George H. Nash Finds Our Moment ‘Sobering’

George H. Nash once set out to write on the conservative intellectual tradition. Somewhere along the way, he became a part of it.

His original plan was different. As a graduate student in history at Harvard University in the late 1960s, Nash needed a subject for his doctoral dissertation. He searched for one in the story of American liberalism. “I started with muckraking journalists and the progressives, but I moved on to the left-wing student activists of the 1930s,” he says. “Eventually I settled on the Americans for Democratic Action.”

The ADA was founded in 1947 by anti-communist liberals aligned with President Truman. It was a suitable topic — so fitting, in fact, that another Ph.D. student already had thought of it. “He had a head start,” says Nash. “I needed another idea.”

Then his thesis adviser made a surprising suggestion: What about the emerging intellectuals on the right?

At a time when the conservative movement was young and still reeling from Barry Goldwater’s election rout in 1964, Nash saw lots of reasons to shun the proposal, from the problem of finding sufficient source documents to the risk that current events would overtake his work.

“I picked it anyway,” says Nash, who wrote his dissertation and turned it into one of the great books of his era: The Conservative Intellectual Movement in America Since 1945. A few months before the book’s formal publication in 1976, National Review printed a 48-page excerpt in its 20th-anniversary issue. “One can confidently predict that much will be heard from [Nash] in the world of scholarship,” said an introductory note. Indeed, Nash went on to become the chief interpreter of what the sages of conservatism have thought and said — and he remains active even now, at a time when, in his words, “the movement is at war with itself.”

Today, the 75-year-old Nash lives in the house his father built in South Hadley, Mass. “He was a carpenter, and we moved in when I was eight years old,” he says. “We’re a Massachusetts Yankee family.” Nash says he was a voracious reader who became the valedictorian of his high-school class and went on to study history at nearby Amherst College. From there, he went straight to Harvard for his advanced degree: “I had decided that I was cut out for an academic career.”

He was also a conservative. “Most of my professors were liberal, but they didn’t put their liberalism in the classroom,” he says. Yet he saw them lose control of their university. He watched with dismay as radicals tried to take over the campus in 1969, prompting Harvard’s president to seek help from the police. “I saw the cost of reckless and violent protest,” says Nash. “I also saw prominent members of the faculty who did not try to maintain the integrity of the institution against an opposition. This developed my interest in the role of intellectuals in politics.”

By the following year, he was toiling at what would become his seminal book on how thinkers shape politics. “There was almost no scholarship on conservatives, and what did exist was dismissive,” he says. The most influential work at the time belonged to Richard Hofstadter, whose essay “The Paranoid Style in American Politics” treated Goldwater and his supporters as quacks. Nash aimed to overturn this prejudice, but not as a partisan cheerleader: “I knew what I wrote would have to pass academic muster. I had to strain for objectivity and show that I was a professional.”

Because archival material was scarce, Nash took up a tool of journalism: He interviewed as many of his subjects as possible. “I wanted to know how these conservatives understood themselves,” he says. His book is a character-driven chronicle of how ideas are born, clash, and change, with biographical sketches of William F. Buckley Jr., Friedrich Hayek, Russell Kirk, Irving Kristol, and others. Nash recounts their arguments and alliances, describing what is in essence a success story that anticipates conservatism’s ascendancy in the 1980s. Right-of-center readers who sought to understand the messy intellectual history of their movement’s modern founders suddenly had an authoritative source, with footnotes.

Nash wanted to avoid taking sides in conservatism’s internecine battles. “I tried to keep my personal preferences out of it,” he says. By striving to stay above the fray, however, he perhaps had the effect of promoting “fusionism,” an idea usually associated with Frank Meyer, a senior editor at National Review, even though Meyer didn’t care for the term. Fusionism offered a philosophical home for the factions of the Right, encouraging them to balance as best they could the imperatives of tradition with the demands of freedom as they formed an ecumenical coalition against the Left. Put crudely, it meant that social conservatives, market libertarians, and others should set aside their squabbles and get along in the face of a common foe.

With his freshly minted doctorate, Nash assumed that he was bound for a conventional career in academia. Instead, he received an unexpected offer from the Hoover Presidential Library Association to write a definitive biography of the 31st president. In 1975, he moved to Iowa, Hoover’s native state, and got to work. “My goal was to write a comprehensive account that would become the standard in the field,” he says. For the next 20 years, he labored to produce three thick and well-regarded volumes that total nearly 2,000 pages. Yet they recounted Hoover’s life only to 1918 — ten years before he was elected president and decades before he died, in 1964. At this point, his sponsors, perhaps frustrated with Nash’s pace and perfectionism, withdrew their support. Others finished the project.

Nash returned to the family home in 1995 to care for his aging parents and assume the role of what he calls “an independent scholar and historian.” He delivered lectures, wrote essays, and published Reappraising the Right, which examined the state of conservatism as it entered the 21st century. He continued to work on several Hoover-related projects, including an unfinished book on the rivalry between Hoover and Franklin Delano Roosevelt.

By this time, a younger generation of conservatives had come to see Nash as one of their movement’s wise men, the author of a contemporary classic that sat on bookshelves beside the likes of Ideas Have Consequences, by Richard Weaver, and Witness, by Whittaker Chambers. ISI Books issued a new edition of Nash’s old tome, with an epilogue that assessed the presidency of Ronald Reagan. It arrived at a time when academic interest in the history of conservatism was rising, thanks in part to Alan Brinkley of Columbia University, who had called upon his colleagues and their students to correct the error of having overlooked a big development in American politics. Nash appreciates it when conservatives compliment him on his work, but he says he takes special satisfaction from liberal historians who praise his fair-mindedness.

What he hears today, he says, is bitterness — not directed at him, but in American politics generally, and among conservatives, too. “There always have been moments of ferment, especially in the 1960s and after the Cold War,” he says. “Yet I’ve never seen so much dissension. Conservatives have had sharp disagreements and they could get personal, but now there’s name-calling and a willingness to engage in personally abrasive politics.” Nash worries that by focusing on their feuds, conservatives ignore the sources of their unity. “Conservatives need allies,” he says. “We’re not the majority. Ronald Reagan taught us that successful politics is about addition, not subtraction.”

As a historian, Nash is more comfortable discussing the past than the future. He also knows that past is prologue, and that studying history is a key to understanding what may come next. Conservatives, he says, should expect a reckoning with the legacy of President Trump, leading to their movement’s reconfiguration: “We may see an attempt to refurbish conservatism with Trumpian elements — a kind of Trumpism without Trump.” This could take a variety of forms. “The movement may become less libertarian as it tries to appeal to Trump voters,” he says, with implications for free trade and immigration as well as policies that affect working-class Americans. “The language of order may become stronger.”

A different possibility is a reinvigorated commitment to liberty, especially as a Biden administration starts to exercise power. “There’s still a general bias among conservatives toward free markets and against regulations,” says Nash. “Conservatives may start to talk even more about freedom — not just economic freedom but also religious freedom and free speech, especially if the culture of wokeness strengthens.” He sums up the conservative predicament with caution: “It’s a sobering moment.”

When ISI Books brought out a 30th-anniversary edition of his landmark book in 2006, Nash wrote a new preface in which he thanked the conservative intellectuals who were his subjects because they, “in defiance of criticism and even ostracism, pursued their callings, raised their banners, and refused to vanish into the so-called dustbin of history.”

If conservatism flourishes in the years ahead, it will have survived a new set of sobering moments and have gained a new group of intellectuals to thank — but it will be lucky to have another Nash.