very conservative kind of revolutionary document. Learn about the Federalists' role in creating and passing it and their dismay over the eventual changes in national direction brought by Thomas Jefferson and his party.

Southern plantation owners wanted to be left to their own devices, without the federal government imposing its power on their states. Explore how these desires combined with unapologetic racist justifications for slavery to shape the face of southern Conservatism.

See how concerns over President Andrew Jackson becoming a tyrant—with democracy turning into mere demagoguery—became the catalyst for the formation of a new political party. The Whigs drew their nucleus from remnants of the Federalist Party in New England and prosperous businessmen throughout the Union.

A mood of romantic conservatism in early 19th-century England pitted Conservatives against reform movements like Catholic emancipation and the Great Reform Act of 1832. See that Conservatives vigorously resisted passage of such bills, which began the slow process of making Britain a parliamentary democracy.

Follow the career of Robert Peel, who built the modern Conservative Party. Although he presided over a great Conservative revival, his rivalries with Benjamin Disraeli and William Gladstone created a party rift.

Take a ride on the swinging pendulum of political definitions as you meet the pioneers of free-market capitalism. The same principles now considered bulwarks of modern Conservatism then marked them as radicals, with some of their admirers even now referring to them as "classical Liberals."

Can the Civil War be considered the clash of two Conservative philosophies? Judge for yourself as you see conservative southern states secede from the Union while northern Conservatives refused to acknowledge their secession as legitimate.

With American industrialization accelerating after the Civil War, at least three different brands of Conservatism surfaced, including the "Gospel of Wealth" argued by Andrew Carnegie; the older Republican values of the "Mugwumps"; and the longing for an even more-distant past evident in the works of Henry Adams.

Meet Benjamin Disraeli, the outsider who converted from Judaism to Anglicanism and enjoyed a meteoric ascent through the ranks of the Conservative Party. Creating much of the structure of the modern Conservative Party, Disraeli remained an inspirational figure to the party for more than a century.

Although the American trade union movement never created a political party of its own, you see how Britain's union movement did just that, with the founding of the Labour Party in 1900 carrying powerful implications for both the Liberal and Conservative parties.

Racism was intellectually respectable in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, with Anglo-Saxons seen as destined to rule the rest of the world. Explore how this idea influenced Conservative thought in Britain and America.

While today's belief is that men and women are similar in all essentials except the most physical, articulate Britons and Americans in the early 20th century were more struck by the differences. Explore how this different perspective made itself felt in the debate over suffrage for women.

Under a trio of Conservative Republican presidents, the 1920s was a period of prosperity throughout the United States. Examine how isolated Conservatives—including groups known as the New Humanists and the Southern Agrarians, along with journalist H. L. Mencken—deplored this turn to materialism.

The onset of the Great Depression would transform American Conservatism. Explore how Conservatives reacted to both the New Deal and to arguments over whether America should stand behind Britain in defending European civilization in the Second World War, or remain aloof from a conflict in which the nation had no vital interest.

Britain entered the interwar years sobered and psychologically wounded by the First World War. Learn how a string of Conservative leaders, though holding power much of this time, offered mediocre leadership until the crisis of the oncoming war forced the party to turn to Winston Churchill.

Gain insight into the reasons why Churchill, in spite of victory, was repudiated in 1945 by an electorate to whom he represented the wrong kind of Conservatism: backward-looking, elitist, and dedicated to class distinctions and empire. Although he would eventually lead the Conservatives back to power, he was unable to reverse the massive political and economic changes of the postwar years.

American Conservatives, already afraid of Socialism, were horrified by the militant Communism of Lenin's Bolsheviks. See how anticommunism gradually became one of the defining features of postwar American Conservatism.

While McCarthyism was making headlines in the early 1950s, a quieter, self-identified Conservative movement was also taking shape and becoming intellectually influential. This lecture explores some of the thinkers prominent in this movement, including Ross Hoffman, Richard Weaver, Russell Kirk, Walter Lippmann, and Peter Viereck.

See a third strand of the new American Conservatism emerge in the 1950s, as Libertarianism joined anti-Communism and traditionalism. Its adherents had virtually unlimited faith in the powers of the free market, deplored state intervention in the economy, and regarded personal liberty as the highest possible good.

Enjoy a front-row seat as Conservatism in America achieves a level of unity with the publication of William F. Buckley Jr.'s National Review in 1955. Anti-Communist, anti-big government, and sympathetic to traditional values—the magazine soon becomes the central journal of the Conservative movement.

Why did the Conservative movement gain adherents during the 1960s, despite the defeat of Conservative Republican presidential candidate Barry Goldwater? You'll grasp the answer in the galvanizing influence of the Vietnam War, the spread of affirmative action, and an increasingly activist—and often violently demonstrative—youth culture on college campuses.

Among the sharpest critics of the new Conservatives in the 1950s were a group of Liberal social scientists, including Daniel Bell, Nathan Glazer, Samuel Huntington, and Daniel Patrick Moynihan. See how the unfolding social turbulence of the 1960s prompted them to begin thinking in different directions.

In the 1970s Saigon fell, the Soviet Union built a world-spanning navy, and revolutions broke out in Iran and Nicaragua. See that the Neoconservatives—who had come to share the Conservatives' views on domestic issues—began to join them on foreign policy, as well.

For five decades, evangelical Protestants in America had avoided direct involvement in politics. You grasp how societal changes in the 1960s and 1970s—including feminism, the sexual revolution, gay rights, and the legalization of abortion—prompted some evangelical leaders to rethink their position.

Margaret Thatcher, a shopkeeper's daughter from Grantham, was an unlikely figure to rise to the leadership of the Conservative Party. Learn how she nevertheless became the decisive personality of her era and left an impression on the country as vivid as that left 40 years before by Winston Churchill.

Examine how John Major, the successor to Margaret Thatcher, consolidated her counterrevolution and gave further evidence that the Conservative Party was no longer the preserve of aristocrats. Meanwhile, see how the outpouring of grief at the death of Princess Diana in 1997 demonstrated the continuing emotional appeal of royalty and the monarchy's skill over three centuries of adapting to changing times.

You look at the rise of Ronald Reagan, who was to American Conservatism what Thatcher was to British Conservatism. Enjoying great personal popularity, he was able to make Conservatism seem normal, friendly, relaxed, and all-American, qualities it had certainly not exhibited in the 1950s and 1960s.

When most of the Communist world collapsed at the end of the 1980s, American Conservatives were taken by surprise. Explore America's dilemma in navigating this strange new world. Should it withdraw into isolationism, or exert its power to influence all future global crises?

Look at the arguments of those American Conservatives who were opposed to a foreign policy based on trying to democratize the world. Among them were the Paleoconservatives, which included southern descendents of the Agrarians; Libertarians; and the Theoconservatives, a group of ecumenical religious writers organized by Richard John Neuhaus.

Focus on several writers, including Allan Bloom, E. D. Hirsch, Lynne Cheney, and Roger Kimball, who lamented what they considered a decline in civilization and civility. They argued that Conservatives had won the battle for national politics, but not the one for the souls of young Americans.

This final lecture summarizes the issues discussed in the course. See why, no matter how Anglo-American Conservatives react to new challenges, they have good reason, whatever their short-term anxieties, to approach the future in a mood of quiet confidence.