Conservatism in the United States

Declaration of Independence ("that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness") and of the U.S. Constitution, which established a federal republic under the rule of law.

[41][42][43] In the 21st century United States, types of conservatism include: In February 1955, in the first issue of National Review, William F. Buckley Jr. explained the standards of his magazine and articulate the beliefs of American conservatives:[76] Among our convictions: It is the job of centralized government (in peacetime) to protect its citizens' lives, liberty and property.

The profound crisis of our era is, in essence, the conflict between the Social Engineers, who seek to adjust mankind to scientific utopias, and the disciples of Truth, who defend the organic moral order.

Kirk's use of the word "prejudice" here is not intended to carry its contemporary pejorative connotation: a conservative himself, he believed that the inherited wisdom of the ages may be a better guide than apparently rational individual judgment.

In the United States, this translates into hard-line stances on moral issues, such as opposition to abortion, LGBT rights, feminism, pornography, comprehensive sex education, and recreational drug use.

[28][29][11] Social conservatives are strongest in the Southern "Bible Belt" and in recent years played a major role in the political coalitions of George W. Bush and Donald Trump.

Activist Grover Norquist is a well-known proponent of the strategy and has famously said, "My goal is to cut government in half in twenty-five years, to get it down to the size where we can drown it in the bathtub.

The movement seeks to promote national interests through the preservation of traditional cultural values,[59] restrictions on illegal immigration,[61] and strict law and order policies.

[92] All of the major American political parties support republicanism and the basic classical liberal ideals on which the country was founded in 1776, emphasizing liberty, the rule of law, the consent of the governed, and that all men were created equal.

[93] Political divisions inside the United States often seemed minor or trivial to Europeans, where the divide between the left and the right led to violent polarization, starting with the French Revolution.

[102] In 1955, Clinton Rossiter, a professor of history at Mount Holyoke College, wrote: Here was no lover of government by plutocracy, no dreamer of an America filled with factions and hard-packed cities.

The GAR, according to Stuart McConnell, promoted, "a nationalism that honored white, native-stock, middle-class males and ... affirmed a prewar ideal of a virtuous, millennial Republic, based on the independent producer, entrepreneurial capitalism, and the citizen-soldier volunteer".

[111] Its Counter-Subversive Activities Committee in 1946 began publishing the American Legion Firing Line, a newsletter for members which provides information on communist, fascist, and other extremist groups to its subscribers.

[117] To that end, Thatcher privatized industries and public housing, and Reagan cut the maximum capital gains tax from 28% to 20%, though in his second term he agreed to raise it back up to 28%.

He did so with tax cuts, continued deregulation, a greatly increased military budget, a policy of rollback of Communism as opposed to just containing it, and appeals to family values and religious morality.

"[99] Nate Cohn of The New York Times stated that Donald Trump's re-election in 2024 helped cement a realignment of right-wing populism as the dominant faction of American conservatism.

[124] According to political scientists Matt Grossmann and David A. Hopkins, the Republican Party's gains among white voters without college degrees contributed to the rise of right-wing populism.

They often oppose abortion, feminism, pornography, comprehensive sex education, homosexuality, same-sex marriage, transgender rights, secularism, atheism, and recreational drug use.

This has been particularly controversial as racial tensions have intensified since the 2010s, with points of contention including the 1619 Project, the removal of Confederate monuments and memorials, reparations for slavery, and the defund the police movement.

[165] These percentages were fairly constant from 1990 to 2009,[166] when conservatism spiked in popularity briefly,[167] before reverting to the original trend, while liberal views on social issues reached a new high.

For example, the term originalism has been used by current Supreme Court justices Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas, as well as former federal judges Robert Bork and Antonin Scalia to explain their beliefs.

[188]From the left, law professor Herman Schwartz argues that Rehnquist's reliance on federalism and state's rights has been a "Fig Leaf for conservatives": Today's conservative Supreme Court majority, led by Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist, has imposed limitations on federal power to curtail the rights of women, religious groups, the elderly, racial minorities, and other disadvantaged groups.

[190][191] David Hinshaw writes that William Allen White, editor of a small-town newspaper in Kansas from 1895, used "socialistic" as "his big gun to blast radical opposition".

[205] The Salem Radio Network syndicates a group of religiously oriented Republican activists, including Roman Catholic Hugh Hewitt, and Jewish conservatives Dennis Prager and Michael Medved.

In an array of reactions against the race, gender, and class biases found to be woven into the tradition of Anglo lit, multicultural writers and political literary theorists have sought to expose, resist, and redress injustices and prejudices.

[245] Allan Bloom, in his highly influential The Closing of the American Mind (1987) argues that moral degradation results from ignorance of the great classics that shaped Western culture.

He argues that this shift registered and mediated the deeper foundational antinomy structuring postwar conservatism itself: the stable social order of traditionalism and the creative destruction of free-market capitalism.

[257][258] To them, the U.S. is like the biblical "City upon a Hill", a phrase evoked by Puritan settlers in the colonial-era Province of Massachusetts Bay as early as 1630, and exempt from historical forces that have impacted other nations.

[264] In the decades around the end of the 19th century, Rossiter says Grover Cleveland, Elihu Root, William Howard Taft, and Theodore Roosevelt "were most successful in shaping the old truths of conservatism to the new facts of industrialism and democracy".

In what Rossiter called the "Great Train Robbery of Intellectual History", the laissez-faire, he says conservatives appropriated the themes of classical liberalism, especially liberty, opportunity, progress, and individualism, and packaged them into an ideology that supported the property rights of big corporations.

William F. Buckley Jr. , an author who founded National Review magazine in 1955
President Ronald Reagan holding a "Stop Communism Central America" t-shirt on the South Lawn of the White House in March 1986.
American Legion postcard from the 1930s to 1940s. A brown-haired white man and blonde white woman stand smiling beside their young blonde daughter who is kneeling by her bed, praying. It states "Teach Children Religion for a better community. Religion means reverence, obedience, order. Irreligion means chaos, crime, social collapse. Parents, wake up!" followed by "American Legion".
An American Legion postcard urging parents to teach religion to their children as a civic duty, c. 1930s
Ronald Reagan gives a televised address from the Oval Office , outlining his plan for tax reductions in July 1981 (excerpt).
President Donald Trump (2017–2021, 2025-present)
Russell Kirk , conservative theorist and author of The Conservative Mind , published in 1953
Percent of self-identified conservatives by state as of 2018 , according to a Gallup poll: [ needs update ] [ 174 ]
45% and above
40–44%
35–39%
30–34%
25–29%
24% and under
A 1792 portrait of John Adams by John Trumbull