New Deal liberalism and 'Creeping Socialism': The Republican Party and the construction of modern American conservatism, c. 1933–c. 1960

The Democratic Party’s response to the Great Depression in the United States – involving the New Deal and its agenda of government activism – left Republicans in ideological and electoral disarray. This period saw a redefinition of liberalism in the political arena, with Democrats insisting that statism was necessary to protect liberty. This chapter explores debates among Republicans about the new focus on statism, known as ‘New Deal liberalism’, debates that were formative in refashioning conservatism in the United States as an ideology focusing on the ills of ‘big government’. It demonstrates how, within the analyses of Republicans, there was little distinction between this big-government liberalism and socialism, with connections between socialism and communism then becoming a focus of concern as the Cold War arrived. In the public arena, Republicans spoke of their opponents’ statism as a danger to democracy, in an era of dictatorship, as well as a threat to American ideals of individualism. During the 1930s they emphasized that their party – not the Democrats’ – was the genuine advocate of liberalism. After World War II, within the context of not only the advent of the Cold War but also a fresh impetus for democratic socialism in Western Europe, Republicans, now playing down their own ideological claim to the label of liberalism, tried to demonize their rivals’ liberal self-identity through the tag of ‘creeping socialism’ – close, they often insinuated, to communism. Although historians usually see this demonization, as well as references to the New Deal’s parallels with dictatorship, as mostly rhetorical, this chapter shows that alarm about the implications of its statism closely informed Republicans’ private analyses of American politics. As a result, American conservatism of this era possessed an oppositional and frequently negative character, which exacerbated Republican efforts to achieve a long-term challenge to the Democrats at the polls for several decades.