NYT Magazine: Bush's Ancestors

[Pirate Smile]

Reconsideration
Bush's Ancestors

By SEAN WILENTZ
Published: October 16, 2005

Ever since Ronald Reagan's election in 1980, the strength of American conservatism has largely confounded historians and intellectuals. Before then, a generation of influential scholars claimed that liberalism was the core of all American political thinking and suggested that it always would be. Well into the 1970's, many observers wondered whether a Republican Party that allied itself with the conservative movement could long survive.

History has, to say the least, disproved these judgments. Yet many prominent liberals continue to see contemporary conservatism as a rhetorical smoke screen intended to deceive the masses - even as conservatives often trace their movement back no farther than William F. Buckley Jr.'s founding of National Review in 1955, fusing religious and pro-business-minded voters. Such thinking, however, slights the coherence and durability of conservative politics in America. The blend of businessmen's aversion to government regulation, down-home cultural populism and Christian moralism that sustains today's Republican Party is a venerable if loosely knit philosophy of government dating back to long before the right-wing upsurge that prepared the way for Reagan's presidency. A few pundits and political insiders have likened the current Republicans to the formidable, corporate-financed political machine behind President William McKinley at the end of the 19th century. The admiration Karl Rove has expressed for the machine strengthens the historical connection. Yet neither conservatives nor liberals have fully recognized that the Bush administration's political and ideological recipe was invented decades before McKinley by a nearly forgotten American institution: the Whig Party of the 1830's.

The Whigs arose in 1834 to oppose Andrew Jackson's anti-elitist Democratic Party. Furious at Jackson's destruction of the privately controlled, all-powerful Second Bank of the United States and his forceful claims for presidential authority, the Whigs built a national following dedicated to protecting business and reducing federal economic regulation. Enriching the rich, they proclaimed, would eventually enrich everyone else. By combining a pro-business conservatism geared to the common man with an evangelical Christian view of social virtues and vices, they won the presidency twice in the 1840's and controlled either the House or the Senate for most of the decade. In the Senate, the legendary Henry Clay of Kentucky and Daniel Webster of Massachusetts magnified the Whig Party's influence far beyond Capitol Hill with the power of their oratory. Insofar as perennial themes shape our politics, it is remarkable how so many of contemporary conservatism's central ideas and slogans renovate old Whig appeals.

-snip-
A century and a half before Reagan's election, the Whigs worked out the basic ideas of supply-side, trickle-down economics. They acclaimed the romance of risk and private investment and a compelling but simplistic view of America as, in one widely used Whig phrase, "a country of self-made men." These views would reappear in Reagan's and Newt Gingrich's celebrations of a coming "opportunity society," later reformulated by George W. Bush as the "ownership society." The Whigs also dismissed the Jacksonians' attacks on the privileged classes as demagogic - much as Bush, running in 2000 as a unifying "compassionate conservative," labeled his opponent's criticisms of corporate power and tax breaks for the wealthy a mean-spirited effort "to wage class warfare to get ahead."

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/10/16/magazine/16essay.html?pagewanted=1

[depakid]

1. All that nice history spoiled with a transparent self serving

and largely innaccurate conclusion:

Even today, unsettled by hurricanes, scandals and an increasingly unpopular war, the G.O.P. nonetheless stands for conservative principles and speaks a political language readily understood by voters.

(And this guy's a professor? Even a lowly undergrad could tear that assertion apart)


Those principles and that language are venerable (oh please) and, as proclaimed by today's Republicans, more compelling than the confused and uncertain message coming from their opponents. (that much is true).

As inadequate, or worse, as the G.O.P.'s privatizing policies may appear, the conservatives' often misunderstood connection to the American past may yet carry them successfully into the future.

(I guess only time will tell)

[Pirate Smile]

4. I was waiting for the ending that spelled out their downfall and it was

never clearly stated in the article.

[MichiganVote]

5. There's nothing worse than sentimental history

[RoyGBiv]

6. Self-serving?

How is that statement self-serving?

Regardless, I don't think the assertion is as clearly wrong as you apparently believe. Sean Wilentz's work to a great extent focuses on imagery and perception in politics and how these elements are used by political parties to shape voter behavior. Whether the GOP "stands for" conservative principles in reality is, at the moment, less important than how it is perceived. That perception is one intentionally fostered through a political language that I think clearly many voters do understand in the sense that this language speaks to their interests regardless of whether the actual ideas behind the language do.

That said, the larger problem with this article is that it is so thin on the historical aspects of the connection between modern "conservatism" and American Whiggery. I believe the assertions made are essentially valid but not well supported in this article itself. The author has taken short-cuts that, as you say, could be torn apart by an undergrad.

[depakid]

8. It reveals the author's slant

The current (and I'd contend past 20 years worth) of Republican policies have been in more ways than not- anything but traditionally conservative (or venerable)- although the author does make some saleint points with respect to Whig policies. Not that they're related by any tradition- just that they amount to a similar view of elitism and big business (you couldn't really call it corpoartism back then).

To the extent that you're looking at perception- or propaganda- as opposed to objective criteria, your interpretation could be correct.

I however, am not willing to provide the prof with that much slack... :-)

[RoyGBiv]

9. I'm not so sure ...

I've read a great deal of Wilentz's work, and I detect no particular political slant in the direction you imply. It's clear to me he doesn't particularly like Whigs in large part due to their existence being a result of Jackson's presidency and their opposition to democratic ideals. Wilentz is thinly veiled fan of Andrew Jackson and Jacksonian Democracy, so much so he has formulated a particular version of the thesis that concludes Jackson was actually a friend of Native Americans and was trying to save them rather than exterminate them. Regardless, he's critical of Whigs in most of their manifestations, no less so than of the one mentioned in this article. Given his association of Whiggery with the modern GOP, what logically follows is that he's critical of the latter as well.

That's not to say I agree with Wilentz's politics in all respects. He's somewhat infamous for being among the writers for the _New Republic_ who initially supported the Iraq war, having been caught up in the fervor of misdirected nationalistic rage. However, he is also infamous among right-wingers for seeking to examine the reasons America was attacked on 9/11, to remove the shroud of code words and phrases and truly tackle the subject for what it is, i.e. they feel oppressed by the West, not what we want it to be or some of our leaders claim it to be, i.e. they hate us for our freedoms. He did so in language that was less inflammatory but which carried the same intended meaning as the more infamous words of Ward Churchill. But, I do agree with a lot of what he has to say, in particular his critique of the role religion has taken in American politics in the last 20 years or so.

Back to the subject, the only comment in he article that really bothers me is the use of "venerable" when applied to conservative ideology. For such a term to apply, the mere perception of truly conservative ideals is not even close to enough. It's a shallow assessment, in other words. I would that the summary somewhat kills the article itself, but not for precisely the same reasons.

[McKenzie]

2. self delete

[aquart]

3. So why did the Whigs disappear?

Is it possible that nobody voted for them?

[RoyGBiv]

7. They didn't ...

They mutated, like a virus.

The fall of the American Whig party is an extremely complex subject that this article attempts to summarize as a result of tension over slavery. That was certainly one element of Whig's lack of longevity, but it's more like the final straw than the fundamental cause of the breakdown. The larger problem for the Whigs is that they never really stood for anything specific, never had any true "Whig Principles" that defined a coherent ideology. Historians have tried and failed to synthesize model of what it meant to be a Whig, and the only common element of the various explanations is that the Whigs existed to oppose Democrats.

Regardless, the Whigs had a strong central core of individuals, most notably Henry Clay and his disciples, Lincoln among them, that went further toward defining a distinct meaning of Whiggery than anyone else, and this appears to be what Wilentz has chosen as his focus. The so-called American System was carried forward into the emerging Republican party as it absorbed Whigs in the 1850's. The faction of the Republican party guided by these Whig ideal took control of the party in the aftermath of the Civil War, this transformation being what this article begins to examine without directly doing so.