The Tory Right and the American Conservative Movement

This chapter examines the distinctions between the Tory tradition and what now passes for American conservatism. In the post-World War II era, many prominent voices of the American conservative movement portrayed their cause as a noble continuation of the traditional English conservatism that such worthies as Edmund Burke and Benjamin Disraeli defended in an earlier era. The chapter maintains that these claims are unfounded. By focusing on self-described Tory traditionalist writers such as George Grant, one can locate a wide gap between the neoconservative valorization of capitalist democracy and the inveterate conservative suspicion of what contemporary American conservatives are taught to venerate. Unlike traditional Tories, the advocates of “democratic capitalism,” wherever they are present, represent globalization, not a conservative defense of particularity and organic social relations.