A Forgotten Version of Conservatism

At The American Conservative, Addison Del Mastro discusses Vance Packard, a journalist and author who Del Mastro says that though considered liberal in his time, fits well with the ideals of today’s conservatives. Del Mastro writes:

Vance Packard is not a name that comes to mind when you think of mid-century conservatives. Certainly, you won’t hear him mentioned alongside William F. Buckley, James Burnham, or Russell Kirk. If Packard is remembered at all, it is as the author of the anti-advertising tome The Hidden Persuaders, and more generally as a left-leaning critic of consumer capitalism and of America’s complacent Cold War culture.

That image is not exactly wrong, but it is woefully incomplete. Vance Packard may have been a liberal in his own time, but today he reads as a reasonable and fundamentally conservative voice in an era that was redefining at breakneck speed the nature of American life.

In A Nation of Strangers, published in 1972, Packard presciently warned against the “attrition of communal structure” brought on by Americans’ increasing tendency to move, splitting up extended families and rooted communities. This was often, he noted, a result of corporate ladder-climbing, which required transferring often and all over the country. He recounts an anecdote involving a CEO who forced his entire company to relocate halfway across the country rather than relocate himself