52 The two-party system
of conservative values became an electoral asset. The emphasis was placed
upon cutting back government expenditure and bureaucracy, maintaining
the social fabric through greater efforts at crime control, decentralising gov-
ernment by returning functions to the states, and encouraging individualism
and self-help. As James Reichley has noted, ‘American conservatism, as it was
practised under Nixon and Ford, and as it continues to be practised today,
surely qualifies as an expression of a distinct social ideology.’ Newt Gingrich,
the Republican Speaker of the House of Representatives, who took office
in 1994, saw himself as the spearhead of the conservatives in opposition to
President Clinton. Gingrich developed his ‘Contract with America’ which set
out a programme of ten aims including tax cuts, a constitutional amendment
requiring the budget to be in balance, and welfare reform.
Another strain of conservatism is ‘libertarianism’ – the belief that all gov-
ernment action is evil and should be kept to an absolute minimum. Thus
groups on the extreme right of American politics, who are really not conserv-
ative at all, have appropriated the title of ‘conservative’. A group such as the
John Birch Society really consists of right-wing radicals, who wish to change
society fundamentally, not maintain its present form, or wish to use methods
in politics that are so far outside the American tradition as to be anything
but conservative of American values. These groups have been described as
the ‘pseudo-conservatives’ of the present age, falling outside the consensual
framework of the American ideology, although claiming loudly to be the only
true Americans. The John Birch Society defines its role as:
Identifying the overall enemy as unrestrained government power in any
of its forms, whether communism in Beijing or socialism in Washington,
DC. In order to succeed in its goal of world merger under socialism, the
conspiratorial apparatus must deceive us into accepting totalitarian con-
trols here at home, such as national service, national industrial policy,
a national police force, national health care, national curriculum and
teacher certification, national food and vitamin labeling, even national
control of parking lots (to force us into mass transit), to name a few new
government power grabs on the horizon.Militia groups, the extreme form of libertarianism, prepared to use armed
force to fight the federal government, sprang up, particularly in the West.
The newest, and in some ways the most successful proponents of ‘con-
servatism’ are the neoconservatives, or neocons, who have come to play a
significant role in the administration of President George W. Bush. They
have developed a ‘Neocon Persuasion’ differing from both the traditional
conservatives and the libertarians. Drawing on the inspiration of Leo Strauss,
a philosopher at the University of Chicago, a group of academics and intel-
lectuals, many of them Jewish, had become disillusioned with the direction
being taken by America in both domestic and foreign policy. The ‘godfather’