“In the United States at this time liberalism is not only the dominant but even the sole intellectual tradition,” Lionel Trilling wrote in the Preface to The Liberal Imagination in 1953. “The conservative impulse and the reactionary impulse do not … express themselves in ideas but only in irritable mental gestures which seek to resemble ideas.” Trilling was saddened by liberals' inability to recognize the “powerful conservative mind” as a corrective needed to bring modern American liberalism back to its “primal imagination.”

Although a serious body of conservative thought was beginning to emerge, marked by the more cosmopolitan and humane impulses of F. A. Hayek, Leo Strauss, Eric Voegelin, and Michael Oakeshott, the chief characteristics of the Old Right prior to World War II included a fanatical opposition to Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal, resistance to international alliances (along with a bias in favor of protectionist trade policies), and complacent tolerance (occasionally even active support) of racial and religious discrimination against blacks, Jews, and other minorities.

In the early 1960s, there were “conspiracy addicts” who saw themselves as conservatives. Robert Welch of the John Birch Society, for example, believed that communists dominated most of America; outright bigots such as the fundamentalist minister Gerald L. K. Smith; Conde McGinley, publisher of Common Sense; Westbrook Pegler, the famous journalist; and Willis Carto, a founder of the the so-called Liberty Lobby, were convinced that the decline of this country was due to Jews and blacks.