The two-party system 51world, a powerful force against revolutionary change. And yet America of all
countries in the world has been the most liberal, if by that word we mean a
readiness to accept change. As Daniel Bell has put it, America was perhaps
the first large-scale society in the world to have change and innovation ‘built
into’ its culture. American thought has always been dominated by the desire
to create a new society, to develop its economy, to move to higher standards of
living and a better life. It is this commitment to the very idea of change that
has made American society so distinct from that of Europe, because there
were no real conservatives in America to react against. For about 150 years
it was even considered undesirable to be labelled as a conservative. However,
after the Second World War the climate began to change. The word ‘liberal’
came to be used by those on the right as indicating anyone who was ‘soft
on communism’, or was too concerned with asserting civil rights for blacks
and other disadvantaged groups. The label ‘conservative’ came to be sought
after. Clinton Rossiter in his Conservatism in America, published in 1955, wrote
that ‘After generations of exile from respectability, the word itself has been
welcomed home with cheers by men who, a few short years ago, would sooner
have been called arsonists than conservatives.’ Rossiter argued for a ‘New
Conservatism’ which ‘would steer a middle course between ultra-conserva-
tism and liberalism.’ However, conservatism came to be claimed by a number
of differing groups, sometimes with little in common.
There was the development of what we might label as ‘traditional con-
servatism’, which in the American context means an antipathy to ‘big gov-
ernment’, a desire to balance the budget, to lower taxes and to reduce the
role of the federal government, in particular in relation to the welfare state;
in foreign affairs traditional conservatives tended towards isolationism, the
desire to withdraw from involvement in foreign entanglements, leading at
the extreme to a policy of ‘Fortress America’. Senator Barry Goldwater ran
for the presidency on the Republican ticket in 1964 on the assumption that
‘America is fundamentally a conservative nation’, although some of his views
sounded so radical that he won the support of the John Birch Society and the
super-patriots. Yet when it came to a vote it seems that Goldwater’s brand
of conservatism was not popular, even in traditionally Republican areas. In
rock-ribbed Maine, in ‘conservative’ New England, only 31.2 per cent of the
voters chose Goldwater, and many of these voted out of loyalty to the Repub-
lican Party rather than positively for Goldwater’s more ideological brand of
politics.
However, Goldwater’s defeat was not the end of the growth of conserva-
tive ideology in America, although it might have seemed so in 1964. Lyndon
Johnson’s overwhelming victory re-established for a time the Democratic
Party’s New Deal philosophy in the shape of Johnson’s Great Society pro-
grammes, but the election of Richard Nixon four years later ushered in a
new era of conservatism, which continued under Ford and Carter, and which
was extended and deepened by President Reagan. Carter was a Democrat,
but from the South and certainly not fully in the tradition of Roosevelt and
Kennedy. In Reagan’s 1980 campaign for the presidency the open avowal