Three—
The Growth of a Movement:
Old Right and New

By the mid-1950s several waves of political reaction to the New Deal and its legacy had left American conservatism a significant political voice but still disorganized and powerless. The second act in the drama of postwar American conservatism was the steady growth of an organized conservative movement as both an independent entity and a dominating presence in the Republican party. I divide this process into two phases: from the late 1950s through the early 1970s the conservative movement became an effective political contender but failed to make its mark on American politics; from the mid-1970s into the early 1980s the movement, in the form of the New Right, reached full maturity and became for a time a dominant force in American politics.

Each phase raises distinct questions. In the earlier phase the central issues are why the movement grew and why, despite the mass of right-leaning discontents in the late 1960s, it failed to have more impact. In other words what were the sources of both its strengths and its weaknesses? Effective answers to these questions do not come from theories of status politics and the allied image of a radical Right, which have often framed discussion of the conservative movement of the 1950s and 1960s. I shall address the shortcomings of this approach later in the chapter.

The key to understanding the strengths of the conservative movement in this period lies instead in a more rounded perspective. Theo-

rists of social movements sometimes distinguish members of a polity (those who have low-cost, routine access to government through established channels) from challengers (those who do not).^[1] The great strength of the conservative movement was that it had characteristics of both groups, or more precisely, that it combined many of the resources of a member with the capacity to talk like a challenger. Even as it railed against a political and cultural establishment, it drew on significant established sources of power. This combination of insider resources—support from business and the upper middle class as well as solid roots within the Republican party—and a capacity to use antiestablishment rhetoric to talk to the growing range of discontents that grew out of the 1960s constituted the strengths of the conservative movement. Though paradoxical, this combination was certainly fruitful.

The weaknesses of the conservative movement in its earlier phase were of several distinct kinds. The movement failed to form solid attachments to the two most likely standard-bearers of their cause, Richard Nixon and George Wallace. Many of the discontents to which they spoke were politically ambiguous, and if they led substantial constituencies away from liberalism and the Democratic Party, they did not encourage them to embrace conservative Republicanism. Finally, the economic downturn that would ultimately break the association of Democrats and liberals with national prosperity and progress had not yet occurred.

In the later phase of the conservative movement, from the mid-1970s into the early 1980s, the central question inevitably is what accounts for the dramatic change in the movement's fortunes, that is, for its political ascendancy. Answering that question is the task of the remaining chapters of this book, but here I must first examine the relationship between the emergent New Right and the older conservative movement out of which it grew. Did the triumph of the Right result in part from its transformation in some important way? The most common image of the New Right as a neopopulist or right-wing populist revolt quite different from earlier conservatism, and as a result more effective, is quite misleading on this score. The leaders of the New Right were not newcomers to politics with a political agenda and strategy distinct from those of the old conservatism; they were men and women with deep roots in the conservative movement and a solid commitment to conservative ideology, whose greatest inno-

vations involved reinvigorating established conservative principles and extending time-honored conservative strategies. Conservatism triumphed in the late 1970s and early 1980s not by changing but by staying mostly the same. What changed in multiple ways was the social context in which it acted.

The Old Right:
Growth and Frustration

In the late 1950s conservatism was at a nadir.^[2] Within the Republican party, where nearly two decades of conflict had sharply distinguished conservative and moderate camps, conservatives had been reduced to fruitless railing at the Eisenhower administration, which they deemed too liberal. Their longtime leader, Senator Robert Taft, had died in 1953; McCarthy had been discredited two years later; and the Democratic landslide in the 1958 midterm elections had swept much of a generation of conservative leadership out of office, though several moderate-to-liberal Republicans, most notably Governor Nelson Rockefeller of New York, managed to buck the tide.

Two palpable signs of the times came in 1960. In the spring, liberal Republican senator Clifford Case of New Jersey easily turned back a well-organized primary challenge from conservative Robert Morris, a former counsel for the communist-hunting Senate Internal Security Subcommittee. The National Review commented ruefully that Morris's loss might well mean that "a principled conservatism is not what the majority of the American people, or even, apparently, a majority of voting Republicans wants."^[3] At the Republican convention that summer, Vice President Richard Nixon, the front-runner for the presidential nomination, who tilted toward conservatism without ever being one of the faithful, bent to pressure from the liberal wing of the Republican party in acceding to Rockefeller's demands that the party pursue civil rights legislation aggressively, use the government to stimulate the economy, and support a program of medical care for the aged.

More important, there was simply no independent conservative movement to speak of, no dense network of activists, ideas, and organizations dedicated to conservative goals. There was but a smattering of journals, political organizations, and intellectual societies struggling to preserve the faith. The National Review , along with Human Events and Modern Age , provided a recognized forum for con-

servative ideas. The Intercollegiate Society of Individualists (ISI, later renamed the Intercollegiate Studies Institute) disseminated antistatist ideas on college campuses—a belated response, said founder Frank Chodorov, to the Intercollegiate Society of Socialists of the early twentieth century.^[4] Further to the right stood a collection of groups—collectively known to their many critics as the radical Right—who professed to see not just creeping collectivism at home and marauding communism abroad but also an actual communist conspiracy in control of major American institutions. The most prominent of these was the John Birch Society, founded in 1958 by Robert Welch. Others included a number of sectarian religious organizations, most of which were rooted in Christian fundamentalism: Carl McIntire's American Council of Christian Churches, Fred Schwarz's Christian Anti-Communism Crusade, Billy James Hargis's Christian Crusade, and Edgar Bundy's Church League of America.

Signs of the renewal to come were few. Out of the debacle of the 1958 elections emerged a new conservative Republican leader, Barry Goldwater. Goldwater had ridden the Eisenhower landslide into the Senate from Arizona in 1952 when he defeated then Senate majority leader Ernest McFarland. A delegate for Eisenhower, rather than Taft, at the 1952 Republican convention, he muted his criticism of the Republican administration throughout Eisenhower's first term. By 1957, however, Goldwater broke openly with the White House, declaring that it "aped New Deal antics" and that "the citizens of this country are tired of the New Deal now more than in 1952."^[5] His outspokenness and his ability to win reelection in 1958 turned the rugged, handsome Goldwater into the new conservative standard-bearer. On a less conspicuous level, conservative activists, including John Ashbrook, William Rusher, and F. Clifton White, successfully won control of the Young Republican National Federation from more moderate forces, thereby establishing a base for what would be the Draft Goldwater movement.

The early 1960s witnessed an explosion of conservative activity. Its more sensational, but less important, element was the fast growth of the radical Right. The Birch Society and the major religious right-wing organizations together had raised only a few hundred thousand dollars a year in the late 1950s, but by 1964 they were gathering about $7 million a year.^[6] The Birch Society claimed about fifty thousand members and public-opinion polls showed that at least 5 percent of

the American public could be counted as supporters of its extremist position.^[7] The insistence of these groups that communists directly controlled the government, the public schools, and the National Council of Churches received growing attention. This attention peaked in the mid-1960s, but the influence of the groups continued. The Christian Crusade and the Birch Society led the apparently grass-roots movement against sex education in public schools in the late 1960s, and the Birch Society itself played an important role in the movement against the Equal Rights Amendment in the 1970s.

Of much greater impact, however, was the growth of the less radical Right, of the conservative wing of the Republican party and the closely related conservative movement. Stung by the Nixon-Rockefeller agreement on the eve of the 1960 Republican convention (they called it the "surrender of Fifth Avenue" and the "Munich of the Republican party"), conservative Republicans managed to place Barry Goldwater's name in nomination. Knowing that conservatives were not yet strong enough to control the GOP, Goldwater withdrew his name but urged conservatives to "go to work to take this party back."^[8]

Young conservative activists within the Republican party did just that. Not content to work solely within a Young Republican organization then gearing up to campaign for Nixon, they met at William F. Buckley's family home in September 1960 to form the Young Americans for Freedom. The organization sought to "mobilize support among American youth for conservative political candidates and legislation and to act as spokesmen for conservative opinion on key issues affecting young people."^[9] Following Nixon's defeat in November, other Young Republican alumni, including Ashbrook, Rusher, and White, met in Chicago to launch what would become the Draft Goldwater movement.

Other signs of conservative revival abounded in 1962 and 1962. The New York Conservative party was founded; YAF held two successful mass rallies in New York City; and William F. Buckley, Jr., began his syndicated newspaper column. Between 1960 and 1964 the circulation of the National Review tripled to ninety thousand.^[10] Noting the proliferation of conservative clubs on college campuses, conservative M. Stanton Evans proclaimed a "new wave" of campus revolt—not the radical revolt that marked the 1960s but a conservative one. These new campus conservatives, he predicted, would be the "opin-

ion-makers—the people who in ten, fifteen, and twenty-five years will begin to assume positions of power in America."^[11]

The Draft Goldwater movement went public in the summer of 1963 and a year later helped procure the Republican presidential nomination for their candidate, in what William Rusher describes as "the most important and truly seminal year for American conservatism since the founding of National Review in 1955. It laid the foundations for everything that followed."^[12]

The glimmerings of success brought some friction within the conservative movement between the radical Right and less radical conservatives. In particular, the adamant claim of Birch Society head Welch that a literal communist conspiracy, led through most of the 1950s by none other than President Eisenhower, was taking control of American life did not sit well with more respectable conservatives who did not want their movement to appear as a lunatic fringe. The real problem, Buckley and other conservatives argued, was not a communist conspiracy but a liberal political culture, a set of widely shared beliefs that was leading America to ruin. The critique of the Birch Society escalated in the National Review from an attack on Welch alone in 1961 to a wholesale rejection of the society itself in 1965.

The growing split, however, should not obscure continuing commonalities and ties. Whether they identified it as a conspiracy or a culture, all conservatives had the same enemy—the liberal establishment. They supported the same causes, sponsored the same committees, got funds from the same sources, and shared leaders and ideas. ISI had Bircher trustees and contributors. Human Events for a time offered a joint subscription with American Opinion , the journal of the Birch Society. The radical rightist Carl McIntire joined YAF's first board of directors. Even after the break within the movement, certain connections continued. Scott Stanley, Jr., a YAF official in the early 1960s, went on to edit American Opinion for years until he left it in the early 1980s to edit Conservative Digest , a New Right journal. The active participation of Congressman Larry McDonald in the Birch Society did not dim his popularity among conservatives in the 1970s and early 1980s.^[13]

Goldwater, of course, lost badly in the 1964 general election, and with his defeat another wave of political reaction in American politics appeared to have receded. The Goldwater debacle gave Democrats control of the presidency and better than two-to-one majorities in the

House and the Senate for the first time since the New Deal. Great Society legislation continued apace.

Appearances, however, were deceiving. The conservative movement itself continued to develop, hardly skipping a beat; and in the long run Goldwater even in defeat had a positive impact. His campaign gave conservatives a commanding voice in the Republican party that they would never wholly relinquish. It stimulated further conservative activism and initiated a new generation of conservative activists: leading conservatives immediately created the American Conservative Union to carry on the battle, while the membership of YAF grew to twenty-eight thousand by 1966.^[14] The Goldwater campaign also provided the basis for direct mail as a means of fund-raising and communication for conservatives because it attracted a record number of individual contributors. Richard Viguerie, for one, began his direct-mail fund-raising empire with the names of 12,500 persons who had given fifty dollars or more to the Goldwater campaign.^[15] Finally, Ronald Reagan launched his political career with a nationally televised speech for Goldwater—still known among conservatives as "The Speech." Reagan subsequently won the governorship of California in 1966, while Republicans made major gains in Congress and the statehouses.

By the mid-1960s, too, some conservatives, especially Draft Goldwater activists like White and Rusher, had developed a general strategy for how to build a conservative majority. They argued that under conservative auspices Republicans could offset Democratic gains in the Northeast by winning over Democrats and independents in the South and the West, adding these regions to bedrock GOP support in the Midwest and the Great Plains. The "bonding ingredient of the new coalition," as Rusher put it, looking back many years later, would be exasperation with the "social consequences of liberalism." "Hard-hats, blue-collar workers, and small farmers," once drawn to the Democratic party when the dominant issues involved conflict with employers and creditors, could be attracted to the GOP because of their anger at the growth of a welfare class and at the "upswing in drugs and pornography, the loosening of sexual restraints and much else."^[16]

At the 1968 Republican convention, even though conservatives were not firmly in the saddle, the balance of political forces had shifted. Richard Nixon, again the front-runner, fought off a last-

minute challenge, not from party liberals this time, but from Reagan and party conservatives. Nixon secured the nomination largely because prominent conservative senators like Goldwater, Strom Thurmond, and John Tower honored long-standing commitments to him and held southern and western delegations in line. The lesson was not lost on Nixon: The following year he remarked that if a Republican could not win with the party's right wing alone, neither could he win without it.^[17]

By 1970 the American Conservative Union had sixty thousand members, and YAF had fifty thousand; the National Review and Human Events each boasted one hundred thousand subscribers. William Buckley's newspaper column had become one of the two or three most widely syndicated in the country, and his television debate program, Firing Line , flourished.^[18] Also in 1970 James Buckley, William's older brother, won election to the U. S. Senate from New York, running on the Conservative party ticket in a three-person race.

By this point, too, the fate of the conservative movement had become caught up in the broader sweep of political change. The resurgent radicalism of the late 1960s—black rebellion, the student movement, the counterculture, the opposition to the war in Vietnam—shattered the easy consensus that had dominated American politics since the mid-1950s. Where once there was overwhelming agreement that American capitalism amended by a variety of liberal government programs was essentially just and progressive, voices from the left condemned the continuing concentration of wealth, misplaced priorities, and racial, class, and gender injustice. Where once economic growth appeared as the central precondition for a good society, dissenters now argued that the emphasis on growth was ruining the quality of everyday life. Where once American foreign policy was widely accepted as a high-minded effort to fight communism and spread the benefits of American society around the world, critics condemned the war in Vietnam as but one barbarous expression of an immoral, imperialistic foreign policy. The shattering of the American consensus and celebration from the left ironically created an even wider opening to the right. There emerged a backlash, partly patriotic, partly racial, partly concerned broadly with law, order, and morality, always complex and contradictory, which took the form of a protest vote against the Democratic party. In the 1968 presidential

election Republican Richard Nixon and independent George Wallace together polled 57 percent of the popular vote.

Suddenly a potential conservative majority appeared within reach in America, and the political strategy of the conservative movement seemed suited to mobilizing it. To conservatives late-1960s radicalism was simply the logical extension of liberalism (not a bitter critique, as radicals saw their own actions), its ultimate harvest of violence and permissiveness. They felt sure that the popular backlash against radicalism could be turned ultimately against liberals as well as Democrats. A young conservative Nixon aide, Kevin Phillips, made these points effectively in his 1969 book The Emerging Republican Majority . (Phillips later said that he had almost substituted conservative for Republican .) American politics, he argued, was undergoing a major realignment along regional and ethnic lines comparable in magnitude to those of 1828, 1860, 1896, and 1932. Traditionally Democratic regions of the South and the West were moving into the Republican camp, as were the urban Catholics and other non-Yankee ethnic groups in the Northeast. The upheaval, Phillips argued, was partly a reaction to the "Negro socioeconomic Revolution," partly a creature of the growth of the Sun Belt and the "rootless, socially mobile" middle class that arose in its wake, and partly an expression of hostility to the liberal establishment among groups that had always opposed the established political elite. Whatever the causes, Republicans and conservatives had a great political opportunity and a clear way to exploit it—by appealing to the antielitist sentiments of the "silent majority" of Americans and to anger over what Dick Scammon and Ben Wattenberg a few years later referred to as the "social issue"—lawlessness, permissiveness, radicalism, and generally "the more personally frightening aspects of disruptive social change."^[19]

By the late 1960s a strong, growing conservative movement faced increasingly favorable circumstances for taking political power and building a conservative majority. White southerners, Catholics, and blue-collar workers seemed poised to abandon the Democratic party in response to the conservative rhetoric of Nixon and Agnew or of Wallace. Yet the early 1970s did not bring a Republican realignment or a conservative majority. Republicans ruthlessly applied the social strategy in the 1970 midterm elections, appealing in the name of law and order to "middle America" against radicals, rioters, and "permis-

sivists," but with little result. Democrats picked up twelve seats in the House and lost only three in the Senate, so that the new Congress was hardly less liberal than the previous one. In 1972 Nixon's landslide victory over McGovern brought all southern states into the Republican column for the first time and narrowed considerably class- and religion-based political cleavages. Nixon actually won a majority of blue-collar, low-income, and Catholic voters. His coattails, however, were quite short: Republicans won back only twelve seats in the House and actually lost two in the Senate.

Watergate doused conservative (and Republican) hopes. Nixon having resigned, and the GOP tarred with his disgrace, voters in 1974 elected the most Democratic Congress since the Goldwater debacle, and Republican party identification among the public hit an all-time low. President Ford chose Nelson Rockefeller, still the epitome of "eastern establishment" Republicanism to many conservatives, as his vice president. The political winds blew in a liberal direction: there was broad support for cutting defense spending; the Supreme Court had ruled unconstitutional all existing state laws restricting a woman's right to an abortion, and thirty-three of the necessary thirty-eight states had ratified the Equal Rights Amendment; government domestic spending continued to increase, and a new generation of regulatory agencies concerned with occupational health and safety, equal opportunity, and environmental protection was solidly in place; feminist, environmental, consumer, and many other liberal movements were taking wing.

What best explains the growth of the conservative movement in the 1960s, and what accounts for its limited impact? In other words, what were the sources of its strengths and weaknesses? To answer these questions effectively, one needs to move beyond the dominant line of social-scientific theorizing about American conservatism during this period. Most often sociologists, historians, and political scientists viewed the development of conservatism in terms of the growth of a radical Right, focusing in effect on the more extreme elements of the movement, such as the John Birch Society and the Christian Crusade, and they usually explained this radical Right as an expression of status politics.^[20] In this way, they constructed a picture of the conservative movement that on balance obscured more than it clarified.

In particular, the status politics analysis of conservatism as the rad-

ical Right was misleading in four ways. First, it downplayed the most important and powerful elements of the conservative movement, from National Review intellectuals to YAF political activists to Draft Goldwater movement supporters, as well as the connections between these and the radical Right. Second, it treated the conservative movement not as a sustained organizational effort but as a series of discrete political eruptions, angry expressions of diffuse social discontent that had little structure or cumulative impact. Third, it pictured conservatism primarily as a political challenger operating outside established political institutions and cutting across established political allegiances. Finally, this analysis argued that as a political challenger conservatism drew its support from those groups whose status and power in American society were either increasing or decreasing rapidly as well as from people who occupied discrepant statuses (for example, those of high income and low education). These people experienced the strains associated with their uncertain or changing social status as resulting from broader threats to cherished values. They thus were receptive to conservative polemics about communist subversion, moral decay, and creeping collectivism.^[21]

We have already seen how the first two are misleading. The radical Right did not stand alone but was one of the lesser parts of a broad conservative movement with which it shared political fortunes. Conservatism, in addition, was indeed a sustained movement to which ideology and organization were significant, not just an episodic eruption of jumbled discontent and diffuse malaise. The last two claims taken together are equally open to criticism. Conservatism was not primarily an outsider with tenuous access to political channels and resources and with its deepest roots in socially dislocated groups. On the contrary, it drew core support from the politically well-connected and the economically well-off.

Indeed, closer scrutiny reveals that the theory of status politics was not a very rigorous theory at all. It did not clearly specify who would, and who would not, be attracted to right-wing movements because in practice nearly everyone could be said to suffer status anxiety or dislocation. The contributors to The New American Right (1955) and its revised edition, The Radical Right (1963), found support for the Right everywhere—among upwardly mobile Catholic ethnics and downwardly mobile WASPs, among the newly wealthy and soured patricians, among the new elite of corporate executives and the de-

clining elite of independent businessmen, among politically disgruntled Republicans and culturally alienated fundamentalists, and among the less educated in general.

In other words, the theory of status politics created a false unity out of the diversity of support that its own social-scientific literature showed that the conservative movement enjoyed. The Right raised a rallying banner for a variety of discontents, and different movement organizations attracted different combinations of support. Indeed, in their comprehensive study The Politics of Unreason Seymour Martin Lipset and Earl Raab conceded that right-wing movements have a "cafeteria kind of quality."^[22]

A still closer look, nonetheless, reveals that common threads of another kind united the conservative movement from the McCarthy era through the 1960s. Although different movement organizations did reach out into different parts of society, they started from three common bases that assured them access to political channels and financial resources. First, they shared bedrock support among Republicans. Supporters of McCarthy in the early 1950s and the Birch Society in the early 1960s included a disproportionate number of Republicans, as did the membership of ISI and YAF and students at Christian Anti-Communism Crusade seminars. Goldwater delegates to the 1964 convention by and large were not outsiders or infiltrators with little loyalty to the party, as some maintained at the time. They had been active in the party longer and more intensively than other delegates and had contributed more money. The conservative movement thus had access to an established network of political loyalties and ties.^[23]

Second, the conservative movement drew support from important elements of the business community. McCarthy rallied small businessmen and the more conservative elements of big business, especially from the Midwest and Texas and from family-owned independent companies. Birch Society founder Welch was a former executive in his family's candy manufacturing company and vice president of the National Association of Manufacturers. In the mid 1960s the society's national council was dominated by the executives of family-owned businesses. In the early 1960s the conservative movement enjoyed considerable financial support—estimated at about half their yearly total of fourteen million dollars by investigators Arnold Forster and Benjamin R. Epstein—from a range of businessmen, corpora-

tions, and business-related foundations. Certainly not all of the business community flocked to the conservative camp, but substantial elements did even before the conservative corporate mobilization of the 1970s.^[24]

Third, with important qualifications the conservative movement had its greatest appeal among the upper middle class. Supporters of the Birch Society and other radical Right organizations in the 1960s were disproportionately affluent, well educated, and in professions or businesses. So were readers of the National Review and members of the Conservative party in New York. McCarthy, to be sure, got higher approval ratings among blue-collar workers than white-collar workers and among the less educated, but within particular occupational and educational levels he did better among those with higher incomes. Members of ISI and YAF in the 1960s were also partial exceptions to the rule, being drawn mainly from families of average income. Yet the conservative movement's center of gravity, compared to that of other movements with a quasi-conservative appeal, such as the Wallace movement, was clearly in the upper part of the social spectrum. In both the 1964 Democratic primaries and the 1968 general election presidential aspirant Wallace consistently drew his strongest support from blue-collar workers, the least educated, and the least affluent.^[25]

Beyond this bedrock support the conservative movement also drew strength from the growth of the Sun Belt, the southern white backlash to civil rights, the drift of other groups away from the Democratic party, and a pervasive, growing dissatisfaction with major American institutions. After World War II the South and Southwest underwent a rapid process of industrialization, urbanization, and population growth. Although these changes were heavily subsidized by government spending on highways, water projects, and energy production as well as on the military and the aerospace industry, they created a culture that celebrated unfettered development, free-wheeling investment, and individual enterprise—in general, unregulated capitalism. The transformation of the Sun Belt also created a class of nouveaux riches, extended affluence more broadly than before, and began to draw the disproportionate number of fundamentalists in the region back into the mainstream of American economic and, later, political life. In all these ways, it encouraged conservative political trends in the region.^[26]

Certainly the conservative movement showed tangible strength in the Sun Belt. Independent Texas oilmen like H. L. Hunt and Clint Murchison were among McCarthy's strongest backers. The John Birch Society found its greatest support in urban and suburban areas in Texas and Southern California and in the faster-growing areas of the West. Conservative activists were able to dominate the Republican party in the late 1950s by mobilizing southern and western support to join core support in the Midwest against the party's moderate, predominantly eastern faction. Finally, the Sun Belt produced a number of prominent new conservative Republican leaders, including Goldwater and Texan John Tower.^[27]

The national Democratic party's growing advocacy of civil rights legislation and an end to white supremacy in the South after World War II drove large numbers of southern whites out of the party, first in presidential elections and later gradually in lower-level races as well. The realignment had two distinct elements. The more immediate was a direct shift to the Republican party in the late 1940s and early 1950s among middle-class urban voters in the "rim" South—Virginia, Texas, Florida, North Carolina, Tennessee. This was a constituency with long-standing objections to the economic policies of the New Deal, a constituency that was already solidly Republican outside the South. Although these voters were less concerned about race, the Democratic turn to civil rights broke the thrall of the one-party South for them and left them free to pursue their economic interests. The immediate beneficiaries of their defection were moderate Republicans—Eisenhower in 1952 and 1956 and Nixon in 1960. The second kind of defection, indirect and less immediate, involved whites of all social strata in the Deep South, especially in the "black belts," those areas with high black populations. These voters supported Dixiecrat Strom Thurmond in 1948, tilted to Eisenhower in 1952, danced between the two major parties and various states' rights tickets in 1956 and 1960, went strongly for Goldwater in 1964, and then ran off with independent George Wallace in 1968. Nixon won them over (along with the rest of the South) in 1972, but Jimmy Carter brought them briefly back into the Democratic fold in 1976. This second element of realignment thus remained volatile throughout the 1950s, 1960s, and early 1970s, supporting the conservative movement's candidate in 1964 but manifesting no abiding political loyalties.^[28]

The growing restiveness of traditionally Democratic working-class and white-ethnic constituencies in the Northeast and Midwest also provided a potential reservoir of conservative support. The strong support of Catholics for McCarthy in the early 1950s and the anger of so-called hard hats at campus unrest and antiwar demonstrations in the late 1960s were two manifestations of this, but survey data also showed a more gradual, less spectacular decline in class- and ethnic-based political cleavages.^[29]

Finally, a broad public dissatisfaction with major institutions created an ethos in which an insurgent conservatism could flourish. From the 1930s through the early 1960s public confidence in government and other institutions generally increased. From the mid-1960s on, however, it plummeted. The decline perhaps was most noticeable with regard to government; more and more the public told pollsters that government leadership was unresponsive, corrupt, and subservient to special interests. Public trust in other major institutions, including business, the press, organized religion, the military, education, and unions, also declined.^[30]

What gave the conservative movement the potential to address varied constituencies and broad discontent was not specifically its anticommunism, its enthusiasm for laissez-faire capitalism, or its preoccupation with the decay of social order but the common enemy it attacked on all these grounds: central to conservative ideology from McCarthyism on was an assault on the liberal, secular, insufficiently anticommunist elite or establishment associated with the New Deal and its legacy. This establishment was identified as both ideological (liberal) and regional (eastern); it was said to embrace Washington bureaucrats as well as the leadership of big business; it included the heads of the Democratic party as well as moderate Republicans. Its protean character helped it serve as an umbrella under which to gather diverse constituencies. The conservative attack on an eastern liberal establishment could appeal to the political animosities of midwestern and rural Republicans against the eastern urban kingmakers that dominated the GOP through the 1940s and 1950s, to generations-old regional hostilities of the West and South against the East, to the racial anger of southern whites against a federal government in pursuit of racial justice, to a host of divisions within the business world, to the class hostilities of workers against business, and to discontent with the leadership of major institutions.

Hence the strength of the conservative movement lay in a paradoxical combination of respectability and rebelliousness. It combined solid political and socioeconomic roots that gave it the resources and opportunities to make itself heard with a broad antiestablishment rhetoric that allowed it to appeal to a variety of discontents.

What, then, kept the conservative movement through the early 1970s from making a deeper impression on American politics? What were its weaknesses? To begin with, conservatives never effectively hitched their wagon to either of the two leaders capable at the time of leading them to power, Richard Nixon or George Wallace. Wallace they largely rejected out of hand: although Birchers flocked to the Wallace campaign, a Human Events poll of conservative leaders in 1968 found that they overwhelmingly opposed his candidacy for president. Why did conservatives oppose Wallace? Certainly Wallace was an enemy of liberalism and a symbol of a rising tide of reaction. Certainly he took the correct conservative positions on Vietnam, crime in the streets, and the role of the federal government. Yet, conservatives argued, as governor of Alabama he had built a huge welfare state, and his presidential campaign supported Social Security and Medicare increases, public-works programs (if needed to overcome unemployment), and a range of labor legislation. Furthermore, his populist appeal coarsened, vulgarized, and distorted the conservative position. As Buckley put it in a column late in the 1968 presidential campaign: "What are we left with? The coarsening of distinctions, certainly. Polarization, just as certainly. But also the disintegrating penetration of Big Daddy Government, accelerated by the thumping dissent of the backwoods heckler."^[31]

Nixon provoked more ambivalence. He garnered conservative support in his race for the presidency and ran on a basically conservative platform. Once in the White House, his rhetorical appeals to middle America and Agnew's attacks on liberals, student radicals, and the media warmed conservative hearts. Yet, at least in conservative eyes, Nixon's policies were too liberal. During his first term he enacted wage and price controls, proposed a modest guaranteed minimum income, and failed to curb the growth in government domestic spending. He also undertook détente with the Soviet Union and made his famous opening to the People's Republic of China. In August 1971 the National Review announced it was "suspending" its support for Nixon. Later that year Congressman John Ashbrook an-

nounced his candidacy to take the Republican presidential nomination away from Nixon in 1972. Ultimately most conservatives, with important exceptions, endorsed Nixon for reelection, but only as the lesser of two evils.^[32]

The incompleteness of many of the regional, class, and ethnic realigning trends—of the revolt of middle America—in the 1960s and 1970s also limited the advance of conservatism. Although much of the West was solidly Republican and conservative, the South was in limbo, and workers and white ethnics were far from finding the Republican party and the conservative camp to be comfortable new homes. Writing in 1977, political scientist Everett C. Ladd, Jr., saw a still solidly Democratic middle America. "The protesting lower middle class may well be the natural constituency of the GOP," he remarked, "but, if so, these voters don't know it yet." Several years later, sociologist Jonathan Rieder made a similar observation about the 1970s. "Middle America was a mixture of discrete forces," he wrote, whose various discontents Republicans and conservatives could easily appeal to, but who could not easily be unified. In studying Jews and Italians of the Carnarsie neighborhood of Brooklyn, Rieder found one piece of middle America that was not so much a solidly conservative constituency as one that could be episodically and temporarily pushed to the right by antibusing controversies or bad economic conditions.^[33]

Finally, however great the political and cultural backlash that buoyed Nixon, Wallace, and the conservative movement, one more pivotal issue, the state of the economy, had not yet become problematic: the economy through the early 1970s remained fundamentally sound. The gross national product, productivity, and real wages were still growing; unemployment and inflation were relatively low. Dissatisfaction with the economic state of the nation, however, has usually been the crucial factor in public openness to parties and movements that claim to offer political alternatives. Whatever else the conservative movement could feed on in its efforts to redirect American politics from the late 1950s to the early 1970s, it lacked the one essential ingredient for political success: a sick economy with a Democrat in the White House.

The New Right:
Conservatism Triumphant

The Rise of the New Right

The early 1970s were the best and the worst of times for conservatives—times of strengths and weaknesses, redolent of the possibility of long-sought political realignment but filled with disappointment. Unlike in the late 1950s, America had a conservative movement, but that movement seemed no nearer to reorienting American politics. The tantalizing opportunities and palpable frustrations of the early 1970s brought a new generation of conservatives to political maturity and triggered a surge of conservative activism. Nixon's failure to be conservative enough, the continuing liberal direction of American politics, the Watergate scandal, and, later, President Gerald Ford's naming of Nelson Rockefeller as vice president all contributed to a growing conservative malaise. In the eyes of direct-mail fund-raiser Richard Viguerie, the last of these symbolized the dreadful state of affairs:

Nelson Rockefeller! The liberal who attacked Barry Goldwater during the GOP primaries in 1964 so strongly it helped defeat Goldwater in November. The liberal who got Richard Nixon to agree to the infamous midnight Pact of Fifth Avenue in 1960, placing a liberal stamp on the GOP platform. Nelson Rockefeller—the high-flying, wild-spending leader of the Eastern Liberal Establishment.

As a conservative Republican, I could hardly have been more upset if Ford had selected Teddy Kennedy.^[34]

Viguerie discovered that most Republicans were willing to accept the Rockefeller nomination, and conservatives standing on their own simply "didn't have the leadership or the clout" to stop it. More ominously he decided that conservatives "might be close to losing the entire battle to the left" unless something were done.^[35]

It was in this mood that new conservative leaders began to meet in 1973 and 1974 to figure out how to shore up the fortunes of their apparently sagging movement. The term New Right refers to these leaders and the strategy and network of organizations they created. They agreed that conservative failure lay not in a lack of opportunities but in a failure of leadership, organization, and effective outreach to new constituencies. The established leadership of the conservative

movement, Viguerie proclaimed, "didn't know how to lead"; they "had no stomach for a hardnosed fight"; they were "defensive and defeatist." As a result, conservatives in the early 1970s had "no organized, continuing effort to exert a political influence on elections, on Capitol Hill, on the news media, and on the nation at large." They needed an autonomous, variegated network of organizations to make the conservative presence felt. By stressing independence, the New Right did not at all want a divorce from the Republican party but simply a more equitable relationship: its leaders wanted their own independent clout so as better to influence party and politics. Conservatives had also failed, these New Right activists reasoned, to reach out to the hard-hat, ethnic, and white southern constituencies that had supported Wallace and might be ripe for conversion to the Republican party and conservatism, and the movement needed new ways for doing so.^[36]

The core leaders of the New Right included Richard Viguerie, the direct-mail fund-raiser; Howard Phillips, head of the Conservative Caucus; Paul Weyrich, head of the Committee for the Survival of a Free Congress (CSFC) and of Coalitions for America; John Terry Dolan, longtime head of the National Conservative Political Action Committee (NCPAC); and Jesse Helms, founder of the National Congressional Club. The Viguerie Company was the major New Right fund-raising organization; NCPAC and the Congressional Club became the movement's two largest political action committees; CSFC and the Conservative Caucus were pivotal organizations for lobbying, recruiting candidates, training activists, and all-purpose politicking; and Coalitions for America, including the Library Court, Kingston, and Stanton groups, was the umbrella for an array of single-issue organizations concerned with social, economic, and national-security questions. These leaders were at the heart of a dense and endlessly proliferating network of conservative organizations of every type.

Others mentioned as major New Right leaders or consistently topping lists of most-admired conservatives included Phyllis Schlafly, who spearheaded the drive against the Equal Rights Amendment; Edwin Feulner, Jr., head of the Heritage Foundation; Morton Blackwell, founder of the Committee for Responsible Youth Politics and director of the Leadership Institute; Patrick Buchanan, political columnist and for a time White House communications director in the

second Reagan administration; and Congressmen Phillip Crane, Jack Kemp, and Larry McDonald. One might include as well the leading figures of the New Religious Right because they were tied so closely to the New Right, including Pat Robertson, Jerry Falwell, James Robison, Edward McAteer, and Robert Billings.^[37]

The conservative network grew impressively in the latter half of the 1970s. By 1980 Viguerie's computer data banks held the names of about fifteen million conservative contributors, of whom about one-quarter were deemed reliable activists. NCPAC and the National Congressional Club became the two largest political action committees of any kind, followed in the top ten by several other conservative PACs, including the Fund for a Conservative Majority, Citizens for the Republic, Americans for an Effective Presidency, and CSFC. Coalitions for America served as a central forum for more than one hundred conservative organizations concerned with economic, social, and national-security issues. Beyond these were a vast range of organizations for policy-making (the Heritage Foundation), coordinating the efforts of conservative senators, congressmen, and their aides (the Senate Steering Committee, the House Republican Study Committee, the Madison Group), organizing conservative programs in state legislatures (the American Legislative Exchange Council), influencing the media (the National Journalism Center, Accuracy in Media), and pursuing conservative issues in the courts (the Pacific Legal Foundation, the National Legal Center for the Public Interest and its regional affiliates), as well as countless single-issue organizations. In some cases, New Right leaders simply worked with existing conservative organizations on an issue—for example, with the National Right to Work Committee to oppose labor unions. In others, they created organizations where none had existed before, such as Stop ERA. In still other cases, where existing single-issue groups steered clear of close ties to the conservative movement (the National Right to Life Committee on abortion and the National Rifle Association on gun control), New Right leaders added their own distinctive groups (the American Life Lobby and the Life Amendment Political Action Committee, Gun Owners of America).^[38]

New Right leaders also made a systematic effort to reach out to new constituencies in several ways. First bucking the general conservative disdain for George Wallace, they established ties with the renegade Democrat. In 1973 Viguerie took on the job of retiring Wal-

lace's 1972 campaign debt, and in the next few years he raised $7 million for the governor and came away with many million new names for his computers. In 1975 several conservatives sought to create a Reagan-Wallace third-party ticket, an effort that fell apart when Reagan's prospects for the Republican nomination seemed to improve the following year.^[39]

Second, New Right leaders made a concerted effort to appeal to the social conservatism of traditionally Democratic or politically independent constituencies on a growing list of issues that the 1970s bountifully threw their way: abortion, the Equal Rights Amendment and feminism, drug use, pornography, school textbooks and curricula, busing, affirmative action, gay rights, and so on. "Conservatives cannot become the dominant political force in America," Viguerie insisted, "until we stress the issues of concern to ethnic and blue-collar Americans, born-again Christians, pro-life Catholics and Jews. Some of these are busing, abortion, pornography, education, traditional Biblical moral values and quotas." Weyrich argued that social or family issues would be to conservatives in the 1980s what Vietnam or the environment was to liberals in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Upon Reagan's 1980 victory and for several years thereafter New Right leaders emphasized the importance of the social agenda in putting Reagan in power and maintaining his support.^[40]

Most important, the New Right sought to organize the growing political restlessness of evangelical Christians in the late 1970s. As television preachers and other evangelical leaders became politically active over abortion and what they regarded as government harassment of private Christian schools, New Right leaders helped channel their efforts. Howard Phillips recruited Edward McAteer, already active in the conservative Christian Freedom Foundation, as a field director of the Conservative Caucus and then helped him found the Religious Roundtable. Weyrich helped Robert J. Billings, long active in the Christian schools movement, found the National Christian Action Coalition to lobby for legislation relevant to these schools. McAteer and Billings in turn brought Phillips and Weyrich together with television evangelists James Robison, Pat Robertson, and Jerry Falwell. With New Right help, Falwell founded the Moral Majority in 1979. The New Right was also instrumental in starting the third major religious Right organization, Christian Voice, whose first Washington representative, Gary Jarmin, had been legislative director of Ameri-

can Conservative Union. "We are sort of the operations people," said Weyrich, summing up the New Right's role. "It has been our job to tell them, 'Okay, here is what to do.' "^[41]

With heightened activism and organization, the New Right also showed signs of substantive political clout. The opposition to the ERA, led largely by Schlafly and Stop ERA, along with the John Birch Society and other older conservative groups, effectively blocked further progress to ratification after 1974. In 1976 conservatives, with the conspicuous exception of Goldwater and Clifton White, united around Ronald Reagan's candidacy for the Republican presidential nomination, and President Ford needed the full power of his office to eke out a narrow victory. In the late 1970s the Conservative Caucus, along with the American Conservative Union and the American Security Council (a right-wing organization founded in the 1950s), led the vigorous opposition to the Panama Canal treaty, which enjoyed bipartisan political support. In the 1978 midterm elections NCPAC backed the successful senatorial campaigns of several conservative Republican challengers, including Gordon Humphrey in New Hampshire and Roger Jepsen in Iowa. In the New Jersey Republican primary that year Jeff Bell, a young activist with the American Conservative Union, did what conservatives had failed to do eighteen years before—defeat Senator Clifford Case. Bell lost to Bill Bradley in the general election, but his success in the primary symbolized how far conservatism had come.

Reagan's victory in the 1980 elections completed the conservative ascent. Gone were the dour tones and long looks of 1974; "the greatest victory for conservatism since the American Revolution," crowed Phillips; "the most massive political victory" in the history of conservatism, exulted Dolan; "conservatives don't have to be ashamed of what they profess to believe in order to win elections," rejoiced Weyrich. It was "your victory," Reagan told the Conservative Political Action Conference in March 1981. In retrospect the 1970s appeared as a "conservative decade" to James C. Roberts, a former ACU political director and conservative historian of the period. Conservatism had "come to the climax of its long march," William Rusher concluded; whatever future elections might bring, it was "unmistakably on the playing field."^[42]

What Was New about the New Right?

In coming of age, did conservatism, or some element of it, change? Did the secret of the New

Right's success lie in some qualitative transformation in the nature of right-wing politics? Many of the most influential studies of the New Right, most notably Alan Crawford's Thunder on the Right and the writings of Kevin Phillips, argued that it constituted a major rupture within the conservative movement. The New Right, it was alleged, comprised a cadre of political activists with roots outside the conservative movement, who departed from older conservatism by advocating collectivist economic positions and making other ideological innovations, attacking established elites (including big business) and invoking populist symbols, and noisily proclaiming themselves radicals while assailing other conservatives. It was, in short, neopopulist, not conservative. Kevin Phillips put it this way:

Leaders of the overtly populist New Right—Richard Viguerie, Paul Weyrich, and Howard Phillips, among others—also waved the banner of radical conservatism, invoking the tactics of Andrew Jackson, inveighing against the Fortune 500, mobilizing single-issue movements, criticizing the institutionalized elites of both parties, and occasionally even acknowledging their roles as radicals, not as traditional conservatives.^[43]

Although many New Right leaders themselves at times seemed to endorse this image, it was for the most part misleading and wrong. The most striking characteristic of the New Right was its continuity with the older conservative movement in leadership and ideology as well as to a large extent in strategy and rhetoric. In it the conservative movement had come of political age. Differences between the New Right and the Old Right were usually superficial.

New Right leaders, when in a more reflective mood, acknowledged as much. Thus Viguerie at a 1981 conference on the New Right said, "There's not a great deal 'new' about the New Right. Our views, our philosophy, our beliefs, are not that different, if at all, from the Old Right. It is our emphasis that is different at times."^[44]

And Roberts, in his exhaustive work on the conservative movement in the 1970s, added:

To the extent that Old Right and New Right have any meaning at all, it is only in purely chronological terms. . . . Such differences as exist between these two factions—and they are numerous enough—tend to be personal or to issue quite understandably out of a competition for fame and fortune.

On matters of principle and policy there is no major difference between these groups and individuals.^[45]

Most of the leaders and core activists of the New Right had cut their political teeth in the conservative movement or the Republican party (or both).^[46] Those who had not were recruited largely by those who had and came to similar political positions independent of the conservative movement. Viguerie was the first executive secretary of the Young Americans for Freedom in the early 1960s, before beginning his own direct-mail organization in 1965 with a list of Goldwater contributors. He subsequently raised funds for various conservative Republican candidates, including Phil Crane's initial run for Congress in 1969 and John Ashbrook's 1972 primary challenge to President Nixon, thus establishing himself as a major conservative fund-raiser. Howard Phillips helped found the Young Americans for Freedom in 1960 while student body president at Harvard and joined its first board of directors. He spent the 1960s and early 1970s working in and around the Republican party, ending up as head of the Office of Economic Opportunity in the Nixon administration, where he was initially charged with dismantling the War on Poverty program. Weyrich, though the product of a blue-collar, union neighborhood, came from a Republican family and got his political training in the GOP as an aide to conservative Republican senators Gordon Allott of Colorado and Carl Curtis of Nevada. Dolan was a member of YAF and an organizer for Nixon in 1972.

Other New Right leaders had similar or even longer histories in conservative and Republican politics. Schlafly got her first job after graduate school in 1945 with the American Enterprise Association (later the American Enterprise Institute). Between 1952 and 1964 she ran unsuccessfully for Congress on the Republican ticket, served as a delegate to several Republican conventions, presided over the Illinois Federation of Republican Women, worked with a number of right-wing organizations, and published several anticommunist pamphlets. In 1964 she gained considerable fame for her pro-Goldwater book A Choice, Not an Echo . Subsequently she published several more books on the communist threat, lectured and spoke at conservative gatherings, and was elected vice president of the National Federation of Republican Women. After losing a bitter contest for presidency of that organization in 1967, she withdrew and began

to publish the Phyllis Schlafly Report to keep in touch with those who supported her. These supporters became the core of Stop ERA and the Eagle Forum in the 1970s.

Phillip Crane began his political life in the Draft Goldwater movement in the early 1960s before winning election to the House of Representatives and serving a stint in the late 1970s as head of the American Conservative Union. Patrick Buchanan, who was a YAF member, worked in the Goldwater movement and subsequently became a speechwriter for Nixon and Agnew. Edwin Feulner of the Heritage Foundation joined ISI in his undergraduate days and did graduate work in the mid-1970s on an ISI Weaver Fellowship before becoming a personal assistant to Nixon's defense secretary, Melvin Laird, and working as an aide to Congressman Crane. Larry McDonald was a member of the John Birch Society (of which he became national director shortly before his death in 1983) before his election to Congress in 1974. Morton Blackwell began his political career as the youngest delegate at the 1964 Republican convention, where he supported Goldwater. He subsequently became executive director of the College Republican National Committee, an executive with the Viguerie Company, and editor of Conservative Digest , Viguerie's New Right monthly. Finally, Jack Kemp, a quarterback for the Buffalo Bills in the American Football League in the 1960s, supported Goldwater in 1964, served as an aide to Governor Reagan in California, and was a long-time member of ISI before winning election to Congress in 1970.

To be sure, not all prominent New Right figures grew up in the conservative movement and the Republican party, but even those who did not hardly represent departures from the conservative mold. They simply came to the same conservatism along a different route. As I shall show in Chapter 4, issues like abortion, pornography, school prayer, and the rights of Christian schools put a number of evangelical Christians on the road to the conservative movement, with indigenous conservative activists helping them along. Helms began his career in segregationist politics in North Carolina. In 1950 he worked on Willis Smith's successful primary campaign against incumbent senator Frank Graham, a campaign marked by racist and red-baiting tactics. He subsequently served as head of the North Carolina Bankers' Association and was elected to the Raleigh City Council before beginning a twelve-year stint in 1960 as a commentator on a Raleigh television station. Helms's commentaries were noted for

their uncompromising support of free enterprise (he had read libertarian economist Ludwig von Mises years before) and opposition to civil rights and communism, which he tied closely together. He switched to the Republican party in 1970 and ran successfully for the U. S. Senate in 1972, a position to which he was reelected in 1978 and 1984.

The continuity in leadership between the New Right and the older generations of the conservative movement stretched well below the top ranks. The generation of conservative activists that came of age in the 1970s was filled with alumni of YAF and ISI. Important former YAF members included Robert Bauman, a former Republican congressman and head of the American Conservative Union before the revelation of his homosexuality ruined his career; Jeffrey Bell, also an important figure in ACU and a Reagan campaign advisor in the late 1970s; Anthony Dolan, a Reagan speechwriter; Lee Edwards, one-time editor of Conservative Digest ; Kathleen Teague, head of the American Legislative Exchange Council; R. Emmett Tyrrell, Jr., editor of the American Spectator , a conservative journal begun in 1967. ISI alumni prominent on the Right have included Kemp and Feulner as well as Richard Allen, Reagan's first national-security advisor; Paul Craig Roberts, an assistant secretary of the treasury under Reagan and a major proponent of supply-side economics; John F. Lehman, who served many years as Reagan's secretary of the navy; and Charles Heatherly, who edited Mandate for Leadership , the Heritage Foundation's primer for the incoming Reagan administration, and in the mid-1980s was acting head of the Small Business Administration.^[47]

Just as important, the basic ideology of the New Right did not change substantively: it combined a militant anticommunism with a libertarian defense of pristine capitalism and a traditionalist concern with moral and social order. In the 1980 volume The New Right: We're Ready to Lead , for example, Viguerie evenhandedly condemned government intervention in the economy, the decay of traditional values, and the advance of world communism. Just as telling were the heroes and mentors Viguerie invoked, virtually all of whom were of the conservative movement. His first political heroes, he wrote, were "the two Macs," Douglas MacArthur and Joseph McCarthy. He credited William F. Buckley, Jr., and Barry Goldwater as the "two men more responsible than any others for the strength and vitality of conservatism in American today," and for a definition of conservatism he

turned to the fusionism of Frank Meyer.^[48] Surveying New Right writings, one finds no evidence for the claim that it was a neopopulist combination of statist economics with social conservatism. The label might well fit George Wallace, but the New Right's overtures to Wallace did not result in an abandonment of its economic libertarianism.

Moreover, the two most noteworthy ideological departures of the New Right, the emphasis on social issues and the adoption of supply-side economics, ended up simply reemphasizing or restating established conservative themes. The emphasis of New Right Leaders in the 1970s on social issues as a way of winning over blue-collar, Catholic, and evangelical constituencies certainly was new, but it largely reflected historical opportunities: the 1970s gave conservatives a cornucopia of social issues on which to build. Although some conservatives and many of Reagan's advisors disagreed with the strategy, because social issues are divisive and unpredictable, the general approach was one that conservative activists had employed with growing awareness at least since the Draft Goldwater movement.

Above all, the New Right's stance on social issues invoked the basic traditionalist themes that were incorporated into conservatism in the 1950s and 1960s. More precisely, by the 1970s an ideological division of labor had developed within conservatism that directed the traditionalist emphasis on moral order, community, and constraint to the social issues while the discussion of economic issues stressed mainly libertarian themes of individualism and freedom. A gender division inevitably developed as well, in which issues relating to what was considered the male world of work evoked libertarian rhetoric and those relating to what was seen as the female world of family evoked traditionalist rhetoric.

The March 1981 Conservative Digest provided an especially sharp example of this compartmentalization. In that issue articles on unions and big government struck a distinctly libertarian chord. A discussion of the National Right to Work Committee criticized the union shop ("compulsory unionism") as a restriction of "freedom of choice for millions of American workers." An account of the work of the Council for a Competitive Economy stressed that organization's effort "to put the 'free' back into a free economy." Both articles were effusive in their praise of individualism, opportunity, and self-fulfillment.^[49]

In the same issue articles on abortion and the family echoed very

different traditionalist themes. A critical discussion of the National Abortion Rights Action League expressed skepticism about the whole notion of free choice: "To hear the pro-abortion folks talk, you'd think choice is an absolute right. But it isn't. Underlying the whole concept of law is the idea of choice limitation. In no area of human activity is choice unlimited."^[50] Another article stressed that the very existence of society requires restraining the pursuit of individual self-interest: "A society cannot exist without recognition of and adherence to a common good. The common good requires people to act out of motives larger than their own narrow self-interest. Unless people are capable of self-restraints upon their appetites and desires, the common good cannot be maintained."^[51] The family and the traditional nurturant role of women in it, the article continued, are essential to cultivating these self-restraints.

In short, the New Right's emphasis on social issues did not introduce a new concern into conservative ideology and certainly not one that was incompatible with established themes. Granted that on issues like abortion and the Equal Rights Amendment one could find in the New Right, as one observer put it, a strong "critique of market rationality, individualism, and the prevalence of career convenience over nurturant ties of kin and community"; this critique still did not imply a new and explosive philosophical incompatibility. As I showed in Chapter 2, such traditionalist themes had been central to conservative ideology for a generation. If they seemed to contradict the libertarian themes of the Right, the contradictions were time-honored, and conservatives had considerable experience managing them.^[52]

A second unique feature of the ideology of the New Right was the adoption of supply-side economics.^[53] Developed by a small but enthusiastic group of economists in the mid-1970s and propagated in The Public Interest and the Wall Street Journal , this theory caught the imagination of New Right intellectuals, and of Ronald Reagan and Jack Kemp in particular. Its basic argument was that high marginal tax rates are a major cause of economic stagnation and hence that tax cuts are the key to economic prosperity. Cutting marginal tax rates, supply-siders argued, stimulates investment, work, and creativity and thus promotes economic growth. A sufficient cut could produce enough economic stimulus actually to increase government revenues by greatly expanding the tax base. This was the message of the so-

called Laffer curve: a large tax base and low rates will yield as much revenue as a smaller tax base and higher rates.

Supply-side economics reoriented conservative and Republican economic thinking in two ways. First, it made reducing the size of government more palatable by emphasizing cutting taxes before dealing with the more arduous problems of cutting spending and balancing the budget, which had traditionally preoccupied the Right. Second, it conveyed a rosy optimism by arguing that the economic problems wrought by big government could be solved with little pain or dislocation. Previously conservatives and Republicans had usually offered tight money, balanced budgets, a degree of austerity, and other painful remedies for the nation's economic ills.^[54] Supply-siders, by contrast, were sure that tax cuts would so stimulate the economy that no one would suffer: there was, after all, a "free lunch." In both these ways supply-side economics, when taken up by Reagan, Kemp, and others, offered what seemed a more positive and appealing statement of the conservative economic position to an American public concern about unemployment, inflation, and economic stagnation and less than sanguine about the capacity of the Democratic party to deal with those problems. If the 1980 election, as many observers have argued, was largely a plebiscite on how well the Carter administration had handled the economy, the presence of a cheery supply-side alternative made the judgment all the more easy. As Thomas E. Cavanagh and James L. Sundquist noted in 1985:

The Republican Party is no longer the party of austerity, the party of balanced budgets and tight money. . . . The adoption of supply-side economics has given it a new rhetoric of growth and opportunity, and its politics have given priority to tax reduction for both individuals and corporations with an almost casual disregard for deficits far larger than those for which it used to castigate the Democrats.^[55]

In no sense, however, was supply-side economics a substantive departure from conservative ideology; indeed, it echoed the deepest of conservative themes. In justifying tax cuts, it provided an especially forceful restatement of the classic libertarian defense of pristine capitalism by emphasizing that individual creativity and productivity, not rational planning, are still the essence of capitalism; that entrepreneurship and competition still energize the system even in an age

of large corporations; and that the state is largely an impediment to economic health, not its prerequisite. At the same time it also lent itself to the incorporation of traditionalist themes and to the construction of a moral, as well as a utilitarian, case for capitalism. In Wealth and Poverty , the 1980 volume that became a bible for the new Reagan administration, George Gilder argued that capitalism is not only economically productive but morally good as well: its creative impulse is fundamentally altruistic and divinely inspired.^[56]

In light of the continuities of leadership and ideology on the Right, neither the invocation of populist and radical rhetoric nor occasional political infighting constitute evidence for a fissure between the New Right and the Old Right. To be sure, New Right leaders occasionally boldly proclaimed themselves radicals, not conservatives, as in Weyrich's often-quoted statement: "We are radicals who want to change the existing power structure. We are not conservatives in the sense that conservative means accepting the status quo." But the conservative movement, since its earliest days in the 1950s, had never been conservative in this sense; its goal had been to undo the legacy of the New Deal. The very first issue of the National Review in 1955 in fact referred to its readership as "radical conservatives." Other New Right leaders, like Jack Kemp, spoke spiritedly about a "new conservatism." The newness, however, usually meant greater optimism or activism, a new effort to appeal to traditionally Democratic constituencies, not any major change in ideology or agenda.^[57]

The New Right leaders also used populist rhetoric, attacking the establishment and the elite in the name of the people. In the mid-1980s they founded the American Populist Institute and the Populist Conservative Tax Coalition, and there was much talk about a populist-conservative third party. But all this was just rhetoric, and even as rhetoric it was hardly new. As John Judis pointed out, "populist conservatism" was not an alternative to an older conservatism, but simply a "new way to market it." Although in his 1983 book The Establishment vs. the People Viguerie took broad aim at the power and corruption of America's elites, attacking big business and banks as well as big government, unions, and media, he offered no program for radical decentralization of power in general or for dealing with the concentrated power of business in particular. Indeed, big business in his view sinned not by being capitalist or big but by being liberal—seeking government subsidies and regulation, supporting

sex and violence on television, and trading with the Soviet Union. Accordingly, Viguerie's proposals for change were standard conservative pleas for less government domestic spending, more law, order, and morality, and a tougher foreign policy. His populist rhetoric, moreover, was hardly new. As I have shown, ever since the days of Joe McCarthy and Whittaker Chambers conservatives have inveighed in the name of the people against the establishment, though less because it was an establishment than because it was liberal.^[58]

Finally, the rise of the New Right certainly caused conflict within the conservative movement itself. Older conservative organizations initially feared that the creations of Viguerie and other New Right activists would siphon off scarce resources rather than expanding them. New Right leaders criticized some older conservatives for failures of leadership and organization. More strikingly, they beat a steady tattoo of criticism of the Reagan administration for failing to appoint enough movement conservatives to government positions and to pursue the conservative agenda aggressively. None of these conflicts, however, reflected a basic split over ideology and policy, which is why they never led to outright schism. Despite often feeling the barbs of New Right criticism, Buckley could still praise the New Right as the "front-line troops of the conservative movement" and as "brilliant technicians" exerting "the kind of lobbying pressure we haven't seen in years." And the venerable National Review , while disagreeing with New Right criticism of Reagan, could still acknowledge that such criticism valuably focused attention on the unfinished elements of the conservative agenda. The National Review and Human Events , another older conservative publication, ran large congratulatory ads in the tenth-anniversary issue of the New Right's Conservative Digest in 1985. Even Barry Goldwater, who clashed bitterly with those in the New Right over the nomination of Sandra Day O'Connor to the United States Supreme Court (he supported his fellow Arizonan, they opposed her as too liberal) and a host of other issues never totally lost their affection. The Heritage Foundation honored the retiring senator at a 1985 dinner, during which Feulner declared him to be "the main contributor to the whole political movement which led to the election of Ronald Reagan."^[59]

All in all, what was new about the New Right was much less significant than what was old. Its leadership, ideology, strategy, and even rhetoric was largely of a piece with those of the Old Right.

Those who claimed otherwise either misread what the New Right said or invoked a faulty image of the history of the conservative movement.

The conservative movement that had emerged haltingly in the late 1950s and early 1960s with a reconstructed ideology and the beginnings of political organization and had become an effective political contender by the early 1970s strode confidently into power in the early 1980s. The secret to its transformation from contender to victor cannot lie in internal changes since in fact it had changed little in the 1970s. Nor can the secret lie simply in growing public discontent or social upheaval, of which the late 1960s certainly had more than the late 1970s. It lies instead in broader changes that crystallized existing conservative-leaning discontents into the palpable form of activists, money, and votes, matters that the remaining chapters address.