ABSTRACT

The essence of progressive orthodoxy, conservatism maintains, is ideology, which involves an attempt to construct alternative realities that make no concession to the limitations inherent in the human condition. The political school sympathizes with the free-market ideology, but qualifies it by adding a concern for moral and communal factors, as well as a greater emphasis on nationalism and the authority of the state. The most dramatic empirical work on the counterproductive nature of welfare measures was done in the USA, in response to growing dissatisfaction with the results of the ‘War on Poverty’ launched by President Johnson in the 1960s, under the ideological banner of creating the Great Society. Attention will be concentrated on Britain and the USA, since it was in these countries that the New Right made the going, so to speak, in the conservative swing of the 1980s.