my term paper on Conservatives and the Cold War (long)

[sam h]

Hi Waxie,

Nice job. I just did a quick read. My one comment is that I think you have the periodization a bit wrong concerning when anti-statist ideas really started to gain currency in the Republican party and, relatedly, when the Republicans really became "conservatives."

Consider this quote from the literary critic Lionel Trilling in 1950: "Liberalism is not only the dominant but even the sole intellectual tradition... there are no conservative or reactionary ideas in circulation, [merely] irritable mental gestures which seek to resemble ideas."

The Republican Party in the aftermath of WWII was also "liberal" to an important degree. They might have opposed some of FDR's initiatives, but the ideas of people like Hayek and the big ideological assault on the state's role in the economy was really launched a bit later, in the early 1960s. That is also when the Republican Party became slowly taken over by the "conservative movement," with the candidacy of Barry Goldwater in 1964 representing the watershed moment when the first real conservative emerged to carry the Republican flag.

But overall it is a very astute and well-written essay.

Sam