In tracing their ideology through American history, conservative intellectuals struggled to come to terms with two of the most important events of that history: the American Revolution and the adoption of the U.S. Constitution. Were the pro-British Tories the true conservatives and were the American rebels liberals and radicals? Conservative scholars such as Willmore Kendall, George Carey, Forrest MacDonald, and Harry V. Jaffa saw the War of Independence not as a left-wing revolution but rather as a conservative movement to defend the status-quo ante. The colonists, insisted conservative historians, had been contented subjects of the British Empire for almost two centuries. They had honored their monarchs, fought for the empire, and acknowledged the supremacy of Parliament in regulating the general relations of the empire. George III and his Parliament were radical innovators who attempted to repress the traditional rights of colonial subjects and to turn the empire into a unitary state. In line with this interpretation, conservatives read the Declaration of Independence as a traditional, natural-law justification against tyrannical government, phrased in the natural-rights language of John Locke as modified by Thomas Jefferson.

American conservatives have emphasized the Constitution's role as the guiding political document of the United States, and they have protested its distortion and abuse by modern governmental practice and the misinterpretations of an activist judiciary. For conservatives, the Constitution's success came in part from the colonists' love of their traditions. A number of the Constitution's features reflected the traditional ways that colonists had been governed by the British Empire, since many of Britain's constitutional conventions were carried over into the new U.S. Constitution; conservatives rejected the view of the Constitution as a radical departure from prior practice.

The checks and balances of the constitutional system appealed to conservatives' fear of tyranny. Beginning with the New Deal and the wartime presidency of Franklin D. Roosevelt and increasing with the cold-war presidencies, conservatives objected to the idea of an "imperial presidency," in which they saw Congress surrendering many of its prerogatives to the executive branch. Federalism, often misidentified as "states' rights," enjoyed a central place in American conservative constitutional theory. Under the original design of the Union, shared sovereignty between the federal government and the states, each in its respective sphere, was heavily emphasized. Conservatives saw this federalism not only as an important bastion against tyranny but also as a design to allow local laws to reflect the cultural and religious differences in the separate societies that composed the various states.

At the time of the rise of conservatism in America, the judicial branch entered an extremely activist phase, and it was often state authority that suffered at the hands of federal judges. Conservatives reacted against what they perceived as judicial usurpation. Conservatives have become champions of various interpretivist hermeneutics for Constitution exegesis, especially the philosophy of original intent; they have formed groups such as the Federalist Society and Judicial Watch to attack judicial activism both by political means and by scholarship.

Conservatives advocate the advantages of the free market, rejecting the rise of the welfare state and excessive governmental regulation as economically destructive and politically dangerous. They have never advocated an extreme libertarianism that would repudiate all governmental interventions, but they have argued for the natural-law-based Roman Catholic social teaching concerning the principle of subsidiarity; that is to say, that activities should be done on the lowest feasible level of society. Ideally individuals and families should care for themselves and contribute to the overall social good; then private charities and religious organizations should assist the disadvantaged; and only then should government become involved, in an ascending order: local, state, and federal.

Conservatives tend to endorse the views of such classical economists as Adam Smith, Jean-Baptiste Say, and others, and to embrace one of the modern liberty-oriented schools of economic thought, such as the Chicago school, exemplified by Milton Friedman, or the Austrian school, exemplified by Friedrich von Hayek and Ludwig von Mises. Beyond the economic devastation wrought by governmental interference, conservatives emphasize the danger to political liberty represented by massive infusions of government largess. The increasing dependence of voters on the bounty of government and the creation of classes of governmental clients who depend utterly on government handouts threaten the operation of democracy and the freedom of states within the federal union.

Although the collapse of the Soviet Union removed communism as a major issue in U.S. politics, the conservative movement began at the time that the United States was struggling to combat communism at home and to contain Soviet expansionism abroad. Conservatives led the way, in alliance with cold-war liberals, in recognizing the danger that expansionist totalitarianism presented to the West. Beyond the communist threat, conservatives emphasized the need for a strong defense posture, especially given the necessary U.S. role as the postwar guarantor of international order. During the Korean War, and later the confrontations with Fidel Castro's Cuba, and then the Vietnam War, conservatives condemned the no-win strategies that the United States and its allies had adopted.

To the conservative view, pacifism, world federalism, and the like are utopian delusions arising from historical ignorance, moral failures, and heterodox religious impulses. The failure of Western leaders and theoreticians to take proper account of the necessary use of force in the imperfect world of international politics was characterized as the "suicide of the West" by James Burnham in his 1964 book of the same name.

Conservatives have eschewed the relativism and subjectivism that they believed permeated modern ethics, and they have especially denounced the decline of religious practice and theological doctrine, a development they have seen as underlying the distortion of modern morals. An unusual combination of conservative Catholics, fundamentalist Christians, and Orthodox Jews has united in opposition to the rise of secular-humanist values and against the inner decay of religion, reflected in a "religion of humanitarianism" and a pseudo-ecumenism, which Catholic conservatives identified as the heresy of indifferentism that holds all beliefs to be equal.

The self-centeredness of modern humanity, exacerbated by an arrogance born of material prosperity and scientific triumphs, has made people unwilling to accept divine and ecclesiastic authority. Conservatism in religious belief and practice does not automatically equate to political conservatism, but the two seem to have often kept company with one another. In Catholicism, Triumph magazine was founded by William F. Buckley's brother-in-law L. Brent Bozell, who was active in Catholics United for the Faith, and National Review itself took a critical view of many of the changes in post�Vatican II Catholic liturgy, teaching, and moral practice. Eventually other Catholic groups were founded, including the Society of Catholic Social Scientists and the Hildebrand Institute, that were committed to the full magisterium of the Church. Similar movements arose in Protestantism; eventually the intellectual ferment and doctrinal controversies spilled over into political activism.

Two of the events that crystallized political activities by these groups (which had been stirred by the Supreme Court's decisions banning school prayer and similar judgments on church-state relations) were Roe v. Wade (1973), which legalized abortion-on-demand across the country, and the government's toleration and seeming promotion of homosexuality. Developments such as these provoked the rise of the Moral Majority, founded by the Reverend Jerry Falwell, and numerous other politically oriented religious groups.

Conservatives see the "decline of Western civilization" as a result of the deterioration of education. The lack of academic rigor is by now well recognized in the United States and in many other Western nations, but even earlier conservatives had objected to the general direction education had taken under the guidance of the disciples of John Dewey. The death of classical language studies, of detailed knowledge of history, philosophy, and literature, and of familiarity with the Constitution and classical political theory all have been lamented.

Education, which is supposed to serve as a means to propagate and sustain civilization, has become, in the view of the conservatives, a source of radical attacks on that civilization. According to conservatives sex education was utilized to undermine religious morality and parental authority; history was now taught topically, allowing teachers to propagandize ahistorical ideologies; and political theory (now called civics) became a mindless veneration of concepts such as democracy and equality, wrenched from their traditional meanings and historical contexts. Despite having won some major political and cultural victories, most conservative thinkers would assess their successes as representing only retardations of the ongoing decline of the nation and of American culture.