The Schools of Conservative Thought

The Declaration of Independence rests the American founding on a claim about human nature: that all men are created equal and “endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights,” among them life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, and that governments are instituted to secure those rights, “deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.” The idea drew on classical and Christian natural-law thought and on English writers, above all John Locke, who argued that people hold rights to life, liberty and property before any government exists.

Many conservatives regard these principles as the core of the American tradition. Abraham Lincoln treated the Declaration’s principle of equality as the foundation of free government and invoked it against the expansion of slavery — the cause the Republican Party was founded to advance — and Frederick Douglass appealed to the same principles against slavery itself. In the twentieth century the political philosopher Harry V. Jaffa and his students, who founded the Claremont Institute in 1979, made the Declaration central to a strand of conservatism that sees the founding as the statement of permanent principles, not merely a set of inherited customs.

Edmund Burke, an Irish-born member of the British Parliament, urged conciliation with the American colonies in the 1770s but condemned the French Revolution in Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790). The revolutionaries, he argued, had swept away the institutions, customs and religion through which a people’s accumulated wisdom is carried, in favor of abstract theories that would end in tyranny. Society, he wrote, is “a partnership not only between those who are living, but between those who are living, those who are dead, and those who are to be born.”

Burke did not oppose change — “A state without the means of some change is without the means of its conservation,” he wrote — but he insisted that reform proceed cautiously and build on what already works. American conservatives rediscovered him after World War II, especially through Russell Kirk’s The Conservative Mind (1953), and his emphasis on prudence, local attachments and the “little platoon” remains a touchstone for conservatives wary of sweeping plans from any direction.

The Constitution creates a national government of enumerated powers while leaving most governing authority with the states. “The powers delegated by the proposed Constitution to the federal government are few and defined,” James Madison wrote in Federalist No. 45. “Those which are to remain in the State governments are numerous and indefinite.” The Tenth Amendment confirms that powers not delegated to the United States are reserved to the states or to the people, and Madison argued in Federalist No. 51 that dividing power between two levels of government creates “a double security” for the rights of the people.

Federalism has meant different things in different eras. The Republican Party of Lincoln used national power to preserve the Union and end slavery, and the Reconstruction amendments gave the federal government new authority to protect civil rights; “states’ rights” was invoked to defend slavery and, later, segregation. Modern conservatives have championed federalism as a check on Washington — in the Rehnquist Court’s decisions limiting federal power in the 1990s, in the block grants of the 1996 welfare reform, and in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization (2022), which returned abortion policy to elected representatives. Justice Louis Brandeis’s observation that “a single courageous state may, if its citizens choose, serve as a laboratory” remains a common argument for letting states experiment.

The framers designed a government strong enough to secure the nation but restrained by enumerated powers, separated branches and checks and balances, because, as Madison wrote in Federalist No. 51, “If men were angels, no government would be necessary.” American conservatives have long argued that a government confined to its proper functions — defense, justice, the protection of rights and essential public goods — leaves room for families, markets and civil society to flourish.

The principle has taken different forms across the Republican Party’s history, from Calvin Coolidge’s budget cutting and Barry Goldwater’s 1964 campaign to Ronald Reagan’s declaration in his first inaugural address: “In this present crisis, government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem.” Its advocates have pressed for lower taxes, balanced budgets, deregulation and the return of programs to the states, though federal spending has continued to grow under presidents of both parties.

Originalism holds that the meaning of each provision of the Constitution was fixed when it was ratified and that judges should apply that meaning, leaving change to the amendment process and to elected legislatures. Its companion, textualism, holds that statutes mean what their words ordinarily meant when enacted, read in context, rather than what judges suppose legislators intended or what policy would be best. The approach developed in reaction to the Warren and Burger Courts, which critics accused of reading their own policy preferences into the Constitution.

Attorney General Edwin Meese called in 1985 for a “Jurisprudence of Original Intention,” and Robert Bork and Antonin Scalia refined the theory, with Scalia and others shifting its focus from the framers’ intentions to the original public meaning of the text. The Federalist Society, founded by law students in 1982, built a national network of originalist lawyers and judges. With the appointments of Justices Clarence Thomas, Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett, originalist and textualist reasoning became central to Supreme Court decisions such as District of Columbia v. Heller (2008), New York State Rifle & Pistol Association v. Bruen (2022) and Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization (2022).

Free-enterprise conservatism holds that private property, free exchange and competition, under the rule of law, produce more prosperity and more freedom than central direction of the economy. Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations (1776) described how individuals pursuing their own interest in open markets are led, as by an “invisible hand,” to promote the good of society, and twentieth-century economists such as Friedrich Hayek and Milton Friedman argued that prices coordinate knowledge no planner could gather and that economic freedom is a condition of political freedom.

These ideas shaped the Republican Party’s modern economic agenda — tax cuts, deregulation, free trade and skepticism of government planning — especially under Ronald Reagan, who drew on Friedman and other free-market economists. The tradition also makes a moral case, advanced by writers such as the Catholic theologian Michael Novak, that markets reward work, thrift and service to others. In recent years a revived debate over trade, tariffs and industrial policy has divided free-market conservatives from economic nationalists.

Postwar traditionalists argued that the crisis of the modern West was at root spiritual and cultural, not merely political or economic. Richard Weaver’s Ideas Have Consequences (1948) traced modern disorder to the abandonment of belief in transcendent truth; Russell Kirk’s The Conservative Mind (1953) described a tradition, from Burke onward, grounded in an enduring moral order, reverence for custom and suspicion of ideological schemes; and Robert Nisbet’s The Quest for Community (1953) warned that the decline of family, church and local association left individuals exposed to an all-absorbing state.

Traditionalists hold that liberty depends on virtue, and virtue on institutions — religion, family, schools and local communities — that must be cultivated across generations. Kirk’s Enemies of the Permanent Things (1969) took its title from T. S. Eliot’s phrase for these enduring norms. Their influence runs through conservative arguments about education, culture and the family, and through institutions such as the Intercollegiate Studies Institute and the journal Modern Age, which Kirk founded in 1957.

In the 1950s the American right was divided between traditionalists, who emphasized virtue, religion and order, and libertarians, who emphasized individual freedom and free markets. Frank S. Meyer, a former Communist who became an editor at National Review, argued that the two belonged together: virtue cannot be coerced, so the state’s task is to protect freedom, while the pursuit of virtue belongs to persons, families and churches. The synthesis came to be known as fusionism.

William F. Buckley Jr.’s National Review gave the synthesis a home, and the Sharon Statement, adopted by the founders of Young Americans for Freedom at Buckley’s Connecticut home in 1960, joined faith in God-given free will with the conviction that political liberty depends on economic liberty. Anticommunism bound the coalition together, and Ronald Reagan’s alliance of social, economic and national-security conservatives — often called the “three-legged stool” — was its political fulfillment.

Libertarians hold that individuals own themselves and have the right to live, work, trade and associate as they choose, so long as they do not use force or fraud against others. Government, on this view, should be limited to protecting rights through police, courts and national defense — or, for some libertarians, should not exist at all. The tradition draws on classical liberals such as John Locke and Adam Smith, the Austrian economists Ludwig von Mises and Friedrich Hayek, the novelist Ayn Rand (who rejected the libertarian label for her own philosophy, Objectivism), the economist Murray Rothbard and the philosopher Robert Nozick.

Libertarians have been part of the conservative coalition since the 1950s, united with traditionalists by opposition to communism and to the growth of federal power; Ronald Reagan told Reason magazine in 1975 that he considered libertarianism the heart and soul of conservatism. The Libertarian Party, founded in 1971, offers an independent alternative, and former Representative Ron Paul, the party’s 1988 presidential nominee who later ran in Republican primaries, carried libertarian ideas into the GOP. Libertarians often break with other conservatives on drug policy, immigration, foreign intervention and civil liberties.

Neoconservatism began among liberal and formerly leftist intellectuals, many of them based in New York, who grew disillusioned in the 1960s and 1970s with the Great Society, the New Left and what they saw as the Democratic Party’s retreat from anticommunism. Irving Kristol and Daniel Bell founded The Public Interest in 1965 to test social policy against evidence, and Commentary, edited by Norman Podhoretz, became a leading voice. The label was first applied by critics; Kristol eventually embraced it, describing neoconservatism as a “persuasion” rather than a movement.

Neoconservatives accepted a limited welfare state but stressed unintended consequences, bourgeois virtues and strong civic institutions; James Q. Wilson’s “broken windows” theory of policing grew from this outlook. In foreign policy they favored military strength, confrontation with the Soviet Union and the promotion of democracy; Jeane Kirkpatrick, Ronald Reagan’s ambassador to the United Nations, was among the most prominent. After the Cold War a younger generation championed American global leadership and supported the 2003 invasion of Iraq, which made neoconservatism the subject of fierce criticism from both left and right.

Religious conservatives believe that moral truth is grounded in God and knowable through revelation and natural law, and that a free society depends on the virtues faith cultivates. In American politics they have emphasized the dignity of human life from conception, marriage and the family, religious liberty and the rights of parents, and a public square open to religious voices. The tradition is broad: it includes Catholics shaped by natural-law teaching, evangelical and other Protestants, Eastern Orthodox Christians, Latter-day Saints and observant Jews.

As a political movement, religious conservatism grew rapidly in the 1970s, spurred by the Supreme Court’s school-prayer decisions, Roe v. Wade (1973), disputes over the tax status of Christian schools and rapid changes in family life. Organizations such as Focus on the Family (1977), the Moral Majority (1979), the Family Research Council (1983) and the Christian Coalition (1989) mobilized millions of voters, and religious conservatives became one of the Republican Party’s most reliable constituencies. A central goal of the movement was realized in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization (2022), which overruled Roe and returned abortion policy to elected representatives.

Paleoconservatism emerged in the 1980s among traditionalist writers who believed that neoconservatives — many of them former liberals — had captured the conservative movement and steered it toward global interventionism and acceptance of the modern welfare state. The historian Paul Gottfried, often credited with coining the term, the Southern literary scholar M. E. Bradford, the columnist Samuel Francis and the magazine Chronicles defended regional and national particularity, inherited culture and decentralized government against what they called the managerial state.

Patrick J. Buchanan, a former aide to Presidents Nixon and Reagan, carried these ideas into presidential politics: he challenged President George H. W. Bush in the 1992 Republican primaries, won the 1996 New Hampshire primary and ran as the Reform Party nominee in 2000. His program — restricting immigration, protecting American industry from foreign competition and avoiding foreign wars, under the revived banner of “America First” — anticipated themes that later reshaped the Republican Party. Critics, including other conservatives, charged that parts of the movement tolerated nativism and prejudice; William F. Buckley Jr.’s In Search of Anti-Semitism (1991–92) examined such charges against Buchanan and others.

Compassionate conservatism held that conservatives should measure policies by how they help the poor, the addicted, the imprisoned and children in failing schools, and that the most effective help comes through families, congregations and community groups rather than distant bureaucracies. The journalist and scholar Marvin Olasky’s The Tragedy of American Compassion (1992) argued that nineteenth-century private charity, personal and demanding, had succeeded where the modern welfare state failed.

George W. Bush made the idea the centerpiece of his 2000 campaign, beginning with a July 1999 speech in Indianapolis, “The Duty of Hope.” As president he created the White House Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives (2001), signed the No Child Left Behind Act (2002) to hold schools accountable for results, added a prescription-drug benefit to Medicare (2003) and launched the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (2003). Supporters saw an agenda that joined conservative principles to concern for the vulnerable; critics on the right saw an expansion of federal spending and power, and critics on the left doubted its commitment to the poor.

National conservatism took shape in the late 2010s among writers and politicians who argued that the post–Cold War conservative consensus — free trade, high levels of immigration, foreign interventionism and deference to markets — had failed working Americans and weakened the nation. The Israeli-American philosopher Yoram Hazony’s The Virtue of Nationalism (2018) defended a world of independent nation-states against universal empires and international institutions, and the Edmund Burke Foundation, which he chairs, launched the National Conservatism Conference in Washington in 2019.

A 2022 statement of principles called for national independence, restraint abroad, an economy of private enterprise that serves the national interest, more restrictive immigration, strong families and a public role for religion; it held that where a Christian majority exists, public life should be rooted in Christianity, while Jews and other religious minorities should be protected in their own traditions. Oren Cass’s think tank American Compass has developed the movement’s economic program, and figures associated with national conservatism, including Vice President J. D. Vance, have gained influence in the Republican Party of Donald Trump.