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The history of conservatism in the United States is different from many other forms of conservatism throughout the Western world. There has never been a national political party in the United States called the Conservative Party. All major American political parties support republicanism and the basic classical liberal ideals on which the country was founded in 1776, emphasizing liberty, the pursuit of happiness, rule of law, consent of the governed, fear of corruption, and equal rights before the law.[1] 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 political polarization, starting with the French Revolution.[2]
No American party has advocated European ideals of conservatism such as a monarchy, an established church, or a hereditary aristocracy. American conservatism is best characterized as opposition to utopian ideas of progress.[3] Historian Patrick Allitt expresses the difference between conservative and liberal in terms not of policy but of attitude.[4]
Unlike Canada and the United Kingdom, there has never been a major national political party named the Conservative Party in the United States.[5] The Conservative Party of Virginia, founded in 1867, elected members to the House of Representatives from two other states (Maryland and North Carolina). Since 1962, there has been a small Conservative Party of New York State. During Reconstruction in the late 1860s, the former Whigs formed a Conservative Party in several Southern states, but they soon merged into the state Democratic parties.[6]
- ^ Harrison, Brigid C. (January 1, 2016). Power and Society: An Introduction to the Social Sciences. Cengage Learning. pp. 47–49. ISBN 9781337025966. Archived from the original on 18 January 2023. Retrieved 30 March 2016.
- ^ Arthur Aughey, Greta Jones, W. T. M. Riches, The Conservative Political Tradition in Britain and the United States (1992), p. 1: "there are those who advance the thesis that American exceptionalism means...there can be no American conservatism precisely because the American Revolution created a universally liberal society."
- ^ Iain McLean and Alistair McMillan, Concise Oxford Dictionary of Politics, p. 114, "Conservative ideas are, thus, more genuine and profound than many critics suggest, but such unity as they have is purely negative, definable only by its opposition and rejection of abstract, universal, and ideal principles..."
- ^ Allitt, Patrick (2009). The Conservatives: Ideas and Personalities Throughout American History. Yale University Press. p. 278. ISBN 9780300155297.
- ^ Michael Kazin et al. eds. The Concise Princeton Encyclopedia of American Political History (2011) pp 117-28.
- ^ Jack P. Maddex Jr. (2018). The Virginia Conservatives, 1867-1879: A Study in Reconstruction Politics. University of North Carolina Press. p. 13. ISBN 9781469648101. Archived from the original on 2023-01-18. Retrieved 2019-01-19.