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]