This remains a theme of modern conservatism. During the 1950s and 1960s, Russell Kirk looked to the segregationist South as the essential pillar on which the American republic rested, and believed that in these “times of trouble” the South had “something to teach the modern world.” William F. Buckley Jr. criticized such “convulsive measures” as the 1954 Supreme Court decision in Brown v. Board of Education because they did “violence to the traditions of our system.” When a mob of white students attacked a young black woman who had been admitted to the University of Alabama following a court order in 1956, Buckley criticized the courts for declaring illegal “a whole set of deeply-rooted folkways and mores” and argued that the “white community” was “entitled to take such measures” as were necessary “to prevail, politically and culturally.” Nor, he wrote, could the nation get away with “feigning surprise” at the violent reaction.
Authoritarians’ sympathetic friends: American conservatives
In the decades since, it has sometimes been difficult to distinguish between conservative efforts to protect political and cultural traditions against the assaults of progressive liberalism on the one hand, and the protection of white Christian ascendancy against the demands of racial and ethnic and other minorities on the other. Today, many in the United States — mostly, but certainly not exclusively, white Christians — are once again defending themselves and their “deeply-rooted folkways and mores” against decisions by U.S. courts granting rights and preferences to minorities, to women, to the LGBTQ community, to Muslims and other non-Christians, and to immigrants and refugees. And perhaps again we should not “feign surprise” that they are mounting a challenge to the liberalism in whose name this assault on traditional customs and beliefs has been launched. The backlash certainly played a part in the election of Donald Trump and continues to roil the United States today.
Nor should we be surprised that there has been a foreign-policy dimension to this backlash. Debates about U.S. foreign policy are also debates about American identity. The 1920s combined rising white nationalism, restrictive immigration policies and rising tariffs with a foreign policy that repudiated “internationalism” as anti-American. The “America First” movement in 1940 not only argued for keeping the United States out of the war in Europe, but also took a sympathetic view of German arguments for white supremacy.
Those views were suppressed during a war fought explicitly against Nazism and its racial theories, and then during a Cold War waged against communism. But when the Cold War ended, the old concerns about the nation’s social and cultural identity reemerged. The political scientist Samuel P. Huntington, who once made the case for authoritarianism as a necessary stage in “modernization,” in his more advanced years worried that the United States’ Anglo-Saxon Protestant “identity” was being swamped by liberalism in the form of “multiculturalism.” He both predicted and cautiously endorsed a new “white nativism,” and it was largely on these grounds that in his post-Cold War writings about a “clash of civilizations,” he urged Americans to pull back from the world and tend to their own “Western” civilization.
There has always been an element of anti-Americanism in that strand of conservatism, in the sense that it has stood in opposition to the liberal Enlightenment essence of the American founding. Abraham Lincoln wrote of this essence when he described the universal principles of the Declaration of Independence as an “apple of gold” and the Union and the Constitution as the “picture of silver,” the frame erected around it. At a time when many in both the South and the North were calling for a conservative defense of a Constitution that enshrined slavery and white supremacy, Lincoln insisted that neither the Constitution, nor even the Union, were the ultimate guarantors of Americans’ freedoms. It was the universal principles of the Declaration that lay at the heart of free government — the “picture was made for the apple, not the apple for the picture.”
The Civil War vindicated that view on the field of battle, and ever since, the story of the United States has been the continual expansion of rights to more and more groups claiming them, as well as continual resistance to that expansion. When conservatives object to this historical reality, they may or may not be right in their objections, but it is to America that they are objecting.
These days, some American conservatives find themselves in sympathy with the world’s staunchest anti-American leaders, precisely because those leaders have raised the challenge to American liberalism. In 2013, Putin warned that the “Euro-Atlantic countries” were “rejecting their roots,” which included the “Christian values” that were the “basis of Western civilization.” They were “denying moral principles and all traditional identities: national, cultural, religious, and even sexual.” Conservative commentator Patrick Buchanan responded by calling Putin the voice of “conservatives, traditionalists and nationalists of all continents and countries” who were standing up against “the cultural and ideological imperialism of . . . a decadent West.”
The conservative thinker and writer Christopher Caldwell recently observed that the Russian leader is a “hero to populist conservatives around the world” because he refuses to submit to the U.S.-dominated liberal world order. If the polls are to be believed, the number of favorable views of Putin has grown among Trump supporters. They are not simply following their leader. As the political scientist M. Steven Fish observes, Putin has positioned himself as the leader of the world’s “socially and culturally conservative” common folk against “international liberal democracy.” Orban in Hungary, the self-proclaimed leader of “illiberalism” within the democratic world, is another hero to some conservatives. Caldwell suggests that the avowedly anti-liberal Christian democracy that Orban is trying to create in Hungary is the sort of democracy that “prevailed in the United States 60 years ago,” presumably before the courts began imposing liberal values and expanding the rights of minority groups.
Political theorist Marc Plattner argues that the gravest threat to liberal democracy today is that the “mainstream center-right parties” of the liberal democratic world are being “captured by tendencies that are indifferent or even hostile to liberal democracy.” He does not mention the United States, but the phenomenon he describes is clearly present among American conservatives, and not just among the “alt-right.”
Liberalism under attack at home, from both the left and the right