Professor Bloom's Delight on the Right: American Conservatism and The Closing of the American Mind

Extract:
Chapter I, American Conservatism from the End of the Second World War to 1987:
During Franklin D. Roosevelt's time in office his liberalism dominated the political atmosphere in the United States. Even after the war, conservatives still had not climbed out of the hole they had dug during the New Deal and in their isolationism prior to World War II. The Grand Old Party did ultimately manage to win the White House and both houses of Congress in the election of 1952 but did so largely as a result of the sentiment that twenty years of Democratic rule was enough. Moreover, the Republican nominee Dwight D. Eisenhower, an immensely popular war hero, was largely apolitical (and therefore chose right-winger and avowed anti-communist Richard Nixon as his running mate to signal goodwill to the hard-liners in the GOP). Eisenhower provided steady, pragmatic and non-ideological stewardship; after the Congress was regained by the Democrats in 1954, he went on to implement essentially liberal policies. His presidency could hardly be called that of a convinced conservative.
It was outside of the political arena that conservatives slowly found an intellectual basis on which to erect their ideological edifice. From 1943 to 1953 conservatives had rallied around intellectuals like Austrian economist and philosopher F. A. Hayek, who in his famous 1944 book The Road to Serfdom had argued forcefully against any form of economic and political collectivism, which he saw as the breeding ground for both Communism and German National Socialism. In 1953, a number of books were published that would influence generations of conservatives to come: Leo Strauss's Natural Right and History, Robert Nisbet's The Quest for Community, Whittaker Chamber's Witness, and, above all, The Conservative Mind by Russell Kirk. The latter also became an early contributor to another milestone in the intellectual history of the American Right, namely the opinion journal National Review, which was founded

Moritz P. Mücke, B.A., was born in 1990 in Frankfurt am Main. He studied in Germany and the United States and completed his degree in American Studies at the Goethe-University in Frankfurt in 2014 with distinction. His research interests include Political Philosophy, American History, Geopolitics, and American Conservatism.