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Their long embrace of “responsible conservatives” has always been dangerous.
- July 22, 2024
J. D. Vance’s selection as Donald Trump’s running mate has unnerved many Democrats. He is closely tied to the architects of Project 2025, the Heritage Foundation plan to purge large swathes of the civil service. He is friendly with Tucker Carlson, Elon Musk, and Alex Jones, and he warns darkly about falling birthrates and rising immigration. All of this strikes many as remarkable given that Vance began his political career as the darling of the liberal establishment with his 2016 book Hillbilly Elegy, widely praised as offering the definitive explanation of the appeal of Donald Trump to the white working class. In reality, Vance was a prominent Never Trumper in 2016, telling his former roommate that Donald Trump was “America’s Hitler” and publicly declaring he would vote for a third party.
Vance’s political transformation—if it is indeed even much of a transformation at all—from liberal darling to reactionary proto-fascist is easy to dismiss as simply a case of unchecked political ambition and thirst for power. The bigger story is what the fact that liberals’ favorite conservative in 2016 has now aligned himself with the hard right tells us about the deeper pathologies of U.S. politics—above all, the liberal dream of finding a “responsible conservative” to spar with that would render American democracy stable and safe from partisan extremes.
Like most political categories, the term’s meaning has changed over time, but in general a “responsible conservative,” since the 1950s, is a right-winger who liberals consider a legitimate part of the American political order. In this sense, responsible conservatism is fundamentally an invention of the liberal political imagination. A “responsible conservative” is neither a fascist nor a reactionary, but someone who offers thoughtful critiques of the excesses of American liberalism and especially of the left.
The category is fluid, reflecting changing liberal conceptions about formally acceptable politics. In the 1950s, liberals saw William F. Buckley, Jr. as a dangerous reactionary; by 1970, despite having more or less the same substantive political commitments, he was thought of as a responsible conservative by a liberal establishment terrified by the challenge of the New Left. Ronald Reagan, tarred as a dangerous extremist in the 1960s, was feted as a responsible conservative in the 1980s by the very same intellectuals who had condemned Buckley in the fifties, most of whom had become neoconservatives in the meantime.
But unlike the elite and out-of-touch liberal establishment, “responsible conservatives,” even when they were the products of the Yale Club, understood some deeper truths about American politics. There is nothing more responsible, after all, than consistently winning elections.
In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the phrase “responsible conservative” was practically a tautology. To be temperamentally conservative just was to be sober, responsible, and bourgeois. One Florida bank advertised in 1918 that it was a “responsible, conservative, and progressive” institution—meaning, presumably, that it was a practical and risk-averse organization while still paying close attention to the dynamics of the marketplace.
But as a distinct political category, the type only began to emerge in the 1930s to distinguish between conservatives and fascists. The New York Herald Tribune referred to Paul von Hindenburg and his supporters as “sober and responsible conservative elements” in July 1930 as opposed to the Nazis and their allies. By the 1940s “responsible conservative” (or more rarely “respectable conservative”) was shorthand in American political discourse for “right-wing but non-Nazi.” This did not imply a total wall of separation between the two—one letter writer to the New York Times bemoaned in 1941 that American Nazis “hide behind more respectable conservative elements”—but that the “responsible conservatives” were a legitimate element of liberal democracy and should not bear the same political stigma as Nazism.
The end of World War II and the first comprehensive defeats for the New Deal coalition in 1946 prompted a round of liberal soul-searching about the need for a responsible conservatism to temper American liberalism’s reform agenda without rolling back the New Deal state. There was perhaps no greater liberal apostle of this need than Harvard historian and political pundit Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., one of the founders of the liberal anticommunist group Americans for Democratic Action (ADA). His 1949 book The Vital Center was practically a manifesto for the ADA, focusing on the dangers of the “totalitarian” challenge posed by communism and the need for a robust, muscular, and militant liberalism to counter the threat, particularly overseas. Schlesinger also lamented that American conservatism lacked a Churchill—a far-sighted, old-school leader savvy enough to recognize the communist threat. Instead, Schlesinger argued, American conservatives were mere “businessmen,” focused on short-term gain rather than long-term social stability. While he attested that capitalism was a positive good, he did not trust the business class to be able to defend it.
Schlesinger did not seriously believe that a responsible conservatism would supplant liberal hegemony—for what made conservatism responsible was that it accepted the changes in American society since 1933 and merely sought to slow the pace of reform. “There is a vital difference between a conservative and a reactionary,” he wrote in the New York Times in 1950. “A true conservative believes that the processes of change are gradual and organic. . . . but he knows well that there is a stream of history, that change does come about, and that the recognition of the necessity of change is the best way of preventing it from disrupting society.” The “responsible liberal,” according to Schlesinger, would rather have a strong “responsible conservative” political party win an election every now and then—an essential component of a two-party system—rather than have such a party shatter and its followers be co-opted by fascist demagoguery.
Schlesinger’s policy definition of “responsible conservatism” was indistinguishable from that of contemporary liberalism. Responsible conservatives should reject tariffs and trade protectionism because the boost to domestic production would come, he wrote, “only at the expense of world economic stability.” Channeling Bismarck, responsible conservatives should support social welfare, if only to “bribe the masses into loyalty” toward capitalism. Schlesinger even argued that responsible conservatives “must demand the speedy recognition of the equal rights of the Negro.” He conceded that he was essentially arguing that his program for responsible conservatism was a sort of “me-tooism”—the political premise that American conservatism should be a lighter, more decentralized, and technocratically competent version of American liberalism—but he insisted that this was simply the rational response to the social, political, and technological conditions of the mid-twentieth century. Besides, there were already politicians in the Republican Party who represented the future of responsible conservatism, men like Wayne Morse, Henry Cabot Lodge, and Jacob Javits—all of whom are remembered today, if at all, as avatars of liberal Republicanism. Conservatives must follow those leaders, Schlesinger concluded, and “not [Karl] Mundt and [Richard] Nixon.”
In this conceit, responsible conservatism also implied fervent support for America’s global anticommunist role in the Cold War. In a 1951 resolution passed at its national convention, the ADA condemned what it called the “Taft-McCarthy alliance” between Ohio senator Robert Taft and the infamous Wisconsin demagogue Joseph McCarthy, as well as other Republican leaders who, “abandoning the role of a responsible conservatism have formed [this] alliance based on disguised isolationism and cynical demogy [sic] . . . at the cost of this country’s position in the world.” Still, the ADA’s vision was not universal—some proponents of “responsible conservatism,” like newspaperman Marquis Childs, called Taft “as near to being a responsible conservative as our political system produces” despite his opposition to NATO and the United Nations. The Reporter, a hawkish anticommunist liberal magazine, avowed that Nixon was the “responsible and more effective alternative to Senator McCarthy.”
“Responsible conservatism,” in short, was a moving target—a category that conservatives could flit in and out of depending on the specific demands of the political moment. While McCarthy would remain universally despised by liberals as “irresponsible,” men with the same substantive political commitments—but without McCarthy’s crude aesthetics—could be welcomed under the cloak of respectability.
Nowhere was this more evident than in Buckley’s political transformation. The enfant terrible of the New Right was nearly universally despised by liberals and even many responsible conservatives when he first rose to prominence in the early 1950s. Peter Viereck and McGeorge Bundy—both on Schlesinger’s list of “responsible conservatives”—were unstinting in their criticism, the former saying Buckley offered “the most sterile Old Guard brand of Republicanism, far to the right of Taft” and the latter writing that “I find the book is dishonest in its use of facts, false in its theory, and a discredit to its author.” Seymour Lipset, in his contribution to the influential 1955 edited volume The New American Right, decries Buckley as the “McCarthy’s young intellectual spokesman”—Buckley having just written a book-length defense of McCarthy—and laments that while Buckley and other rising conservative intellectuals like James Burnham preach a kind of free-market libertarianism, Buckley himself urged in God and Man at Yale (1951) a purge of American universities.
In his contribution to the volume, historian Richard Hofstadter did not address Buckley directly but tried to make sense of what he called the “new dissent” from the right more broadly. Borrowing the term “pseudo-conservative” from Theodor Adorno’s The Authoritarian Personality (1950), Hofstadter used the phrase to attempt to describe and define the emerging conservative movement of the decade. “They have little in common with the temperate and compromising spirit of true conservatism in the classical sense of the word,” he wrote. While it would be reductive to say that “the new pseudo-conservatism is simply the old ultra-conservatism and the old isolationism,” it would not be inaccurate, although Hofstadter also took pains to emphasize that pseudo-conservatism is not “purely and simply fascist or totalitarian.” But he did consider pseudo-conservatives to be radicals, as did the other contributors to the volume, including Lipset, Daniel Bell, and Nathan Glazer. Even the revised and expanded edition of the book published in 1962—prompted by the rise of the John Birch Society—included National Review on the list of radical right-wing publications. Anti-Defamation League chiefs Arnold Forster and Benjamin R. Epstein labeled Buckley an “Extreme Conservative” in their 1964 book Danger on the Right, who served as an “ideological bridge” between the radical right and responsible conservatives.
But what a difference a mid-Atlantic accent makes! By the mid-1960s Buckley had savvily positioned himself as the “responsible conservative” with whom liberals could congenially debate the issues of the day. Even Forster and Epstein were forced to concede Buckley’s “attractiveness, erudition, charm, intelligence, and wit.” Despite his continued and outspoken support for McCarthy and his calls to purge the Ivy League, Buckley was friendly with leading liberal intellectuals and celebrities, including Schlesinger and TV host Steve Allen, with whom he often appeared in public debates. (To be fair, Buckley also debated James Baldwin in 1965, and Baldwin emphatically did not consider Buckley his friend.) Buckley’s TV program Firing Line also did wonders for his reputation as the witty, urbane, and responsible conservative for liberals to be in dialogue with, a necessary check on liberal ambition and self-importance. This persona was made even more magnetic following the insurgent challenges of the New Left. In his 1965 book Letter to a Conservative, which emphasized the need for a strong conservative movement to restore “rationality to the American political dialogue,” Steve Allen also warned of the rising danger from the left and that responsible conservatives were vital allies of sane liberals.
Indeed, “responsible conservative” as a political term lost much of its moxie in the 1970s and 1980s, as many liberals began their long march to the right in response to the New Left insurgency. By the end of the 1970s, most of the contributors to The New American Right were staunch neoconservatives. (The notable exception was Hofstadter, whose political drift was interrupted by his sudden death in 1970.) The increasing influence of the conservative movement had moved the Overton window of responsible conservatism so significantly that Barry Goldwater and Ronald Reagan, condemned in the sixties as dangerous radicals, now found a place entirely within the mainstream of American politics.
Furthermore, liberals could no longer approach conservatives with a degree of condescending detachment. Buckley had grown into something more than simply the intellectual sparring partner of the liberal establishment—he was a powerful political figure in his own right, especially given his close relationship with Reagan. And Reagan’s repeated crushing political victories over the Democratic Party in the 1980s underwrote liberal anxieties. Ironically Schlesinger, of all people, wrote in 1986 that “Democrats feel that President Reagan knows a secret and that if they could only learn the secret they could be as popular as he.” Schlesinger warned that Democrats should resist the temptation to go all in “for cutting back social programs, for deregulation, for abandonment of racial minorities, for dumping [the New Deal and Great Society] into the ash heap of history, and for worshipping at the shrine of the free market.” Democrats, of course, did not follow Schlesinger’s advice. Instead, Al From’s Democratic Leadership Council and the Third Way ideology of the Clinton administration fully embraced Reaganite me-tooism—in essence, becoming the “responsible liberals” in a period of conservative hegemony.
The rise of Trump—especially after an era where the Democratic Party was supposed to have learned the lessons of Reaganism—sparked another liberal crisis of confidence. Ever since MAGAism came on the political scene there has been a pronounced tendency among American liberals toward nostalgia for the good old days of civil and responsible discourse, a time when bipartisanship ruled the day on Capitol Hill and the far left and far right were both marginal forces. In essence, this is the same vision that the ADA had elaborated in the 1940s and 1950s—but even the ADA was not looking backward. It understood that state of affairs to be a political project that remained to be built.
The reactionary nostalgia trap of post-2016 liberalism brings us back to Vance. When he burst on the scene with Hillbilly Elegy—which drew critical acclaim from the liberal establishment and quickly led to a post as a contributor at CNN—Vance was already the perfect archetype of a responsible conservative. For one, he had the right credentials: he was a military veteran, a Yale Law School grad, and corporate lawyer who had successfully navigated the (supposedly) ultra-left-wing world of Silicon Valley. And unlike fellow Yalie Buckley, the son of a millionaire, Vance really was from a hardscrabble background. If anything, the liberal establishment took his story as proof that the American political and economic system fundamentally worked. Vance’s argument that white rural poverty stemmed from a culture of laziness and welfare dependency simply took age-old racialized tropes about Black and brown people and redirected them to poor whites. For all of the establishment’s gushing that Hillbilly Elegy explained Trumpism, Vance offered largely bog-standard Republicanism and was completely embraced by liberal elites. Not even Buckley got a Ron Howard movie.
What is novel—at least so far—about Vance’s political trajectory is that unlike Buckley or Reagan, who began as “radicals” and morphed into “responsible conservatives” as far as liberals were concerned, Vance has traveled the opposite direction. At one time he might have made a political name for himself by running as a moderate Republican or even a conservative Democrat—a millennial Joe Manchin. But there is little future in national politics today for either moderate Republicans or conservative Democrats.
In reality, Vance was never very far from the far right. His mentor in Silicon Valley circles was Peter Thiel, among the most influential right-wing power brokers in American politics today. Thiel’s first book, published well before he became a billionaire, was entitled The Diversity Myth: Multiculturalism and the Politics of Intolerance at Stanford, and in 2009—years before Vance joined his orbit—he wrote that he no longer believed that “freedom and democracy are compatible.” As for Vance’s populist rhetoric in July at the Republican National Convention, which some commentators have interpreted as signaling a shift toward a pro-worker Republican Party, the truth is that it resembled nothing so much as the anti-monopolist rhetoric of the far-right John Birch Society and the Liberty Lobby in the 1970s. For that matter, the rhetoric of producers versus parasites is entirely within keeping of the arguments of Hillbilly Elegy.
Vance cannily understands that national political hegemony has flipped again, at least in the liberal narrative. It is no longer the age of Reagan; it is the age of Trump. And while Vance’s speech to the RNC was full of dangerous and illiberal overtones—especially on birthrates and immigration—there is little political price to be paid over the long term for one’s image as “responsible,” provided that you can back it up with political victory. If Vance can convince liberals again that he knows a secret—and that if they could learn the secret from him again, they, too, could be as popular as he—then there is no reason to think that he could not once again be fashioned as a “responsible conservative.” Because it is ultimately liberals who make that determination.
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