Standing Athwart History, Yelling Stop: The Emergence of American Movement Conservatism, 1945-1965 (original) (raw)
Related papers
The Contemporary American Conservative Movement
The Contemporary American Conservative Movement, 2011
The American conservative movement that began to gain steam in the post–World War II era had, by the 1980s, emerged as a transformative political force in the United States and the world. Yet sociology has been slower than other disciplines to come to grips with conservatism. In the hope of spurring more research, we review the substantial literature on the conservative movement produced by historians, political scientists, and serious journalists since the mid-1990s, along with the more limited number of sociological contributions. After identifying what we see as a promising approach for conceptualizing conservatism, we illustrate the benefits of sociological engagement by showing how three areas of sociology that might at first glance seem disconnected from the movement—the sociology of intellectuals, theories of social change, and scholarship on stratification—could profit from consideration of the conservative case.
American Conservatism 2012: A Historical Perspective
This essay examines the peculiar history of American political thought to seek a possible explanation for why conservatism in the United States remains a movement without a spokesperson or a platform to which all citizens of this country who describe themselves as conservative can subscribe. The primary cause of these problems appears to be a serious mismatch between the traditional conservative traits of caution and limits and the historic American spirit of dynamic change and boundless optimism.
The Role of Post-Disciplinary Organizations and Think Tanks in the Rise of Conservatism
Anti/Post-Disciplinarity : Rethinking Academic Paradigms (English Edition), 2017
Think tanks are essentially interdisciplinary and contradictory. Their interdisciplinary aspect is a good thing as long as their clear ideological commitment remains sincere and purpose-oriented. If we recognize many of them as actors in the political context then we can accept their operations. Think tanks generally target policy makers in central government and in the media. Young Republicans and Libertarian Party organizations, for instance, provided facilitating networks and experienced local leaders who could produce volunteers and local publicity. The present paper examines the role of think tanks and organizations in the recent emergence of the Tea Party movement. Think tanks such as Cato Institute and the Heritage Foundation provided speakers for rallies and events, and leadership training for local organizers. Business-originated political and interest groups such as Americans for Prosperity, Citizens for a Sound Economy, and National Federation of Independent Business provided fact sheets with arguments. Sociologist and historian Charles Tilly used the term facilitation to describe assistance given to populist movements like the Tea Party. In fact, we tend to investigate how facilitation provided resources to local groups that led to promote Tea Party mobilizations and the return of populist wave in general. We finally analyze the impact of this protest movement on the Republican Party and “polity members” especially in deliberations.
This review article offers a critical assessment of three recent books on postwar conservatism in the United States. The broad themes of these works – anticommunism, the new class critique, and opposition to environmentalism – are used as a basis to review the extant literature and to analyse the historical trajectory of the conservative movement. Although American conservatism is generally a unified political force, important ideological divisions remain both among and between libertarians and social conservatives. These divisions are imperative for understanding the movement today and offer promising lines of future scholarship.