Welcome to the latest iteration of the Counter Revolution...
Trump’s Conservative Counterrevolution
It’s being waged on more fronts than Reagan’s.
Donald Trump’s presidency is the latest political phase in a decades-long cultural and political counterrevolution. In some respects, it mirrors the capture of the national Republican Party by the insurgent conservative movement that formed in response to the New Deal and Democratic foreign policy after the Second World War and that reached its zenith in the presidency of Ronald Reagan. At the time of Reagan’s political triumph, some observers called it the “
Reagan Revolution.” But the Reagan Revolution then, like Trump’s populist agenda today, was really a counterrevolution that first gained control of a Republican Party and that until then had refused to do battle against the administrative state formed by the New Deal and the Great Society and refused to seek victory in the Cold War.
The Reagan counterrevolution began in the aftermath of the Second World War. It started as intellectual-philosophical opposition to the exponential growth of the federal bureaucracy, as advocated by F. A. Hayek in
The Road to Serfdom, and criticism of the Democratic Party’s defensive policy of containment most compellingly presented by James Burnham in
The Struggle for the World,
The Coming Defeat of Communism, and
Containment or Liberation? Perhaps the postwar counterrevolutionary movement’s most important and influential book was Whittaker Chambers’s
Witness, which argued that the most fundamental question was whether the United States would descend into a secular nightmare at the altar of reason or recognize that God was the center of the universe.
Early conservative magazines such as Isaac Don Levine’s
Plain Talk, William Bradford Huie’s
American Mercury, and John Chamberlain’s
Freeman sparked the nascent conservative counterrevolutionary movement in the late 1940s and early 1950s, paving the way for the movement’s flagship journal, William F. Buckley Jr.’s
National Review, where Henry Hazlitt, among others, promoted free markets, free enterprise, and smaller government, and James Burnham presented a strategy for winning the Cold War.
It’s being waged on more fronts than Reagan’s.
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