Coordinates	40°14′36″N77°53′36″N
Conventional long name	United States of America
Common name	the United States
Image coat	US-GreatSeal-Obverse.svg
Length	1776–present
Symbol type	Great Seal
National motto	In God We Trust(official)(traditional)(Latin: Out of Many, One)
Map width	220px
National anthem	"The Star-Spangled Banner"
Official languages	None at federal level
Languages type	National language
Languages	English (''de facto'')
Capital	Washington, D.C.
Largest city	New York City
Government type	Federal presidential constitutional republic
Leader title1	President
Leader name1	Barack Obama (D)
Leader title2	Vice President
Leader name2	Joe Biden (D)
Leader title3
Leader name3	John Boehner (R)
Leader title4	Chief Justice
Leader name4	John Roberts
Legislature	Congress
Upper house	Senate
Lower house	House of Representatives
Sovereignty type	Independence
Established event1	Declared
Established date1	July 4, 1776
Established event2	Recognized
Established date2	September 3, 1783
Established event3	Current constitution
Established date3	June 21, 1788
Area footnote
Area sq mi	3794101
Area km2	9826675
Area rank	3rd/4th
Area magnitude	1 E12
Percent water	6.76
Population estimate	}}

|population_estimate_year = 2011 |population_estimate_rank = 3rd |population_density_km2 = 33.7 |population_density_sq_mi = 87.4 |GDP_PPP_year = 2010 |GDP_PPP = $14.780 trillion |GDP_PPP_rank = 1st |GDP_PPP_per_capita = $47,123 |GDP_PPP_per_capita_rank = 6th |GDP_nominal = $14.780 trillion |GDP_nominal_rank = 1st |GDP_nominal_year = 2010 |GDP_nominal_per_capita = $47,132 |GDP_nominal_per_capita_rank = 9th |HDI_year = 2010 |HDI = 0.902 |HDI_rank = 4th |HDI_category = very high |EF_year = 2007 |EF = 8.0 gha |EF_rank = 6th |Gini = 45.0 |Gini_rank = 39th |Gini_year = 2007 |currency = United States dollar ($) |currency_code = USD |country_code = USA |utc_offset = −5 to −10 |utc_offset_DST = −4 to −10 |cctld = .us .gov .mil .edu |calling_code = +1 |date_format = m/d/yy (AD) |drives_on = right |demonym = American |footnotes = a. English is the official language of at least 28 states—some sources give a higher figure, based on differing definitions of "official". English and Hawaiian are both official languages in the state of Hawaii.

b. English is the ''de facto'' language of American government and the sole language spoken at home by 80% of Americans age five and older. Spanish is the second most commonly spoken language.

c. Whether the United States or the People's Republic of China is larger is disputed. The figure given is from the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency's ''World Factbook''. Other sources give smaller figures. All authoritative calculations of the country's size include only the 50 states and the District of Columbia, not the territories.

d. The population estimate includes people whose usual residence is in the fifty states and the District of Columbia, including noncitizens. It does not include either those living in the territories, amounting to more than 4 million U.S. citizens (most in Puerto Rico), or U.S. citizens living outside the United States. }}

The United States of America (also called the United States, the States, the U.S., the USA, and America) is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district. The country is mostly in central North America, where its forty-eight contiguous states and Washington, D.C., the capital district, lie between the Pacific and Atlantic Oceans, bordered by Canada to the north and Mexico to the south. The state of Alaska is in the northwest of the continent, with Canada to the east and Russia to the west across the Bering Strait. The state of Hawaii is an archipelago in the mid-Pacific. The country also possesses several territories in the Pacific and Caribbean.

At 3.79 million square miles (9.83 million km²) and with over 312 million people, the United States is the third or fourth largest country by total area, and the third largest by both land area and population. It is one of the world's most ethnically diverse and multicultural nations, the product of large-scale immigration from many countries. The U.S. economy is the world's largest national economy, with an estimated 2010 GDP of $14.780 trillion (23% of nominal global GDP and 20% of global GDP at purchasing-power parity).

Indigenous peoples have inhabited what is now the mainland United States for between 12,000 and 40,000 years since the Paleo-Indians crossed the Bearing land bridge from Asia to North America. This Native American population was greatly reduced by disease and warfare after European contact. The United States was founded by thirteen British colonies located along the Atlantic seaboard. On July 4, 1776, they issued the Declaration of Independence, which proclaimed their right to self-determination and their establishment of a cooperative union. The rebellious states defeated the British Empire in the American Revolution, the first successful colonial war of independence. The current United States Constitution was adopted on September 17, 1787; its ratification the following year made the states part of a single republic with a strong central government. The Bill of Rights, comprising ten constitutional amendments guaranteeing many fundamental civil rights and freedoms, was ratified in 1791.

Through the 19th century, the United States displaced native tribes, acquired the Louisiana territory from France, Florida from Spain, part of the Oregon Country from the United Kingdom, Alta California and New Mexico from Mexico, Alaska from Russia, and annexed the Republic of Texas and the Republic of Hawaii. Disputes between the agrarian South and industrial North over the expansion of the institution of slavery and states' rights provoked the Civil War of the 1860s. The North's victory prevented a permanent split of the country and led to the end of legal slavery in the United States. By the 1870s, its national economy was the world's largest. The Spanish–American War and World War I confirmed the country's status as a military power. It emerged from World War II as the first country with nuclear weapons and a permanent member of the United Nations Security Council. The end of the Cold War and the dissolution of the Soviet Union left the United States as the sole superpower. The country accounts for 41% of global military spending, and it is a leading economic, political, and cultural force in the world.

Etymology

In 1507, German cartographer Martin Waldseemüller produced a world map on which he named the lands of the Western Hemisphere "America" after Italian explorer and cartographer Amerigo Vespucci. The former British colonies first used the country's modern name in the 1776 Declaration of Independence, the "unanimous Declaration of the thirteen united States of America". On November 15, 1777, the Second Continental Congress adopted the Articles of Confederation, which states, "The Stile of this Confederacy shall be 'The United States of America.'" The Franco-American treaties of 1778 used "United States of North America", but from July 11, 1778, "United States of America" was used on the country's bills of exchange, and it has been the official name ever since.

The short form "United States" is also standard. Other common forms include the "U.S.", the "USA", and "America". Colloquial names include the "U.S. of A." and, internationally, the "States". "Columbia", a once popular name for the United States, derives from Christopher Columbus; it appears in the name "District of Columbia".

The standard way to refer to a citizen of the United States is as an "American". Although "United States" is the official appositional term, "American" and "U.S." are more commonly used to refer to the country adjectivally ("American values", "U.S. forces"). "American" is rarely used in English to refer to people not connected to the United States.

The phrase "United States" was originally treated as plural—e.g., "the United States are"—including in the Thirteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution, ratified in 1865. It became common to treat it as singular—e.g., "the United States is"—after the end of the Civil War. The singular form is now standard; the plural form is retained in the idiom "these United States".

Geography and environment

The land area of the contiguous United States is approximately . Alaska, separated from the contiguous United States by Canada, is the largest state at . Hawaii, occupying an archipelago in the central Pacific, southwest of North America, has just over . The United States is the world's third or fourth largest nation by total area (land and water), ranking behind Russia and Canada and just above or below China. The ranking varies depending on how two territories disputed by China and India are counted and how the total size of the United States is measured: calculations range from to to . Including only land area, the United States is third in size behind Russia and China, just ahead of Canada.

The coastal plain of the Atlantic seaboard gives way further inland to deciduous forests and the rolling hills of the Piedmont. The Appalachian Mountains divide the eastern seaboard from the Great Lakes and the grasslands of the Midwest. The Mississippi–Missouri River, the world's fourth longest river system, runs mainly north–south through the heart of the country. The flat, fertile prairie of the Great Plains stretches to the west, interrupted by a highland region in the southeast. The Rocky Mountains, at the western edge of the Great Plains, extend north to south across the country, reaching altitudes higher than 14,000 feet (4,300 m) in Colorado. Farther west are the rocky Great Basin and deserts such as the Mojave. The Sierra Nevada and Cascade mountain ranges run close to the Pacific coast. At 20,320 feet (6,194 m), Alaska's Mount McKinley is the tallest peak in the country and in North America. Active volcanoes are common throughout Alaska's Alexander and Aleutian Islands, and Hawaii consists of volcanic islands. The supervolcano underlying Yellowstone National Park in the Rockies is the continent's largest volcanic feature. The United States, with its large size and geographic variety, includes most climate types. To the east of the 100th meridian, the climate ranges from humid continental in the north to humid subtropical in the south. The southern tip of Florida is tropical, as is Hawaii. The Great Plains west of the 100th meridian are semi-arid. Much of the Western mountains are alpine. The climate is arid in the Great Basin, desert in the Southwest, Mediterranean in coastal California, and oceanic in coastal Oregon and Washington and southern Alaska. Most of Alaska is subarctic or polar. Extreme weather is not uncommon—the states bordering the Gulf of Mexico are prone to hurricanes, and most of the world's tornadoes occur within the country, mainly in the Midwest's Tornado Alley.

The U.S. ecology is considered "megadiverse": about 17,000 species of vascular plants occur in the contiguous United States and Alaska, and over 1,800 species of flowering plants are found in Hawaii, few of which occur on the mainland. The United States is home to more than 400 mammal, 750 bird, and 500 reptile and amphibian species. About 91,000 insect species have been described. The Endangered Species Act of 1973 protects threatened and endangered species and their habitats, which are monitored by the United States Fish and Wildlife Service. There are fifty-eight national parks and hundreds of other federally managed parks, forests, and wilderness areas. Altogether, the government owns 28.8% of the country's land area. Most of this is protected, though some is leased for oil and gas drilling, mining, logging, or cattle ranching; 2.4% is used for military purposes.

Political divisions

The United States is a federal union of fifty states. The original thirteen states were the successors of the thirteen colonies that rebelled against British rule. Early in the country's history, three new states were organized on territory separated from the claims of the existing states: Kentucky from Virginia; Tennessee from North Carolina; and Maine from Massachusetts. Most of the other states have been carved from territories obtained through war or purchase by the U.S. government. One set of exceptions comprises Vermont, Texas, and Hawaii: each was an independent republic before joining the union. During the American Civil War, West Virginia broke away from Virginia. The most recent state—Hawaii—achieved statehood on August 21, 1959. The states do not have the right to secede from the union.

The states compose the vast bulk of the U.S. land mass; the two other areas considered integral parts of the country are the District of Columbia, the federal district where the capital, Washington, is located; and Palmyra Atoll, an uninhabited but incorporated territory in the Pacific Ocean. The United States also possesses five major overseas territories: Puerto Rico and the United States Virgin Islands in the Caribbean; and American Samoa, Guam, and the Northern Mariana Islands in the Pacific. Those born in the major territories (except for American Samoa) possess U.S. citizenship. American citizens residing in the territories have many of the same rights and responsibilities as citizens residing in the states; however, they are generally exempt from federal income tax, may not vote for president, and have only nonvoting representation in the U.S. Congress.

History

Native American and European settlement

The indigenous peoples of the U.S. mainland, including Alaska Natives, are believed to have migrated from Asia, beginning between 12,000 and 40,000 years ago. Some, such as the pre-Columbian Mississippian culture, developed advanced agriculture, grand architecture, and state-level societies. After Europeans began settling the Americas, many millions of indigenous Americans died from epidemics of imported diseases such as smallpox.

In 1492, Genoese explorer Christopher Columbus, under contract to the Spanish crown, reached several Caribbean islands, making first contact with the indigenous people. On April 2, 1513, Spanish conquistador Juan Ponce de León landed on what he called "La Florida"—the first documented European arrival on what would become the U.S. mainland. Spanish settlements in the region were followed by ones in the present-day southwestern United States that drew thousands through Mexico. French fur traders established outposts of New France around the Great Lakes; France eventually claimed much of the North American interior, down to the Gulf of Mexico. The first successful English settlements were the Virginia Colony in Jamestown in 1607 and the Pilgrims' Plymouth Colony in 1620. The 1628 chartering of the Massachusetts Bay Colony resulted in a wave of migration; by 1634, New England had been settled by some 10,000 Puritans. Between the late 1610s and the American Revolution, about 50,000 convicts were shipped to Britain's American colonies. Beginning in 1614, the Dutch settled along the lower Hudson River, including New Amsterdam on Manhattan Island.

In 1674, the Dutch ceded their American territory to England; the province of New Netherland was renamed New York. Many new immigrants, especially to the South, were indentured servants—some two-thirds of all Virginia immigrants between 1630 and 1680. By the turn of the 18th century, African slaves were becoming the primary source of bonded labor. With the 1729 division of the Carolinas and the 1732 colonization of Georgia, the thirteen British colonies that would become the United States of America were established. All had local governments with elections open to most free men, with a growing devotion to the ancient rights of Englishmen and a sense of self-government stimulating support for republicanism. All legalized the African slave trade. With high birth rates, low death rates, and steady immigration, the colonial population grew rapidly. The Christian revivalist movement of the 1730s and 1740s known as the Great Awakening fueled interest in both religion and religious liberty. In the French and Indian War, British forces seized Canada from the French, but the francophone population remained politically isolated from the southern colonies. Excluding the Native Americans (popularly known as "American Indians"), who were being displaced, those thirteen colonies had a population of 2.6 million in 1770, about one-third that of Britain; nearly one in five Americans were black slaves. Though subject to British taxation, the American colonials had no representation in the Parliament of Great Britain.

Independence and expansion

Tensions between American colonials and the British during the revolutionary period of the 1760s and early 1770s led to the American Revolutionary War, fought from 1775 to 1781. On June 14, 1775, the Continental Congress, convening in Philadelphia, established a Continental Army under the command of George Washington. Proclaiming that "all men are created equal" and endowed with "certain unalienable Rights", the Congress adopted the Declaration of Independence, drafted largely by Thomas Jefferson, on July 4, 1776. That date is now celebrated annually as America's Independence Day. In 1777, the Articles of Confederation established a weak confederal government that operated until 1789.

After the British defeat by American forces assisted by the French and Spanish, Great Britain recognized the independence of the United States and the states' sovereignty over American territory west to the Mississippi River. Those wishing to establish a strong national government with powers of taxation organized a constitutional convention in 1787. The United States Constitution was ratified in 1788, and the new republic's first Senate, House of Representatives, and president—George Washington—took office in 1789. The Bill of Rights, forbidding federal restriction of personal freedoms and guaranteeing a range of legal protections, was adopted in 1791.

Attitudes toward slavery were shifting; a clause in the Constitution protected the transatlantic slave trade only until 1808. The Northern states abolished slavery between 1780 and 1804, leaving the slave states of the South as defenders of the "peculiar institution". The Second Great Awakening, beginning about 1800, made evangelicalism a force behind various social reform movements, including abolitionism.

Americans' eagerness to expand westward prompted a long series of Indian Wars. The Louisiana Purchase of French-claimed territory under President Thomas Jefferson in 1803 almost doubled the nation's size. The War of 1812, declared against Britain over various grievances and fought to a draw, strengthened U.S. nationalism. A series of U.S. military incursions into Florida led Spain to cede it and other Gulf Coast territory in 1819. The Trail of Tears in the 1830s exemplified the Indian removal policy that stripped the native peoples of their land. The United States annexed the Republic of Texas in 1845, amid a period when the concept of Manifest Destiny was becoming popular. The 1846 Oregon Treaty with Britain led to U.S. control of the present-day American Northwest. The U.S. victory in the Mexican-American War resulted in the 1848 cession of California and much of the present-day American Southwest. The California Gold Rush of 1848–49 further spurred western migration. New railways made relocation easier for settlers and increased conflicts with Native Americans. Over a half-century, up to 40 million American bison, or buffalo, were slaughtered for skins and meat and to ease the railways' spread. The loss of the buffalo, a primary resource for the plains Indians, was an existential blow to many native cultures.

Civil War and industrialization

Tensions between slave and free states mounted with arguments over the relationship between the state and federal governments, as well as violent conflicts over the spread of slavery into new states. Abraham Lincoln, candidate of the largely antislavery Republican Party, was elected president in 1860. Before he took office, seven slave states declared their secession—which the federal government maintained was illegal—and formed the Confederate States of America. With the Confederate attack upon Fort Sumter, the Civil War began and four more slave states joined the Confederacy. Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation in 1863 declared slaves in the Confederacy to be free. Following the Union victory in 1865, three amendments to the U.S. Constitution ensured freedom for the nearly four million African Americans who had been slaves, made them citizens, and gave them voting rights. The war and its resolution led to a substantial increase in federal power. The war remains the deadliest conflict in American history, resulting in the deaths of 620,000 soldiers.

After the war, the assassination of Lincoln radicalized Republican Reconstruction policies aimed at reintegrating and rebuilding the Southern states while ensuring the rights of the newly freed slaves. The resolution of the disputed 1876 presidential election by the Compromise of 1877 ended Reconstruction; Jim Crow laws soon disenfranchised many African Americans. In the North, urbanization and an unprecedented influx of immigrants from Southern Southern and Eastern Europe hastened the country's industrialization. The wave of immigration, lasting until 1929, provided labor and transformed American culture. National infrastructure development spurred economic growth. The 1867 Alaska Purchase from Russia completed the country's mainland expansion. The Wounded Knee Massacre in 1890 was the last major armed conflict of the Indian Wars. In 1893, the indigenous monarchy of the Pacific Kingdom of Hawaii was overthrown in a coup led by American residents; the United States annexed the archipelago in 1898. Victory in the Spanish–American War the same year demonstrated that the United States was a world power and led to the annexation of Puerto Rico, Guam, and the Philippines. The Philippines gained independence a half-century later; Puerto Rico and Guam remain U.S. territories.

World War I, Great Depression, and World War II

At the outbreak of World War I in 1914, the United States remained neutral. Most Americans sympathized with the British and French, although many opposed intervention. In 1917, the United States joined the Allies, and the American Expeditionary Forces helped to turn the tide against the Central Powers. After the war, the Senate did not ratify the Treaty of Versailles, which established the League of Nations. The country pursued a policy of unilateralism, verging on isolationism. In 1920, the women's rights movement won passage of a constitutional amendment granting women's suffrage. The prosperity of the Roaring Twenties ended with the Wall Street Crash of 1929 that triggered the Great Depression. After his election as president in 1932, Franklin D. Roosevelt responded with the New Deal, a range of policies increasing government intervention in the economy, including the establishment of the Social Security system. The Dust Bowl of the mid-1930s impoverished many farming communities and spurred a new wave of western migration. The United States, effectively neutral during World War II's early stages after Nazi Germany's invasion of Poland in September 1939, began supplying materiel to the Allies in March 1941 through the Lend-Lease program. On December 7, 1941, the Empire of Japan launched a surprise attack on Pearl Harbor, prompting the United States to join the Allies against the Axis powers as well as the internment of Japanese Americans by the thousands. Participation in the war spurred capital investment and industrial capacity. Among the major combatants, the United States was the only nation to become richer—indeed, far richer—instead of poorer because of the war. Allied conferences at Bretton Woods and Yalta outlined a new system of international organizations that placed the United States and Soviet Union at the center of world affairs. As victory was won in Europe, a 1945 international conference held in San Francisco produced the United Nations Charter, which became active after the war. The United States, having developed the first nuclear weapons, used them on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August. Japan surrendered on September 2, ending the war.

Cold War and protest politics

The United States and Soviet Union jockeyed for power after World War II during the Cold War, dominating the military affairs of Europe through NATO and the Warsaw Pact, respectively. While they engaged in proxy wars and developed powerful nuclear arsenals, the two countries avoided direct military conflict. Resisting leftist land and income redistribution projects around the world, the United States often supported authoritarian governments. American troops fought Communist Chinese forces in the Korean War of 1950–53. The House Un-American Activities Committee pursued a series of investigations into suspected leftist subversion, while Senator Joseph McCarthy became the figurehead of anticommunist sentiment.

The 1961 Soviet launch of the first manned spaceflight prompted President John F. Kennedy's call for the United States to be first to land "a man on the moon", achieved in 1969. Kennedy also faced a tense nuclear showdown with Soviet forces in Cuba. Meanwhile, the United States experienced sustained economic expansion. A growing civil rights movement, symbolized and led by African Americans such as Rosa Parks, Martin Luther King, Jr., and James Bevel, used nonviolence to confront segregation and discrimination. Following Kennedy's assassination in 1963, the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and Voting Rights Act of 1965 were passed under President Lyndon B. Johnson. He also signed into law the Medicare and Medicaid programs. Johnson and his successor, Richard Nixon, expanded a proxy war in Southeast Asia into the unsuccessful Vietnam War. A widespread countercultural movement grew, fueled by opposition to the war, black nationalism, and the sexual revolution. Betty Friedan, Gloria Steinem, and others led a new wave of feminism that sought political, social, and economic equality for women.

As a result of the Watergate scandal, in 1974 Nixon became the first U.S. president to resign, to avoid being impeached on charges including obstruction of justice and abuse of power. The Jimmy Carter administration of the late 1970s was marked by stagflation and the Iran hostage crisis. The election of Ronald Reagan as president in 1980 heralded a rightward shift in American politics, reflected in major changes in taxation and spending priorities. His second term in office brought both the Iran-Contra scandal and significant diplomatic progress with the Soviet Union. The subsequent Soviet collapse ended the Cold War.

Contemporary era

Under President George H. W. Bush, the United States took a lead role in the UN–sanctioned Gulf War. The longest economic expansion in modern U.S. history—from March 1991 to March 2001—encompassed the Bill Clinton administration and the dot-com bubble. A civil lawsuit and sex scandal led to Clinton's impeachment in 1998, but he remained in office. The 2000 presidential election, one of the closest in American history, was resolved by a U.S. Supreme Court decision—George W. Bush, son of George H. W. Bush, became president.

On September 11, 2001, al-Qaeda terrorists struck the World Trade Center in New York City and The Pentagon near Washington, D.C., killing nearly three thousand people. In response, the Bush administration launched the global War on Terror, invading Afghanistan and removing the Taliban government and al-Qaeda training camps. Taliban insurgents continue to fight a guerrilla war. In 2002, the Bush administration began to press for regime change in Iraq on controversial grounds. Forces of a so-called Coalition of the Willing invaded Iraq in 2003, ousting Saddam Hussein. In 2005, Hurricane Katrina caused severe destruction along much of the Gulf Coast, devastating New Orleans. In 2008, amid a global economic recession, the first African American president, Barack Obama, was elected. In 2010, major health care and financial system reforms were enacted.

Government, elections, and politics

The United States is the world's oldest surviving federation. It is a constitutional republic and representative democracy, "in which majority rule is tempered by minority rights protected by law". The government is regulated by a system of checks and balances defined by the U.S. Constitution, which serves as the country's supreme legal document. In the American federalist system, citizens are usually subject to three levels of government, federal, state, and local; the local government's duties are commonly split between county and municipal governments. In almost all cases, executive and legislative officials are elected by a plurality vote of citizens by district. There is no proportional representation at the federal level, and it is very rare at lower levels.

The federal government is composed of three branches:

Legislative: The bicameral Congress, made up of the Senate and the House of Representatives, makes federal law, declares war, approves treaties, has the power of the purse, and has the power of impeachment, by which it can remove sitting members of the government.

Executive: The president is the commander-in-chief of the military, can veto legislative bills before they become law, and appoints the members of the Cabinet (subject to Senate approval) and other officers, who administer and enforce federal laws and policies.

Judicial: The Supreme Court and lower federal courts, whose judges are appointed by the president with Senate approval, interpret laws and overturn those they find unconstitutional.

The House of Representatives has 435 voting members, each representing a congressional district for a two-year term. House seats are apportioned among the states by population every tenth year. As of the 2000 census, seven states have the minimum of one representative, while California, the most populous state, has fifty-three. The Senate has 100 members with each state having two senators, elected at-large to six-year terms; one third of Senate seats are up for election every other year. The president serves a four-year term and may be elected to the office no more than twice. The president is not elected by direct vote, but by an indirect electoral college system in which the determining votes are apportioned to the states and the District of Columbia. The Supreme Court, led by the Chief Justice of the United States, has nine members, who serve for life.

The state governments are structured in roughly similar fashion; Nebraska uniquely has a unicameral legislature. The governor (chief executive) of each state is directly elected. Some state judges and cabinet officers are appointed by the governors of the respective states, while others are elected by popular vote.

The original text of the Constitution establishes the structure and responsibilities of the federal government and its relationship with the individual states. Article One protects the right to the "great writ" of habeas corpus, and Article Three guarantees the right to a jury trial in all criminal cases. Amendments to the Constitution require the approval of three-fourths of the states. The Constitution has been amended twenty-seven times; the first ten amendments, which make up the Bill of Rights, and the Fourteenth Amendment form the central basis of Americans' individual rights. All laws and governmental procedures are subject to judicial review and any law ruled in violation of the Constitution is voided. The principle of judicial review, not explicitly mentioned in the Constitution, was declared by the Supreme Court in ''Marbury v. Madison'' (1803).

Parties and ideology

The United States has operated under a two-party system for most of its history. For elective offices at most levels, state-administered primary elections choose the major party nominees for subsequent general elections. Since the general election of 1856, the major parties have been the Democratic Party, founded in 1824, and the Republican Party, founded in 1854. Since the Civil War, only one third-party presidential candidate—former president Theodore Roosevelt, running as a Progressive in 1912—has won as much as 20% of the popular vote.

Within American political culture, the Republican Party is considered center-right or "conservative" and the Democratic Party is considered center-left or "liberal". The states of the Northeast and West Coast and some of the Great Lakes states, known as "blue states", are relatively liberal. The "red states" of the South and parts of the Great Plains and Rocky Mountains are relatively conservative.

The winner of the 2008 presidential election, Democrat Barack Obama, is the 44th U.S. president. The 2010 midterm elections saw the Republican Party take control of the House and make gains in the Senate, where the Democrats retain the majority. In the 112th United States Congress, the Senate comprises 51 Democrats, two independents who caucus with the Democrats, and 47 Republicans; the House comprises 240 Republicans and 192 Democrats—three seats are vacant. There are 29 Republican and 20 Democratic state governors, as well as one independent.

Foreign relations and military

The United States exercises global economic, political, and military influence. It is a permanent member of the United Nations Security Council and New York City hosts the United Nations Headquarters. It is a member of the G8, G20, and Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development. Almost all countries have embassies in Washington, D.C., and many have consulates around the country. Likewise, nearly all nations host American diplomatic missions. However, Cuba, Iran, North Korea, Bhutan, Libya, and the Republic of China (Taiwan) do not have formal diplomatic relations with the United States.

The United States has a "special relationship" with the United Kingdom and strong ties with Canada, Australia, New Zealand, the Philippines, Japan, South Korea, Israel, and several European countries. It works closely with fellow NATO members on military and security issues and with its neighbors through the Organization of American States and free trade agreements such as the trilateral North American Free Trade Agreement with Canada and Mexico. In 2008, the United States spent a net $25.4 billion on official development assistance, the most in the world. As a share of America's large gross national income (GNI), however, the U.S. contribution of 0.18% ranked last among twenty-two donor states. By contrast, private overseas giving by Americans is relatively generous.

The president holds the title of commander-in-chief of the nation's armed forces and appoints its leaders, the secretary of defense and the Joint Chiefs of Staff. The United States Department of Defense administers the armed forces, including the Army, Navy, Marine Corps, and Air Force. The Coast Guard is run by the Department of Homeland Security in peacetime and the Department of the Navy in time of war. In 2008, the armed forces had 1.4 million personnel on active duty. The Reserves and National Guard brought the total number of troops to 2.3 million. The Department of Defense also employed about 700,000 civilians, not including contractors.

Military service is voluntary, though conscription may occur in wartime through the Selective Service System. American forces can be rapidly deployed by the Air Force's large fleet of transport aircraft, the Navy's eleven active aircraft carriers, and Marine Expeditionary Units at sea with the Navy's Atlantic and Pacific fleets. The military operates 865 bases and facilities abroad, and maintains deployments greater than 100 active duty personnel in 25 foreign countries. The extent of this global military presence has prompted some scholars to describe the United States as maintaining an "empire of bases".

Total U.S. military spending in 2008, more than $600 billion, was over 41% of global military spending and greater than the next fourteen largest national military expenditures combined. The per capita spending of $1,967 was about nine times the world average; at 4% of GDP, the rate was the second-highest among the top fifteen military spenders, after Saudi Arabia. The proposed base Department of Defense budget for 2012, $553 billion, is a 4.2% increase over 2011; an additional $118 billion is proposed for the military campaigns in Iraq and Afghanistan. As of September 2010, the United States is scheduled to have 96,000 troops deployed to Afghanistan, and 50,000 to Iraq. As of July 25, 2011, the United States had suffered 4,474 military fatalities during the Iraq War, and 1,680 during the War in Afghanistan.

Economy

The United States has a capitalist mixed economy, which is fueled by abundant natural resources, a well-developed infrastructure, and high productivity. According to the International Monetary Fund, the U.S. GDP of $15 trillion constitutes 23% of the gross world product at market exchange rates and over 20% of the gross world product at purchasing power parity (PPP). Though larger than any other nation's, its national GDP is about 5% smaller than the GDP of the European Union at PPP in 2008. The country ranks ninth in the world in nominal GDP per capita and sixth in GDP per capita at PPP. The U.S. dollar is the world's primary reserve currency.

The United States is the largest importer of goods and third largest exporter, though exports per capita are relatively low. In 2008, the total U.S. trade deficit was $696 billion. Canada, China, Mexico, Japan, and Germany are its top trading partners. In 2007, vehicles constituted both the leading import and leading export commodity. China is the largest foreign holder of U.S. public debt.

In 2009, the private sector was estimated to constitute 55.3% of the economy, with federal government activity accounting for 24.1% and state and local government activity (including federal transfers) the remaining 20.6%. While its economy has reached a postindustrial level of development and its service sector constitutes 67.8% of GDP, the United States remains an industrial power. The leading business field by gross business receipts is wholesale and retail trade; by net income it is manufacturing. Chemical products are the leading manufacturing field. The United States is the third largest producer of oil in the world, as well as its largest importer. It is the world's number one producer of electrical and nuclear energy, as well as liquid natural gas, sulfur, phosphates, and salt. While agriculture accounts for just under 1% of GDP, the United States is the world's top producer of corn and soybeans. Coca-Cola and McDonald's are the two most recognized brands in the world.

In August 2010, the American labor force comprised 154.1 million people. With 21.2 million people, government is the leading field of employment. The largest private employment sector is health care and social assistance, with 16.4 million people. About 12% of workers are unionized, compared to 30% in Western Europe. The World Bank ranks the United States first in the ease of hiring and firing workers. In 2009, the United States had the third highest labor productivity per person in the world, behind Luxembourg and Norway. It was fourth in productivity per hour, behind those two countries and the Netherlands. Compared to Europe, U.S. property and corporate income tax rates are generally higher, while labor and, particularly, consumption tax rates are lower.

Income and human development

According to the United States Census Bureau, the pretax median household income in 2007 was $49,777. The median ranged from $65,469 among Asian American households to $32,584 among African American households. Using purchasing power parity exchange rates, the overall median is similar to the most affluent cluster of developed nations. After declining sharply during the middle of the 20th century, poverty rates have plateaued since the early 1970s, with 11–15% of Americans below the poverty line every year, and 58.5% spending at least one year in poverty between the ages of 25 and 75. In 2009, 43.6 million Americans lived in poverty.

The U.S. welfare state is one of the least extensive in the developed world, reducing both relative poverty and absolute poverty by considerably less than the mean for rich nations, though combined private and public social expenditures per capita are relatively high. While the American welfare state effectively reduces poverty among the elderly, it provides relatively little assistance to the young. A 2007 UNICEF study of children's well-being in twenty-one industrialized nations ranked the United States next to last.

Between 1947 and 1979, real median income rose by over 80% for all classes, with the incomes of poor Americans rising faster than those of the rich. Since 1980, the United States has witnessed strong increases in productivity, low unemployment, and low inflation. However, income gains since 1980 have been slower than in previous decades, less widely shared, and accompanied by increased economic insecurity. Median household income has increased for all classes since 1980, largely owing to more dual-earner households, the closing of the gender gap, and longer work hours, but growth has been slower and strongly tilted toward the very top (see graph). Consequently, the share of income of the top 1%—21.8% of total reported income in 2005—has more than doubled since 1980, leaving the United States with the greatest income inequality among developed nations. The top 1% pays 27.6% of all federal taxes, while the top 10% pays 54.7%. Wealth, like income, is highly concentrated: The richest 10% of the adult population possesses 69.8% of the country's household wealth, the second-highest share among developed nations. The top 1% possesses 33.4% of net wealth. In 2010 the United Nations Development Programme ranked the United States 12th among 139 countries on its inequality-adjusted human development index (IHDI), eight places lower than in the standard HDI.

Infrastructure

Science and technology

The United States has been a leader in scientific research and technological innovation since the late 19th century. In 1876, Alexander Graham Bell was awarded the first U.S. patent for the telephone. Thomas Edison's laboratory developed the phonograph, the first long-lasting light bulb, and the first viable movie camera. Nikola Tesla pioneered alternating current, the AC motor, and radio. In the early 20th century, the automobile companies of Ransom E. Olds and Henry Ford popularized the assembly line. The Wright brothers, in 1903, made the first sustained and controlled heavier-than-air powered flight.

The rise of Nazism in the 1930s led many European scientists, including Albert Einstein and Enrico Fermi, to immigrate to the United States. During World War II, the Manhattan Project developed nuclear weapons, ushering in the Atomic Age. The Space Race produced rapid advances in rocketry, materials science, and computers. IBM, Apple Computer, and Microsoft refined and popularized the personal computer. The United States largely developed the ARPANET and its successor, the Internet. Today, 64% of research and development funding comes from the private sector. The United States leads the world in scientific research papers and impact factor. Americans possess high levels of technological consumer goods, and almost half of U.S. households have broadband Internet access. The country is the primary developer and grower of genetically modified food, representing half of the world's biotech crops.

Transportation

Personal transportation is dominated by automobiles, which operate on a network of 13 million roads, including the world's longest highway system. The world's second largest automobile market, the United States has the highest rate of per-capita vehicle ownership in the world, with 765 vehicles per 1,000 Americans. About 40% of personal vehicles are vans, SUVs, or light trucks. The average American adult (accounting for all drivers and nondrivers) spends 55 minutes driving every day, traveling .

Mass transit accounts for 9% of total U.S. work trips, ranking last in a survey of 17 countries. While transport of goods by rail is extensive, relatively few people use rail to travel. Light rail development has increased in recent years but, like high speed rail, is below European levels. Bicycle usage for work commutes is minimal.

The civil airline industry is entirely privately owned and has been largely deregulated since 1978, while most major airports are publicly owned. The four largest airlines in the world by passengers carried are American; Southwest Airlines is number one. Of the world's thirty busiest passenger airports, sixteen are in the United States, including the busiest, Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport.

Energy

The United States energy market is 29,000 terawatt hours per year. Energy consumption per capita is 7.8 tons of oil equivalent per year, the 10th highest rate in the world. In 2005, 40% of this energy came from petroleum, 23% from coal, and 22% from natural gas. The remainder was supplied by nuclear power and renewable energy sources. The United States is the world's largest consumer of petroleum. For decades, nuclear power has played a limited role relative to many other developed countries, in part due to public perception in the wake of a 1979 accident. In 2007, several applications for new nuclear plants were filed. The United States has 27% of global coal reserves.

Education

American public education is operated by state and local governments, regulated by the United States Department of Education through restrictions on federal grants. Children are required in most states to attend school from the age of six or seven (generally, kindergarten or first grade) until they turn eighteen (generally bringing them through twelfth grade, the end of high school); some states allow students to leave school at sixteen or seventeen. About 12% of children are enrolled in parochial or nonsectarian private schools. Just over 2% of children are homeschooled.

The United States has many competitive private and public institutions of higher education. According to prominent international rankings, 13 or 15 American colleges and universities are ranked among the top 20 in the world. There are also local community colleges with generally more open admission policies, shorter academic programs, and lower tuition. Of Americans twenty-five and older, 84.6% graduated from high school, 52.6% attended some college, 27.2% earned a bachelor's degree, and 9.6% earned graduate degrees. The basic literacy rate is approximately 99%. The United Nations assigns the United States an Education Index of 0.97, tying it for 12th in the world.

Health

The United States life expectancy of 78.3 years at birth is ranked 36th among 194 United Nations member states; while above the world average, it falls short of the overall figure in Western Europe. Increasing obesity in the United States and health improvements elsewhere have contributed to lowering the country's rank in life expectancy from 1987 to 2007, from 11th to 42nd in the world. The infant mortality rate of 6.37 per thousand places the United States 42nd out of 221 countries, above average but behind all of Western Europe. Approximately one-third of the adult population is obese and an additional third is overweight; the obesity rate, the highest in the industrialized world, has more than doubled in the last quarter-century. Obesity-related type 2 diabetes is considered epidemic by health care professionals.

The U.S. health care system far outspends any other nation's, measured in both per capita spending and percentage of GDP. The World Health Organization ranked the U.S. health care system in 2000 as first in responsiveness, but 37th in overall performance.

Health care coverage in the United States is a combination of public and private efforts, and is not universal as in all other developed countries. In 2004, private insurance paid for 36% of personal health expenditures, private out-of-pocket payments covered 15%, and federal, state, and local governments paid for 44%. In 2005, 46.6 million Americans, 15.9% of the population, were uninsured, 5.4 million more than in 2001. The main cause of this rise is the drop in the number of Americans with employer-sponsored health insurance. The subject of uninsured and underinsured Americans is a major political issue. A 2009 study estimated that lack of insurance is associated with nearly 45,000 deaths a year. In 2006, Massachusetts became the first state to mandate universal health insurance. Federal legislation passed in early 2010 will create a near-universal health insurance system around the country by 2014.

Crime and law enforcement

Law enforcement in the United States is primarily the responsibility of local police and sheriff's departments, with state police providing broader services. Federal agencies such as the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and the U.S. Marshals Service have specialized duties. At the federal level and in almost every state, jurisprudence operates on a common law system. State courts conduct most criminal trials; federal courts handle certain designated crimes as well as certain appeals from the state systems. Federal law prohibits a variety of drugs, although states sometimes pass laws in conflict with federal regulations. The smoking age is generally 18 and the drinking age is generally 21.

Among developed nations, the United States has above-average levels of violent crime and particularly high levels of gun violence and homicide. There were 5.0 murders per 100,000 persons in 2009, 10.4% fewer than in 2000. Gun ownership rights are the subject of contentious political debate.

The United States has the highest documented incarceration rate and total prison population in the world. At the start of 2008, more than 2.3 million people were incarcerated, more than one in every 100 adults. The current rate is about seven times the 1980 figure, and over three times the figure in Poland, the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) country with the next highest rate. African American males are jailed at about six times the rate of white males and three times the rate of Hispanic males. The country's high rate of incarceration is largely due to sentencing and drug policies.

Though it has been abolished in most Western nations, capital punishment is sanctioned in the United States for certain federal and military crimes, and in thirty-four states. Since 1976, when the U.S. Supreme Court reinstated the death penalty after a four-year moratorium, there have been more than 1,000 executions. In 2010, the country had the fifth highest number of executions in the world, following China, Iran, North Korea, and Yemen. In 2007, New Jersey became the first state to legislatively abolish the death penalty since the 1976 Supreme Court decision, followed by New Mexico in 2009 and Illinois in 2011.

Demographics

{|class="infobox" style="font-size: 90%; border: 1px solid #999; float: right; margin-left: 1em; width: 240px;" |- style="background:#f5f5f5;" ! colspan="2" | Race/Ethnicity (2010) |- | White || style="text-align: center;" |72.4% |- | Black/African American || style="text-align: center;" |12.6% |- | Asian || style="text-align: center;" |4.8% |- | American Indian and Alaska Native || style="text-align: center;" |0.9% |- | Native Hawaiian and Pacific Islander || style="text-align: center;" |0.2% |- | Other || style="text-align: center;" |6.2% |- | Two or more races || style="text-align: center;" | 2.9% |- | Hispanic/Latino (''of any race'') || style="text-align: center;" |16.3% |}

The U.S. Census Bureau estimates the country's population now to be }}, including an estimated 11.2 million illegal immigrants. The U.S. population almost quadrupled during the 20th century, from about 76 million in 1900. The third most populous nation in the world, after China and India, the United States is the only industrialized nation in which large population increases are projected. Even with a birth rate of 13.82 per 1,000, 30% below the world average, its population growth rate is positive at 1%, significantly higher than those of many developed nations. In fiscal year 2010, over 1 million immigrants (most of whom entered through family reunification) were granted legal residence. Mexico has been the leading source of new residents for over two decades; since 1998, China, India, and the Philippines have been in the top four sending countries every year.

The United States has a very diverse population—thirty-one ancestry groups have more than one million members. White Americans are the largest racial group; German Americans, Irish Americans, and English Americans constitute three of the country's four largest ancestry groups. African Americans are the nation's largest racial minority and third largest ancestry group. Asian Americans are the country's second largest racial minority; the two largest Asian American ethnic groups are Chinese Americans and Filipino Americans. In 2010, the U.S. population included an estimated 5.2 million people with some American Indian or Alaska Native ancestry (2.9 million exclusively of such ancestry) and 1.2 million with some native Hawaiian or Pacific island ancestry (0.5 million exclusively). The census counted more than 19 million people of "Some Other Race" who were "unable to identify with any" of its five official race categories in 2010.

The population growth of Hispanic and Latino Americans (the terms are officially interchangeable) is a major demographic trend. The 50.5 million Americans of Hispanic descent are identified as sharing a distinct "ethnicity" by the Census Bureau; 64% of Hispanic Americans are of Mexican descent. Between 2000 and 2010, the country's Hispanic population increased 43% while the non-Hispanic population rose just 4.9%. Much of this growth is from immigration; as of 2007, 12.6% of the U.S. population was foreign-born, with 54% of that figure born in Latin America. Fertility is also a factor; the average Hispanic woman gives birth to 3.0 children in her lifetime, compared to 2.2 for non-Hispanic black women and 1.8 for non-Hispanic white women (below the replacement rate of 2.1). Minorities (as defined by the Census Bureau, all those beside non-Hispanic, non-multiracial whites) constitute 34% of the population, and are projected to constitute the majority by 2042.

About 82% of Americans live in urban areas (including suburbs); about half of those reside in cities with populations over 50,000. In 2008, 273 incorporated places had populations over 100,000, nine cities had more than 1 million residents, and four global cities had over 2 million (New York City, Los Angeles, Chicago, and Houston). There are fifty-two metropolitan areas with populations greater than 1 million. Of the fifty fastest-growing metro areas, forty-seven are in the West or South. The metro areas of Dallas, Houston, Atlanta, and Phoenix all grew by more than a million people between 2000 and 2008.

Language

{|class="infobox" style="font-size: 90%; border: 1px solid #999; float: right; margin-left: 1em; width: 200px;" |- style="background:#f5f5f5;" !colspan="2"|Languages (2007) |- |English (''only'')||style="text-align: center;"|225.5 million |- |Spanish, incl. Creole||style="text-align: center;"|34.5 million |- |Chinese||style="text-align: center;"|2.5 million |- |French, incl. Creole||style="text-align: center;"|2.0 million |- |Tagalog||style="text-align: center;"|1.5 million |- |Vietnamese||style="text-align: center;"|1.2 million |- |German||style="text-align: center;"|1.1 million |- |Korean||style="text-align: center;"|1.1 million |}

English is the de facto national language. Although there is no official language at the federal level, some laws—such as U.S. naturalization requirements—standardize English. In 2007, about 226 million, or 80% of the population aged five years and older, spoke only English at home. Spanish, spoken by 12% of the population at home, is the second most common language and the most widely taught second language. Some Americans advocate making English the country's official language, as it is in at least twenty-eight states. Both Hawaiian and English are official languages in Hawaii by state law.

While neither has an official language, New Mexico has laws providing for the use of both English and Spanish, as Louisiana does for English and French. Other states, such as California, mandate the publication of Spanish versions of certain government documents including court forms. Many jurisdictions with large numbers of non-English speakers produce government materials, especially voting information, in the most commonly spoken languages in those jurisdictions. Several insular territories grant official recognition to their native languages, along with English: Samoan and Chamorro are recognized by American Samoa and Guam, respectively; Carolinian and Chamorro are recognized by the Northern Mariana Islands; Spanish is an official language of Puerto Rico.

Religion

The United States is officially a secular nation; the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution guarantees the free exercise of religion and forbids the establishment of any religious governance. In a 2002 study, 59% of Americans said that religion played a "very important role in their lives", a far higher figure than that of any other wealthy nation. According to a 2007 survey, 78.4% of adults identified themselves as Christian, down from 86.4% in 1990. Protestant denominations accounted for 51.3%, while Roman Catholicism, at 23.9%, was the largest individual denomination. The study categorizes white evangelicals, 26.3% of the population, as the country's largest religious cohort; another study estimates evangelicals of all races at 30–35%. The total reporting non-Christian religions in 2007 was 4.7%, up from 3.3% in 1990. The leading non-Christian faiths were Judaism (1.7%), Buddhism (0.7%), Islam (0.6%), Hinduism (0.4%), and Unitarian Universalism (0.3%). The survey also reported that 16.1% of Americans described themselves as agnostic, atheist, or simply having no religion, up from 8.2% in 1990.

Family structure

In 2007, 58% of Americans age 18 and over were married, 6% were widowed, 10% were divorced, and 25% had never been married. Women now mostly work outside the home and receive a majority of bachelor's degrees.

Same-sex marriage is a contentious issue. Some states permit civil unions or domestic partnerships in lieu of marriage. Since 2003, several states have legalized gay marriage as the result of judicial or legislative action. Meanwhile, the federal government and a majority of states define marriage as between a man and a woman and/or explicitly prohibit same-sex marriage. Public opinion on the issue has shifted from general opposition in the 1990s to a statistical deadlock as of 2011.

The U.S. teenage pregnancy rate, 79.8 per 1,000 women, is the highest among OECD nations. Abortion policy was left to the states until the Supreme Court legalized the practice in 1972. The issue remains highly controversial, with public opinion closely divided for many years. Many states ban public funding of the procedure and restrict late-term abortions, require parental notification for minors, and mandate a waiting period. While the abortion rate is falling, the abortion ratio of 241 per 1,000 live births and abortion rate of 15 per 1,000 women aged 15–44 remain higher than those of most Western nations.

Culture

The United States is a multicultural nation, home to a wide variety of ethnic groups, traditions, and values. Aside from the now small Native American and Native Hawaiian populations, nearly all Americans or their ancestors immigrated within the past five centuries. The culture held in common by most Americans—mainstream American culture—is a Western culture largely derived from the traditions of European immigrants with influences from many other sources, such as traditions brought by slaves from Africa. More recent immigration from Asia and especially Latin America has added to a cultural mix that has been described as both a homogenizing melting pot, and a heterogeneous salad bowl in which immigrants and their descendants retain distinctive cultural characteristics.

American culture is considered the most individualistic in the world. Though the American Dream, or the perception that Americans enjoy high social mobility, plays a key role in attracting immigrants, other developed nations offer greater social mobility. While the mainstream culture holds that the United States is a classless society, scholars identify significant differences between the country's social classes, affecting socialization, language, and values. The American middle and professional class has initiated many contemporary social trends such as modern feminism, environmentalism, and multiculturalism. Americans' self-images, social viewpoints, and cultural expectations are associated with their occupations to an unusually close degree. While Americans tend greatly to value socioeconomic achievement, being ordinary or average is generally seen as a positive attribute.

Popular media

The world's first commercial motion picture exhibition was given in New York City in 1894, using Thomas Edison's Kinetoscope. The next year saw the first commercial screening of a projected film, also in New York, and the United States was in the forefront of sound film's development in the following decades. Since the early 20th century, the U.S. film industry has largely been based in and around Hollywood, California. Director D. W. Griffith was central to the development of film grammar and Orson Welles's ''Citizen Kane'' (1941) is frequently cited as the greatest film of all time. American screen actors like John Wayne and Marilyn Monroe have become iconic figures, while producer/entrepreneur Walt Disney was a leader in both animated film and movie merchandising. The major film studios of Hollywood have produced the most commercially successful movies in history, such as ''Star Wars'' (1977) and ''Titanic'' (1997), and the products of Hollywood today dominate the global film industry.

Americans are the heaviest television viewers in the world, and the average viewing time continues to rise, reaching five hours a day in 2006. The four major broadcast networks are all commercial entities. Americans listen to radio programming, also largely commercialized, on average just over two-and-a-half hours a day. Aside from web portals and search engines, the most popular websites are Facebook, YouTube, Wikipedia, Blogger, eBay, and Craigslist.

The rhythmic and lyrical styles of African-American music have deeply influenced American music at large, distinguishing it from European traditions. Elements from folk idioms such as the blues and what is now known as old-time music were adopted and transformed into popular genres with global audiences. Jazz was developed by innovators such as Louis Armstrong and Duke Ellington early in the 20th century. Country music developed in the 1920s, and rhythm and blues in the 1940s. Elvis Presley and Chuck Berry were among the mid-1950s pioneers of rock and roll. In the 1960s, Bob Dylan emerged from the folk revival to become one of America's most celebrated songwriters and James Brown led the development of funk. More recent American creations include hip hop and house music. American pop stars such as Presley, Michael Jackson, and Madonna have become global celebrities.

Literature, philosophy, and the arts

In the 18th and early 19th centuries, American art and literature took most of its cues from Europe. Writers such as Nathaniel Hawthorne, Edgar Allan Poe, and Henry David Thoreau established a distinctive American literary voice by the middle of the 19th century. Mark Twain and poet Walt Whitman were major figures in the century's second half; Emily Dickinson, virtually unknown during her lifetime, is now recognized as an essential American poet. A work seen as capturing fundamental aspects of the national experience and character—such as Herman Melville's ''Moby-Dick'' (1851), Twain's ''The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn'' (1885), and F. Scott Fitzgerald's ''The Great Gatsby'' (1925)—may be dubbed the "Great American Novel".

Eleven U.S. citizens have won the Nobel Prize in Literature, most recently Toni Morrison in 1993. William Faulkner and Ernest Hemingway are often named among the most influential writers of the 20th century. Popular literary genres such as the Western and hardboiled crime fiction developed in the United States. The Beat Generation writers opened up new literary approaches, as have postmodernist authors such as John Barth, Thomas Pynchon, and Don DeLillo.

The transcendentalists, led by Thoreau and Ralph Waldo Emerson, established the first major American philosophical movement. After the Civil War, Charles Sanders Peirce and then William James and John Dewey were leaders in the development of pragmatism. In the 20th century, the work of W. V. Quine and Richard Rorty, built upon by Noam Chomsky, brought analytic philosophy to the fore of U.S. academics. John Rawls and Robert Nozick led a revival of political philosophy.

In the visual arts, the Hudson River School was a mid-19th-century movement in the tradition of European naturalism. The realist paintings of Thomas Eakins are now widely celebrated. The 1913 Armory Show in New York City, an exhibition of European modernist art, shocked the public and transformed the U.S. art scene. Georgia O'Keeffe, Marsden Hartley, and others experimented with new styles, displaying a highly individualistic sensibility. Major artistic movements such as the abstract expressionism of Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning and the pop art of Andy Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein developed largely in the United States. The tide of modernism and then postmodernism has brought fame to American architects such as Frank Lloyd Wright, Philip Johnson, and Frank Gehry. One of the first major promoters of American theater was impresario P. T. Barnum, who began operating a lower Manhattan entertainment complex in 1841. The team of Harrigan and Hart produced a series of popular musical comedies in New York starting in the late 1870s. In the 20th century, the modern musical form emerged on Broadway; the songs of musical theater composers such as Irving Berlin, Cole Porter, and Stephen Sondheim have become pop standards. Playwright Eugene O'Neill won the Nobel literature prize in 1936; other acclaimed U.S. dramatists include multiple Pulitzer Prize winners Tennessee Williams, Edward Albee, and August Wilson.

Though little known at the time, Charles Ives's work of the 1910s established him as the first major U.S. composer in the classical tradition, while experimentalists such as Henry Cowell and John Cage created a distinctive American approach to classical composition. Aaron Copland and George Gershwin developed a new synthesis of popular and classical music. Choreographers Isadora Duncan and Martha Graham helped create modern dance, while George Balanchine and Jerome Robbins were leaders in 20th century ballet. Americans have long been important in the modern artistic medium of photography, with major photographers including Alfred Stieglitz, Edward Steichen, and Ansel Adams. The newspaper comic strip and the comic book are both U.S. innovations. Superman, the quintessential comic book superhero, has become an American icon.

Food

Mainstream American cuisine is similar to that in other Western countries. Wheat is the primary cereal grain. Traditional American cuisine uses indigenous ingredients, such as turkey, venison, potatoes, sweet potatoes, corn, squash, and maple syrup, which were consumed by Native Americans and early European settlers. Slow-cooked pork and beef barbecue, crab cakes, potato chips, and chocolate chip cookies are distinctively American foods. Soul food, developed by African slaves, is popular around the South and among many African Americans elsewhere. Syncretic cuisines such as Louisiana creole, Cajun, and Tex-Mex are regionally important.

Characteristic dishes such as apple pie, fried chicken, pizza, hamburgers, and hot dogs derive from the recipes of various immigrants. French fries, Mexican dishes such as burritos and tacos, and pasta dishes freely adapted from Italian sources are widely consumed. Americans generally prefer coffee to tea. Marketing by U.S. industries is largely responsible for making orange juice and milk ubiquitous breakfast beverages.

The American fast food industry, the world's largest, pioneered the drive-through format in the 1930s. Fast food consumption has sparked health concerns. During the 1980s and 1990s, Americans' caloric intake rose 24%; frequent dining at fast food outlets is associated with what public health officials call the American "obesity epidemic". Highly sweetened soft drinks are widely popular, and sugared beverages account for 9% of American caloric intake.

Sports

Baseball has been regarded as the national sport since the late 19th century, while American football is now by several measures the most popular spectator sport. Basketball and ice hockey are the country's next two leading professional team sports. College football and basketball attract large audiences. Boxing and horse racing were once the most watched individual sports, but they have been eclipsed by golf and auto racing, particularly NASCAR. Soccer is played widely at the youth and amateur levels. Tennis and many outdoor sports are popular as well.

While most major U.S. sports have evolved out of European practices, basketball, volleyball, skateboarding, snowboarding, and cheerleading are American inventions. Lacrosse and surfing arose from Native American and Native Hawaiian activities that predate Western contact. Eight Olympic Games have taken place in the United States. The United States has won 2,301 medals at the Summer Olympic Games, more than any other country, and 253 in the Winter Olympic Games, the second most.

Measurement systems

The country retains United States customary units, constituted largely by British imperial units such as miles, yards, and degrees Fahrenheit. Distinct units include the U.S. gallon and U.S. pint volume measurements. The United States is one of only three countries that have not adopted the International System of Units. However, metric units are increasingly used in science, medicine, and many industrial fields.

See also

International rankings of the United States

List of Americans

List of places in the United States

List of U.S. state portals

References

External links

;Government

Official U.S. Government Web Portal Gateway to government sites

House Official site of the United States House of Representatives

Senate Official site of the United States Senate

White House Official site of the President of the United States

[ Supreme Court] Official site of the Supreme Court of the United States ;Overviews and Data

InfoUSA Portal to U.S. Information Agency resources

Library of Congress Official site of the U.S. Library of Congress

Demographic Highlights Statistics from the Population Reference Bureau

The 50 States of the U.S.A. Collected informational links for each state

United States travel guide from Wikitravel

United States ''Encyclopædia Britannica'' entry

U.S. Census Housing and Economic Statistics Wide-ranging data from the U.S. Census Bureau

U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services Official government site

State Fact Sheets Population, employment, income, and farm data from the U.S. Economic Research Service

State Energy Profiles Economic, environmental, and energy data for each state from the U.S. Energy Information Administration

;History

Historical Documents Collected by the National Center for Public Policy Research

U.S. National Mottos: History and Constitutionality Analysis by the Ontario Consultants on Religious Tolerance

USA Collected links to historical data

;Maps

National Atlas of the United States Official maps from the U.S. Department of the Interior

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Conservatism in the United States has played an important role in American politics since the 1950s. Historian Gregory Schneider identifies several constants in American conservatism: respect for tradition, support of republicanism, preservation of "the rule of law and the Christian religion", and a defense of "Western civilization from the challenges of modernist culture and totalitarian governments." The history of American conservatism has been marked by tensions and competing ideologies. Economic conservatives and libertarians favor small government, low taxes, limited regulation, and free enterprise. Social conservatives want a strong government to enforce Christian morality. Neoconservatives want to expand American ideals throughout the world. The conservative movement of the 1950s attempted to bring together these divergent strands, stressing the need for unity to prevent the spread of "Godless Communism".

In the 1980s President Ronald Reagan solidified conservative Republican strength with tax cuts, greatly increased defense spending, deregulation, a policy of rolling back Communism (rather than just containing it), a greatly strengthened military, and appeals to family values and conservative Christian morality. The Reagan model became the conservative standard for social, economic and foreign policy issues, and that period of American history became known as the "Reagan Era". After the fall of Soviet Communism in 1991, key conservative domestic issues become what conservative columnist William Safire calls "God, guns, and gays". Conservative voters tend to oppose abortion, gun control, and gay marriage. From 2001 to 2008 Republican President George W. Bush stressed cutting taxes, increasing spending, minimizing regulation of industry and banking, and the use of American military power to fight terrorists, promote democracy, and secure American Oil interests in the Middle East.

Other modern conservative beliefs include opposition to a world government, skepticism about the importance or validity of various environmental issues, the importance of self-reliance instead of reliance on the government to solve problems, support for the state of Israel, support for prayer in the public schools, support for the right to bear arms, opposition to embryonic stem cell research, opposition to illegal immigration, support for a strong Law and Order policy, strict enforcement of the law, and long jail terms for repeat offenders.

According to a August 1st 2011 poll, 11% of American voters identify themselves as "very conservative", 30% as "conservative", 36% as "moderate", 15% as "liberal", and 6% as "very liberal". These percentages have been fairly constant since 1990.

The meaning of "conservatism" in America has little in common with the way the word is used elsewhere. As Ribuffo (2011) notes, "what Americans now call conservatism much of the world calls liberalism or neoliberalism." Since the 1950s conservatism in the United States has been chiefly associated with the Republican Party. However, during the era of segregation many Southern Democrats were conservatives, and they played a key role in the Conservative Coalition that controlled Congress from 1937 to 1963.

History

The United States has never had a national political party called the Conservative Party. All major American political parties support the republican and liberal ideals on which the country was founded in 1776, with an emphasis on liberty, pursuit of happiness, rule of law, opposition to aristocracy, and emphasis on equal rights. Political divisions inside the United States have seemed minor or trivial to Europeans, where the divide between the Left and the Right led to very high polarization, starting with the French Revolution.

However American historian Patrick Allitt, finds "Certain continuities can be traced through American history. The conservative 'attitude' ... was one of trusting to the past, to long-established patterns of thought and conduct, and of assuming that novelties were more likely to be dangerous than advantageous."

Since 1776 there have been no American spokesmen for the European ideals of "conservatism" such as an established church and a hereditary aristocracy. Rather, American conservatism is a reaction against utopian ideas of progress. Russell Kirk saw the American Revolution itself as "a conservative reaction, in the English political tradition, against royal innovation".

In the 1790s Jeffersonian Democracy arose in opposition to the elitism of the Federalist Party, and fears that it intended to impose a monarchical system like Britain's. Jeffersonians opposed a strong federal government and an interventionist judiciary—themes later picked up by conservatives. By the 1830s, conservatism came to be identified with the Whig Party, which supported banks, business and modernization of the economy, while opposing the Jacksonian democracy which represented poor farmers and the urban working class. They chose the name "Whig" because it had been used by patriots in the Revolution. Daniel Webster and other Whig leaders referred to their new political party as the "conservative party", and they called for a return to tradition, restraint, hierarchy, and moderation.

During the American Civil War the South fought for the right to expand slavery while the North fought to preserve the Union. After the war, "conservative" meant opposition to the Radical Republicans, who wanted to grant full citizenship rights to freed slaves. During the Reconstruction Era, conservative meant opposition to the Radical Republicans, who wanted to grant freed slaves political power and take it away from the ex-Confederates.

American Revolution

American conservatives today strongly admire the Founding Fathers, and demand a return to their values. Historians have given considerable attention to the values of the Founding Fathers, and to conservatism in America at the time of the Revolution. By the 1750s and 1760s some colonial institutions had conservative aspects. These included political power held by small elites, established churches in half the colonies, entailed property rights in Virginia, large landholdings operated by riotous tenants in New York, and slavery in every colony. Although the colonists lived under the freest government in the European world, they were fiercely determined to protect and preserve their historic rights. By the 1750s most Americans owned property and could vote in elections that controlled local government. Local and colonial taxes were low, and imperial taxes were few.

By the 1770s there was a large element tied to the British Empire, including wealthy merchants involved in international trade, and royal officials and patronage holders. Most of these conservative elites and their followers who remained loyal to the Crown are called Loyalists or "Tories". The Loyalists were "conservatives" in that they tried to preserve the status quo of Empire against revolutionary change. Their leaders were men of wealth and property who loved order, respected their betters, looked down on their inferiors, and feared democratic rule by the rabble at home more than rule by a distant aristocracy. When it came to a choice between protecting their historic rights as Americans or remaining loyal to the King, they chose King and Empire.

The patriots who fought the Revolution did so in the name of preserving traditional rights of Englishmen—especially the right of "no taxation without representation"; they increasingly opposed attempts by Parliament to tax and control the fast-growing colonies. When the British cracked down hard on Boston after the Boston Tea Party in 1773, the patriots organized colony-by-colony and were ready to fight. Fighting broke out in spring 1775, and all Thirteen Colonies rallied to expel royal officials. The colonies formed a Congress that became the de facto national government, raised an army under George Washington, won support from France, and declared independence as the "United States of America" in July 1776. The patriots formed a consensus around the ideas of republicanism, whereby the people were sovereign (not the king), every citizen had equal legal rights, elected assemblies made the laws, inherited titles, established armies and churches were rejected, and corruption of the sort practiced by royalty was repudiated.

Labaree (1948) has identified eight characteristics of the Loyalists that made them essentially conservative in opposing Independence. Psychologically they were older, better established, and resisted innovation. They thought resistance to the Crown—the legitimate government—was morally wrong. They were alienated when the Patriots' resorted to violence, such as burning houses and tarring and feathering. They wanted to take a middle-of-the road position and were angry when forced by the Patriots to declare their opposition. They had a long-standing sentimental attachment to Britain (often with business and family links). They were procrastinators who realized that independence was bound to come some day, but wanted to postpone the moment. They were cautious and afraid of anarchy or tyranny that might come from mob rule. Finally they were pessimists who lacked the confidence in the future displayed by the Patriots. Loyalists willing to accept republican principles remained after the war—80% stayed on—while those who rejected republicanism went elsewhere in the British Empire (mostly to Canada), taking their conservatism with them. The new principles of the Revolution became the core American political values agreed to by all sides, and became part of the core principles of what is now called American conservatism.

Thus the American Revolution disrupted the old networks of conservative elites. The departure of so many royal officials, rich merchants and landed gentry destroyed the hierarchical networks that had dominated most of the colonies. In New York, for example, the departure of key members of the DeLancy, DePester Walton, and Cruger families undercut the interlocking families that largely owned and controlled the Hudson Valley. Likewise in Pennsylvania, the departure of powerful families—Penn, Allen, Chew, Shippen—destroyed the cohesion of the old upper class there. New men became rich merchants but they shared a spirit of republican equality that replaced the elitism and the Americans never recreated such a powerful upper class. One rich patriot in Boston noted in 1779 that "fellows who would have cleaned my shoes five years ago, have amassed fortunes and are riding in chariots." Nevertheless the conservatism of the Loyalists did not die out. Eight in ten remained in America after the Revolution. For the most part, they avoided politics; certainly they never tried to form a revanchist movement seeking a return to the Empire. Samuel Seabury remained and abandoned politics but became the first Episcopalian bishop in the United States, rebuilding a church that appealed to the upper class that still admired hierarchy, tradition, and historic liturgy.

Federalists

The Federalist Party, dominated by Treasury Secretary Alexander Hamilton used the presidency of George Washington to promote a strong nation capable of holding its own in world affairs, with a strong army and navy, capable of suppressing internal revolts (such as the Whiskey Rebellion) and founding the national finances on a sound basis while winning the broad support of the financial and business community. Intellectually, Federalists, while devoted to liberty held profoundly conservative views atuned to the American character. As Samuel Eliot Morison explained, They believed that liberty is inseparable from union, that men are essentially unequal, that vox populi [voice of the people] is seldom if ever vox Dei [the voice of God], and that sinister outside influences are busy undermining American integrity. Historian Patrick Allitt concludes that Federalists promoted many conservative positions, including the rule of law under the Constitution, republican government, peaceful change through elections, judicial supremacy, stable national finances, credible and active diplomacy, and protection of wealth.

The Federalists were dominated by businessmen and merchants in the major cities and was supportive of the modernizing, urbanizing, financial policies of Hamilton. These policies included the funding of the national debt and also assumption of state debts incurred during the Revolutionary War (thus allowing the states to lower their own taxes and still pay their debts), the incorporation of a national Bank of the United States, the support of manufactures and industrial development, and the use of a tariff to fund the Treasury. In foreign affairs the Federalists opposed the French Revolution. Under John Adams they fought the "Quasi War" (an undeclared naval war) with France in 1798–99 and built a strong army and navy. Ideologically the controversy between Jeffersonian Republicans and Federalists stemmed from a difference of principle and style. In terms of style the Federalists distrusted the public, thought the elite should be in charge, and favored national power over state power. Republicans distrusted Britain, bankers, merchants and did not want a powerful national government. The Federalists, notably Hamilton, were distrustful of "the people," the French, and the Republicans. In the end, the nation synthesized the two positions, adopting representative democracy and a strong nation state. Just as importantly, American politics by the 1820s accepted the two-party system whereby rival parties stake their claims before the electorate, and the winner takes control of the government. As time went on, the Federalists lost appeal with the average voter and were generally not equal to the tasks of party organization; hence, they grew steadily weaker as the political triumphs of the Republican Party grew after 1800. After 1816 the Federalists had no national influence apart from John Marshall's Supreme Court. They retained some local support into the 1820s, but important leaders left their fading cause, including future presidents John Quincy Adams and James Buchanan, and future Chief Justice Roger B. Taney.

The "Old Republicans," led by John Randolph of Roanoke, refused to form a coalition with the Federalists and instead set up a separate opposition since the main Republican leaders (notably James Madison, Albert Gallatin, James Monroe, John C. Calhoun and Henry Clay) had in effect adopted Federalist principles by chartering the Second national bank, promoting internal improvements (like roads), raising tariffs to protect factories, and promoting a strong army and navy after the failures of the War of 1812.

Lincoln and the Civil War

Before the outbreak of the war, Abraham Lincoln tried to appeal to conservatives. In a speech in Ohio in 1859 he explained what he meant by conservatism in terms of fealty to the original intent of the Founding Fathers: :"''The chief and real purpose of the Republican party is eminently conservative. It proposes nothing save and except to restore this government to its original tone in regard to this element of slavery, and there to maintain it, looking for no further change in reference to it than that which the original framers of the Government themselves expected and looked forward to."''

Lincoln elaborated his position in his famous Cooper Union speech in early 1860 arguing that the Founding Fathers expected slavery to die a natural death, not to spread. His point was that the Founding Fathers were anti-slavery and the notion that slavery was good was a radical innovation that violated American ideals. This speech solidified Lincoln's base in the Republican party and helped assure his nomination.

During the war Lincoln fought the Radical Republicans on the issue of dealing with slavery and re-integrating the South in to the nation. He built his own coalition of conservative and moderate Republicans, and War Democrats. After the war, Lincoln tried to reintegrate the white South into the union as soon as possible by offering generous peace terms, "with malice toward none, with charity toward all". When Lincoln was assassinated, the Radicals gained the upper hand and imposed much harsher terms than those Lincoln had wished.

Throughout his career Lincoln was a champion of the conservative Whig party and fought the liberal Jacksonian Democracy. He promoted business interests, especially banks, railroads and factories. The question of whether Lincoln was a liberal or conservative has been debated. Norman Graeber has argued in favor of Lincoln having conservative positions while James Randall has argued in favor of Lincoln having 19th century liberal positions while at the same time emphasized Lincoln's tolerance and moderation "in his preference for orderly progress, his distrust of dangerous agitation, and his reluctance toward ill digested schemes of reform." Randall concluded that Lincoln was "conservative in his complete avoidance of that type of so-called 'radicalism' which involved abuse of the South, hatred for the slaveholder, thirst for vengeance, partisan plotting, and ungenerous demands that Southern institutions be transformed overnight by outsiders." David Greenstone agrues that Lincoln's thought was grounded in reform liberalism but notes his unionism and Whiggish politics had a deeply conservative side as well.

Southern conservatism

White Southerners took a lesson from the Reconstruction era that the radical experiments by Northern reformers violated the rights of white men and were inevitably tied to corruption. The race-based conservatism in the American South differed from the business-based conservatism in the North in its strong support for white supremacy, and insistence on a second-class powerless status for blacks, regardless of the Constitution. There was also a liberal element in the South—in support of Woodrow Wilson and Franklin Roosevelt—but they rarely opposed Jim Crow. From 1877 to 1960, the "Solid South" voted for Democrats in almost all national elections; Democrats had firm control of state and local government in all southern states. By the late 1930s conservative Southern Democrats in Congress joined with most Northern Republicans in an informal Conservative Coalition that usually proved decisive in stopping liberal domestic legislation until 1964. However the Southerners generally were much more internationalist than the mostly isolationist Republicans in the Coalition.

Fundamentalism, especially on the part of Southern Baptists, was a powerful force in Southern conservative politics beginning in the late 1970s. They voted for Reagan in 1980 over a fellow Southern Baptist Jimmy Carter.

The Gilded Age

There was little nostalgia and backward looking in the dynamic North and West during the "Gilded Age"—the boom decades that followed the Civil War. Business was expanding rapidly, with manufacturing, mining, railroads, and banking leading the way. There were millions of new farms in the prairie states. Immigration reached record levels. Progress was the watchword of the day. The wealth of the period is highlighted by American upper class opulence, but also by the rise of American philanthropy (referred to by Andrew Carnegie as the "Gospel of Wealth") that used private money to endow thousands of colleges, hospitals, museums, academies, schools, opera houses, public libraries, symphony orchestras, and charities.

Conservatives in the 20th Century, looking back at the Gilded Age, retroactively applied the word "conservative" to those who supported unrestrained capitalism. For example, Oswald Garrison Villard, writing in 1939, characterized his former mentor Horace White (1834–1916) as "a great economic conservative; had he lived to see the days of the New Deal financing he would probably have cried out loud and promptly demised."

In this sense, the conservative element of the Democratic party was led by the Bourbon Democrats and their hero President Grover Cleveland, who fought against high tariffs and on behalf of the gold standard. In 1896, the Bourbons were overthrown inside the Democratic Party by William Jennings Bryan and the agrarians, who preached "Free Silver" and opposition to the power that banks and railroads had over the American farmer. The agrarians formed a coalition with the Populists and vehemently denounced the politics of big business, especially in the decisive 1896 election, won by Republican William McKinley, who was easily reelected over Bryan in 1900 as well.

Religious conservatives of this period sponsored a large and flourishing media network, especially based on magazines, many with close ties to the Protestant churches that were rapidly expanding thanks to the Third Great Awakening. Catholics had few magazines but opposed agrarianism in politics and established hundreds of schools and colleges to promote their conservative religious and social values.

Modern conservatives often point to William Graham Sumner (1840–1910), a leading public intellectual of the era, as one of their own, citing his articulate support for free markets, anti-imperialism, and the gold standard, and his opposition to what he saw as threats to the middle class from the rich plutocrats above or the agrarians and ignorant masses below.

The Gilded Age came to an end with the Panic of 1893 and the severe nationwide depression that lasted from 1893 to 1897.

Empire

As the 19th century drew to a close the United States became a major world power, having acquired overseas territories in Hawaii, Cuba, the Philippines, and Puerto Rico. The two parties re-aligned in the election of 1896, with the Republicans, led by William McKinley, becoming the party of business, sound money, and assertive foreign policy, while the Democrats, led by William Jennings Bryan, became the party of the worker, the small farmer, "Free Silver", and anti-imperialism. Bryan was also popular with religious fundamentalists and white supremacists.

Imperialism won out, as the election of 1900 ratified McKinley's policies and the U.S. possession of Hawaii, Puerto Rico, Guam, the Philippines and (temporarily) Cuba. Theodore Roosevelt promoted the military and naval advantages of the U.S., and echoed McKinley's theme that America had a duty to civilize and modernize the heathen. The supposed business, religious, and military advantages of having an empire proved illusory; by 1908 or so the most ardent imperialists, including Theodore Roosevelt, William Howard Taft, and Elihu Root turned their attention to building up an army and navy at home and to building the Panama Canal. They dropped the notion of additional expansion and agreed by 1920 that the Philippines should become independent.

Progressive Era

In the early years of the 20th century, Republican spokesmen for big business in Congress included Speaker of the House Joe Cannon and Senate Republican Leader Nelson Aldrich of Rhode Island. Aldrich introduced the Sixteenth Amendment, which allowed the federal government to collect an income tax; he also set in motion the design of the Federal Reserve System, which began in 1913. Pro-business conservatives supported many Progressive Era reforms, especially those opposed to corruption and inefficiency in government, and called for purification of politics. Conservative Senator John Sherman sponsored the nation's basic anti-trust law in 1890, and conservatives generally supported anti-trust in the name of opposing monopoly and opening up opportunities for small business. The issues of prohibition and woman suffrage split the conservatives.

The "insurgents" were on the Left of the Republican Party. Led by Robert LaFollette of Wisconsin, George W. Norris of Nebraska, and Hiram Johnson of California, they fought the conservatives in a series of bitter battles that split the GOP and allowed the Democrats to take control of Congress in 1910. Teddy Roosevelt, a hawk on foreign and military policy, moved increasingly to the Left on domestic issues regarding courts, unions, railroads, big business, labor unions and the welfare state. By 1910–11, Roosevelt had broken bitterly with Taft and the conservative wing of the GOP. In 1911–12 he took control of the insurgency, formed a third party, and ran an unsuccessful campaign for president on the Progressive Party ticket in 1912. His departure left the conservatives, led by President William Howard Taft, dominant in the Republican party until 1936. The split opened the way in 1912 for Democrat Woodrow Wilson to become president with only 42% of the vote.

World War I

The Great War broke out in 1914, with Wilson proclaiming neutrality. Former president Theodore Roosevelt denounced Wilson's foreign policy, charging, 'Had it not been for Wilson's pusillanimity, the war would have been over by the summer of 1916." Indeed, Roosevelt believed that Wilson's approach to foreign policy was fundamentally and objectively evil. He dropped the ill-fated Progressive Party and campaigned for the GOP. But Wilson gained many of the Progressive Party voters, and won a narrow victory in 1916. The GOP, under conservative leadership, regained Congress in 1918 and the White House in 1920.

1920s

Conservative Republicans returned to dominance in 1920 with the election of President Warren G. Harding, who called for a return to "normalcy." Tucker (2010) argues that the 1924 election marked the "high tide of American conservatism," as both major candidates campaigned for limited government, reduced taxes, and less regulation. A third-party candidate on the left won only 17% of the vote, as Calvin Coolidge scored a landslide. Under Coolidge (1923–29) the economy boomed and the society was stabilized by moving to Americanize the immigrants already here, and not allowing many more in.

A representative conservative of the 1900–1930 era was James M. Beck, a lawyer under Presidents Roosevelt, Harding and Coolidge, and a congressman 1927–1933. His conservatism appeared in his support for nationalism, individualism, constitutionalism, laissez-faire, property rights, and opposition to reform. Conservatives like Beck saw the need to regulate bad behavior in the corporate world with the intention of protecting corporate capitalism from radical forces, but they were alarmed by the anti-business and pro-union proposals of Roosevelt after 1905. They began to question the notion of a national authority beneficial to big capital, and instead emphasized legalism, concern for the Constitution, and reverence for the American past.

Anti-Communism

With the success of the Communist takeover of Russia in 1917, both American political parties became strongly anti-Communist. Within the U.S., the far Left split and an American Communist Party, emerged in the 1920s. Conservatives denounced the movement as a subversion of American values and kept up relentless opposition until Communism collapsed in Russia in 1991. They paid special attention to Communist agents trying to change national policies and values in the U.S. government, the media, and academe. Conservatives gave enthusiastic support to anti-Communist agencies such as the FBI and the Congressional investigations of the 1940s and 1950s, particularly those led by Richard Nixon and Joe McCarthy. They paid special attention to ex-Communists who exposed the system, such as Whittaker Chambers.

Writers and intellectuals

Classic conservative writing of the period includes ''Democracy and Leadership'' (1924) by Irving Babbitt. The Efficiency Movement attracted Progressive Republicans like Herbert Hoover with its pro-business, quasi-engineering approach to solving social and economic problems.

Numerous literary figures developed a conservative sensibility and warned of threats to Western Civilization. In the 1900–1950 era Henry Adams, T. S. Eliot, Allen Tate, Andrew Lytle, Donald Davidson, and others feared that heedless scientific innovation would unleash forces that would undermine traditional Western values and lead to the collapse of civilization. Instead they searched for a rationale for promoting traditional cultural values in the face of an onslaught by moral nihilism based on historical and scientific relativism.

Conservatism as an intellectual movement in the South after 1930 was represented by writers such as Flannery O'Connor and the Southern Agrarians. The focus was on traditionalism and hierarchy.

Numerous former Communist or Trotskyite writers repudiated the Left in the 1930s or 1940s and embraced conservatism, becoming contributors to ''National Review'' in the 1950s. They included Max Eastman (1883–1969), John Dos Passos (1896–1970), Whittaker Chambers (1901–1961), Will Herberg (1901–1977), and James Burnham (1905–1987).

Dozens of small circulation magazines aimed at intellectuals promoted the conservative cause in the 20th century.

Newspapers

Major newspapers in metropolitan centers with conservative editorial viewpoints have played an important part in the development of American conservatism. In the 1930–1960 era, the Hearst chain, and the McCormick family newspapers (especially the ''Chicago Tribune''), and the ''Los Angeles Times'' championed most conservative causes, as did the Henry Luce magazines, ''Time'' and ''Fortune''. In recent years, those media have lost their conservative edge.

By 1936, most publishers favored Republican Alf Landon over Franklin Roosevelt. In the nation's 15 largest cities the newspapers that editorially endorsed Landon represented 70 percent of the circulation, while Roosevelt won 69% of the actual voters Roosevelt's secret was to open up a new channel of communication to his supporters, through radio. His Fireside Chats especially influenced young radio broadcaster Ronald Reagan, who was an enthusiastic New Dealer at that time. Newspaper publishers continue to favor conservative Republicans.

The Wall Street Journal has continuously been a major voice of conservatism since the 1930s, and remains so since its takeover by Rupert Murdoch in 2007. As editor of the editorial page, Vermont C. Royster (1958–1971), and Robert L. Bartley 1972 to 2000, were especially influential in providing a conservative interpretation of the news on a daily basis.

Great Depression

The Great Depression which followed the 1929 stock market collapse led to price deflation, massive unemployment, falling farm incomes, investment losses, bank failures, business bankruptcies and reduced government revenues. Herbert Hoover's conservative protectionist economic policies failed to halt the depression, and in the 1932 presidential election, Democrat Franklin Delano Roosevelt won a landslide victory.

When Roosevelt tried to bring the country out of depression and ease the plight of the unemployed with the New Deal, conservatives fought him every inch of the way. The counterattack first came from conservative Democrats, led by presidential nominees John W. Davis (1924) and Al Smith (1928), who mobilized business men into the American Liberty League. Opposition to the New Deal also came from the Old Right, a group of conservative free-market anti-interventionists, originally associated with Midwestern Republicans led by Hoover and Robert A. Taft, the son of former President William Howard Taft. The Old Right accused Roosevelt of promoting socialism and being a "traitor to his class".

Vice President John Nance Garner worked with congressional allies to prevent Roosevelt from packing the Supreme Court with six new judges, so the court would not over-rule New Deal legislation as unconstitutional. U.S. Senator Josiah Bailey (D-NC) released the "Conservative Manifesto" in December 1937 which marked the beginning of the "conservative coalition" between Republicans and Southern Democrats. Roosevelt tried and failed to purge conservative Democrats in the 1938 primaries, but all but one beat him back and the Republicans made nationwide gains in 1938. The Conservative Coalition generally controlled Congress until 1963; no major legislation passed which the Coalition opposed. Its most prominent leaders were Senator Robert Taft (R-OH) and Senator Richard Russell (D-GA). Robert Taft unsuccessfully sought the Republican nomination in 1940, 1948, and 1952, and was an opponent of American membership in NATO and of American participation in the Korean War.

Many conservatives, especially in the Midwest, in 1939–41 favored isolationism and opposed American entry into World War II—and so did many liberals. (see America First Committee). Conservatives in the East and South were generally interventionist, as typified by Henry Stimson. However, the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in Dec. 1941 united all Americans behind the war effort, with conservatives in Congress taking the opportunity to close down many new agencies, such as the bête noire WPA.

Jefferson's image

In the New Deal era of the 1930s, Jefferson's memory became contested ground. Franklin D. Roosevelt greatly admired Jefferson and had the Jefferson Memorial built to honor his hero. Even more dramatic, however, was the reaction of the conservatives, as typified by the American Liberty League (comprising mostly conservative Democrats who resembled the Bourbon Democrats of the 1870–1900 era), and the Republican Party. Conservative Republicans abandoned their Hamiltonian views because they led to enlarged national government. Their opposition to Roosevelt's New Deal was cast in explicitly Jeffersonian small-government terms, and Jefferson became a hero of the Right.

1945–1951

Modern conservatism, which combines elements from both traditional conservatism and libertarianism, emerged following World War II, but has its immediate political roots in reaction to the New Deal. In 1946, conservative Republicans took control of Congress and opened investigations into communist infiltration of the federal government under Roosevelt. Congressman Richard Nixon accused Alger Hiss, a senior State Department official, of being a Soviet spy. Based on the testimony of Whittaker Chambers, an ex-Communist who became a leading anti-Communist and hero to conservatives, Hiss was convicted of perjury.

President Harry Truman adopted a containment strategy against the U.S.'s World War II ally, the Soviet Union, through the Truman Doctrine, the Marshall Plan and NATO (1947–1949). Truman's Cold War policies had the support of most conservatives except for the remaining isolationists. The far left (comprising Communist Party members and fellow travelers) wanted to continue détente with Russia, and followed FDR's vice president Henry Wallace in a quixotic crusade in 1948 that failed to win broad support and, indeed, largely destroyed the far left in the Democratic party. Truman was reelected but his vaunted "Fair Deal" went nowhere, as the Conservative Coalition set the domestic agenda in Congress. However, the Coalition did not play a role in foreign affairs.

In 1947 the Conservative Coalition in Congress passed the Taft Hartley Act, balancing the rights of management and unions, and delegitimizing Communist union leaders. However, the major job of rooting out Communists from labor unions and the Democratic party was undertaken by liberals, such as Walter Reuther of the autoworkers union and Ronald Reagan of the Screen Actors Guild (Reagan was a liberal Democrat at the time).

Korean War

When the Communists from North Korea invaded South Korea in 1950 Truman adopted a rollback strategy, planning to free the entire country by force. Truman decided not to obtain Congressional approval for his war—he relied on UN approval—which left the Republicans free to attack his war policies. Taft said Truman's decision was "a complete usurpation by the president." Truman's reliance on the UN reinforced conservative distrust of that body. With the Allies on the verge of victory, the Chinese Communists entered the war and drove the Allies back with terrific fighting in sub-zero weather. Truman reversed positions, dropped the rollback policy, and fired the conservative hero General Douglas MacArthur (who wanted rollback), and settled for containment. Truman's acceptance of the status quo at a cost of 37,000 Americans killed and undermined Truman's base of support. Truman did poorly in the early 1952 and primaries was forced to drop his reelection bid. The Democrats nominated a liberal intellectual with no ties to Roosevelt or Truman, Illinois Governor Adlai Stevenson II.

McCarthyism: 1950–54

When anxiety over Communism in Korea and China reached a fever pitch, an otherwise obscure Senator, Joe McCarthy of Wisconsin, launched extremely high visibility investigations into the cover-up of spies in the government. McCarthy used careless tactics that allowed his opponents to effectively counterattack. Irish Catholics (including Buckley and the Kennedy Family) were intensely anti-Communist and defended McCarthy (a fellow Irish Catholic). Paterfamilias Joseph Kennedy (1888–1969), a very active conservative Democrat, was McCarthy's most ardent supporter and got his son Robert F. Kennedy a job with McCarthy. McCarthy had talked of "twenty years of treason" (i.e. since Roosevelt's election in 1932). When he in 1953 he started talking of "21 years of treason and launched a major attack on the Army for promoting a Communist dentist in the medical corps, his recklessness was too much for Eisenhower, who encouraged Republicans to censure McCarthy formally in 1954. The Senator's power collapsed overnight. Senator John F. Kennedy did not vote for censure.

Arthur Herman says, "McCarthy was always a more important figure to American liberals than to conservatives." McCarthy defined the liberal target, and made liberals look like the innocent victims. In recent years conservatives have not so much defended McCarthy's rough tactics as argue, using fresh evidence from Soviet records such as the Venona project, that the Left at the time was not at all innocent and indeed was covering up networks of Communist spies.

1950s

Eisenhower

Isolationism had weakened the Old Right, as shown by General Eisenhower's defeat of Senator Robert Taft for the GOP nomination in 1952. Eisenhower then won the 1952 election against Adlai Stevenson II by crusading against "Korea, Communism and Corruption." Eisenhower quickly ended the Korean War, which most conservatives now opposed and adopted a conservative fiscal policy while cooperating with Taft, who became the Senate Majority Leader. Eisenhower as president promoted "Modern Republicanism," involving limited government, balanced budgets, and curbing government spending. Although taking a firm anti-Communist position, Ike cut defense spending by shifting the national strategy from reliance on expensive manpower to cheap nuclear weapons. He tried (but failed) to eliminate expensive supports for farm prices, and tried (and succeeded) to reduce the federal role by returning offshore oil reserves to the states. Eisenhower kept the regulatory and welfare policies of the New Deal, with the Republicans taking credit for the expansion of Social Security. Eisenhower sought to minimize conflict among economic and racial groups in the quest for social harmony, peace and prosperity. He was reelected over Stevenson by a landslide in 1956.

Russell Kirk

While Republicans in Washington were tweaking the New Deal, the most critical opposition to liberalism came from writers. Russell Kirk (1918–1994) claimed that both classical and modern liberalism placed too much emphasis on economic issues and failed to address man's spiritual nature, and called for a plan of action for a conservative political movement. He said that conservative leaders should appeal to farmers, small towns, the churches, and others. This target group is similar to the core constituency of the British Conservative Party.

Kirk adamantly opposed libertarian ideas, which he saw as a threat to true conservatism. In ''Libertarians: the Chirping Sectaries'' Kirk wrote that the only thing libertarians and conservatives have in common is a detestation of collectivism. "What else do conservatives and libertarians profess in common? The answer to that question is simple: nothing. Nor will they ever have.".

William F. Buckley and the ''National Review''

The most effective organizer and proponent of conservative ideas was William F. Buckley, Jr. (1925–2008), the founder of ''National Review'' in 1955 and a highly visible writer and media personality. There had been numerous small circulation magazines on the right before, but the ''National Review'' gained national attention and shaped the conservative movement, thanks to strong editing and a strong stable of regular contributors. Erudite, witty and tireless, Buckley inspired a new enthusiasm.

Buckley assembled an eclectic group of writers: traditionalists, Catholic intellectuals, libertarians and ex-Communists. They included: Russell Kirk, James Burnham, Frank Meyer, Willmoore Kendall, L. Brent Bozell, and Whittaker Chambers In the magazine’s founding statement Buckley wrote:

The launching of a conservative weekly journal of opinion in a country widely assumed to be a bastion of conservatism at first glance looks like a work of supererogation, rather like publishing a royalist weekly within the walls of Buckingham Palace. It is not that of course; if ''National Review'' is superfluous, it is so for very different reasons: It stands athwart history, yelling Stop, at a time when no other is inclined to do so, or to have much patience with those who so urge it.

Milton Friedman and Libertarian economics

Austrian economist F.A. Hayek (1899–1992) in 1944 galvanized opponents of the New Deal by arguing that the left in Britain was leading that nation down the "road to serfdom".

More influential was the Chicago School of Economics, led by Milton Friedman (1912–2006) and George J. Stigler (1911–1991), which used advanced technical economics to advocate neoclassical and monetarist public policy. The Chicago School provided a vigorous criticism of regulation, on the grounds that it led to control of the regulations by the regulated industries themselves. Since 1974, government regulation of industry and banking has greatly decreased. The School attacked Keynesian economics, the dominant liberal theory of economics, which Friedman claimed was based on unsound models. The "stagflation" of the 1970s (combining high inflation and high unemployment) was impossible according to Keynesian models, but was predicted by Friedman, giving his approach credibility among the experts.

By the late 1960s, Ebenstein argues, Friedman was "the most prominent conservative public intellectual at least in the United States and probably in the world." Friedman advocated, in lectures, weekly columns, and books and on television, greater reliance on the marketplace. Americans should be "Free to Choose". He convinced many conservatives the draft was inefficient and unfair; Nixon ended it in 1973. Nine Chicago School economists won Nobel Prizes, and their ideas on deregulation became widely accepted. Friedman's "monetarism" did not fare as well, but economists such as Ben Bernanke took to heart Friedman's warning that the Federal Reserve had failed to stop the Great Depression when it had a chance. As Chairman of the Federal Reserve, Bernanke's energetic reaction to the great financial crisis of 2008 was based on Friedman's ideas.

John Birch Society

Robert W. Welch Jr. (1900–1985) founded the John Birch Society as an authoritarian top-down force to combat Communism. It had tens of thousands of members and distributed books, pamphlets and the magazine ''American Opinion.'' It was so tightly controlled by Welch that its effectiveness was limited, and it focused on calls to impeach Chief Justice Earl Warren, as well as supporting local police Instead it became a lighting rod for liberal attacks, and indeed Welch was denounced by Goldwater, Buckley and other mainstream conservatives.

Internal disagreements

The main disagreement between Kirk, who would become described as a traditionalist conservative, and the libertarians was whether tradition and virtue or liberty should be their primary concern. Frank Meyer tried to resolve the dispute with "fusionism": America could not conserve its traditions without economic freedom. He also noted that they were united in opposition to "big government" and made anti-communism the glue that would unite them. The term "conservative" was used to describe the views of ''National Review'' supporters, despite initial protests from the libertarians, because the term "liberal" had become associated with "New Deal" supporters. They were also later known as the "New Right", as opposed to the New Left.

1960s

Goldwater in 1964

The conservatives united behind the unsuccessful 1964 presidential campaign of Arizona Senator Barry Goldwater (1919–1998), who had published ''The Conscience of a Conservative'' (1960), a best-selling book that explained modern conservative theory. Support for the campaign came from numerous grass roots activists, such as Phyllis Schlafly (1924– ) and from the newly formed Young Americans for Freedom, a project sponsored by Buckley. In 1965 conservatives campaigned for Buckley as a third party candidate for Mayor of New York and in 1966 for Ronald Reagan (1911–2004), who was elected governor of California.

1970s

Governor Reagan increasingly dominated the conservative movement, especially in his failed 1976 quest for the Republican presidential nomination and his successful run in 1980.

Religious Right

By the 1950s conservatives were emphasizing the Judeo-Christian roots of their values. Goldwater noted that conservatives "believed the communist projection of man as a producing, consuming animal to be used and discarded was antithetical to all the Judeo-Christian understandings which are the foundations upon which the Republic stands." Ronald Reagan frequently emphasized Judeo-Christian values as necessary ingredients in the fight against communism. Belief in the superiority of Western Judeo-Christian traditions led conservatives to downplay the aspirations of Third World and to denigrate the value of foreign aid. Since the 1990s, the phrase "Judeo-Christian" has been primarily used by conservatives.

The emergence of the "religious right" as a political force and part of the conservative coalition dates from the 1970s. According to Wilcox and Robinson, "The Christian Right is an attempt to restore Judeo-Christian values to a country that is in deep moral decline. ....[They] believe that society suffers from the lack of a firm basis of Judeo-Christian values and they seek to write laws that embody those values". Especially important was the hostile reaction to the ''Roe v. Wade'' Supreme Court decision legalizing abortion, which brought together Catholics (who had long opposed abortion) and evangelical Protestants (who were new to the issue).

Neoconservatives

A major development of the 1970s was the movement of many prominent liberal intellectuals to the right, many of them from New York City Jewish roots and well-established academic reputations. They had become disillusioned with liberalism, especially the foreign policy of détente with the Soviet Union.

Irving Kristol and Leo Strauss were the major founders of the movement. The magazines ''Commentary'' and ''Public Interest'' were their key outlets, as well as op-ed articles for major newspapers and position papers for think tanks. Activists around Democratic senator Henry Jackson became deeply involved as well. Prominent spokesmen include Gertrude Himmelfarb, Bill Kristol, Paul Wolfowitz, Lewis Libby, Norman Podhoretz, Richard Pipes, Charles Krauthammer, Richard Perle, Robert Kagan, Elliott Abrams and Ben Wattenberg. Meanwhile, Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan was highly sympathetic but remained a Democrat. Some of Strauss' influential neoconservative disciples included Supreme Court nominee Robert Bork, Paul Wolfowitz (who became Deputy Secretary of Defense), Alan Keyes (who became Assistant Secretary of State), William Bennett (who became Secretary of Education), ''Weekly Standard'' editor William Kristol, political philosopher Allan Bloom, writer John Podhoretz, college president John Agresto; political scientist Harry V. Jaffa; and novelist Saul Bellow.

Neocons generally support pro-business policies. Some went on to high policy-making or advisory positions in the Reagan, Bush I and Bush II administrations.

Conservatism in the South

The growth of conservatism within the Republican Party attracted White conservative Southern Democrats in presidential elections. A few big names switched to the GOP, including South Carolina Senator Strom Thurmond in 1964 and Texas Governor John Connally in 1973. Starting in 1968 the GOP dominated most presidential elections in the South (1976 was the lone exception), but not until the 1990s did the GOP become dominant in state and local politics in the region. The Republicans built their strength among Southern Baptists and other religious Fundamentalists, among the middle class suburbs, and among migrants from the North, and Cubans in Florida. Meanwhile, starting in 1964, African American voters in the South began to show overwhelming support for the Democratic Party at both the presidential and local levels. They elected a number of Congressmen and mayors. By 1990 there were still many moderate white Democrats holding office in the South, but when they retired they were typically replaced by much more conservative Republicans, or by liberal blacks.

Think tanks

In 1971 Lewis F. Powell Jr. urged conservatives to retake command of public discourse by "financing think tanks, reshaping mass media and seeking influence in universities and the judiciary." In the following decades conservative policies once considered outside the liberal mainstream—such as abolishing welfare, privatizing Social Security, deregulating banking, embracing preemptive war—were taken seriously and sometimes passed into law thanks to the work of the Hoover Institution, Heritage Foundation, the American Enterprise Institute and smaller tanks.

Nixon, Ford, Carter

The Republican administrations of President Richard Nixon (1969–74) and Gerald Ford (1974–77) were characterized by their emphasis on détente and on economic intervention through wage and price controls. Ford angered conservatives by continuing Henry Kissinger as Secretary of State and pushing his policy of détente with the Soviet Union. Conservatives finally found a new champion in Ronald Reagan, whose 8 years as governor of California had just ended in 1976, and supported his campaign for the Republican nomination. Ford narrowly won renomination but lost the White House. Liberal Democrats, who had made major gains in the 1974 midterm election, elected Jimmy Carter. Carter proved much too liberal for his fellow Southern Baptists (they voted for him in 1976 but not 1980), too conservative for the mainstream of the Democratic Party, and too incompetent in foreign affairs to please anyone. Carter realized there was a strong national sense of malaise, for which he blamed the people, as inflation skyrocketed, interest rates soared, the economy stagnated, and prolonged humiliation resulted when Islamic militants in Tehran kept American diplomats hostage for 444 days in 1979–81.

Stopping the Equal Right Amendment

Conservative women were mobilized in the late 1970s by Phyllis Schlafly (1924– ) in an effort to stop ratification of the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) to the U.S. Constitution. The ERA had seemed a noncontroversial effort to provide legal equality when it easily passed Congress in 1972 and quickly was ratified by 28 of the necessary 38 states. Schlafly denounced it as tilting the playing field against the traditional housewife in a power grab by anti-family feminists on the left. She warned it would mean women would be drafted in the Army on the same basis as men. Through her Eagle Forum she organized state-by-state to block further ratification, and to have states rescind their ratification. Congress extended the time needed, and a movement among feminists tried to boycott tourist cities in states that had not ratified (such as Chicago and New Orleans). It was to no avail. The ERA never became law and Schlafly became a major spokesperson for anti-feminism in the conservative movement.

1980s: Reagan Era

Conservative ascent

In Tehran, Islamic militants released the hostages at the moment Ronald Reagan was sworn in. With its victory in 1980 the modern American conservative movement took power. Republicans took control of the Senate for the first time since 1954, and conservative principles dominated Reagan's economic and foreign policies, with supply side economics and strict opposition to Soviet Communism defining the Administration's philosophy. Reagan's ideas were largely espoused and supported by the conservative Heritage Foundation, which grew dramatically in its influence during the Reagan years as Reagan and his senior aides looked to Heritage for policy guidance.

An icon of the American conservative movement, Reagan is credited by his supporters with transforming the politics of the United States, galvanizing the success of the Republican Party. He brought together a coalition of economic conservatives, who supported his supply side economics; foreign policy conservatives, who favored his staunch opposition to Communism and the Soviet Union; and social conservatives, who identified with his religious and social ideals. Reagan labeled the former Soviet Union the "evil empire." He was attacked by liberals at the time as a dangerous warmonger, but conservative historians assert that he decisively won the Cold War.

In defining conservatism, Reagan said: "If you analyze it I believe the very heart and soul of conservatism is libertarianism. I think conservatism is really a misnomer just as liberalism is a misnomer for the liberals—if we were back in the days of the Revolution, so-called conservatives today would be the Liberals and the liberals would be the Tories. The basis of conservatism is a desire for less government interference or less centralized authority or more individual freedom and this is a pretty general description also of what libertarianism is." Reagan's views on government were influenced by Thomas Jefferson, especially his hostility to strong central governments. "We're still Jefferson's children," he declared in 1987. "Freedom is not created by Government, nor is it a gift from those in political power. It is, in fact, secured, more than anything else, by limitations placed on those in Government". Likewise he greatly admired and often quoted Abraham Lincoln

Supply side economics dominated the Reagan Era During his eight years in office the national debt more than doubled, from $907 billion in 1980 to $2.6 trillion in 1988, and consumer prices rose by more than 50%. But despite cuts in income tax rates, federal income tax revenues grew from $244 billion in 1980 to $467 billion in 1990. The real median family income, which had declined during the previous administration, grew by about ten percent under Reagan. The period from 1981 to 1989 was among the most prosperous in American history, with 17 million new jobs created.

Since 1990

In 1992 many conservatives repudiated President Bush because he violated his promise, "Read My Lips: No New Taxes." He was defeated for reelection in 1992 in a three way race, with populist Ross Perot attracting considerable support on the right. Democrat Bill Clinton was stopped in his plan for government health care, and in 1994 the GOP made sweeping gains under the leadership of Newt Gingrich, the first Republican to become Speaker in 40 years. Gingrich overplayed his hand by cutting off funding for the Federal government, allowing Clinton to regain momentum and win reelection in 1996. The "Contract with America" promised numerous reforms, but little was accomplished beyond the ending of major New Deal welfare programs. A national movement to impose term limits failed to reach Congress (because the Supreme Court ruled that a constitutional amendment was needed) but did transform politics in some states, especially California

George W. Bush

In an extremely close race George W. Bush was elected president in 2000 after a contested recount in Florida, and brought a new generation of conservative activists to power in Washington. Bush cut taxes dramatically in a 10-year plan that was renewed in late 2010, following major debate. Bush forged a bipartisan coalition to pass "No Child Left Behind", which for the first time imposed national standards on public schools. The 9-11 Attacks unified the nation in a War against Terrorism, with invasions of Afghanistan in 2001 (which is still underway in 2011), and Iraq in 2003 (which was winding down in 2010). Bush won solid support from Republicans in Congress and from conservative voters in his reelection bid in 2004. When the financial system verged on total collapse in 2008, Bush pushed through very large scale rescue packages for banks and auto companies that conservatives in Congress very reluctantly supported. Some noted conservatives, including Richard A. Viguerie and William F. Buckley, Jr. concluded that Bush was not a conservative, either in foreign policy nor in domestic economic policy.

2008 election

The Republican contest for the nomination in 2008 was a free-for-all, with Senator John McCain the winner, facing the first African American US presidential candidate, Barack Obama. McCain chose Alaska Governor Sarah Palin as his running mate, and while greeted by the establishment of the GOP with initial skepticism, she electrified many conservatives and has become a major political force on the Right. The economic crisis of 2008 arguably doomed McCain. Congress had already shifted to the Left in 2006.

In 2009–10 the GOP in Congress was unified in almost total opposition to the programs of the Democratic majority. They tried but failed to stop a $814 billion stimulus spending program, new regulations on Wall Street investment firms, and a bill to provide health insurance for all Americans. They did keep "cap and trade" from coming to a vote, and vow to continue to work to convince Americans that burning fossil fuel does not cause Global warming. The slow growth of the economy in the first two years of the Obama administration has led Republicans to call for a return to tax cuts for the richest one percent and deregulation of the oil and banking industries as the best way to solve the financial crisis. Under heavy conservative attack, Obama's popularity steadily declined in his first year in office, then leveled off at about 50-50, as some elements of his 2008 coalition slackened in their enthusiasm, especially young voters and independents. Many conservatives, especially in the National Review circle, supported his foreign policy of a surge in Afghanistan, air raids to support the insurgents in Libya, and the war on terror, especially after he ordered the killing of Osama bin Laden in May, 2011.

Tea Party

A new element of conservatism was the Tea Party movement of 2009–present, a populist grass-roots movement comprising over 600 local units angry at the government and at both major parties. Many units have promoted activism and protests. The stated purpose of the movement has been to stop what it views as wasteful government spending, excessive taxation, and strangulation of the economy through regulatory bureaucracies. The Tea Party attracted national attention when it propelled Republican Scott Brown to a stunning victory in Senate election for the Massachusetts seat held by the Kennedy brothers for nearly 60 years. In 2010 Tea Party candidates upset establishment Republicans in several primaries, such as Alaska, Colorado, Delaware, Florida, Nevada, New York, South Carolina, and Utah, giving a new momentum to the conservative cause in the 2010 elections, and boosting Sarah Palin's visibility. Rasmussen and Schoen (2010) conclude that "She is the symbolic leader of the movement, and more than anyone else has helped to shape it." In the fall 2010 elections, the ''New York Times'' has identified 129 House candidates with significant Tea Party support, as well as 9 running for the Senate; all are Republicans, as the Tea Party has not been active among Democrats.

House Republicans, optimistic about regaining control, announced "A Pledge to America," in September 2010. It called for permanent extension of the Bush tax cuts, including those on the wealthy; cancellation of $250 billion in unspent stimulus money, and repeal of the health care law, replacing it with conservative proposals, including limits on malpractice lawsuits.

The Tea Party itself is a conglomerate of conservatives with diverse viewpoints including libertarians and social conservatives. Most Tea Party supporters self-identify as "angry at the government". One survey found that Tea Party supporters in particular distinguish themselves from general Republican attitudes on social issues such as gay marriage, abortion and immigration, as well as global warming. However, discussion of abortion and gay rights has also been downplayed by Tea Party leadership. In the lead up to the 2010 election, most Tea Party candidates have focused on federal spending and deficits, with little focus on foreign policy.

Noting the lack of central organization or explicit spokesmen, Matthew Continetti of ''The Weekly Standard'' has said: "There is no single Tea Party. The name is an umbrella that encompasses many different groups. Under this umbrella, you’ll find everyone from the woolly fringe to Ron Paul supporters, from Americans for Prosperity to religious conservatives, independents, and citizens who never have been active in politics before. The umbrella is gigantic."

As the editors of the Gallup Poll said, "in addition to conservatives being more enthusiastic than liberals about voting in this year’s election, their relative advantage on enthusiasm is much greater than we've seen in the recent past."

Types

In the United States today, the word "conservative" is often used very differently from the way the word was used in the past and still is used in many parts of the world. The Americans after 1776 rejected the core ideals of European conservatism, based on the landed aristocracy, the established church, and the powerful, prestigious army.

Barry Goldwater in the 1960s spoke for a "free enterprise" conservatism. Jerry Falwell in the 1980s preached traditional moral and religious social values. It was Reagan's challenge to form these groups into an electoral coalition.

In the 21st century U.S., some of the groups calling themselves "conservative" include:

Traditionalist conservatism—Opposition to rapid change in governmental and societal institutions. This kind of conservatism is anti-ideological insofar as it emphasizes means (slow change) over ends (any particular form of government). To the traditionalist, whether one arrives at a right- or left-wing government is less important than whether change is effected through rule of law rather than through revolution and sudden innovation.

Christian conservatism—Conservative Christians are primarily interested in family values. Typical positions include the view that the United States was founded as a Christian nation, that abortion is wrong, that there should be prayer in state schools, and that marriage should be defined as between one man and one woman and not between two members of the same sex. Many attack the profanity and sexuality in the media and movies.

Limited government conservatism—Limited government conservatives look for a decreased role of the federal government. They follow Thomas Jefferson and James Madison in their suspicion of a powerful federal government.

Neoconservatism—A modern form of conservatism that supports a more assertive, interventionist foreign policy, aimed at promoting democracy abroad. It is tolerant of an activist government at home, but is focused mostly on international affairs. Neoconservatism was first described by a group of disaffected liberals, and thus Irving Kristol, usually credited as its intellectual progenitor, defined a ''neoconservative'' as "a liberal who was mugged by reality." Although originally regarded as an approach to domestic policy (the founding instrument of the movement, Kristol's ''The Public Interest'' periodical, did not even cover foreign affairs), through the influence of figures like Dick Cheney, Robert Kagan, Richard Perle, Kenneth Adelman and (Irving's son) Bill Kristol, it has become most famous for its association with the foreign policy of the George W. Bush administration. Many of the nation's most prominent and influential conservatives during the two terms of the Bush administration were considered "neoconservative" in their ideological orientation. Paleoconservatism—Arising in the 1980s in reaction to neoconservatism, stresses tradition, especially Christian tradition and the importance to society of the traditional family. Some, Samuel P. Huntington for example, argue that multiracial, multi-ethnic, and egalitarian states are inherently unstable. Paleoconservatives are generally isolationist, and suspicious of foreign influence. The magazines ''Chronicles'' and ''The American Conservative'' are generally considered to be paleoconservative in nature.

Libertarian conservatism – A fusion with libertarianism, this type emphasizes a strict interpretation of the constitution, particularly with regard to federal power. Libertarian conservatism is constituted by a broad, sometimes conflicted, coalition including pro-business social moderates, those favoring more rigid enforcement of states' rights, individual liberty activists, and many of those who place their socially liberal ideology ahead of their fiscal beliefs. This mode of thinking tends to espouse ''laissez-faire'' economics and a critical view of the federal government. Libertarian conservatives' emphasis on personal freedom often leads them to have social positions contrary to those of social conservatives. The libertarian branch of conservatism may have similar disputes that isolationist paleoconservatives would with neoconservatives. However, libertarian conservatives may be more militarily interventionist or support a greater degree of military strength than other libertarians. Contrarily, a strong preference for local government puts libertarian conservatives in frequent opposition to international government.

Ideology and political philosophy

Classical conservatives tend to be anti-ideological, and some would even say anti-philosophical, promoting rather, as Russell Kirk explains, a steady flow of "prescription and prejudice." Kirk's use of the word "prejudice" here is not intended to carry its contemporary pejorative connotation: a conservative himself, he believes that the inherited wisdom of the ages may be a better guide than apparently rational individual judgment.

In contrast to classical conservatism, ''social conservatism'' and ''fiscal conservatism'' are concerned with consequences.

There are two overlapping subgroups of social conservatives—the traditional and the religious. Traditional conservatives strongly support traditional codes of conduct, especially those they feel are threatened by social change. For example, traditional conservatives may oppose the use of female soldiers in combat. Religious conservatives focus on conducting society as prescribed by a religious authority or code. In the United States this translates into taking hard-line stances on moral issues, such as opposition to abortion and homosexuality. Religious conservatives often assert that "America is a Christian nation" and favor laws that enforce Christian morality.

Fiscal conservatives support limited government, limited taxation, and a balanced budget. They argue that low taxes produce more jobs and wealth for everyone, and also that, as President Grover Cleveland said, "unnecessary taxation is unjust taxation". A recent movement against the inheritance tax labels such a tax as a death tax. Fiscal conservatives often argue that competition in the free market is more effective than the regulation of industry. Some make exceptions in the case of trusts or monopolies. Others, libertarians and followers of Ludwig von Mises, believe all government intervention in the economy is wasteful, corrupt, and immoral. More moderate fiscal conservatives argue that "free market economics" is the most efficient way to promote economic growth: they support it not based on some moral principle, but pragmatically, because they hold that it just "works."

Most modern American fiscal conservatives accept some social spending programs not specifically delineated in the Constitution. As such, fiscal conservatism today exists somewhere between classical conservatism and contemporary consequentialist political philosophies.

Throughout much of the 20th century, one of the primary forces uniting the occasionally disparate strands of conservatism, and uniting conservatives with their liberal and socialist opponents, was opposition to communism, which was seen not only as an enemy of the traditional order, but also the enemy of Western freedom and democracy. Thus it was the British Labour government—which embraced socialism—that pushed the Truman administration in 1945–47 to take a strong stand against Soviet Communism. In the 1980s, the United States government spent billions of dollars arming and supporting Islamic terrorists, because these terrorists were fighting communists.

Social conservatism and tradition

Social conservatism in the United States is the defense of traditional social norms and Judeo-Christian values. Typically rooted in religion, modern cultural conservatives, in contrast to "small-government" conservatives and "states-rights" advocates, increasingly turn to the federal government to overrule the states in order to reverse state laws they find unacceptable, such as laws allowing gay marriage or restricting gun ownership.

Social conservatives tend to strongly identify with American nationalism and patriotism. They often denounce anti-war protesters and hail the police and the military. They hold that military institutions embody core values such as honor, duty, courage, loyalty, and a willingness on the part of the individual to make sacrifices for the good of the country.

While some conservatives denounce judges they consider too liberal, many want to use the federal courts to fight against the health care law of 2010 and to over-rule laws allowing legalized marijuana or assisted suicide.

Richard Hofstadter in 1966 claimed that opposition to conservatism has been common among intellectuals since about 1890. In the 1920s, religious fundamentalists including William Bell Riley and William Jennings Bryan (a liberal Democrat) led the battle against Darwinism and evolution, a battle which fundamentalists are still fighting today. More recently, conservative anti-intellectualism has taken the form of attacks on elites, experts, scientists, public schools and universities.

The Republican Party (United States) is the largest political party with some socially conservative ideals incorporated into its platform.

Social conservatives are strongest in the South, and in recent years played a major role in the political coalitions of Ronald Reagan, George W. Bush and Sarah Palin.

Fiscal conservatism

Fiscal conservatism is the economic and political policy that advocates restraint of governmental taxation and expenditures. Fiscal conservatives since the 19th century have argued that debt is a device to corrupt politics; they argue that big spending ruins the morals of the people, and that a national debt creates a dangerous class of speculators. The argument in favor of balanced budgets is often coupled with a belief that government welfare programs should be narrowly tailored and that tax rates should be low, which implies relatively small government institutions.

This belief in small government combines with fiscal conservatism to produce a broader ''economic liberalism'', which wishes to minimize government intervention in the economy. This amounts to support for ''laissez-faire'' economics. This ''economic liberalism'' borrows from two schools of thought: the classical liberals' pragmatism and the libertarian's notion of "rights." The classical liberal maintains that free markets work best, while the libertarian contends that free markets are the only ethical markets.

The economic philosophy of conservatives in the United States tends to be more liberal allowing for more economic freedom. ''Economic liberalism'' can go well beyond ''fiscal conservatism's'' concern for fiscal prudence, to a belief or principle that it is not prudent for governments to intervene in markets. It is also, sometimes, extended to a broader "small government" philosophy. Economic liberalism is associated with free-market, or laissez-faire economics.

Economic liberalism, insofar as it is ''ideological'', owes its creation to the "classical liberal" tradition, in the vein of Adam Smith, Friedrich A. Hayek, Milton Friedman, and Ludwig von Mises.

''Classical liberals'' and ''libertarians'' support free markets on moral, ideological grounds: principles of individual liberty morally dictate support for free markets. Supporters of the moral grounds for free markets include Ayn Rand and Ludwig von Mises. The liberal tradition is suspicious of government authority, and prefers individual choice, and hence tends to see capitalist economics as the preferable means of achieving economic ends.

Modern conservatives, on the other hand, derive support for free markets from practical grounds. Free markets, they argue, are the most productive markets. Thus the modern conservative supports free markets not out of necessity, but out of expedience. The support is not moral or ideological, but driven on the Burkean notion of prescription: what works best is what is right.

Another reason why conservatives support a smaller role for the government in the economy is the belief in the importance of the civil society. As noted by Alexis de Tocqueville, there is a belief that a bigger role of the government in the economy will make people feel less responsible for the society. These responsibilities would then need to be taken over by the government, requiring higher taxes. In his book Democracy in America, De Tocqueville describes this as "soft oppression."

While classical liberals and modern conservatives reached free markets through different means historically, to-date the lines have blurred. Rarely will a politician claim that free markets are "simply more productive" or "simply the right thing to do" but a combination of both. This blurring is very much a product of the merging of the classical liberal and modern conservative positions under the "umbrella" of the conservative movement.

The archetypal free-market conservative administrations of the late 20th century—the Margaret Thatcher government in Britain and the Ronald Reagan administration in the U.S. – both held the unfettered operation of the market to be the cornerstone of contemporary modern conservatism (this philosophy is called neoliberalism by critics on the left). To that end, Thatcher privatized industries and public housing and Reagan cut the maximum capital gains tax from 28% to 20%, though in his second term he agreed to raise it back up to 28%. He wanted to increase defense spending and achieved that; liberal Democrats blocked his efforts to cut domestic spending. Reagan did not control the rapid increase in federal government spending, or reduce the deficit, but his record looks better when expressed as a percent of the gross domestic product. Federal revenues as a percent of the GDP fell from 19.6% in 1981 when Reagan took office to 18.3% in 1989 when he left. Federal spending fell slightly from 22.2% of the GDP to 21.2%. This contrasts with statistics from 2004, when government spending was rising more rapidly than it had in decades.

Electoral politics

In the United States, the Republican Party is generally considered to be the party of conservatism. This has been the case since the 1960s, when the conservative wing of that party consolidated its hold, causing it to shift to the right of the Democratic Party. The most dramatic realignment was the white South, which moved from 3–1 Democratic to 3–1 Republican between 1960 and 2000.

In addition, some United States libertarians, in the Libertarian Party and even some in the Republican Party, see themselves as conservative, even though they advocate significant economic and social changes – for instance, further dismantling the welfare system or liberalizing drug policy. They see these as conservative policies because they conform to the spirit of individual liberty that they consider to be a traditional American value.

On the other end of the scale, some Americans see themselves as conservative while not being supporters of free market policies. These people generally favor protectionist trade policies and government intervention in the market to preserve American jobs. Many of these conservatives were originally supporters of neoliberalism who changed their stance after perceiving that countries such as China were benefiting from that system at the expense of American production. However, despite their support for protectionism, they still tend to favor other elements of free market philosophy, such as low taxes, limited government and balanced budgets.

Geography

Geographically the South, the Great Plains, the Rocky Mountain states, and Alaska are conservative strongholds. The "Left Coast" (California, Oregon, Washington), and the Northeast are liberal strongholds, albeit with some pockets of conservative strength. Conservatives are strongest in rural areas and, to a lesser extent, in the "exurbs" or suburbs. Voters in the urban cores of large metropolitan areas tend to be more liberal and Democratic. Thus, within each state, there is a division between urban, suburban, exurban, and rural areas.

Other topics

Kirk's six canons of conservatism

Russell Kirk developed six "canons" of conservatism, which Gerald J. Russello described as follows: # A belief in a transcendent order, which Kirk described variously as based in tradition, divine revelation, or natural law; # An affection for the "variety and mystery" of human existence; # A conviction that society requires orders and classes that emphasize "natural" distinctions; # A belief that property and freedom are closely linked; # A faith in custom, convention, and prescription, and # A recognition that innovation must be tied to existing traditions and customs, which entails a respect for the political value of prudence.

Kirk said that Christianity and Western Civilization are "unimaginable apart from one another" and that "all culture arises out of religion. When religious faith decays, culture must decline, though often seeming to flourish for a space after the religion which has nourished it has sunk into disbelief."

Courts

One stream of conservatism exemplified by William Howard Taft extols independent judges as experts in fairness and the final arbiters of the Constitution. In 1910 Theodore Roosevelt broke with most of his lawyer friends and called for popular votes that could overturn unwelcome decisions by state courts. Taft denounced his old friend and rallied conservatives to defeat him for the 1912 GOP nomination. Taft and the conservative Republicans controlled the Supreme Court until the late 1930s.

President Franklin D. Roosevelt, a liberal Democrat, did not attack the Supreme Court directly in 1937, but ignited a firestorm of protest by a proposal to add seven new justices. Conservative Democrats immediately broke with FDR, defeated his proposal, and built up the Conservative Coalition. While the liberals did take over the Court through replacements, they lost control of Congress. That is, the Court no longer overthrew liberal laws passed by Congress, but there were very few such laws that passed in 1937–60.

A recent variant of conservatism condemns "judicial activism"; that is, judges using their decisions to control policy, along the lines of the Warren Court in the 1960s. It came under conservative attack for decisions regarding redistricting, desegregation, and the rights of those accused of crimes. This position goes back to Jefferson's vehement attacks on federal judges and to Abraham Lincoln's attacks on the Dred Scott decision of 1857.

Originalism

A more recent variant that emerged in the 1970s is "originalism", the assertion that the United States Constitution should be interpreted to the maximum extent possible in the light of what it meant when it was adopted. Originalism should not be confused with a similar conservative ideology, strict constructionism, which deals with the interpretation of the Constitution as written, but not necessarily within the context of the time when it was adopted. In modern times, originalism has been advocated by Supreme Court justice Antonin Scalia, former federal judge Robert Bork and other conservative jurists.

Semantics, language, and media

Vocabulary

Democrat Party

In the late 20th century conservatives found new ways to use language and the media to support their goals and to shape the vocabulary of political discourse. Thus the use of "Democrat" as an adjective, as in "Democrat Party" was used first in 1940 by Republicans to criticize large urban Democratic machines run in authoritarian non-democratic fashion. Republican leader Harold Stassen stated in 1940, "I emphasized that the party controlled in large measure at that time by Hague in New Jersey, Pendergast in Missouri and Kelly Nash in Chicago should not be called a 'Democratic Party.' It should be called the 'Democrat party.'"

In 1947 Senator Robert A. Taft said, "Nor can we expect any other policy from any Democrat Party or any Democrat President under present day conditions. They cannot possibly win an election solely through the support of the solid South, and yet their political strategists believe the Southern Democrat Party will not break away no matter how radical the allies imposed upon it". The use of "Democrat" as an adjective is standard practice in Republican national platforms (since 1948), and was a standard practice in the White House in 2001–2008, for press releases and speeches.

Socialism

Since the late 19th century "socialism" (or "creeping socialism") is often used as an epithet by conservatives to attack liberal spending or tax programs that enlarge the role of the government. In this sense it has little to do with government ownership of the means of production, or the various Socialist parties. Thus William Allen White attacked presidential candidate William Jennings Bryan in 1896 by warning that, "The election will sustain Americanism or it will plant Socialism."

Radio

Conservatives gained a major new communications medium with the resurgence of talk radio in the late 1980s. Rush Limbaugh proved there was a huge nationwide audience for specific and heated discussions of current events from a conservative viewpoint. Other major hosts who describe themselves as conservative include: Michael Peroutka, Jim Quinn, Dennis Miller, Ben Ferguson, William Bennett, Lars Larson, Sean Hannity, G. Gordon Liddy, Laura Ingraham, Mike Church, Glenn Beck, Mark Levin, Michael Savage, Kim Peterson, Michael Reagan, Jason Lewis and Ken Hamblin. The Salem Radio Network syndicates a group of religiously oriented Republican activists, including Evangelical Christian Hugh Hewitt, and Jewish conservatives Dennis Prager and Michael Medved. One popular Jewish conservative, Laura Schlessinger, offers parental and personal advice, but is outspoken on social and political issues.

Pew researchers found in 2004 that 17% of the public regularly listens to talk radio. This audience is mostly male, middle-aged, well-educated and conservative. Among those who regularly listen to talk radio, 41% are Republicans and 28% are Democrats. Moreover, 45% describe themselves as conservatives, compared with 18% who say they are liberal.

Academic analysis

Academic discussion of conservatism in the United States has been dominated by ''American exceptionalism'', the theory that British and European conservatism has little or no relevance to American traditions. This is in contrast to the view that Burkean conservatism has a set of universal principles which can be applied all societies. According to political scientist Louis Hartz, because the United States skipped the feudal stage of history, the American community was united by liberal principles, and the conflict between the "Whig" and "Democratic" parties were conflicts within a liberal framework. In this view, what is called "conservatism" in America is not European conservatism (with its royalty, landowning aristocracy, elite officer corps, and established churches) but rather 19th century classical liberalism with an emphasis on economic freedom and entrepreneurship. Another view is found in Russell Kirk's ''The Conservative Mind'' who argued that the American Revolution was "a conservative reaction, in the English political tradition, against royal innovation". Theodore Adorno and Richard Hofstader referred to modern American conservatives as "pseudo-conservatives", because of their "dissatisfaction with American life, traditions and institutions" and because they had "little in common with the temperate and compromising spirit of true conservatism".

Thinkers and leaders

Major American conservatives

Rossiter's giants

Clinton Rossiter, a leading expert on American political history, published his history of ''Conservatism in America'' and also a summary article on "The Giants Of American Conservatism" in ''American Heritage''. His goal was to identify the "great men who did conservative deeds, thought conservative thoughts, practiced conservative virtues, and stood for conservative principles." To Rossiter, conservatism was defined by the rule of the upper class. He wrote, "The Right of these freewheeling decades was a genuine Right: it was led by the rich and well-placed; it was skeptical of popular government; it was opposed to all parties, unions, leagues, or other movements that sought to invade its positions of power and profit; it was politically, socially, and culturally anti-radical." His "giants of American conservatism" were: John Adams, Alexander Hamilton, John Marshall, Daniel Webster, John C. Calhoun, Elihu Root, and Theodore Roosevelt. He added that Washington and Lincoln transcend the usual categories, but that conservatives "may argue with some conviction that Washington and Lincoln can also be added to his list."

Rossiter went to note the importance of other conservative leaders over the past two centuries. Among the fathers of the Constitution, which he calls "a triumph of conservative statesmanship", Rossiter said conservatives may "take special pride" in James Madison, James Wilson, Roger Sherman, John Dickinson, Gouverneur Morris and the Pinckneys of South Carolina. For the early 19th century, Rossiter said the libertarians and constitutionalists who deserve the conservative spotlight for their fight against Jacksonian Democracy include Joseph Story and Josiah Quincy in Massachusetts; Chancellor James Kent in New York; James Madison, James Monroe, and John Randolph of Roanoke in Virginia.

In the decades around 1900, Rossiter finds that Grover Cleveland, Elihu Root, William Howard Taft, and Theodore Roosevelt "were most successful in shaping the old truths of conservatism to the new facts of industrialism and democracy."

Finally, he suggests that someday Robert A. Taft, Charles Evans Hughes, and Dwight D. Eisenhower may be added to the list.

Prominent figures

Politicians

Vice-President John C. Calhoun (1782–1850)

President Grover Cleveland (1837–1908)

President William McKinley (1843–1901)

Secretary of State Elihu Root (1845–1937)

President Calvin Coolidge (1872–1933)

Congressman Howard W. Smith (1883–1976)

Senator Robert Taft (1889–1953)

President Dwight Eisenhower (1890–1969)

Senator Richard Russell, Jr. (1897–1971)

Senator Strom Thurmond (1902–2003)

Ambassador Clare Boothe Luce (1903–1987)

Senator Joseph McCarthy (1908–1957)

Senator Barry Goldwater (1909–1998), 1964 GOP presidential candidate

President Ronald Reagan (1911–2004)

President Richard Nixon (1913–1994)

Senator Jesse Helms (1921–2008)

Senate Majority Leader Robert Dole (1923–), 1996 GOP presidential candidate

Secretary of State Henry Kissinger (1923-)

UN Ambassador Jeane Kirkpatrick (1926–2006)

Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld (1932–)

Senator James Inhofe (1934–)

Congressman Larry McDonald (1935–1983)

Congressman Jack Kemp (1935–2009)

Congressman Ron Paul (1935–)

Senator John McCain (1939–), 2008 GOP presidential candidate

Vice President Dick Cheney (1941–)

Attorney General John Ashcroft (1942–)

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (1942–)

Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich (1943–)

President George W. Bush (1946–)

Governor Mitt Romney (1947–)

UN Ambassador John Bolton (1948–)

Speaker of the House John Boehner (1949–)

Governor Rick Perry (1950–)

Senator Jim DeMint (1951–)

Governor Bob McDonnell (1954–)

Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice (1954–)

Governor Mike Huckabee (1955–)

Attorney General Alberto Gonzales (1955–)

Congresswoman Michele Bachmann (1956–)

Senator Rick Santorum (1958–)

RNC Chairman Michael Steele (1958–)

Governor Luis Fortuño (1960–)

Congressman Allen West (1961–)

Governor Chris Christie (1962–)

House Majority Leader Eric Cantor (1963–)

Senator Rand Paul (1963–)

Governor Sarah Palin (1964–)

Congressman Paul Ryan (1970–)

Governor Bobby Jindal (1971–)

Senator Marco Rubio (1971–)

Jurists

Chief Justice and President William Howard Taft (1857–1930)

Chief Justice Charles Evans Hughes (1868–1948)

Chief Justice William Rehnquist (1924–2005)

Chief Justice John Roberts (1955–)

Justice Antonin Scalia (1936–)

Justice Clarence Thomas (1948–)

Justice Samuel Alito (1950–)

Judge Robert Bork (1927–)

Judge Richard Posner (1939–)

Intellectuals and activists

William Graham Sumner (1840–1910)

Albert Jay Nock (1873–1945)

F. A. Hayek (1899–1992)

Leo Strauss (1899–1973)

Robert W. Welch (1900–1985)

Whittaker Chambers (1901–1961)

Ayn Rand (1905–1982)

Richard M. Weaver (1910–1963)

George J. Stigler (1911–1991)

Milton Friedman (1912–2006)

Robert A. Nisbet (1913–1996)

Russell Kirk (1918–1994)

Irving Kristol (1920–2009)

Phyllis Schlafly (1924–)

William F. Buckley, Jr. (1925–2008)

Samuel P. Huntington (1927–2008)

Norman Podhoretz (1930–)

Thomas Sowell (1930–)

James Q. Wilson (1931–)

Walter Williams (1936–)

Pat Buchanan (1938–)

Paul Gottfried (1941-)

George Will (1941–)

Cal Thomas (1942–)

Peggy Noonan (1950–)

Charles Krauthammer (1950–)

Karl Rove (1950–)

Lee Atwater (1951–1991)

Bill Kristol (1952–)

Brent Bozell (1955–)

Pamela Geller (1958–)

Ann Coulter (1961–)

Elizabeth Cheney (1966–)

Jonah Goldberg (1969–)

Michelle Malkin (1970–)

S. E. Cupp (1979–)

Foundations

Adolph Coors Foundation

Bradley Foundation

Koch Family Foundations

Scaife Foundations

John M. Olin Foundation, closed in 2005

Media personalities, radio hosts, and bloggers

Bob Grant (1929–)

Roger Ailes (1940–)

Michael Savage (1942–)

William Bennett (1943–)

Neal Boortz (1945–)

Herman Cain (1945–)

Lou Dobbs (1945–)

John Gibson (1946–)

Bill Cunningham (1947–)

Laura Schlessinger (1947-)

Michael Medved (1948–)

Dennis Prager (1948–)

Jesse Lee Peterson (1949–)

Bill O'Reilly (1949–)

Alan Keyes (1950–)

Sandy Rios (1951–)

Rush Limbaugh (1951–)

Larry Elder (1952–)

Joseph Farah (1954–)

Hugh Hewitt (1956–)

Mark Levin (1957–)

Neil Cavuto (1958–)

Dave Ramsey (1960–)

Sean Hannity (1961–)

Glenn Beck (1964–)

Laura Ingraham (1964–)

Matt Drudge (1966–)

Monica Crowley (1968–)

Andrew Breitbart (1969–)

Tucker Carlson (1969–)

Dana Perino (1972–)

Think-tanks

Acton Institute

American Enterprise Institute

Cato Institute

Freedomworks

Heritage Foundation

Hoover Institution

Manhattan Institute

Project for a New American Century

Rockford Institute

Magazines and media

''Commentary''

''National Review''

''The American Spectator''

''Policy Review''

''The Weekly Standard''

''The American Conservative''

''Humanitas''

''Modern Age''

''First Things''

''Chronicles magazine''

''Human Events''

Organizations

Eagle Forum

Federalist Society

Focus on the Family

Intercollegiate Studies Institute

National Rifle Association

United States Chamber of Commerce

Americans for Prosperity

American Solutions for Winning the Future

John Birch Society

Council of Conservative Citizens

Tea Party movement

Religious leaders active in conservative politics

Hal Lindsey (1929–)

Pat Robertson (1930–)

Jack Van Impe (1931–)

Jerry Falwell (1933–2007)

James Dobson (1936–)

John Hagee (1940–)

Richard D. Land (1946–)

Bill Donohue (1947–)

Ralph E. Reed, Jr. (1961–)

Tony Perkins (1963–)

See also

Compassionate conservatism

Common sense conservative

Conservative talk

Constitution Party

Neoconservatism

Neoconservatism and paleoconservatism

New Right

Old Right

Paleoconservatism

Reactionary

Reagan Doctrine foreign policy

Religious right

Tea Party movement

Traditionalist conservatism

United States Republican Party

Other ideologies:

Libertarianism

Liberalism in the United States

Progressivism in the United States

Organizations and publications

American Enterprise Institute

''The American Spectator'' magazine, a conservative political magazine.

Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank.

''Chronicles'' magazine, a paleoconservative publication.

City Journal, official publication of the Manhattan Institute.

First Things, a theoconservative publication.

FreedomWorks, a conservative activist group.

''Humanitas'', a traditionalist conservative publication.

Independence Institute, a conservative think tank

Intercollegiate Studies Institute, a traditionalist conservative academic organization.

Leadership Institute, an organization for conservative activists.

Manhattan Institute for Policy Research

''Modern Age'', a traditionalist conservative intellectual journal.

''National Review'' magazine, a conservative political magazine.

''Policy Review'' magazine, a conservative academic magazine.

Project for a New American Century, a neoconservative think tank.

''The American Conservative'', a paleoconservative publication.

The Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank.

''The Weekly Standard'' magazine, a neoconservative publication.

Townhall.com, conservative news, information, and commentary.

References

Bibliography

Surveys

Critchlow, Donald T. ''The Conservative Ascendancy: How the Right Made Political History'' (2007)

Filler, Louis. ''Dictionary of American Conservatism'' (Philosophical Library, 1987)

Frohnen, Bruce et al. eds. ''American Conservatism: An Encyclopedia'' (2006) ISBN 1-932236-44-9, the most detailed reference

Schneider, Gregory. ''The Conservative Century: From Reaction to Revolution'' (2009)

Intellectual history

Allitt, Patrick. ''The Conservatives: Ideas and Personalities Throughout American History'' (2010) excerpt and text search

de Forest, Jennifer. "Conservatism Goes to College: The Role of Philanthropic Foundations in the Rise of Conservative Student Networks," ''History of Higher Education Annual,'' 26 (2007), 103–27.

Dunn, Charles W. and J. David Woodard; ''The Conservative Tradition in America'' Rowman & Littlefield, 1996

Foner, Eric. "Radical Individualism in America: Revolution to Civil War," ''Literature of Liberty,'' vol. 1 no. 3, 1978 pp 1–31 online

Genovese, Eugene. ''The Southern Tradition: The Achievement and Limitations of an American Conservatism'' (1994)

Gottfried, Paul. ''The Conservative Movement'' Twayne, 1993.

Guttman, Allan. ''The Conservative Tradition in America'' Oxford University Press, 1967.

Kendall, Willmoore, and George W. Carey. "Towards a Definition of 'Conservatism." ''Journal of Politics'' 26 (May 1964): 406–22. [: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2127604 in JSTOR]

Kirk, Russell. ''The Conservative Mind''. Regnery Publishing; 7th edition (2001): ISBN 0-89526-171-5

Lora, Ronald. ''Conservative Minds in America'' Greenwood, 1976.

Lora, Ronald, and William Henry Longton eds. ''The Conservative Press in Eighteenth-and Nineteenth-Century America'' (1999) online edition

Lowi, Theodore J. ''The End of the Republican Era'' (1995) online review

Lyons, Paul. ''American Conservatism: Thinking It, Teaching It.'' (Vanderbilt University Press, 2009). 202 pp. ISBN 978-0-8265-1626-8

Mergel, Sarah Katherine. ''Conservative Intellectuals and Richard Nixon: Rethinking the Rise of the Right'' (Palgrave Macmillan, 2010); 248 pages; traces Nixon's relations with conservative intellectuals from 1968 to 1974, including those who saw him as a closet liberal.

Meyer, Frank S. ed. ''What Is Conservatism?'' (1964).

Murphy, Paul V. ''The Rebuke of History: The Southern Agrarians and American Conservative Thought'' (2001)

Nash, George. ''The Conservative Intellectual Movement in America Since 1945'' (2006; 1st ed. 1978) influential history

Nisbet, Robert A. ''Conservatism: Dream and Reality.'' University of Minnesota Press, 1986.

Ribuffo, Leo P. ''The Old Christian Right: The Protestant Far Right from the Great Depression to the Cold War'' (1983) online edition

Rossiter, Clinton. ''Conservatism in America.'' 2nd ed. Harvard University Press, 1982.

Thorne, Melvin J. ''American Conservative Thought since World War II: The Core Ideas '' (1990) online edition

Viereck; Peter. ''Conservatism: from John Adams to Churchill'' (2nd ed. 1978)

Political activity

Critchlow, Donald T. ''Phyllis Schlafly and Grassroots Conservatism: A Woman's Crusade'' (2005)

Cunningham, Sean P. ''Cowboy Conservatism: Texas and the Rise of the Modern Right.'' (2010).

Hart, Jeffrey. ''The Making of the American Conservative Mind: The National Review and Its Times'' (2005)

Hayward, Steven F. ''The Age of Reagan: The Fall of the Old Liberal Order: 1964–1980'' (2009) excerpt and text search

Hayward, Steven F. ''The Age of Reagan: The Conservative Counterrevolution 1980–1989 (2009) excerpt and text search

Lora, Ronald.; ''The Conservative Press in Twentieth-Century America'' Greenwood Press, 1999 online edition

McDonald, Forrest. ''States' Rights and the Union: Imperium in Imperio, 1776–1876'' (2002)

Malsberger, John W''. From Obstruction to Moderation: The Transformation of Senate Conservatism, 1938–1952'' 2000.

Patterson, James. ''Congressional Conservatism and the New Deal: The Growth of the Conservative Coalition in Congress, 1933–39'' (1967)

Perlstein, Rick. ''Before the Storm: Barry Goldwater and the Unmaking of the American Consensus'' (2004) on 1964

Reinhard, David W.; ''Republican Right since 1945'' University Press of Kentucky, 1983 online edition

Scanlon, Sandra, "The Conservative Lobby and Nixon's 'Peace with Honor' in Vietnam," ''Journal of American Studies'' 43 (Aug. 2009), 255–76.

Schweikart, Larry, and Michael Allen. ''A Patriot's History of the United States: From Columbus's Great Discovery to the War on Terror'' (2004), 930pp; the most thorough textbook from an explicitly conservative viewpoint excerpt and text search

Shelley II, Mack C. ''The Permanent Majority: The Conservative Coalition in the United States Congress'' (1983)

Wilensky, Norman N. ''Conservatives in the Progressive Era: The Taft Republicans of 1912'' (1965).

Biographical

Crunden, Robert M. ''The Mind and Art of Albert Jay Nock'' (1964)

Dierenfield, Bruce J. ''Keeper of the Rules: Congressman Howard W. Smith of Virginia'' (1987), leader of the Conservative coalition in Congress

Fergurson, Ernest B. ''Hard Right: The Rise of Jesse Helms'', 1986

Fite, Gilbert. ''Richard B. Russell, Jr, Senator from Georgia'' (2002) leader of the Conservative coalition in Congress

Goldberg, Robert Alan. ''Barry Goldwater'' (1995)

Judis, John B. ''William F. Buckley, Jr.: Patron Saint of the Conservatives'' (1988)

Kelly, Daniel. ''James Burnham and the Struggle for the World: A Life'' (2002)

Patterson, James T. ''Mr. Republican: A Biography of Robert A. Taft'' (1972)

Rodgers, Marion Elizabeth. ''Mencken: The American Iconoclast'' (2005)

Federici , Michael P. ''Eric Voegelin: The Restoration of Order'' (2002)

Pemberton, William E. ''Exit with Honor: The Life and Presidency of Ronald Reagan'' (1998)

Smant, Kevin J. ''Principles and Heresies: Frank S. Meyer and the Shaping of the American Conservative Movement'' (2002) (ISBN 1-882926-72-2)

Smith, Richard Norton. ''An Uncommon Man: The Triumph of Herbert Hoover'' (1994) strongest on 1933–64

Tanenhaus, Sam. ''Whittaker Chambers: A Biography'' (1997) (ISBN 0-394-58559-3)

Chambers, Whittaker, ''Witness'' (1952), a memoir his Communist years

Recent politics

Bader, John B. ''Taking the Initiative: Leadership Agendas in Congress and the "Contract with America"'' (1996) online edition

Berkowitz, Peter . ''Varieties Of Conservatism In America'' (2004)

Collins, Robert M. ''Transforming America: Politics and Culture During the Reagan Years,'' (2007).

Ehrman, John. ''The Eighties: America in the Age of Reagan'' (2008)

Hayward, Steven F. ''The Age of Reagan, 1964–1980: The Fall of the Old Liberal Order'' (2001)

Hayward, Steven F. ''The Age of Reagan: The Conservative Counterrevolution: 1980–1989'' (2009) excerpt and text search

Himmelstein, Jerome and J. A. McRae Jr., "'Social Conservatism, New Republicans and the 1980 Election'", ''Public Opinion Quarterly'', 48 (1984), 595–605.

Micklethwait, John, and Adrian Wooldridge. The Right Nation (2004) excerpt and text search, overview by British journalists

Geoffrey Nunberg, "Language and Politics"

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Rasmussen, Scott, and Doug Schoen. ''Mad As Hell: How the Tea Party Movement Is Fundamentally Remaking Our Two-Party System'' (2010) by two pollsters

Schoenwald; Jonathan. ''A Time for Choosing: The Rise of Modern American Conservatism'' (2002) excerpt and text search

Zernike, Kate. ''Boiling Mad: Inside Tea Party America'' (2010), by a New York Times reporter

Neoconservatism

List of prominent American neoconservatives, SourceWatch

Bloom, Allan. ''The Closing of the American Mind'' (1988) excerpt and text search

Fukuyama, Francis. ''America at the Crossroads: Democracy, Power, and the Neoconservative Legacy'' (2007)

Gerson, Mark. ''The Neoconservative Vision: From the Cold War to Culture Wars '' (1997)

Halper, Stefan & Clarke, Jonathan, ''America Alone: The Neo-Conservatives and the Global Order'' (Cambridge University Press, 2004) ISBN 0-521-83834-7

Stelzer, Irwin. ''Neo-conservatism'' (2004)

Critical views

Bell, David. ed, ''The Radical Right.'' Doubleday 1963.

Diamond, Sara. ''Roads to Dominion: Right-Wing Movements and Political Power in the United States.'' (1995)

Huntington, Samuel P. "Conservatism as an Ideology." ''American Political Science Review'' 52 (June 1957): 454–73.

Koopman; Douglas L. ''Hostile Takeover: The House Republican Party, 1980–1995'' Rowman & Littlefield, 1996

Lapham, Lewis H. "Tentacles of Rage" in ''Harper's'', September 2004, p. 31–41.

Coser Lewis A., and Irving Howe, eds. ''The New Conservatives: A Critique from the Left'' New American Library, 1976.

Martin, William. 1996. ''With God on Our Side: The Rise of the Religious Right in America'', New York: Broadway Books.

Riebling, Mark, "Prospectus for a Critique of Conservative Reason."

Schulman, Bruce J. and Julian E. Zelizer, eds. ''Rightward Bound: Making America Conservative in the 1970s'' (2008)

Historiography

Brinkley, Alan. "The Problem of American Conservatism," ''American Historical Review'' 99 (April 1994): 409–29.

Burns, Jennifer. "In Retrospect: George Nash's the Conservative Intellectual Movement in America since 1945," ''Reviews in American History,'' Sep 2004, Vol. 32 Issue 3, pp 447–462 in Project MUSE

Dochuk, Darren. Revival on the Right: Making Sense of the Conservative Moment in Post-World War II American History," ''History Compass,'' Oct 2006, Vol. 4 Issue 5, pp 975–999

Kazin, Michael. "The Grass-Roots Right: New Histories of U.S. Conservatism in the Twentieth Century," ''American Historical Review'' (February 1992) 97:136-55

Ponce de Leon, Charles L. "The New Historiography of the 1980s," ''Reviews in American History,'' June 2008, Vol. 36 Issue 2, pp 303–31, in Project MUSE

Ribuffo, Leo. "Why Is There So Much Conservatism in the United States and Why Do So Few Historians Know Anything About It," ''American Historical Review'' 99 (April 1994): 438–49.

Ribuffo, Leo. "Conservatism and American Politics," ''Journal of the Historical Society,'' March 2003, Vol. 3 Issue 2, pp 163–175

Zelizer, Julian E. "Rethinking the History of American Conservatism," ''Reviews in American History'' Volume 38, Number 2, June 2010 in Project MUSE

Primary sources

Buckley, William F., Jr., ed. ''Up from Liberalism'' Stein and Day, (1958)

Buckley, William F., Jr., ed. ''Did You Ever See a Dream Walking? American Conservative Thought in the 20th Century'' Bobbs-Merrill, (1970)

Mark Gerson, ed., ''The Essential Neo-Conservative Reader'' (Perseus Publishing, (1997)) ISBN 0-201-15488-9

Irving Kristol, ''Neoconservatism: the Autobiography of an Idea'', ISBN 0-02-874021-1

Gregory L. Schneider, ed. ''Conservatism in America Since 1930: A Reader'' (2003)

Irwin Stelzer ed. ''The NeoCon Reader'' (2005) ISBN 0-8021-4193-5

Wolfe, Gregory. ''Right Minds: A Sourcebook of American Conservative Thought.'' Regnery, (1987)

External links

"The Origins of the Modern American Conservative Movement," Heritage Foundation.

"Conservative Predominance in the U.S.: A Moment or an Era?", 21 experts from the U.S. and abroad, ponder the future of conservatism.

''Dictionary of the History of Ideas: Conservatism'' at the University of Virginia.

"Comparative Decades: Conservatism in the 1920s and 1980s" Lesson plans

Mark Riebling, "Prospectus for a Critique of Conservative Reason."

Paul Gottfried, "How Russell Kirk (And The Right) Went Wrong"

A History of Conservative Movements – slideshow by ''Newsweek magazine''

es:Conservadurismo en los Estados Unidos it:Conservatorismo negli Stati Uniti d'America nl:Amerikaans conservatisme no:Amerikansk konservatisme simple:Conservatives in the United States yi:קאנסערוואטיזם אין די פאראייניגטע שטאטן

Coordinates	40°14′36″N77°53′36″N
Region	Western philosophy
Era	20th / 21st-century philosophy
Color	#B0C4DE
Name	Noam Chomsky
Other names	Avram Noam Chomsky
Birth date	December 07, 1928
Birth place	Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
Alma mater	University of Pennsylvania (BA 1949, MA 1951, PhD 1955)
School tradition	Generative linguistics, Analytic philosophy
Main interests	Linguistics PsychologyPhilosophy of languagePhilosophy of mind Politics Ethics
Alma mater	University of Pennsylvania
Religion	Atheist
Notable ideas	Generative grammar, universal grammar, transformational grammar, government and binding, X-bar theory, Chomsky hierarchy, context-free grammar, principles and parameters, Minimalist program, language acquisition device, poverty of the stimulus, Chomsky–Schützenberger theorem, Chomsky Normal Form, propaganda model
Influences	Dwight Macdonald, Pāṇini, Bertrand Russell, Ludwig Wittgenstein, John Dewey, Mikhail Bakunin, Karl Marx, Wilhelm von Humboldt, Adam Smith, Zellig Harris, Rudolf Rocker, Immanuel Kant, René Descartes, George Orwell, C. West Churchman, Alan Turing, W. V. O. Quine
Influenced	Niall McLaren, Colin McGinn, Edward Said, Christopher Hitchens, Steven Pinker, Peter Ludlow, Tanya Reinhart, Morris Halle, Gilbert Harman, Jerry Fodor, Howard Lasnik, Robert Fisk, Neil Smith, Ray Jackendoff, Norbert Hornstein, Jean Bricmont, Marc Hauser, Norman Finkelstein, Robert Lees, Hugo Chavez, Mark Baker, Julian Boyd, Ray C. Dougherty, Derek Bickerton, Amy Goodman, Michael Albert }}

Avram Noam Chomsky (; born December 7, 1928) is an American linguist, philosopher, cognitive scientist, historian, and activist. He is an Institute Professor and Professor (Emeritus) in the Department of Linguistics & Philosophy at MIT, where he has worked for over 50 years. Chomsky has been described as the "father of modern linguistics" and a major figure of analytic philosophy. His work has influenced fields such as computer science, mathematics, and psychology.

Chomsky is credited as the creator or co-creator of the Chomsky hierarchy, the universal grammar theory, and the Chomsky–Schützenberger theorem.

Ideologically identifying with anarcho-syndicalism and libertarian socialism, Chomsky is known for his critiques of U.S. foreign policy and contemporary capitalism, and he has been described as a prominent cultural figure. His media criticism has included ''Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media'' (1988), co-written with Edward S. Herman, an analysis articulating the propaganda model theory for examining the media.

According to the Arts and Humanities Citation Index in 1992, Chomsky was cited as a source more often than any other living scholar from 1980 to 1992, and was the eighth most cited source overall. Chomsky is the author of over 100 books.

Life and career

Chomsky was born on December 7, 1928, to Jewish parents in the affluent East Oak Lane neighborhood of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, the elder son of noted professor of Hebrew at Gratz College and IWW (Industrial Workers of the World) member William Chomsky (1896–1977), a native of Ukraine. His mother, Elsie Chomsky (née Simonofsky)—a native of what is present-day Belarus—grew up in the United States and, unlike her husband, spoke "ordinary New York English". Chomsky's parents' first language was Yiddish, but Chomsky said it was "taboo" in his family to speak it. Although Chomsky's mother was part of the radical activism in the 1930s, he was influenced largely by his uncle who, having never passed 4th grade, owned a newsstand that acted as an "intellectual center [where] professors of this and that argu[ed] all night". Chomsky was influenced also by being a part of a Hebrew-based, Zionist organization, as well as by hanging around anarchist bookstores.

He describes his family as living in a sort of "Jewish ghetto", split into a "Yiddish side" and "Hebrew side", with his family aligning with the latter and bringing him up "immersed in Hebrew culture and literature", though he means more a "cultural ghetto than a physical one". Chomsky also describes tensions he experienced with Irish Catholics and German Catholics and anti-semitism in the mid-1930s. He recalls "beer parties" celebrating the fall of Paris to the Nazis. In a discussion of the irony of his staying in the 1980s in a Jesuit House in Central America, Chomsky explained that during his childhood, "We were the only Jewish family around. I grew up with a visceral fear of Catholics. They're the people who beat you up on your way to school. So I knew when they came out of that building down the street, which was the Jesuit school, they were raving anti-Semites. So childhood memories took a long time to overcome."

Chomsky remembers the first article he wrote was at age 10 while a student at Oak Lane Country Day School about the threat of the spread of fascism, following the fall of Barcelona in the Spanish Civil War. From the age of 12 or 13, he identified more fully with anarchist politics.

A graduate of Central High School of Philadelphia, Chomsky began studying philosophy and linguistics at the University of Pennsylvania in 1945, taking classes with philosophers such as C. West Churchman and Nelson Goodman and linguist Zellig Harris. Harris's teaching included his discovery of transformations as a mathematical analysis of language structure (mappings from one subset to another in the set of sentences). Chomsky referred to the morphophonemic rules in his 1951 master's thesis—''The Morphophonemics of Modern Hebrew''—as transformations in the sense of Carnap's 1938 notion of rules of transformation (vs. rules of formation), and subsequently reinterpreted the notion of grammatical transformations in a very different way from Harris, as operations on the productions of a context-free grammar (derived from Post production systems). Harris's political views were instrumental in shaping those of Chomsky. Chomsky earned a BA in 1949 and an MA in 1951.

In 1949, he married linguist Carol Schatz. They remained married for 59 years until her death from cancer in December 2008. The couple had two daughters, Aviva (b. 1957) and Diane (b. 1960), and a son, Harry (b. 1967). With his wife Carol, Chomsky spent time in 1953 living in HaZore'a, a kibbutz in Israel. Asked in an interview whether the stay was "a disappointment" Chomsky replied, "No, I loved it"; however, he "couldn't stand the ideological atmosphere" and "fervent nationalism" in the early 1950s at the kibbutz, with Stalin being defended by many of the left-leaning kibbutz members who chose to paint a rosy image of future possibilities and contemporary realities in the USSR. Chomsky notes seeing many positive elements in the commune-like living of the kibbutz, in which parents and children lived together in separate houses, and when asked whether there were "lessons that we have learned from the history of the kibbutz", responded, that in "some respects, the kibbutzim came closer to the anarchist ideal than any other attempt that lasted for more than a very brief moment before destruction, or that was on anything like a similar scale. In these respects, I think they were extremely attractive and successful; apart from personal accident, I probably would have lived there myself – for how long, it's hard to guess."

Chomsky received his PhD in linguistics from the University of Pennsylvania in 1955. He conducted part of his doctoral research during four years at Harvard University as a Harvard Junior Fellow. In his doctoral thesis, he began to develop some of his linguistic ideas, elaborating on them in his 1957 book ''Syntactic Structures'', one of his best-known works in linguistics.

Chomsky joined the staff of MIT in 1955 and in 1961 was appointed full professor in the Department of Modern Languages and Linguistics (now the Department of Linguistics and Philosophy). From 1966 to 1976 he held the Ferrari P. Ward Professorship of Modern Languages and Linguistics, and in 1976 he was appointed Institute Professor. As of 2010, Chomsky has taught at MIT continuously for 55 years.

In February 1967, Chomsky became one of the leading opponents of the Vietnam War with the publication of his essay, "The Responsibility of Intellectuals", in ''The New York Review of Books''. This was followed by his 1969 book, ''American Power and the New Mandarins,'' a collection of essays that established him at the forefront of American dissent. His far-reaching criticisms of U.S. foreign policy and the legitimacy of U.S. power have raised controversy he is frequently sought out for his views by publications and news outlets internationally. In 1977 he delivered the Huizinga Lecture in Leiden, the Netherlands, under the title: ''Intellectuals and the State''.

Chomsky has received death threats because of his criticisms of U.S. foreign policy. He was also on a list of planned targets created by Theodore Kaczynski, better known as the Unabomber; during the period that Kaczynski was at large, Chomsky had all of his mail checked for explosives. He states that he often receives undercover police protection, in particular while on the MIT campus, although he does not agree with the police protection.

Chomsky resides in Lexington, Massachusetts, and travels often, giving lectures on politics.

Thought

Linguistics

Chomskyan linguistics, beginning with his ''Syntactic Structures'', a distillation of his '' Logical Structure of Linguistic Theory'' (1955, 75), challenges structural linguistics and introduces transformational grammar. This approach takes utterances (sequences of words) to have a syntax characterized by a formal grammar; in particular, a context-free grammar extended with transformational rules.

Perhaps his most influential and time-tested contribution to the field, is the claim that modeling knowledge of language using a formal grammar accounts for the "productivity" or "creativity" of language. In other words, a formal grammar of a language can explain the ability of a hearer-speaker to produce and interpret an infinite number of utterances, including novel ones, with a limited set of grammatical rules and a finite set of terms. He has always acknowledged his debt to Pāṇini for his modern notion of an explicit generative grammar although it is also related to rationalist ideas of a priori knowledge.

It is a popular misconception that Chomsky proved that language is entirely innate and discovered a "universal grammar" (UG). In fact, Chomsky simply observed that while a human baby and a kitten are both capable of inductive reasoning, if they are exposed to exactly the same linguistic data, the human child will always acquire the ability to understand and produce language, while the kitten will never acquire either ability. Chomsky labeled whatever the relevant capacity the human has which the cat lacks the "language acquisition device" (LAD) and suggested that one of the tasks for linguistics should be to figure out what the LAD is and what constraints it puts on the range of possible human languages. The universal features that would result from these constraints are often termed "universal grammar" or UG.

The Principles and Parameters approach (P&P;)—developed in his Pisa 1979 Lectures, later published as ''Lectures on Government and Binding'' (LGB)—makes strong claims regarding universal grammar: that the grammatical principles underlying languages are innate and fixed, and the differences among the world's languages can be characterized in terms of parameter settings in the brain (such as the pro-drop parameter, which indicates whether an explicit subject is always required, as in English, or can be optionally dropped, as in Spanish), which are often likened to switches. (Hence the term principles and parameters, often given to this approach.) In this view, a child learning a language need only acquire the necessary lexical items (words, grammatical morphemes, and idioms), and determine the appropriate parameter settings, which can be done based on a few key examples.

Proponents of this view argue that the pace at which children learn languages is inexplicably rapid, unless children have an innate ability to learn languages. The similar steps followed by children all across the world when learning languages, and the fact that children make certain characteristic errors as they learn their first language, whereas other seemingly logical kinds of errors never occur (and, according to Chomsky, should be attested if a purely general, rather than language-specific, learning mechanism were being employed), are also pointed to as motivation for innateness.

More recently, in his Minimalist Program (1995), while retaining the core concept of "principles and parameters," Chomsky attempts a major overhaul of the linguistic machinery involved in the LGB model, stripping from it all but the barest necessary elements, while advocating a general approach to the architecture of the human language faculty that emphasizes principles of economy and optimal design, reverting to a derivational approach to generation, in contrast with the largely representational approach of classic P&P.;

Chomsky's ideas have had a strong influence on researchers of the language acquisition in children, though many researchers in this area such as Elizabeth Bates and Michael Tomasello argue very strongly against Chomsky's theories, and instead advocate emergentist or connectionist theories, explaining language with a number of general processing mechanisms in the brain that interact with the extensive and complex social environment in which language is used and learned.

His best-known work in phonology is ''The Sound Pattern of English'' (1968), written with Morris Halle (and often known as simply ''SPE''). This work has had a great significance for the development in the field. While phonological theory has since moved beyond "SPE phonology" in many important respects, the SPE system is considered the precursor of some of the most influential phonological theories today, including autosegmental phonology, lexical phonology and optimality theory. Chomsky no longer publishes on phonology.

Generative grammar

The Chomskyan approach towards syntax, often termed generative grammar, studies grammar as a body of knowledge possessed by language users. Since the 1960s, Chomsky has maintained that much of this knowledge is innate, implying that children need only learn certain parochial features of their native languages. The innate body of linguistic knowledge is often termed universal grammar. From Chomsky's perspective, the strongest evidence for the existence of Universal Grammar is simply the fact that children successfully acquire their native languages in so little time. Furthermore, he argues that there is an enormous gap between the linguistic stimuli to which children are exposed and the rich linguistic knowledge they attain (the "poverty of the stimulus" argument). The knowledge of Universal Grammar would serve to bridge that gap.

Chomsky's theories have been immensely influential within linguistics, but they have also received criticism. One recurring criticism of the Chomskyan variety of generative grammar is that it is Anglocentric and Eurocentric, and that often linguists working in this tradition have a tendency to base claims about Universal Grammar on a very small sample of languages, sometimes just one. Initially, the Eurocentrism was exhibited in an overemphasis on the study of English. However, hundreds of different languages have now received at least some attention within Chomskyan linguistic analyses. In spite of the diversity of languages that have been characterized by UG derivations, critics continue to argue that the formalisms within Chomskyan linguistics are Anglocentric and misrepresent the properties of languages that are different from English. Thus, Chomsky's approach has been criticized as a form of linguistic imperialism. In addition, Chomskyan linguists rely heavily on the intuitions of native speakers regarding which sentences of their languages are well-formed. This practice has been criticized on general methodological grounds. Some psychologists and psycholinguists, though sympathetic to Chomsky's overall program, have argued that Chomskyan linguists pay insufficient attention to experimental data from language processing, with the consequence that their theories are not psychologically plausible. Other critics (see language learning) have questioned whether it is necessary to posit Universal Grammar to explain child language acquisition, arguing that domain-general learning mechanisms are sufficient.

Today there are many different branches of generative grammar; one can view grammatical frameworks such as head-driven phrase structure grammar, lexical functional grammar and combinatory categorial grammar as broadly Chomskyan and generative in orientation, but with significant differences in execution.

Chomsky hierarchy

Chomsky is famous for investigating various kinds of formal languages and whether or not they might be capable of capturing key properties of human language. His Chomsky hierarchy partitions formal grammars into classes, or groups, with increasing expressive power, i.e., each successive class can generate a broader set of formal languages than the one before. Interestingly, Chomsky argues that modeling some aspects of human language requires a more complex formal grammar (as measured by the Chomsky hierarchy) than modeling others. For example, while a regular language is powerful enough to model English morphology, it is not powerful enough to model English syntax. In addition to being relevant in linguistics, the Chomsky hierarchy has also become important in computer science (especially in compiler construction and automata theory). Indeed, there is an equivalence between the Chomsky language hierarchy and the different kinds of automata. Thus theorems about languages are often dealt with as either languages (grammars) or automata.

An alternate method of dealing with languages is based upon Formal Power series. Formal Power series as well as the relationship between languages and semi-groups continued to occupy M. P. Schützenberger at the Sorbonne. Formal Power Series are similar to the Taylor Series one encounters in a course on Calculus, and is especially useful for languages where words (terminal symbols) are commutative.

Politics

Chomsky has stated that his "personal visions are fairly traditional anarchist ones, with origins in the Enlightenment and classical liberalism" and he has praised libertarian socialism. Although Chomsky tries to avoid the ambiguity of labels, his political views are often characterized in news accounts as "leftist" or "left-wing," and he has described himself as an anarcho-syndicalist. He is a member of the Campaign for Peace and Democracy and the Industrial Workers of the World international union. He published a book on anarchism titled ''Chomsky on Anarchism'', published by the anarchist book collective AK Press in 2006.

Chomsky has engaged in political activism all of his adult life and expressed opinions on politics and world events, which are widely cited, publicized and discussed. Chomsky has in turn argued that his views are those the powerful do not want to hear and for this reason he is considered an American political dissident.

Chomsky asserts that authority, unless justified, is inherently illegitimate and that the burden of proof is on those in authority. If this burden can't be met, the authority in question should be dismantled. Authority for its own sake is inherently unjustified. An example given by Chomsky of a legitimate authority is that exerted by an adult to prevent a young child from wandering into traffic. He contends that there is little moral difference between chattel slavery and renting one's self to an owner or "wage slavery". He feels that it is an attack on personal integrity that undermines individual freedom. He holds that workers should own and control their workplace, a view held (as he notes) by the Lowell Mill Girls.

Chomsky has strongly criticized the foreign policy of the United States. He claims double standards in a foreign policy preaching democracy and freedom for all while allying itself with non-democratic and repressive organizations and states such as Chile under Augusto Pinochet and argues that this results in massive human rights violations. He often argues that America's intervention in foreign nations, including the secret aid given to the Contras in Nicaragua, an event of which he has been very critical, fits any standard description of terrorism, including "official definitions in the US Code and Army Manuals in the early 1980s." Before its collapse, Chomsky also condemned Soviet imperialism; for example in 1986 during a question/answer following a lecture he gave at Universidad Centroamericana in Nicaragua, when challenged about how he could "talk about North American imperialism and Russian imperialism in the same breath," Chomsky responded: "One of the truths about the world is that there are two superpowers, one a huge power which happens to have its boot on your neck; another, a smaller power which happens to have its boot on other people's necks. I think that anyone in the Third World would be making a grave error if they succumbed to illusions about these matters."

Regarding the death of Osama bin Laden, Chomsky stated: "We might ask ourselves how we would be reacting if Iraqi commandos landed at George W. Bush's compound, assassinated him, and dumped his body in the Atlantic. Uncontroversially, his crimes vastly exceed bin Laden’s, and he is not a 'suspect' but uncontroversially the 'decider' who gave the orders to commit the 'supreme international crime differing only from other war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole' (quoting the Nuremberg Tribunal) for which Nazi criminals were hanged: the hundreds of thousands of deaths, millions of refugees, destruction of much of the country, [and] the bitter sectarian conflict that has now spread to the rest of the region."

He has argued that the mass media in the United States largely serve as a "bought priesthood" of the U.S. government and U.S.-based corporations, with the three intertwined through common interests. In a famous reference to Walter Lippmann, Chomsky along with his coauthor Edward S. Herman has written that the American media manufactures consent among the public. Chomsky has condemned the 2010 US Supreme Court ''Citizens United'' ruling revoking the limits on campaign finance, calling it a "corporate takeover of democracy."

Chomsky opposes the U.S. global "war on drugs", claiming its language is misleading, and refers to it as "the war on certain drugs." He favors drug policy reform, in education and prevention rather than military or police action as a means of reducing drug use. In an interview in 1999, Chomsky argued that, whereas crops such as tobacco receive no mention in governmental exposition, other non-profitable crops, such as marijuana are attacked because of the effect achieved by persecuting the poor. He has stated:

U.S. domestic drug policy does not carry out its stated goals, and policymakers are well aware of that. If it isn't about reducing substance abuse, what is it about? It is reasonably clear, both from current actions and the historical record, that substances tend to be criminalized when they are associated with the so-called dangerous classes, that the criminalization of certain substances is a technique of social control.

Chomsky is critical of the American "state capitalist" system and big business, he describes himself as a socialist, specifically an anarcho-syndicalist, and is critical of "authoritarian" communist branches of socialism. He also believes that socialist values exemplify the rational and morally consistent extension of original unreconstructed classical liberal and radical humanist ideas to an industrial context. He believes that society should be highly organized and based on democratic control of communities and work places. He believes that the radical humanist ideas of his two major influences, Bertrand Russell and John Dewey, were "rooted in the Enlightenment and classical liberalism, and retain their revolutionary character."

Chomsky has stated that he believes the United States remains the "greatest country in the world", a comment that he later clarified by saying, "Evaluating countries is senseless and I would never put things in those terms, but that some of America's advances, particularly in the area of free speech, that have been achieved by centuries of popular struggle, are to be admired." He has also said "In many respects, the United States is the freest country in the world. I don't just mean in terms of limits on state coercion, though that's true too, but also in terms of individual relations. The United States comes closer to classlessness in terms of interpersonal relations than virtually any society."

Chomsky objects to the criticism that anarchism is inconsistent with support for government welfare, stating in part:

One can, of course, take the position that we don't care about the problems people face today, and want to think about a possible tomorrow. OK, but then don't pretend to have any interest in human beings and their fate, and stay in the seminar room and intellectual coffee house with other privileged people. Or one can take a much more humane position: I want to work, today, to build a better society for tomorrow – the classical anarchist position, quite different from the slogans in the question. That's exactly right, and it leads directly to support for the people facing problems today: for enforcement of health and safety regulation, provision of national health insurance, support systems for people who need them, etc. That is not a sufficient condition for organizing for a different and better future, but it is a necessary condition. Anything else will receive the well-merited contempt of people who do not have the luxury to disregard the circumstances in which they live, and try to survive.

Chomsky holds views that can be summarized as anti-war but not strictly pacifist. He prominently opposed the Vietnam War and most other wars in his lifetime. He expressed these views with tax resistance and peace walks. In 1968, he signed the “Writers and Editors War Tax Protest” pledge, vowing to refuse tax payments in protest against the Vietnam War. He published a number of articles about the war in Vietnam, including "The Responsibility of Intellectuals". He maintains that U.S. involvement in World War II to defeat the Axis powers was probably justified, with the caveat that a preferable outcome would have been to end or prevent the war through earlier diplomacy. He believes that the dropping of nuclear bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki were "among the most unspeakable crimes in history".

Chomsky has made many criticisms of the Israeli government, its supporters, the United States' support of the government and its treatment of the Palestinian people, arguing that " 'supporters of Israel' are in reality supporters of its moral degeneration and probable ultimate destruction" and that "Israel's very clear choice of expansion over security may well lead to that consequence." Chomsky disagreed with the founding of Israel as a Jewish state, saying, "I don't think a Jewish or Christian or Islamic state is a proper concept. I would object to the United States as a Christian state." Chomsky hesitated before publishing work critical of Israeli policies while his parents were alive, because he "knew it would hurt them" he says, "mostly because of their friends, who reacted hysterically to views like those expressed in my work." On May 16, 2010, Israeli authorities detained Chomsky and ultimately refused his entry to the West Bank via Jordan. A spokesman for the Israeli Prime Minister indicated that the refusal of entry was simply due to a border guard who "overstepped his authority" and a second attempt to enter would likely be allowed. Chomsky disagreed, saying that the Interior Ministry official who interviewed him was taking instructions from his superiors. Chomsky maintained that based on the several hours of interviewing, he was denied entry because of the things he says and because he was visiting a university in the West Bank but no Israeli universities.

Chomsky has a broad view of free-speech rights, especially in the mass media, and opposes censorship. He has stated that "with regard to freedom of speech there are basically two positions: you defend it vigorously for views you hate, or you reject it and prefer Stalinist/fascist standards". With reference to the United States diplomatic cables leak, Chomsky suggested that "perhaps the most dramatic revelation ... is the bitter hatred of democracy that is revealed both by the U.S. Government -- Hillary Clinton, others -- and also by the diplomatic service." Chomsky refuses to take legal action against those who may have libeled him and prefers to counter libels through open letters in newspapers. One notable example of this approach is his response to an article by Emma Brockes in ''The Guardian'' which alleged he denied the existence of the Srebrenica massacre. Chomsky's complaint prompted The Guardian to publish an apologetic correction and to withdraw the article from the paper's website.

Chomsky has frequently stated that there is no connection between his work in linguistics and his political views and is generally critical of the idea that competent discussion of political topics requires expert knowledge in academic fields. In a 1969 interview, he said regarding the connection between his politics and his work in linguistics:

I still feel myself that there is a kind of tenuous connection. I would not want to overstate it but I think it means something to me at least. I think that anyone's political ideas or their ideas of social organization must be rooted ultimately in some concept of human nature and human needs.

Some critics have accused Chomsky of hypocrisy when, in spite of his political criticism of American and European military imperialism, early research at the institution (MIT) where he did his linguistic research had been substantially funded by the American military. Chomsky makes the argument that because he has received funding from the U.S. military, he has an even greater responsibility to criticize and resist its immoral actions.

He is also an outspoken advocate against the use of the death penalty and has spoken against the execution of Steven Woods.

I think the death penalty is a crime no matter what the circumstances, and it is particularly awful in the Steven Woods case. I strongly oppose the execution of Steven Woods on September 13, 2011.

In March of 2012, Chomsky endorsed Jill Stein for President of the United States in 2012, saying,

Media

Another focus of Chomsky's political work has been an analysis of mainstream mass media (especially in the United States), its structures and constraints, and its perceived role in supporting big business and government interests. Edward S. Herman and Chomsky's book ''Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media'' (1988) explores this topic in depth, presenting their "propaganda model" of the news media with numerous detailed case studies demonstrating it. According to this propaganda model, more democratic societies like the U.S. use subtle, non-violent means of control, unlike totalitarian systems, where physical force can readily be used to coerce the general population. In an often-quoted remark, Chomsky states that "propaganda is to a democracy what the bludgeon is to a totalitarian state." (Media Control)

The model attempts to explain this perceived systemic bias of the mass media in terms of structural economic causes rather than a conspiracy of people. It argues the bias derives from five "filters" that all published news must "pass through," which combine to systematically distort news coverage.

In explaining the first filter, ownership, he notes that most major media outlets are owned by large corporations. The second, funding, notes that the outlets derive the majority of their funding from advertising, not readers. Thus, since they are profit-oriented businesses selling a product—readers and audiences—to other businesses (advertisers), the model expects them to publish news that reflects the desires and values of those businesses. In addition, the news media are dependent on government institutions and major businesses with strong biases as sources (the third filter) for much of their information. Flak, the fourth filter, refers to the various pressure groups that attack the media for supposed bias. Norms, the fifth filter, refer to the common conceptions shared by those in the profession of journalism. (Note: in the original text, published in 1988, the fifth filter was "anticommunism". However, with the fall of the Soviet Union, it has been broadened to allow for shifts in public opinion.) The model describes how the media form a decentralized and non-conspiratorial but nonetheless very powerful propaganda system, that is able to mobilize an elite consensus, frame public debate within elite perspectives and at the same time give the appearance of democratic consent.

Chomsky and Herman test their model empirically by picking "paired examples"—pairs of events that were objectively similar except for the alignment of domestic elite interests. They use a number of such examples to attempt to show that in cases where an "official enemy" does something (like murder of a religious official), the press investigates thoroughly and devotes a great amount of coverage to the matter, thus victims of "enemy" states are considered "worthy". But when the domestic government or an ally does the same thing (or worse), the press downplays the story, thus victims of US or US client states are considered "unworthy."

They also test their model against the case that is often held up as the best example of a free and aggressively independent press, the media coverage of the Tet Offensive during the Vietnam War. Even in this case, they argue that the press was behaving subserviently to elite interests.

Science

Chomsky sees science as a straightforward search for explanation, and rejects the views of it as a catalog of facts or mechanical explanations. In this light, the majority of his contributions to science have been frameworks and hypotheses, rather than "discoveries."

As such, he considers certain so-called post-structuralist or postmodern critiques of logic and reason to be nonsensical:

I have spent a lot of my life working on questions such as these, using the only methods I know of; those condemned here as "science", "rationality," "logic," and so on. I therefore read the papers with some hope that they would help me "transcend" these limitations, or perhaps suggest an entirely different course. I'm afraid I was disappointed. Admittedly, that may be my own limitation. Quite regularly, "my eyes glaze over" when I read polysyllabic discourse on the themes of poststructuralism and postmodernism; what I understand is largely truism or error, but that is only a fraction of the total word count. True, there are lots of other things I don't understand: the articles in the current issues of math and physics journals, for example. But there is a difference. In the latter case, I know how to get to understand them, and have done so, in cases of particular interest to me; and I also know that people in these fields can explain the contents to me at my level, so that I can gain what (partial) understanding I may want. In contrast, no one seems to be able to explain to me why the latest post-this-and-that is (for the most part) other than truism, error, or gibberish, and I do not know how to proceed.

Although Chomsky believes that a scientific background is important to teach proper reasoning, he holds that science in general is "inadequate" to understand complicated problems like human affairs:

Science talks about very simple things, and asks hard questions about them. As soon as things become too complex, science can’t deal with them... But it’s a complicated matter: Science studies what’s at the edge of understanding, and what’s at the edge of understanding is usually fairly simple. And it rarely reaches human affairs. Human affairs are way too complicated.

Psychology

Chomsky's work in linguistics has had profound implications for modern psychology. For Chomsky, linguistics is a branch of cognitive psychology; genuine insights in linguistics imply concomitant understandings of aspects of mental processing and human nature. His theory of a universal grammar was seen by many as a direct challenge to the established behaviorist theories of the time and had major consequences for understanding how children learn language and what, exactly, the ability to use language is.

In 1959, Chomsky published an influential critique of B.F. Skinner's ''Verbal Behavior'', a book in which Skinner offered a theoretical account of language in functional, behavioral terms. He defined "Verbal Behavior" as learned behavior that has characteristic consequences delivered through the learned behavior of others. This makes for a view of communicative behaviors much larger than that usually addressed by linguists. Skinner's approach focused on the circumstances in which language was used; for example, asking for water was functionally a different response than labeling something as water, responding to someone asking for water, etc. These functionally different kinds of responses, which required in turn separate explanations, sharply contrasted both with traditional notions of language and Chomsky's psycholinguistic approach. Chomsky thought that a functionalist explanation restricting itself to questions of communicative performance ignored important questions. (Chomsky—Language and Mind, 1968). He focused on questions concerning the operation and development of innate structures for syntax capable of creatively organizing, cohering, adapting and combining words and phrases into intelligible utterances.

In the review Chomsky emphasized that the scientific application of behavioral principles from animal research is severely lacking in explanatory adequacy and is furthermore particularly superficial as an account of human verbal behavior because a theory restricting itself to external conditions, to "what is learned," cannot adequately account for generative grammar. Chomsky raised the examples of rapid language acquisition of children, including their quickly developing ability to form grammatical sentences, and the universally creative language use of competent native speakers to highlight the ways in which Skinner's view exemplified under-determination of theory by evidence. He argued that to understand human verbal behavior such as the creative aspects of language use and language development, one must first postulate a genetic linguistic endowment. The assumption that important aspects of language are the product of universal innate ability runs counter to Skinner's radical behaviorism.

Chomsky's 1959 review has drawn fire from a number of critics, the most famous criticism being that of Kenneth MacCorquodale's 1970 paper ''On Chomsky’s Review of Skinner’s Verbal Behavior'' (''Journal of the Experimental Analysis of Behavior,'' volume 13, pages 83–99). MacCorquodale's argument was updated and expanded in important respects by Nathan Stemmer in a 1990 paper, ''Skinner's Verbal Behavior, Chomsky's review, and mentalism'' (''Journal of the Experimental Analysis of Behavior,'' volume 54, pages 307–319). These and similar critiques have raised certain points not generally acknowledged outside of behavioral psychology, such as the claim that Chomsky did not possess an adequate understanding of either behavioral psychology in general, or the differences between Skinner's behaviorism and other varieties. Consequently, it is argued that he made several serious errors. On account of these perceived problems, the critics maintain that the review failed to demonstrate what it has often been cited as doing. As such, it is averred that those most influenced by Chomsky's paper probably either already substantially agreed with Chomsky or never actually read it. The review has been further critiqued for misrepresenting the work of Skinner and others, including by quoting out of context. Chomsky has maintained that the review was directed at the way Skinner's variant of behavioral psychology "was being used in Quinean empiricism and naturalization of philosophy."

It has been claimed that Chomsky's critique of Skinner's methodology and basic assumptions paved the way for the "cognitive revolution", the shift in American psychology between the 1950s through the 1970s from being primarily behavioral to being primarily cognitive. In his 1966 ''Cartesian Linguistics'' and subsequent works, Chomsky laid out an explanation of human language faculties that has become the model for investigation in some areas of psychology. Much of the present conception of how the mind works draws directly from ideas that found their first persuasive author of modern times in Chomsky.

There are three key ideas. First is that the mind is "cognitive", or that the mind actually contains mental states, beliefs, doubts, and so on. Second, he argued that most of the important properties of language and mind are innate. The acquisition and development of a language is a result of the unfolding of innate propensities triggered by the experiential input of the external environment. The link between human innate aptitude to language and heredity has been at the core of the debate opposing Noam Chomsky to Jean Piaget at the Abbaye de Royaumont in 1975 (''Language and Learning. The Debate between Jean Piaget and Noam Chomsky,'' Harvard University Press, 1980). Although links between the genetic setup of humans and aptitude to language have been suggested at that time and in later discussions, we are still far from understanding the genetic bases of human language. Work derived from the model of selective stabilization of synapses set up by Jean-Pierre Changeux, Philippe Courrège and Antoine Danchin, and more recently developed experimentally and theoretically by Jacques Mehler and Stanislas Dehaene in particular in the domain of numerical cognition lend support to the Chomskyan "nativism". It does not, however, provide clues about the type of rules that would organize neuronal connections to permit language competence. Subsequent psychologists have extended this general "nativist" thesis beyond language. Lastly, Chomsky made the concept of "modularity" a critical feature of the mind's cognitive architecture. The mind is composed of an array of interacting, specialized subsystems with limited flows of inter-communication. This model contrasts sharply with the old idea that any piece of information in the mind could be accessed by any other cognitive process (optical illusions, for example, cannot be "turned off" even when they are known to be illusions).

Debates

Chomsky has been known to vigorously defend and debate his views and opinions, in philosophy, linguistics, and politics. He has had notable debates with Jean Piaget, Michel Foucault, William F. Buckley, Jr., Christopher Hitchens, George Lakoff, Richard Perle, Hilary Putnam, Willard Quine, and Alan Dershowitz, to name a few. In response to his speaking style being criticized as boring, Chomsky said that "I'm a boring speaker and I like it that way.... I doubt that people are attracted to whatever the persona is.... People are interested in the issues, and they're interested in the issues because they are important." "We don't want to be swayed by superficial eloquence, by emotion and so on."

Influence

''Chomskyan'' models have been used as a theoretical basis in various fields of study. The Chomsky hierarchy is often taught in fundamental computer science courses as it confers insight into the various types of formal languages. This hierarchy can also be discussed in mathematical terms and has generated interest among mathematicians, particularly combinatorialists. Some arguments in evolutionary psychology are derived from his research results.

The 1984 Nobel Prize laureate in Medicine and Physiology, Niels K. Jerne, used Chomsky's generative model to explain the human immune system, equating "components of a generative grammar ... with various features of protein structures". The title of Jerne's Stockholm Nobel lecture was "The Generative Grammar of the Immune System".

Nim Chimpsky, a chimpanzee who was the subject of a study in animal language acquisition at Columbia University, was named after Chomsky in reference to his view of language acquisition as a uniquely human ability.

Famous computer scientist Donald Knuth admits to reading Syntactic Structures during his honeymoon and being greatly influenced by it. "...I must admit to taking a copy of Noam Chomsky's Syntactic Structures along with me on my honeymoon in 1961 ... Here was a marvelous thing: a mathematical theory of language in which I could use a computer programmer's intuition!".

Academic achievements, awards and honors

In early 1969, he delivered the John Locke Lectures at Oxford University; in January 1970, the Bertrand Russell Memorial Lecture at University of Cambridge; in 1972, the Nehru Memorial Lecture in New Delhi; in 1977, the Huizinga Lecture in Leiden; in 1988 the Massey Lectures at the University of Toronto, titled "Necessary Illusions: Thought Control in Democratic Societies"; in 1997, The Davie Memorial Lecture on Academic Freedom in Cape Town, and many others.

Chomsky has received many honorary degrees from universities around the world, including from the following:

University of London

University of Chicago

Loyola University of Chicago

Swarthmore College

University of Delhi

Bard College

University of Massachusetts

University of Pennsylvania

Georgetown University

Amherst College

University of Cambridge

University of Colorado

University of Buenos Aires

McGill University

Rovira i Virgili University

Columbia University

Villanova University

University of Connecticut

University of Maine

Scuola Normale Superiore

University of Western Ontario

University of Toronto

Harvard University

Universidad de Chile

University of Bologna

Universidad de La Frontera

University of Calcutta

Universidad Nacional de Colombia

Vrije Universiteit Brussel

Santo Domingo Institute of Technology

Uppsala University

University of Athens

University of Cyprus

Central Connecticut State University

National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM)

Peking University National Tsing Hua University He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the National Academy of Sciences, and the American Philosophical Society. In addition, he is a member of other professional and learned societies in the United States and abroad, and is a recipient of the Distinguished Scientific Contribution Award of the American Psychological Association, the Kyoto Prize in Basic Sciences, the Helmholtz Medal, the Dorothy Eldridge Peacemaker Award, the 1999 Benjamin Franklin Medal in Computer and Cognitive Science, and others. He is twice winner of The Orwell Award, granted by The National Council of Teachers of English for "Distinguished Contributions to Honesty and Clarity in Public Language" (in 1987 and 1989).

He is a member of the Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts in Department of Social Sciences.

In 2005, Chomsky received an honorary fellowship from the Literary and Historical Society. In 2007, Chomsky received The Uppsala University (Sweden) Honorary Doctor's degree in commemoration of Carolus Linnaeus. In February 2008, he received the President's Medal from the Literary and Debating Society of the National University of Ireland, Galway. Since 2009 he is an honorary member of IAPTI.

In 2010, Chomsky received the Erich Fromm Prize in Stuttgart, Germany. In April 2010, Chomsky became the third scholar to receive the University of Wisconsin's A.E. Havens Center's Award for Lifetime Contribution to Critical Scholarship.

Chomsky has an Erdős number of four.

Chomsky was voted the leading living public intellectual in The 2005 Global Intellectuals Poll conducted by the British magazine ''Prospect''. He reacted, saying "I don't pay a lot of attention to polls". In a list compiled by the magazine ''New Statesman'' in 2006, he was voted seventh in the list of "Heroes of our time".

Actor Viggo Mortensen with avant-garde guitarist Buckethead dedicated their 2006 album, called ''Pandemoniumfromamerica'', to Chomsky.

On January 22, 2010, a special honorary concert for Chomsky was given at Kresge Auditorium at MIT. The concert, attended by Chomsky and dozens of his family and friends, featured music composed by Edward Manukyan and speeches by Chomsky's colleagues, including David Pesetsky of MIT and Gennaro Chierchia, head of the linguistics department at Harvard University.

In June 2011, Chomsky was awarded the Sydney Peace Prize, which cited his "unfailing courage, critical analysis of power and promotion of human rights".

In 2011, Chomsky was inducted into IEEE Intelligent Systems' AI's Hall of Fame for the "significant contributions to the field of AI and intelligent systems".

Bibliography

Filmography

''Manufacturing Consent: Noam Chomsky and the Media'', Director: Mark Achbar and Peter Wintonick (1992)

''Last Party 2000'', Director: Rebecca Chaiklin and Donovan Leitch (2001)

''Power and Terror: Noam Chomsky in Our Times'', Director: John Junkerman (2002)

''Distorted Morality—America's War On Terror?'', Director: John Junkerman (2003)

''Noam Chomsky: Rebel Without a Pause'' (TV), Director: Will Pascoe (2003)

''The Corporation'', Directors: Mark Achbar and Jennifer Abbott; Writer: Joel Bakan (2003)

''Peace, Propaganda & the Promised Land'', Directors: Sut Jhally and Bathsheba Ratzkoff (2004)

''On Power, Dissent and Racism: A discussion with Noam Chomsky'', Journalist: Nicolas Rossier; Producers: Eli Choukri, Baraka Productions (2004)

''Lake of Fire'', Director: Tony Kaye (2006)

''American Feud: A History of Conservatives and Liberals'', Director: Richard Hall (2008)

''Chomsky & Cie'' Director: Olivier Azam (out in 2008)

''An Inconvenient Tax'', Director: Christopher P. Marshall (out in 2009)

''The Money Fix,'' Director: Alan Rosenblith (2009)

''Pax Americana and the Weaponization of Space'', Director: Denis Delestrac (2010)

''Article 12: Waking up in a surveillance society'', Director: Juan Manuel Biaiñ (2010)

See also

American philosophy

Axiom of categoricity

Chomskybot

"Colorless green ideas sleep furiously"

English studies

Knowledge worker

List of American philosophers

Important publications in computability

''The Anti-Chomsky Reader''

References

External links

chomsky.info official website

Noam Chomsky at MIT

Noam Chomsky articles on libcom.org

Noam Chomsky at ''Democracy Now!''

Column archive at ''The Guardian''

*''In Depth'' interview with Chomsky, June 1, 2003

Articles and videos featuring Noam Chomsky at AnarchismToday.org

;Interviews and articles

Talks by Noam Chomsky at A-Infos Radio Project

Interview about Human Rights by scholars (English with French subtitles) – 2009

Chomsky media files at the Internet Archive

Noam Chomsky interviewed by Alyssa McDonald on ''New Statesman'', September 2010.

The Real News (TRNN) ">Noam Chomsky Interviews on The Real News (TRNN)

Hegemony or Survival: America's Quest for Global Dominance – discussion on the "Bush doctrine" and its implications, C-SPAN, Feb 2004

Philosophies of Language & Politics – talk at The Commonwealth Club, October 2009

Thought Economics Interviews Noam Chomsky – Noam Chomsky interviewed on global democracy, April 2011

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Carl Daniel Wimmer (born June 30, 1975) is a member of the Utah House of Representatives and serves from Herriman, Utah, House District 52. He is a member of the Republican Party.

References

External links

- 2011 General session legislation by representative - Carl Wimmer

Category:Members of the Utah House of Representatives Category:Living people

Bill Kauffman (born November 15, 1959) is an American political writer generally aligned with the paleoconservative movement. He was born in Batavia, New York, and currently resides in Elba, New York, with his wife and daughter.

A devout Roman Catholic, Kauffman is also an intimate correspondent of Gore Vidal, with whom he shares many ideological similarities.

Education and career

After earning a Bachelor of Arts degree from the University of Rochester, he went to work as an aide to New York Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan (which he would later describe as an "anarchist-making experience") in 1981. After leaving Moynihan's employ, Kauffman worked as Washington, D.C., editor for ''Reason'' magazine before quitting and returning to Batavia. He is now a contributing editor to ''Chronicles'' and ''Liberty'', and he has also written frequently for ''The American Conservative'', ''The American Enterprise'', ''The Wall Street Journal'', and ''CounterPunch''.

Political beliefs

Although he is known as a paleoconservative, his politics remain difficult to categorize, as he holds strong libertarian leanings with culturally conservative and isolationist inclinations. He is a critic of development, frequently writes approvingly of distributism and agrarianism, and is strongly anti-corporate. Kauffman has described his politics as "a blend of Catholic Worker, Old Right libertarian, Yorker transcendentalist, and delirious localist." He has also described himself as an "Independent. A Jeffersonian. An "anarchist. A (cheerful!) enemy of the state, a reactionary Friend of the Library, a peace-loving football fan." Although he remains a registered Democrat, he rarely supports their candidates or their party platform and has frequently voted Green since the collapse of the Reform Party in 2000. Other positions adopted by Kauffman that are considered controversial to both the Left and the Right include his support for the Second Vermont Republic secessionist movement, his admiration for 1972 Democratic presidential nominee George McGovern, his argument that Catholic Worker activist Dorothy Day had much in common with elements of the Right, and his contention that Philip Roth's book ''The Plot Against America'' is "the novel that a neoconservative would write, if a neoconservative could write a novel."

He voted for Reform Party candidate Pat Buchanan in 2000. In 2004 and 2008, he voted for Ralph Nader for President of the United States "because I never got the chance to vote for Gene Debs or Norman Thomas." On September 2, 2008, he addressed the Rally for the Republic in Saint Paul, Minnesota put on by Ron Paul (R-TX).

Writings

His books include ''Every Man a King'' (1989), a novel about a young senatorial aide who, disgusted with politics, returns to his rural New York hometown to start a new life; ''Country Towns of New York'' (1993), a travel book; ''America First!: Its History, Politics, and Culture'' (1995), a history of American populist, isolationist, and anti-imperialist thought; ''With Good Intentions?: Reflections on the Myth of Progress in America'' (1998), a collection of (often approving) profiles of the opponents of school consolidation, child labor laws, a standing army, women's suffrage, and the Interstate Highway System, as well as the proponents of homesteading as a means of battling the Great Depression; ''Dispatches from the Muckdog Gazette: A Mostly Affectionate Account of a Small Town’s Fight to Survive'' (2003), the story of Batavia and its decline; ''Look Homeward America: In Search of Reactionary Radicals and Front-Porch Anarchists'' (2006), a meditation on American political, literary, and artistic figures whose values he admires; and ''Ain't My America: The Long, Noble History of Anti-War Conservatism and Middle American Anti-Imperialism'' (2008). He also edited ''A Story of America First'' (2003), a memoir by the America First Committee's congressional liaison, Ruth Sarles. ''Forgotten Founder, Drunken Prophet: The Life of Luther Martin'', was published in 2008 by the Intercollegiate Studies Institute, and his latest book is ''Bye Bye, Miss American Empire'' (2010).

References

External links

Bill Kauffman at the Rally for the Republic

Interview with Scott Horton on Antiwar Radio

Vance, Laurence (2006-12-04) Bill Kauffman, American Anarchist, ''LewRockwell.com''

Category:American journalists Category:Living people Category:People from Genesee County, New York Category:University of Rochester alumni Category:Paleoconservatism Category:1959 births