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.