Quote of the Day (Alan Brinkley, on Historians’ Treatment of Conservatism)

“While historians have displayed impressive powers of imagination in creating empathetic accounts of the past, they have seldom done so in considering the character of conservative lives and ideas.” —Columbia University professor of history Alan Brinkley (1949-2019), “The Problem of American Conservatism,” American Historical Review, April 1994

The history department at Columbia University was one of the principal factors attracting me to the school in the late 1970s. Looking back on my four years being taught by its excellent faculty, I have no regrets whatsoever.

Well, okay, maybe one. Because he didn’t arrive at Morningside Heights until nearly a decade after my graduation, I never had a chance to take a course with or even attend a lecture by Alan Brinkley.

Brinkley—who died on Monday at age 70—quickly became one of the university’s most acclaimed teachers, and even, despite his professed distaste for academic administration, even provost of the school for a couple of years.

His influence on a generation at the university, then, was considerable. But so was his impact on how historians came to view liberalism, conservatism, and the catastrophe that redefined these movements for nearly the next century: the Great Depression.

Brinkley’s article for American Historical Review might not have significantly kick-started the intensive study of conservatism that has occurred in the last two decades (surely, the electoral success of Ronald Reagan might have had something to do with that). 

But it instilled a sense in academe that conservatism should be examined in all its varieties, with at least something approaching the same rigor and seriousness accorded liberalism.

But Brinkley had already exerted influence early in his career through his first book, Voices of Protest (1982), an outgrowth of his doctoral thesis that ended up winning him the National Book Award for history. 

Though conceived as an analysis of two populist movements of the past—Huey Long’s Share Our Wealth Society and Fr. Charles Coughlin’s National Union for Social Justice—it should be read now as a warning of the discontents with the latent potential to disrupt the American political landscape that was finally realized in the last Presidential race:

“This casual mingling of themes commonly associated with opposite political poles did not originate with the Long and Coughlin movements; nor did it end with them. The populists, from whom both men derived so much ideological strength, had exhibited similar contradictions; so did later political phenomena: the George Wallace movement of the 1960s and the New Right of the 1980s, which combined populist rhetoric with cultural conservatism. Underlying all such movements in varying degrees has been a common impulse: the fear of concentrated power, the traditional American resistance to being governed—whether by private interests or by public institutions.”

And this sentence seems especially ominous: 

“Were these many protest movements to unite into a single force, they might be capable of toppling the entire structure of traditional party politics."