The Rhetoric of Conservatism

Bruce D. Dickson. The Rhetoric of Conservatism: The Virginia Convention of 1829-30 and the Conservative Tradition in the South. San Marino, CA: The Huntington Library, 1982.

The Virginia Constitutional Convention of 1829 was the culmination of decades of reformist agitation against the 1776 Constitution. By 1829, the largely Eastern conservative elite recognized that further resistance would only stoke ever-more radical backlash, and the reformers of the West got their opportunity.

That convention would largely disappoint those reformers, as conservatives and their moderate allies were able to defeat all but the most modest of reforms, and prevent the adoption of universal white male suffrage or white population apportionment. The first three chapters of this book detail how that happened.

The final three chapters, on the other hand, analyze the particular qualities of Virginia conservatism at this period, and the origins and nature of conservative rhetoric and its underlying ideology. At the time, Virginia conservatism was deeply anti-democratic, but not yet fully defined by the "positive good" defense of slavery which was just beginning to take shape in the 1830's. Although often buttressed by references to classic conservative arguments by Edmund Burke and others, their conservatism was heavily grounded in concrete experience and a suspicion of abstraction and idealism. Government should be predicated on what had worked and what already existed rather than idealized notions of what might improve society. And liberal notions of individual liberation were a threat to social harmony and mutual interests.

Slavery would eventually take a more prominent role in this conception, by way of concerns for the sanctity of property as a basis for political stability. At the same time, the increased focus on slavery as the basis for Virginia society led to a more racially-defined conception of citizenship; so that in the 1850's Virginia conservatives would end up ratifying the same universal white male suffrage they had resisted so successfully two decades prior.

One Nation, Under God

Kevin M. Kruse. One Nation Under God: How Corporate America Invented Christian America. 
Basic Books, 2015.

Most Americans are aware that "In God We Trust" was adopted as the National Motto in the 1950's; many are also aware that the phrase "Under God" was added to the Pledge of Allegiance during the same period. Most accounts have assumed that these changes--and the increased religiosity in political and public life in general--were primarily a product of the Cold War, as American political and social leaders sought to amplify the contrast with the official atheist Communist bloc. But in Kruse's telling, the fusion of faith and conservative politics predated the Cold War. Instead, he traces the origins of the myth of a "Christian America" all the way back before World War II. The rise of what would later become the religious Right was birthed in corporate America, in deep-seated opposition to the liberalism of the Roosevelt years.

Kruse's account locates the center of the rise of the religious Right neither in specific denominations nor even among a particular cadre of politicians (not at first, anyway), but rather in the private sector. First these anti-New Deal corporate interests found common cause with a select group of charismatic and influential ministers like Billy Graham, the push to bring overt religiosity into the Federal government; then they found a willing and able agent in the person of Dwight D. Eisenhower, who shared many of the same values but who failed to utilize the creation of civic religiosity towards the specifically libertarian ends many of his sponsors had hoped to see. On the other hand, his tendency towards vagueness and ideologically-neutral religiosity created a sort of "civic deism" which would give the use of religious language and iconography a permanent home in Washington.

It was up to Billy Graham and Richard Nixon to finish the job of making Republican control of the White House an explicitly religious (and Christian) endeavor. By that point, the nascent religious Right was focused more on the rise of the counterculture and the tumult of the 1960's rather than the economics of the post-New Deal state. Communism was an oft-quoted foe, but it was the fear of domestic fellow-travelers and presumed creeping socialism from within which was the real bogeyman. The language of the Cold War served to validate and institutionalize a process that had begun decades earlier.