Verbal Shifts in the American Presidency: A Content Analysis

The resurgence of conservatism may be described as the most significant postwar development in American thought. “No intellectual phenomenon has been more surprising in recent years,” Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., concedes, “than the revival in the United States of conservatism as a respectable social philosophy.” No longer can one lament, as Alpheus T. Mason did in 1948, that “conservatism, once more than respectable political theology (especially among the educated), now carries overtones of reaction well nigh as discrediting as the rabidities attributed to communism.” Intellectual spokesmen are now, on the contrary, making a concerted effort to revisit and revitalize the conservative point of view.Although most of this “egg head” element in the conservative camp may be, and has been, dismissed as expressing an anachronistic yearning for the anticommercial traditions evolved in British feudalism, the business leaders whom they neglect have themselves been revising and actively selling a conservatism that appears to be more closely related to the realities of the American social situation.