For Clyde Wilson, the Jeffersonian conservative tradition was never a stale embrace of the past for its own sake. It conserves only to produce something better.
In 1969 the late Mel Bradford recommended to Modern Age’s second editor, Eugene Davidson, that he should publish a groundbreaking article by a young historian named Clyde Wilson. The article, entitled “The Jeffersonian Conservative Tradition,” stood in sharp contrast to what most scholars contended was the prevailing spirit of American conservatism. Not only was it marked by Wilson’s crisp, clear writing style for which he is now famous, it also stood squarely against how most self-identified conservatives understood their intellectual genealogy. The article no doubt raised many eyebrows among the conservative movement’s most prominent writers and intellectuals–if, that is, they paid attention. Reportedly, Mel Bradford wrote to Wilson, congratulating him on making a big splash with his first published academic contribution. As Wilson eventually told his own students generations later, it is always “good to make a big success with your first piece.”
As controversial as the article might have been in the winter of 1969, it now holds much appeal as one of the timeless essays of the American conservative movement. It is still republished and reread across a variety of academic and learned websites. Scholars still cite it. Students still read it, and countless others benefit from its unique perspective not only on conservatism as a set of political principles, but on the entirety of American history and politics. Wilson’s efforts clarified the Jeffersonian tradition, which is now most commonly associated with the American South and often used synonymously with “southern conservativism.” Throughout the article, Wilson emphasized several key points about Jeffersonian conservatism and the historic circumstances from which it grew, each of which deserved a book of their own, but can be summarized as follows.
First, there is no linear transition from one conservative political party to another. The Federalists did not evolve into the antebellum Whigs, who then turned into wartime and postbellum Republicans. Nor did the Jeffersonian Republicans, then the Democrats, represent a “liberal” or even revolutionary tendency in American politics. While obvious to anyone who studies American political history, this one small fact eluded most conservatives in the 1960s, who counted on a conservative tradition stretching from the Federalists of the Founding period to the Republican supporters of Barry Goldwater in the 1960s. Of course, this meant the Republicans were not the official conservative party in the United States. Further, Wilson politely and succinctly showed that the antebellum Democrats and the few, small factions that remained in the Grover Cleveland and Gold Bug wing of the party, as well as an odd coalition of 20th century southerners and mid-westerners of different parties, might be the closest thing Americans ever saw of a genuinely conservative political party. In short, like an American golden era of laissez-faire governing institutions, a conservative, national political party was nothing but a myth.
Second, Wilson argued that conservatives should seek to conserve “the structure of society and government that is the most organic, legitimate, and just for the American nation.” No ideal form of society will work, nor can it be forged by a comprehensive, national prescription of legal activism, abstract political commitments, and corporate partnerships. It must be “just” for the Americans who were and are a free people of incredible cultural, racial, political, religious, and economic diversity. There could never be a “one size fits all” on any major political issue, and thus, conservatives who advocated such betrayed a gross ignorance of genuine American federalism. It was not merely a separation of powers into three branches of government. Instead, Wilson insisted that early Americans conceived of federalism as a separation of sovereignties, which reside in the people themselves and the institutions and relationships they actively create. Since the American people are incredibly diverse, justice and necessity means that the sovereignties characterizing American political life must be equally diverse. There were no “Ten Founding Principles” or political guidebook that guided the Framers as they reshaped American society along conservative lines. What mattered instead is that they forged governments fit for the people themselves.
Third, the national, constitutional framework of the Founders was not without its flaws and that many opposed the workings of the Philadelphia Convention and feared that the Constitution itself would create a government sliding ever so slowly toward tyranny. At the time of the publication of Wilson’s effort, serious academics paid scant attention to the Antifederalists, and worse, viewed the Antifederalists as the intellectual forebears of the New Deal and Great Society. Yet Wilson was among the first scholars to present them as the early republic’s conservatives and the Federalist Framers of the Constitution as the real innovators. Wilson’s understanding of the Antifederalists, their political thought, and the vitality of the dissenting tradition in American politics remains under-appreciated but is of enduring importance.
Fourth, there has always existed in America a heated series of culture wars. Not yet a term employed in the winter of 1969 that phrase—“culture wars”—would soon become common place in heated political battles of the 1970s and 1980s. But as with any great historian worth his or her salt, Wilson understood at an early age that the country has always been a collection of regions, communities, and traditions. Since colonial times, they jockeyed for cultural power, lorded their own culture over the rest, or sternly resisted and resented any such attempts to do so. Of all of the article’s key points, the recognition of all of American history as an exceptional series of regional and cultural struggles, interspersed with periods of profound cooperation, continues to correct mainstream conservatives’ understanding of the American past.
Fifth, what was called “Populism” was not a left-wing, proto-progressive movement that anticipated the New Deal and helped create the national welfare state. Instead, it served as the ablest reflection of the Jeffersonian conservative tradition, and Wilson’s interpretation sharply contested what historians and political scientists after World War II commonly promoted. Populists carried forward, albeit imperfectly at times, a commitment to organic government, peaceful coexistence, and a resistance to concentrations of wealth and power. It was Wilson who first noted that most Populists were in the South, and most of those were former Confederates or their descendants. Their political goals were no more radical than any others of their day. When compared to the likes of the Progressives or even the Republicans, they were clearly the most conservative culturally and politically, as well as in their commitment to inherited principles.
But beyond these five things, reading between the lines of the famous article, there is much more that we can say to show its timelessness. For one, throughout the pages there are words and phrases that highlight a general affinity among most Americans despite their differences. Southern conservatism is Jeffersonian, and as such, it is distinctly American and perfectly aligned with common, social customs from colonial times to the late 20th century. Wilson dismissed the pretentiousness of mainstream conservatism–then and now–with its anti-democratic and often unreflective nationalistic tendencies. The problem with America was never the unwashed masses nor the “deplorable” working class or those who lived in rural areas. Neither the propertyless nor the disenfranchised were to be greatly feared if their relationships reflected the complexity of being an American and remained firmly grounded in one of its enduring regional cultures. Instead, the real threat came from the self-conscious elites, shorn from any cultural roots and all too quick to “all[y] themselves with the mob.”
Wilson also insisted that the real problem facing the country in the 1960s was ideological thinking and especially taking ideology to such an extreme that it became the identity of a national political party. Here might lie Wilson’s most prophetic and cautionary tale. As bad as the traditional American party system might have been by the end of the 1960s, at the very least it still reflected genuine if not competing interests among American citizens. Some honest and some not so honest, these interests often fit together in an unruly puzzle as national statesmen carefully juggled each one to build a ruling coalition. Usually, the political party that came out on top was the one that put together what best reflected the majority of interests in the country, until, that is, one or more interests changed and groups shifted their party allegiance. It was not perfect, but it was a political system that kept Americans together in such a way that they mutually respected each other’s existence and tolerated their differences.
Such was not the case, Wilson seemed to surmise, when sectional elites grew tired of honoring interests and the complexity of American life. They then chose what to them seemed to be the easiest path forward–identify a set of ideas or craft a full-blown ideology that could unite enough people around one set of beliefs. The natural interests of society would be sacrificed, and at the same time, those things that characterized common life would be cast aside. Ideas would be the only substance of consequence. The everyday patterns of normal life would not matter when the union, or big business, or equality, globalism or any other set of ideas were at stake. In short, a conservatism of ideas would never bear any clear connection to a conservatism of the things that mattered to most people. For Wilson, this clearly characterized the Republican Party on the eve of the Civil War. But it also reflects the position of both parties at the height of World War I, or the Progressives of the early 20th century, or even the Democratic Party of today. Any political party dedicated to ideological purity can never be conservative in any sense of the word.[1]
In fact, Wilson closed his article with a nod to Richard Nixon’s victory in 1968. The Democratic establishment had sacrificed its traditional moorings for the sake of ideological purity. In doing so they cast aside “sensible, productive, and self-respecting lower-middle and middle class citizens.” They hoped to secure victory by ideologically uniting “discontented minorities and befuddled middle class voters who responded to pseudo-intellectualizing rather than common sense ….” And yet, they lost to a “new Jeffersonian coalition of productive citizens who were a majority in forty-four of the fifty states.”[2]
Looking back across the fifty years since the formation of that new Jeffersonian coalition and the publication of “The Jeffersonian Conservative Tradition,” there are some successes and many failures. What Wilson did not know then but most certainly knows now is that the ideological commitment of the Democratic Party was no passing fancy as it had been during previous periods. This time, the ideology took on new shapes and forced out the party’s sensible followers and whose interests no longer met an ideological litmus test. Not coincidentally, thus began the awkward and tragic history of the modern American “deplorable.”
The common people who served as the backbone of the Jeffersonian conservative tradition–because they lived that tradition–fared poorly over the next several decades. It is true that we can measure their standard of living in countless ways and prove that their lives experienced some limited advancement thanks to new technology and time saving inventions. It is equally true that their lives were eventually turned upside down. The great hopes of 1968 and 1969 soon gave way to inflation, gas lines, factory closures, deportation of jobs, and crumbling public schools. Within a decade, the largest percentage of women in American history began working outside their homes due as much to financial necessity as to anyone’s choice. Black Americans, especially black southerners, came out of the Civil Rights Movement cherishing their newly obtained rights and status only to watch their neighborhood businesses close, crime rates rise around government housing, their families deteriorate, and even their rising dominance in American entertainment eclipsed by none other than … disco.
But in other ways, the 1970s was the most conservative decade of the 20th century. The Jeffersonian political coalition of 1968 easily turned into a national cultural movement of sorts.
Not everyone listened to disco, and the Jeffersonian South, whose political institutions were long controlled by white elites, found its culture institutions flourish and become the envy of the country. Television programs, musical forms, drama, culinary masters, stock car racing, and even religious figures, quickly mimicked or fully adopted southern ways of life. Southern symbols like the Confederate battle flag, moonshine runners, southern athletic teams, and perhaps most important of all, simple, homey celebrations of the bicentennial of the nation’s independence forged a lasting legacy in every American child’s mind.
Not coincidentally, those things sustained the Jeffersonian tradition long enough that yet another Jeffersonian political coalition formed in 1980 and elected Ronald Reagan president. We are still too close to the 1980 election to accurately perceive who the most genuinely conservative candidate was—Jimmy Carter or Ronald Reagan.[3] But what we do know is that the Reagan administration and Republican operatives took little time to disband that coalition and systematically root out any who seemed too Jeffersonian. The Republicans, it seems, followed the Democrats in forging a party of ideological purity. Interests mattered little while cultural matters only received lip service such that by the 1990s, the “deplorables” found themselves in the same financial straits as the mid-1970s. But unlike that decade, Jeffersonian cultural habits faced a rising tide of hatred that has continued unabated for the last 25 years. Ideologies replaced sentiment and interests as the rise of social media aided in making political stance the standard by which to measure everything. It has become so bad that minions of both national parties treat ideological rage as perfectly acceptable and even expected. As a result, there is little joy found in politics today.
Contrary to the conservative movement’s libertarian tendencies, which might insist that “joy” and “politics” must never be synonymous, Jeffersonian conservatives like Clyde Wilson often explained that the sheer entertainment value of politics is what fascinated and engaged early Americans. Traditionally, American politics was merely an extension of social, religious, economic, and even familial arrangements. As Wilson often argued, more so than constitutional principles or venerating the patrimony of the Founders, regular participation in politics and the momentary delight it brought is what ensured common Americans continued governing themselves. Not only did this engagement depend upon partisan celebrations and local events, it also depended upon a variety of symbols that captured then inspired the imaginations of Americans.
To be clear, over the past fifty years, much of what Wilson advocated failed to gain ground. The symbols–the basic symbols even of his beloved South–slowly gave way to those championed by the cultural elites of Los Angeles and Manhattan. At other times, those symbols literally came tumbling down as southerners furled their flags and tore down their once venerated monuments. They openly condemned as “racists” or “white supremacists” innocent men and women of the past whose chief sin was looking upon those symbols or hearing in the names of their towns, schools, and streets examples of bravery, compassion, and the courage needed to follow General Pershing into the Battle of Saint-Mihiel, leap into water at Omaha Beach, or survive in the mountainous desert of Afghanistan.
It is unlikely that Wilson’s greatest single accomplishment will be remembered as the centerpiece of his remarkable scholarly opus. Nor will it be his cutting-edge reinterpretation of American history that anticipated by over twenty years the prize-winning work of subsequent scholars. What mattered and still matters in Clyde Wilson’s arguments is that those who hold the Jeffersonian conservative tradition dear must be creative. The tradition must live in order to endure. Here is the real essence of Jeffersonian movements like the Lost Cause of the Confederacy as much as the Principles of ’76, Jacksonian democracy, or the Reagan Coalition. Theirs was never an effort to draw together a people by their sorrow or stale memories of the past. Their purpose–like that of Wilson’s efforts–was to inspire and create. Permanently memorializing Confederate soldiers in marble and quaint stories was no symbolic act of a people wishing to preserve past social relationships any more than trying to restore the “true Founding.” Theirs was not a battle for ideas nor in any general sense a reawakening of hate and oppression. Rather, the goals and sentiments of those who built Confederate monuments, voted for Richard Nixon and Donald Trump a century later, bravely took their blue slips when the town factory closed, went to work when their husband’s income could not secure a middle class living, or even sang the old hymns in decaying churches involved so much more than abstract ideas.
Then and now, they want to live. And they want to live free from a self-appointed and near comatose elite trampling them into the ground. They want to prove as Thomas Jefferson once wrote, that humanity was not born with saddles on their backs. Throughout his career, Clyde Wilson consistently corrected his students that responding tit for tat to every criticism was violating what scripture teaches. The foolishness of some people is so hardened that rational discourse is nearly impossible.[4] We have to live, and we have to create.
Conservatives in all American regions have lost many of their symbols, but is that loss any more than generations of Americans before? The settlers of Jamestown and most of the first presidents of the United States did not need a battle flag, or a song, or even a name to survive and create something wonderful. But in American political life, as Willmoore Kendall and George Carey argued, symbols do help, so let us suggest a new one that has almost already vanished except in our memories.[5] This is a new symbol that only good southerners and good American Jeffersonians will understand. In recent decades it has become the essential, ubiquitous image of the rural South and is a vivid contrast to the pink houses and white picket fences of Abraham Lincoln’s midwestern America or the polished steel and sterile condominiums of today’s technological elite.
The new symbol of the Jeffersonian conservative tradition, we pose, should be the old, rusted truck sitting wheel-less on top of cinder blocks in a front yard. For today’s elite, this truck represents everything that is wrong with southerners of all races and Jeffersonian deplorables of every region. It shows a people who are literally stuck. They are stuck in the past with a dilapidated vehicle, stuck in a rundown home, stuck without enough sense or opportunity to get a good job or pursue a college degree, or even unable to consider that there might be something newer, fresher, faster, and better suited for modern life. Jeffersonian America, whether we call it “fly-over country” or something else, is to today’s American elites nothing but a small town where people plant idols to the past in their front yards in the form of a vehicle they are better off forgetting.
But for those who have or once had such a vehicle in their yard, or more likely under their carport or in their garage, they know better. They know the love of a father and his son as they spent countless hours tooling away, laughing and learning, and talking about the real facts of life. Those with a truck on bricks know cool breezes that comes down from late summer mountains and promise the first glimpse of fall, and they know this precisely because they are outside to feel it. They know what it is like when the heavy humidity of the afternoon lightens as the sun sets and crickets begin to sing. They know of a people who no longer own their country but love it nonetheless, who expect their government officials to actually work to improve their lives, and believe business owners should not forsake them just because things are cheaper in China.
But most of all, those with trucks on blocks know that when something cannot be preserved as it once was, good Christian stewardship demands that parts of it be used to create something new. These are the real creators and the men and women with real imagination. They have the endurance to teach their own children, to start their own businesses, to practice in a professional field when others tell them they have no chance, or to vote for candidates that the establishment hates. They do not waste their time in endless debates and ideological quarrels. They do not know what it is like to fight lost causes, but that is because they never really lose. They may not always defend well what they love, nor can they always be counted on to stand up for what is right. Never once do they believe that what they create will be perfect. But they know how to take what remains of the past, combine it with the best that they have, then create something new.
For Clyde Wilson, the Jeffersonian conservative tradition was never a stale embrace of the past for its own sake. It conserves only to produce something better. In terms of intellectual history and political thought, Wilson’s essay initiated a quiet revolution. Wilson reminds us that Thomas Jefferson served as the “Republican Patriarch,” the political thinker who had incorporated the Old Republican understanding of liberty into a theory of federal relationships most conducive to the life of the community and political order. Regardless of the desire to accentuate the uniformity of Jefferson’s political thinking and to depict the antebellum periods of southern political theory as “Jeffersonian” and “post-Jefferson,” a common practice among scholars, Wilson reminds us of the vitality of Jefferson as a political thinker and the essential ambiguities of his thought.[6]
Wilson never wavered from the seminal article, and his current scholarly efforts remind us that the states assume a mediatory role between the people of states and the general government. As Wilson argued consistently throughout his life, an adequate understanding of Jefferson’s political theory also necessitates an appreciation of the Kentucky Resolutions as a primary text in the American republican canon perhaps just as much, if not more practically, as Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence. In these documents Jefferson provides a way for restoring the regime to its “simple” design of state authority, allowing for mutual security and greater political liberty.
Amidst the recent confusion of Judge Barrett’s nomination and confirmation to the country’s highest court, and her attachment to a “Natural Rights Republic,” devoid of Jeffersonian self-restraint, Wilson’s Jefferson also teaches us that the Constitution functions as the sinew of the compact, binding the regime together, which was the result of establishing perimeters of authority for popular rule. The designation of this governing authority according to Jefferson’s first Kentucky Resolution was originally articulated in the Ninth and Tenth Amendments to the Constitution, but the political crisis of 1798 required the reclamation of responsibility as a means of protecting the autonomy and fundamental liberties of the states’ “definite reserve powers” from usurpation by the general government. In case the general government trespassed the boundaries of the powers not delegated to it, a state could rightly declare its actions as “unauthoritative, void, and of no force.” For Jefferson and his followers, this was the essence of self-government and the foundation of American politics.
We must remember that Wilson’s Jefferson also continued to exhibit an attachment to the notion of subsidiarity, linking the wisdom of the ancients with the republicanism of the Founding, and with his own political thought. A stable polity and social harmony could only be secured when each part of the community was “just to each other.” During that period an appreciation of subsidiarity was best shown by Jefferson’s willingness to argue that protecting aliens came under the responsibility of the states and was not delegated by the Constitution. With few restrictions having been placed upon states regarding the status of “alien-friends,” which consisted mostly of Irish and French immigrants sympathetic to republican principles, the Alien and Sedition Acts were a blatant infringement upon the reserved powers of the states. Any measures “not delegated are reserved” to the states and any abrogation of such a compact would, in the complementary language of Jefferson’s associate, James Madison, result in the general government’s offense being declared “void and of no force” as an infraction against the Constitution within the confines of the respective state (or states).[7]
We first came upon Clyde Wilson’s essay as young scholars, but we continue to be inspired by its enduring lessons, and by Wilson’s brilliant distillation of the core of what the Jeffersonian tradition best represents–friendship, loyalty, stewardship, joy and laughter, forgiveness, a love for place and home, and most of all, an appreciation for an inherited land and the generations of traditions that make that land worth defending and its future worth living.
The Imaginative Conservative applies the principle of appreciation to the discussion of culture and politics—we approach dialogue with magnanimity rather than with mere civility. Will you help us remain a refreshing oasis in the increasingly contentious arena of modern discourse? Please consider donating now.
Notes:
[1] See H. Lee Cheek, Jr., “The Problem of Ideology in Contemporary Conservative Thought,” The Lincoln Review, Volume 8, Number 1 (Fall 1987).
[2] Wilson, 47.
[3] Clay Ouzts, Showdown in the South: Jimmy Carter and the 1976 Florida Democratic Primary (Tallahassee: Sentry Press, 2018).
[4] H. Lee Cheek, Jr., and Carey Roberts, ”Jurgen Habermas, John C. Calhoun, and Slavery,” The Imaginative Conservative, 2020,
[5] Willmoore Kendall and George W. Carey, The Basic Symbols of the American Political Tradition, Second Edition (Washington, D.C.: The Catholic University Press of America Press, 1995). Both Kendall and Carey acknowledged their intellectual debt to the scholarship of Eric Voegelin as well.
[6] Robert Shalhope, “Thomas Jefferson’s Republicanism and Antebellum Southern Thought,” Journal of Southern History, Vol. XLII, No. 4 (November 1976), pp. 530-532.
[7] The Virginia Report of 1799-1800 Touching the Alien and Sedition Laws; Together With the Virginia Resolutions of December 21, 1798, The Debate and Proceedings Thereon in the House of Delegates of Virginia, and Several Other Documents (Richmond: J. W. Randolph, 1850), 164.
The featured image is “The Pioneer” (1904) by Frederick McCubbin, and is in the public domain, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.
