Abstract
Today thinkers associated with religiously informed “New Right” or “common good” conservatism have affirmed the New Deal, urging protection for workers and the poor and the political counterbalancing of wealthy and powerful elites. And yet they have often done so while also rejecting or seeking to somehow displace the Constitution. This development makes it appropriate to reconsider two of the first conservatives to accept the New Deal, Francis Graham Wilson (1901–1976) and Peter Viereck (1916–2006). Their conservatism was rooted in religious conviction and an evolutionary conception of politics and constitutional change that appealed to moderation, balance, and compromise. This article explicates their intellectual accommodation with the New Deal and then shows briefly how the administration of Dwight Eisenhower proceeded practically along quite similar lines. Today’s conservative reconciliation with the New Deal should revisit how these earlier conservatives managed to do so while also affirming the Constitution.