The Conscience of a Conservative
Author of record: Barry Goldwater (Victor Publishing, April 1960). Actual ghostwriter: L. Brent Bozell Jr.. Origin: a 1959 commission from a group of conservatives led by Clarence Manion (former Notre Dame Law School dean and a Bircher contributor to National Review) for a “pamphlet on Americanism.” Outcome: 3.5 million copies sold; the most widely distributed political manifesto of postwar American conservatism; the textual canon of fusionist politics; the foundation for Goldwater’s 1964 presidential run.
What It Is
A short (~120-page) declaration of conservative principle organized around three themes:
- Traditionalism: man as a “spiritual animal”; conservatism as application of “the wisdom and experience and the revealed truths of the past to the problems of today”; the conservative “looks upon the enhancement of man’s spiritual nature as the primary concern of political philosophy.”
- Libertarianism: government as a leviathan that has overgrown its constitutional role; politics as “the art of achieving the maximum amount of freedom for individuals that is consistent with the maintenance of social order”; tax limitation (“government has a right to claim an equal percentage of each man’s wealth, and no more”); states’ rights; anti–federal subsidy; anti–organized labor.
- Anti-communism: a seven-point program “to win the Cold War,” including U.S. military superiority, NATO maintenance, and encouragement of “the captive peoples” to “overthrow their captors”; central thesis that “the communists seek victories” while America seeks “settlements.”
Goldwater’s gloss on the project: “to apply the wisdom and experience and the revealed truths of the past to the problems of today.”
Why It Matters Here
The Conscience of a Conservative is the wiki’s reference text for what fusionism was as a political program — the precise document that the MAGA New Right has unwound, point by point.
| Conscience (1960) | New Right (post-2016) |
|---|---|
| Traditionalism via private virtue & “spiritual nature” | Traditionalism via state enforcement of substantive moral ends (Postliberalism) |
| Free trade, deregulation, anti-subsidy | Economic nationalism, industrial policy (Oren Cass, American Compass) |
| Anti-communism as foreign policy organizing principle | Anti-progressive / anti-China / anti-immigration as organizing principles |
| ”Each man… responsible for his own development” | The state as agent of cultural restoration (Common Good Constitutionalism) |
| Suspicion of “concentration of power in the hands of a few men” | Decisionism: “sovereign is he who decides on the exception” |
| Constitution as instrument “for limiting the functions of government” | Constitution as instrument of substantive moral order (Declarationism) |
The book is therefore the precise foil against which to read Patrick Deneen’s Why Liberalism Failed, Adrian Vermeule’s Common Good Constitutionalism, Sohrab Ahmari’s Tyranny, Inc, and the Hazony National Conservatism Statement. Each is a deliberate refutation of one or more of Conscience’s pillars.
The Bozell Authorship Problem
Goldwater authored none of the prose. Bozell — Yale-trained Catholic convert, William F. Buckley Jr.’s brother-in-law, and the same writer who, two years later, would publish his anti-fusionist 1962 essay arguing that “the story of how the free society has come to take priority over the good society is the story of the decline of the West” — wrote the actual book. The fusionist manifesto and the proto-postliberal dissent are by the same author within a 24-month window.
The fusionist movement therefore canonized as its central political text a book whose ghostwriter, on his own account, did not believe in fusionism’s first principle (that freedom is prior to virtue). This is one of the wiki’s sharper structural points: the canonical fusionist manifesto was always already shadowed by its own postliberal alternative. See L. Brent Bozell Jr. for the longer argument.
Cross-References
- Barry Goldwater — author of record
- L. Brent Bozell Jr. — actual writer
- Fusionism — the doctrine the book canonized
- The Conservative Consensus — Edwards’s 2007 retrospective canonization
- Frank Meyer — the theorist whose synthesis the book popularized
- Ronald Reagan — fusionism’s later embodiment
- Postliberalism — the position Bozell privately held while writing this book