In 1950, the literary critic Lionel Trilling famously said that, “In the United States at this time liberalism is not only the dominant but even the sole intellectual tradition.” Conservatism was not an ideology or even a set of ideas, he insisted, but a “reactionary impulse.” Was he right? What major issues—political, economic, social, or cultural—united American conservatives from the 1920s onwards? Did the politics of the Right change over the course of the twentieth century? In your answer, you should define what you mean by conservatism, and address any of the following: immigration policy; anti-Communism and the Cold War; race and civil rights; religion and morality; neoliberalism and the free market.

Arguably, all of the issues that you mention were and remain connected. Conservatism could be defined as the effort to maintain a set of customs and political agendas which are centered on the notion that a nation has a particular and distinct cultural foundation that ought to be maintained. Economically, conservatism encourages limitations on spending, particularly for welfare social programs, while encouraging private investment in public construction projects, low taxes, and the value of property ownership.
Though every nation has its specific concerns, conservatives throughout the world often follow these patterns of thought and are, thus, averse to spending money on social programs in favor of encouraging individual enterprise. For this reason, conservatives generally oppose labor unions which, they argue, prevent the arrangement of individual contracts between employees and employers. They also seek to maintain a national character, which is usually defined by the dominant ethnic group's history and traditions. In the West, both during Trilling's time and now, conservatism has emphasized the importance of a Western tradition.
In my opinion, Trilling was wrong in saying that conservatives had no ideas—they had plenty regarding what should determine American culture. The historian and University of Chicago English professor Richard M. Weaver disliked jazz, believing that it encouraged barbarism. He wished for a society built on Platonic ideals, attention to the rules of language, and for a restoration of the Old South's feudal system, which was rooted in the maintenance of private property. Views such as Weaver's explain Trilling's accusation of conservatism being a "reactionary impulse," or a desire to pull backward.
Conservative opposition to immigration, which was particularly fervent in the 1920s and led by Southern politicians, was an urge to prevent the United States's change from a white, Christian society into, possibly, something else. The rabid hunt for Communists, resulting in the "witch hunts" of the House Un-American Activities Committee, was to prevent a disruption to the nation's free market economy as well as its founding principle of property ownership. I would say that Weaver was right in describing private property as a cornerstone of American society. At the nation's founding, only property-owning males could vote—a sign that one's value as a citizen was connected to land ownership. Civil rights for black people, who had been in the nation since its founding, would have disrupted the "feudal" vision that Weaver and many other conservatives had for the nation. Fights over the allowance of prayer in schools and the teaching of evolution tended to be more common in the South. However, they were rooted to a notion that Christian values, based on literal interpretations of the Bible, should be tantamount. According to the conservative historian John Nash, conservatives are tied to a notion that one's life should have meaning and value. While this notion is rather general, for most of us feel this way, for them, that meaning and value lies in the maintenance of Western Christian tradition.
Trilling's dismissal of conservatism may have been partly due to the rather insular lives that he and his wife, fellow writer and intellectual, Diana Trilling, led in New York City. Trilling was born and raised in the city and left only once to teach at the University of Wisconsin. He spent most of his career at Columbia University. New York was surging with ideas in the postwar period, and it was one of few places in the country where one could safely identify as a Socialist or a Communist. New York was much more progressive than other parts of the country. Trilling's sense of conservatism as "reactionary" may not have been felt in Kansas or Georgia where the traditional values that Weaver described—private property and an education rooted in the Western canon—would have made sense.