If you have spent much time studying the intellectual history of the conservative movement, you’ve probably heard the tale of Mel Bradford.
According to the conventional narrative, Ronald Reagan had Bradford – a traditionalist, Southern conservative English professor who taught at the conservative University of Dallas – in mind as the future chairman of the National Endowment for the Humanities. In some tellings of the story, Bradford is already the nominee. Bradford represented the “Old Right,” the true conservative movement, “right from the start,” arcing back to its earliest revolt against modernity and liberalism. And the new post at the Endowment was a reward – a critical piece of patronage for the Old Right’s support for Reagan, allowing Bradford to direct funds towards scholarship he favored.
However, a band of well-connected arrivistes also eyed the NEH chairmanship enviously. This group of “neoconservatives” led by Irving Kristol and including Norman Podhoretz and George Will, were not, in the Old Right’s mind, really conservative at all. But they demanded it for themselves. The patronage fight broke out into the press and the neoconservatives used underhanded tactics to assassinate Bradford’s character – particularly his traditionalist vision of the antebellum South – to steal the job away from Bradford and the Old Right.
Over the 1980s, Bradford’s supporters became increasingly disillusioned with Reagan and the conservative movement. They started to be known as “paleoconservatives,” defining themselves against the “neoconservatives” and purportedly standing for something much older. In this group's folklore, the Bradford affair, extensively recounted in their books and journals, is portrayed as the opening salvo in a personal and ideological struggle between the Old Right and the neoconservatives. This conflict, they argue, was not just about access to the Reagan Presidency, but also about the American Right's fundamental relationship with modernity, history, and the production of knowledge.
The conventional historical narrative follows the same beats as the paleoconservative one. It relies on the extensive and quite good journalistic coverage of the patronage fight, and the same particularly paleoconservative reminiscences. It’s repeated in just about every book on conservative intellectual history.
This story, however, is unsatisfying and incomplete. The narrative treats the nomination as a battle in discursive spaces: the neocons torpedoed Bradford’s nomination by burning his reputation in the press, rolling out George Will to attack Bradford in the Washington Post. As a matter of intra-conservative fights, the conventional narrative frames the nomination fight as a tug-of-war, with the victor claiming the spoils. In all of it, the Reagan Administration, which actually made the decision, is curiously inert – spectators ready to anoint whomever the wider movement chose instead of actively deciding in accord with their own aims.