What Consensus?

For years it has been an axiom not only in all “sophisticated” circles but wherever the Establishment could use the mass-communications network to hatch its eggs that the contemporary conservative movement and conservative ideas are “outside the American consensus.” And for years it was possible to maintain this myth without doing too much violence to the surface facts. Whatever the underlying attitude of the American people in actuality remained, there was nowhere in the intellectual world, and only peripherally or occasionally in the political world, open or striking evidence to dispute the thesis of American consensus upon the moral beauty and existential rightness of the world that Franklin Roosevelt made.

The development, in the last five or ten years, of a conscious and easily observable conservative movement, and the articulation of its attitudes on a high intellectual level, should have shattered the myth. Still, generally, it was sustained by ignoring the reality of a massive and solidly based opposition to the putative consensus. Or sometimes it was glanced at, only to be brushed aside as a fringe phenomenon, primarily expressing the reactions of persons in one way or another “psychologically disturbed.”

FS

About the Author

Frank S. Meyer

Frank S. Meyer was a senior editor of National Review.

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For years it has been an axiom not only in all “sophisticated” circles but wherever the Establishment could use the mass-communications network to hatch its eggs that the contemporary conservative movement and conservative ideas are “outside the American consensus.” And for years it was possible to maintain this myth without doing too much violence to the surface facts. Whatever the underlying attitude of the American people in actuality remained, there was nowhere in the intellectual world, and only peripherally or occasionally in the political world, open or striking evidence to dispute the thesis of American consensus upon the moral beauty and existential rightness of the world that Franklin Roosevelt made.

The development, in the last five or ten years, of a conscious and easily observable conservative movement, and the articulation of its attitudes on a high intellectual level, should have shattered the myth. Still, generally, it was sustained by ignoring the reality of a massive and solidly based opposition to the putative consensus. Or sometimes it was glanced at, only to be brushed aside as a fringe phenomenon, primarily expressing the reactions of persons in one way or another “psychologically disturbed.”