This chapter tracks the changes to the American conservative movement that have unfolded since the heyday of William F. Buckley, who founded the conservative magazine National Review in 1955. Centered on Buckley’s defiance of all things left wing and on his provocative writings on welfare, critiques of the New Deal, and Cold War anxieties, this chapter shows the conflicted relationship many contemporary American conservatives have with his legacy. "Serious conservatives" who place themselves in Buckley’s lineage find themselves alienated in the contemporary media landscape, which, although displaying the same incendiary spirit as Buckley’s essays and his television show Firing Line, lacks the intellectual seriousness that many found in his writings. More generally, this chapter identifies the recurrent themes in conservative writing and dwells on the agitational poetics of conservative essayism.

This chapter addresses Mailer’s sometimes combative but always interesting friendships and feuds with writers and intellectuals like Gore Vidal, William F. Buckley, William Styron, James Jones, and Diana Trilling. These stormy relationships offer examples of Mailer’s embrace of both verbal and physical sparring, and his willingness to engage in debate with individuals “on the other side of the aisle,” his fraught friendship with Buckley being a prime example of this.

Focusing on the birth of the postwar era to the early 1960s, this chapter reconstructs the widely held critical view that even though New Deal liberalism was the dominant political order in the United States, the most celebrated literature of the period was derived from Anglophone modernism, an aesthetic movement embodied by writers including T. S. Eliot, William Faulkner, and Ezra Pound, whom prominent critics such as Lionel Trilling perceived as anti-liberal at best and reactionary at worst. The chapter also reveals how the correlation between highbrow literature and conservative politics accorded not only with the early conservative movement’s neo-Burkean conception of empirical complexity over abstraction, but also the carefully cultivated self-image conservatives had of themselves as guardians of high literary culture.

In the 1930s, with the rise of Adolf Hitler, mental health professionals grew concerned about the future of Europe and sought an understanding of Nazism. Psychoanalysts Walter Langer and Erik H. Erikson formulated the psychology of Hitler for William Donovan and the OSS. Langer emphasized Hitler’s psychodynamics, while Erikson focused on cultural issues in Germany and on Hitler’s appeal to his followers. Psychiatry and psychoanalysis triumphed after the war, yet as Senator Joseph McCarthy and the Red Scare came to dominate the landscape, liberal émigré psychoanalysts came under suspicion. A few, like Erikson, declined to sign loyalty oaths or became critics of American society. Newspapers seemed to flourish, but circulation actually lost ground in relation to population growth. The rise of television changed the news business, but like traditional media, it had differential effects by region. TV was available sooner in the urban areas of the East, and the liberal editorial stance of the large urban dailies had less appeal in the small towns of the Midwest and West. Drawing on these regional differences, Barry Goldwater came to prominence as a presidential candidate.