PART ONE—
BECOMING A CONTENDER

One—
Historical Prologue:
Revolution and Delayed Reaction

"Last November's victory was singularly your victory," President Ronald Reagan told the Conservative Political Action Conference in March 1981. "Fellow citizens, fellow conservatives—our time is now, our moment has arrived."^[1] The political movement that Reagan addressed was hardly three decades old when it savored its greatest triumph. American conservatism had certainly existed before the 1950s, but during that decade conservatives substantially transformed themselves. They reconstructed their ideology, discarding some themes, adding others, modifying still others. They began to build a long-term movement to gain broad political power. They even for the first time agreed on conservative as the name for their new ideology and their fledgling movement—a symbolic expression of a new political beginning. Understanding American conservatism in the age of Reagan requires starting with the historical context in which it emerged in the 1950s.

First of all, however, let us be clear about what this conservatism is. The constellation of economic, social, and national-security themes that define recent American conservatism as a worldview is no doubt clear enough. In economics, conservatives have stressed freeing the market from the constraints of government. They have consistently equated less government with more freedom and greater prosperity: cutting taxes, domestic spending, and regulation would lead to greater freedom for Americans to produce, create, and

achieve and hence to increased national wealth. On social issues, conservatives have condemned the secular, humanistic bent of American culture and its corrosive effects on the traditional family, gender roles, religion, and morality. In regard to national security, conservatives have urged greater spending on the American military to counter the growth of the Soviet military and restrict Soviet power. In their view, the conflict between the United States and the Soviet Union is a struggle not simply between superpowers but between good and evil, civilization and barbarism; it suffuses not just the immediate relationship between the two countries but also most conflicts around the world where U.S. interests are threatened.

We can call these three elements of conservatism respectively economic libertarianism, social traditionalism , and militant anticommunism . To be sure, not all political issues fit neatly within rubrics. Nor is being a conservative an all-or-nothing proposition: one may be an economic conservative without being a social one, or vice versa. One may be more or less conservative within each category; one may advocate conservatism in principle in any of these areas while compromising it in practice—for example, by conceding a minimal "safety net" of welfare programs, downplaying the importance of social issues like abortion, or even negotiating arms agreements with the Soviet Union. What matters is that what has come to be called conservatism and the way that conservatives have defined themselves involve the conjunction of these three elements.

The core assumption that binds these three elements is the belief that American society on all levels has an organic order—harmonious, beneficent, and self-regulating—disturbed only by misguided ideas and policies, especially those propagated by a liberal elite in the government, the media, and the universities. From a fully developed conservative perspective, America's problems result not from the inherent contradictions or conflicts of a capitalist economy, a patriarchal family, or an unequal international world order but from liberal tampering with otherwise harmonious, self-sustaining systems. The free-market capitalist economy would function well except for government grown too big and too powerful because of liberal social-welfare and regulatory programs. Family, morality, religion, and gender roles would be smoothly intact if liberal elites had not encouraged permissiveness, secularism, alternative life-styles, and feminism. The Soviet Union would not pose so great a threat to American security and

international affairs would prove amenable to American interests and actions if liberals had not hobbled defense spending for so long and been soft on communism. Perhaps many conservatives would not put things so baldly, but implicit in their ideology is, first, the identification of liberal elites and ideas as a central cause of America's problems and, second, a belief in the possibility of a natural, pristine harmony within existing institutions.

Conservatives themselves have been quick to identify the 1950s as the seminal decade in their collective political and ideological life. Writing in the early 1960s, Frank Meyer, an editor of the National Review and one of the central architects of a reconstructed conservative ideology, remarked: "The crystallization in the past dozen years or so of an American conservative movement is a delayed reaction to the revolutionary transformation of America that began with the election of Franklin Roosevelt in 1932." Most internal histories of the conservative movement since then have identified a similar starting point.^[2]

Meyer's words may sound strange to nonconservative ears. To many historians and social scientists, the New Deal, far from being a "revolutionary transformation," was a set of moderate reforms that undercut any possibility of such a transformation. The reaction to the New Deal, the hard-line effort to undo it, did not wait for the mid-1950s to coalesce: witness the activities of Herbert Hoover, Robert Taft, the American Liberty League, and the American Mercury in the 1930s and 1940s. Understanding the roots of contemporary American conservatism nonetheless requires seeing how the New Deal, whether a revolution or not, transformed the American political landscape and how the reaction to the New Deal, if not beginning in the 1950s, transformed itself at that time.

The New Deal "Revolution"

Despite the assertion of conservatives like Meyer, in many ways the New Deal was clearly not revolutionary.^[3] It was a practical, fairly moderate collection of programs aimed at dealing with the almost total economic collapse of the Great Depression. It brought together a variegated set of reformers, who enacted an eclectic set of programs between 1933 and 1938—immediate relief for the unemployed, home owners, farmers, and bank depositors; tentative efforts at economic planning and government-owned enterprise; the beginnings of a

welfare state; progressive tax reform; antitrust legislation aimed at utility holding companies and a general inquiry into the concentration of property ownership; and legislation promoting collective bargaining and unions. Certainly, FDR never succeeded in transforming American politics to pave the way for economic planning or social democracy. His plans for reorganizing the executive branch of government got nowhere; his efforts to purge the Democratic party of conservatives were late and half-hearted; and, above all, he failed to articulate a reform ideology, an alternative to the fundamentally individualist, antistatist American political tradition. As a result, the New Deal never created the comprehensive welfare state or the forms of economic planning characteristic of many European capitalist countries.^[4]

Despite occasionally radical rhetoric, New Dealers typically saw themselves as saviors of capitalism at a time when economic hardship was breeding leaders and movements of much greater radical potential. Senator Huey Long of Louisiana, until his assassination in 1935 probably the most popular politician in America after FDR, toured the country advocating a major redistribution of income and starting Share Our Wealth societies. Father Charles Coughlin, a parish priest from Royal Oak, Michigan, enthralled a huge radio audience with a proposal to nationalize the banks. (His anti-Semitism, for which he is better known to posterity, came later, after his political clout and popularity had begun to wane.) Francis Townsend, a California physician, received considerable support for his $200-a-month pension for all persons over sixty, and Townsend clubs sprang up across the country. Also in California, author Upton Sinclair, the best-known socialist in America, started the popular End Poverty in California movement and won the Democratic nomination for governor in 1934, getting 40 percent of the vote in the general election. Progressive and Farmer-Labor movements held political power in Wisconsin and Minnesota, and a new wave of militant union organizing spread throughout the industrial heartland. Compared to all these proposals and movements, the New Deal was hardly radical.

The New Deal nonetheless significantly transformed American politics in at least two ways. First, whatever its limits, it did insert the federal government more deeply into American life than ever before. The federal government became committed to providing at least some social-insurance programs and to exerting at least some control

over economic life. Although New Deal ideas and programs often seemed to echo those of the Progressive Era, the overall ethos and effect were different: operating during general prosperity, most progressives were content to involve government in limited ways to correct the abuses and inequalities of an otherwise sound society. Attempting to cope with almost total economic collapse, the New Deal, without acknowledging it, gave government a more permanent and pervasive role, pushing it further along the continuum from judge or policeman to manager or protector and placing it at the heart of national life.^[5]

Second, the New Deal entailed the biggest political realignment in American political life since the Civil War. From the 1860s to the early 1930s, and especially after the elections of 1896, the Republican party had all but dominated American politics. From 1896 to 1932 Democrats controlled the House and the Senate each in only three of eighteen Congresses. They won the White House only twice—once in 1912, when the Republicans split between William Howard Taft and Theodore Roosevelt, and again in 1916, with Democratic incumbent Woodrow Wilson in the White House. Neither time did Wilson get a majority of the popular vote. Republicans won consecutive presidential elections in 1920, 1924, and 1928 by landslides, the Democratic candidate never getting more than 41 percent of the vote.

In this context the early 1930s did indeed represent a political earthquake. Democrat Franklin D. Roosevelt won the White House in 1932 with 57 percent of the popular vote—the first time since James Buchanan in 1856 that a Democrat had captured the presidency with a popular majority. Democrats made gains in both houses of Congress in an unprecedented four consecutive elections from 1930 to 1936, gaining 170 seats in the House and 36 in the Senate. The Seventy-fifth Congress convened in 1937 with lopsided Democratic majorities of 333-89 in the House and 75-17 in the Senate.

The Democrats rode to power on a major political realignment that, beginning in the mid-1920s and accelerating in the 1930s, brought a large constituency of urban ethnic and working-class voters outside the South into the Democratic fold. Voter turnout in the North and the West increased from an all-time low of 54 percent in the 1920 presidential election to 74 percent in 1940. Northern and western cities, longtime Republican strongholds, slid back into the Democratic camp. The electorate changed in a fundamental way: the

once respected Literary Digest straw poll, which had accurately predicted the results of the 1928 and 1932 elections, failed miserably in 1936, giving Republican candidate Alf Landon about twenty percentage points more than he actually got. Survey samples drawn from telephone directories and presumably biased to the higher socioeconomic strata no longer accurately reflected the electorate as a whole.

The realignment also changed the balance of power and the political divisions within each party. The Democratic party ceased to be a largely southern party with a few northern appendages. As a new urban ethnic and working-class constituency came to the fore, the northern segment of the party came to predominate in the mid-1930s, and the social basis of support for liberal or progressive economic programs changed at least partly from rural to urban. New Deal programs after 1936 shifted accordingly, and resistance to the New Deal among southern and western Democrats—and with it a "conservative" coalition with Republicans—emerged. At the same time, the geographical cleavages within the Republican party reversed themselves. In the East, a bastion of the old guard, or conservative wing, of the party, Republicans found they had to accommodate to New Deal issues to compete for the votes of the new constituencies. In the Midwest and West, formerly the home of the progressive wing of the party, Democrats attracted many of the GOP's progressive elements, while Republicans picked up isolationist defectors from the Democratic ranks. As a result, where eastern old-guard Republicans had once faced progressive midwestern and western Republicans, now more and more the Eastern moderates faced midwestern and western conservatives.^[6] It was, in short, a changed political world in more ways than one, and these changes revolved around the New Deal.

The "Delayed" Reaction

The activist phase of the New Deal came to an end in 1938, the year that saw the last of FDR's major legislation, including the Fair Labor Standards Act and a new Agricultural Adjustment Act; yet its opponents were too weak to organize a full-scale reaction. In the ensuing years—1938, 1946, and the early 1950s—wave after wave of reaction fell short of putting into power a leadership able and willing to undo New Deal gains. The result was a political stalemate that persisted into the 1950s and beyond.

The New Deal in fact lost its momentum very soon after its landslide victory in the 1936 elections. After five years of economic recovery, the gross national product and industrial production fell sharply in 1937 in what opponents dubbed the "Roosevelt recession." Sitdown strikes and labor militancy among industrial workers increasingly alarmed middle-class voters, and FDR's efforts to gain a liberal majority on the U.S. Supreme Court by expanding its membership to fourteen provoked widespread opposition and damaged his prestige. Southern and western Democrats came to oppose New Deal initiatives. In late 1937, on one important vote on the fair labor standards bill, which proposed to set a minimum wage and maximum working hours, one-third of House Democrats joined most Republicans in voting successfully to recommit the bill to committee. While 101 of 152 southern and western Democrats defected, only 31 of 177 other Democrats did.^[7] Seventy-four percent of the defectors were from rural districts. Finally, in the 1938 midterm elections Republicans posted their first gains since 1928, picking up eighty House and six Senate seats, while FDR's belated effort to defeat conservative Democrats fell flat.

The opposition to the New Deal, however, remained weak and disorganized. The Republican party was a small minority in both chambers of Congress and lacked clear leadership. The nascent conservative coalition in Congress never fully solidified; its support shifted from issue to issue and fell apart totally in such areas as farm legislation. Furthermore, it never got beyond rearguard actions, often supporting and winning only small changes in New Deal legislation. Finally, the major independent anti-New Deal organization, the American Liberty League, effectively fell apart after the 1936 elections (though it continued in existence until 1940) despite substantial support from big business.

World War II put domestic political conflict on ice in the early 1940s. Whether the New Deal would have regained momentum in the absence of war, or conservative reaction would have pushed FDR out of office in 1940, is a tantalizing question that we need not address here. As it happened, America emerged from the war still in political stalemate. New Deal activists sought unsuccessfully to press forward with social change.^[8] In 1944 FDR had pledged to enact an economic "bill of rights," guaranteeing decent housing, education, and health care for all Americans. After the war New Dealers argued that the wartime experience, during which the gross national product

doubled in an economy under considerable government control, showed that government investment could keep the economy booming. They proposed an increased role for the government in planning and investment, which would include, among other things, responsibility for full employment and national health insurance. In foreign affairs they emphasized the importance of world peace as central to America's national interest, a peace to be insured through cooperation between the victors in World War II, world government, and a more equitable world order. Little of this came to be; postwar liberal legislation was either never enacted (national health insurance) or was enacted in eviscerated form (full-employment legislation). The new Democratic president, Harry Truman, shied away from the more ambitious ideas and stocked his administration with Democratic moderates. The party itself lost control of Congress in the 1946 elections as Republicans gained fifty-six new House seats and thirteen new seats in the Senate.

The extension of the New Deal failed for many reasons, but two seem especially important. First, continuing economic prosperity dulled the appetite of many Americans for additional social reform. That this prosperity itself benefited from government spending on highways, mortgage subsidies, and GI benefits was simply an irony of history. Second, the growing fear of communism abroad and at home ultimately shifted the emphasis to opposing the Soviet Union and rooting out subversion at home.

A full-scale conservative reaction, however, did not replace New Deal activism. If Americans had little taste for extending the New Deal, they adamantly rejected any hint of undoing it. The 1948 elections drove that point home. Republicans expected to finish the job begun in 1946 by taking back the White House for the first time in sixteen years. The political mood seemed conservative. Truman was hardly the charismatic leader that FDR had been, and the Democratic Party was badly split: its more liberal elements gravitated to former vice president Henry Wallace and his Progressive party, while Southern segregationists, angry at the Democrats' nascent concern with civil rights, defected to Governor Strom Thurmond of South Carolina, running on a states' rights platform. Voter turnout also favored the Republicans as it fell to 53 percent, the lowest since the 1920s. Yet Truman rode to a most improbable victory over Republican Thomas E. Dewey, and Democrats retook the Congress, picking up seventy-

five House and nine Senate seats. Truman's campaign made appeals to many constituencies, but the overarching theme was an attack on the Republicans as "gluttons of privilege" eager "to do a hatchet job on the New Deal" and make "America an economic colony of Wall Street." Class polarization of the presidential vote was the highest ever recorded, with middle-class voters going heavily Republican and working-class voters heavily Democratic.^[9]

The 1948 elections, however, represented a mere interruption in the rumblings of conservative reaction. Unable to make headway by attacking Democrats on domestic New Deal legislation, Republicans and conservatives more and more emphasized Democratic and liberal softness on communism, both the Soviet threat abroad and subversion at home. They in effect chose to run against the spirit and leadership of liberalism, not its economic substance, by accusing liberals of softness, even treason, on the issue of communism. Americans since the beginning of the New Deal seemed to have embraced New Deal programs without wholly forsaking the philosophy of free enterprise. FDR had even encouraged this attitude by ultimately justifying his programs as restoring individual opportunity. Conservatives could most easily advance their fortunes, therefore, by attacking liberals themselves and their allegedly collectivist ideology in a way that did not immediately implicate specific programs. Allegations that Democrats and liberals were sympathetic to, soft on, or even in cahoots with communism were an effective tactic. Conservatives could even use such charges to reverse the rhetoric of class conflict. If Truman had appealed to workers and farmers against Wall Street and its Republican representatives, Senator Joseph McCarthy could appeal to the plain people of America against a treasonous political elite, "the bright young men who are born with silver spoons in their mouths"; and Whittaker Chambers, the accuser of Alger Hiss, could claim to speak for "the plain men and women of America" against "the enlightened and the powerful." The meaning of McCarthyism, Frank Meyer argued later in the 1950s, was that liberals were unfit to lead a free society because their worldview and sympathies were unsuitable.^[10]

Of course, communism did not suddenly emerge as an issue in 1948. Republicans had long linked the New Deal to communism, and they used their control of Congress after the 1946 elections to press investigations by the House Un-American Activities Committee into

alleged cases of subversion. Nor was communism the preserve of Republicans alone. For their part, Democrats and many liberals had moved after World War II against both domestic communism and the Soviet Union. Federal loyalty and security programs scrutinized the political credentials of government appointees; the Democratic party purged itself of leftists; the Congress of Industrial Organizations expelled communist-led unions; the top membership of the Communist party was convicted under the Smith Act; and liberal anticommunist organizations like Americans for Democratic Action policed the left flank of liberalism. In addition, the Truman administration embarked on an anticommunist foreign policy with the Marshall Plan for rebuilding Western Europe, the creation of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, and the promulgation of the Truman Doctrine, a commitment "to support free peoples who are resisting attempted subjugation by armed minorities or by outside pressures"—in effect, to resist communist aggression or subversion around the world.^[11] Meant partly as a defense against conservative charges, this liberal anticommunism may well have helped make communism more of an issue.

What certainly increased the importance of the communism issue and placed it firmly in the Republicans' lap were several events in 1949 and 1950—the announcement of the explosion of the first Soviet atomic bomb coupled with evidence that American atomic secrets had been passed to the Soviet Union; the victory of the Chinese revolution; and the conviction of Alger Hiss, a major New Deal figure, for perjury in denying charges that he had spied for the Soviet Union. It was in this atmosphere that a minor speech by an obscure Republican senator, Joseph R. McCarthy of Wisconsin, on February 9, 1950, in Wheeling, West Virginia, launched a renewed conservative assault on the New Deal around the issue of domestic communist subversion—an assault that became known as McCarthyism. The outbreak of the Korean War later in the year encouraged its growth.

This wave of reaction too, however, fell short. The issues of "corruption, Korea, and Communism" may have helped the Republicans win the presidency and both houses of Congress in 1952, and Republican control of government gave McCarthy control of a Senate subcommittee from which to pursue his investigations.^[12] In the long run, whatever its impact on individual lives, McCarthyism did not lead to a major change in policies. Eisenhower was not a liberal activist, but

neither was he a conservative. His administration was a period of some retrenchment and much consolidation but not of wholesale revocation of New Deal legislation. An expanded domestic role for government was here to stay. After flirting with the idea of liberating Eastern Europe and other communist-controlled areas, Eisenhower settled down to a policy of containment mixed with occasional negotiations. McCarthy himself lost much of his official support in 1954 when he started investigating subversion in the U.S. Army. The 1954 midterm elections returned the Democrats to power in Congress, and a year later the Senate censured McCarthy.

The broader political trend of the late 1940s and the 1950s, moreover, was away from the Republican party. In a sense the New Deal realignment was still unfolding. In states from New England to the West Coast a new generation of elected Democratic leaders emerged: Senator Hubert Humphrey in Minnesota, Governor G. Mennen Williams in Michigan, Governor Edmund Muskie in Maine, Senator William Proxmire in Wisconsin (replacing the deceased McCarthy in 1957), and Governor Pat Brown in California. With them, Democratic party organizations established themselves in states where a sustained Democratic presence had been lacking for generations. The 1958 midterm elections gave Democrats forty-nine new House and fifteen new Senate seats, their biggest majorities since the height of the New Deal and, above all, a majority in the House of Representatives even without counting the southern seats. Eisenhower left office in 1960 with the Republicans in their weakest position of the postwar years; once neck-and-neck in party affiliation among voters in the late 1940s, Republicans now trailed Democrats by a wide margin. The solidly Democratic South, to be sure, was beginning to crack, but this split would not have its full impact until well into the 1960s.^[13]

Finally, a generally healthy economy, though dampening the desire for further liberal reform, also minimized public openness to the major redirection of American politics conservatives proposed. The gross national product and productivity generally rose, as did real income.

What came to dominate American politics in the 1950s was neither an extension of the New Deal liberalism nor conservative reaction. Many have called it cold-war liberalism, stressing its combination of anticommunist foreign policy and the slow growth of the domestic state. Others have called it interest-group liberalism, emphasizing

the extent to which debate over clear political options gave way to jockeying among interest groups for governmental favors. Alan Wolfe has named it the Growth Coalition to underline the importance given to economic growth as a solution to all political conflicts, while Godfrey Hodgson has called it simply, and misleadingly, the liberal consensus.^[14] Whatever its name, the basic elements of this consensus were the following:

1. An affirmation of American capitalism, as reformed or amended since the New Deal, as an unparalleled source of both material abundance and social justice.

2. A belief that enough economic growth would mute social conflict over scarce resources and obviate hard political choices concerning how society ought to be organized.

3. An affirmation of a positive role for government in economic life, not primarily to redistribute wealth or plan production, but rather to promote economic growth by pumping money into the economy and to solve what were regarded as the vestigial injustices of a basically sound society.

4. An acceptance of a permanent American role in international affairs, understood as necessary to protect American interests around the globe and to contain communism.

Within this consensus there remained much room for debate and disagreement. Of more relevance for this discussion, however, is what got left out. On the one side was a tiny, defeated left that doubted the viability or fairness of even a reformed capitalism, questioned the centrality of economic growth, rejected the subordinate role given government in economic life, and criticized American foreign policy as an effort to maintain an American empire rather than as an attempt at true internationalism. On the other side was a sizable conservative force, critical of the new consensus even while sharing common ground with it. From the conservative perspective the new consensus was simply a continuation of New Deal liberalism. Conservatives regarded reform and the growing role of government as detracting from, rather than enhancing, American capitalism. Economic growth would be achieved, wrote Barry Goldwater in 1960, "not by government harnessing the nation's economic forces, but by emancipating them." Conservatives viewed American foreign policy

as a crazy mixture of half-hearted tries at containing communism and doomed attempts to negotiate with it rather than as a forthright effort to roll back communist advance. Goldwater scolded both Republican and Democratic leaders for not making "victory the goal of American policy."^[15]

In general, conservatives in the 1950s were in a contradictory political position. They had shown themselves a force to be reckoned with although unable to get into power—not even in the Republican party, let alone in the country. A national mood of self-satisfaction and quiescence had smothered liberal activism but had not sufficiently promoted conservative reaction. More important, conservatives found themselves rejecting vehemently what they regarded as the liberalism dominant in American politics even while making the same procapitalist, anticommunist appeals. Because they shared two such potent symbols with the dominant consensus, they had sure access to the political arena. At the same time, the liberal consensus gave both those symbols contents different from what conservatives wanted them to have. Procapitalism had come to imply not laissez-faire but an active, if modest, role for the state as macroeconomic manager and guarantor of social welfare; and anticommunism meant not the isolationist ideal of avoiding political involvement in European affairs but a complicated internationalist effort at containment, mixed with negotiation.

In short, political common sense—the content of the dominant political symbols—had changed. Consequently, conservatives could no longer rely on easy appeals to that common sense to put them back into power. They needed to remake in new terms the case for a pristine capitalism—a capitalism devoid of a major role for the state. They needed to stake out a kind of anticommunism at once different from that of the liberal consensus yet shorn of the vestiges of isolationism with which conservatives entered the 1950s. To become an effective political contender, conservatives had to reconstruct their ideology.

At the same time, if the policies of the Eisenhower administration represented the extent to which the political pendulum would swing back after the New Deal swing forward, then conservatives had to concede that the natural rhythms of American politics would not return them to power. The New Deal realignment had by the 1950s created a greatly strengthened Democratic party, well entrenched throughout the north and west, and new constituencies for that par-

ty's liberal wing. To become an effective political contender, conservatives had to build their own movement, look for support in new places, and dig in for the long haul. They had to mobilize.

As if in recognition of the political changes they were undergoing, conservatives finally decided what to call themselves. By the late 1950s they generally agreed that conservative was their proper name, not individualist , true liberal , or libertarian . Up to that point, the label conservative had led a rather homeless existence in American political discourse.^[16] Throughout most of the nineteenth century it was conspicuous by its absence (as was its companion term, liberal ). In the European politics of that day, conservative referred generally to the resistance to the major features of modern Western society—industrial capitalism, political democracy, and an individualist culture—in the name of an agrarian, aristocratic, communal social order. Liberal referred generally to support for those same changes. Because those changes came relatively easily in the United States and conflict over them was relatively muted, there was little use for the terms that described the opposing sides in those conflicts.

In the early twentieth century, conservative and liberal, their meanings substantially altered, did become common labels for describing opposing positions in American politics. Conservatism came to mean the defense of laissez-faire capitalism against government-sponsored reforms as well as opposition to internationalism and world government and to women's rights, and support for traditional religion and morality. Liberalism came to mean the opposite in each case. In the 1930s FDR chose to call his New Deal programs liberal and tarred his opponents as conservatives; general usage followed suit.

Nonetheless conservative remained a partisan political label. FDR might have called his opponents conservatives, but former president Herbert Hoover insisted that he was the "true liberal," while writer Albert Jay Nock called himself a "radical," an "individualist," or an "anarchist," anything but a "conservative."^[17] Entering the 1950s, hard-line opponents of the New Deal legacy still went by a variety of names, or by none at all. The Freeman , the early-1950s mouthpiece of that opposition, described itself in its first issue as a "traditional liberal" journal. William F. Buckley's first book, God and Man at Yale , defended "individualism" and "Christianity" against "collectivism" and "Agnosticism" without calling its position conservative. Frank

Chodorov, for a time editor of both The Freeman and Human Events , another important hard-line journal, usually called himself an "individualist," and named the primary organization he founded the Intercollegiate Society of Individualists.^[18]

As the movement and its reworked ideology coalesced, however, conservative became the label of choice. National Review , which was founded in 1955 and rapidly became the movement's premier journal, called itself a "conservative journal of opinion." Buckley's 1959 volume, Up from Liberalism , made it clear that the destination of its ascent was "conservatism." Works with conservative in their titles proliferated—Goldwater's The Conscience of a Conservative , Willmoore Kendall's The Conservative Affirmation , Frank Meyer's What Is Conservatism? In the fall of 1960 the founders of Young Americans for Freedom referred to themselves as "young conservatives." Indeed, conservatives quickly became protective of their new name, fiercely defending their right to use it against external critics; by 1964 Buckley could comfortably proclaim that any usage that did not center on his National Review and the movement it represented had simply become eccentric.^[19]

The story of American conservatism in the 1950s and 1960s and into the 1970s is about how conservatives both reconstructed an ideology and built a movement. The important point here is that the 1950s represented for conservatives a new beginning, or, in Meyer's word, a "crystallization." Reaction, though not delayed, was transformed.

Two—
Reconstructing an Ideology

Continuities and Changes

American conservative ideology in the 1980s, as exemplified in Ronald Reagan's speeches and in the writings of his followers, developed in the 1950s and early 1960s. Its distinctive themes were articulated in a number of places, the most influential and symptomatic of which was the National Review , founded in 1955 by William F. Buckley, Jr. One ought not to be misled by the fashionable tendency since the mid-1970s to see new beginnings on the right: however much American conservatism has changed since the 1950s in its strategy, its sources of support, and its propensity to compromise on one issue or hew strictly to principle on another, its ideology has remained fundamentally the same. One also ought not to be seduced by the kind of intellectual history that sees an unchanging conservatism extending back over the generations—perhaps to Edmund Burke and nineteenth-century celebrants of tradition and organic order or alternatively to the nineteenth-century purveyors of laissez-faire, social Darwinism, and atomized individualism. American conservatism as we know it is neither brand-new nor timeless; it has a history of some three decades.

The 1950s, as I showed in Chapter 1, were contradictory times for conservatives. Economic prosperity and political reaction stifled any revival of New Deal activism but did not lead to a wholesale undoing of existing New Deal reforms. What emerged instead was the compromise sometimes called the liberal consensus, which emphasized the active use of government to consolidate American power and contain communism abroad and to promote economic growth

through private enterprise at home. Conservatives shared the procapitalism and anticommunism of this consensus but gave both terms quite different meaning. To the extent that they simply acquiesced in the dominant political ethos, they risked political homogenization; to the extent that they departed from it, they risked political oblivion.

Caught in political stalemate and faced with a difficult ideological dilemma, conservatives fell to ideological self-scrutiny, the result of which was the growth of what historian George Nash calls the "conservative intellectual movement." This movement found its voice in a growing number of journals, first Human Events and The Freeman , later the National Review , Modern Age , and many others.^[1]

The fruit of this self-scrutiny was the active reconstruction of conservative beliefs. The conservative ideology that developed in the 1950s and early 1960s preserved the core concern of anti-New Deal conservatism with the problem of collectivism but greatly changed the ways in which that problem was understood. To understand American conservative ideology in the age of Reagan, we need to understand which of its features came through the reconstruction process intact, which features changed, and why they changed. We need to look behind conservative ideology as a finished historical product to see how it was constructed and how its constituent elements fit together.

What has stayed the same in American conservative ideology since the 1930s has been its core opposition not simply to the New Deal but, more importantly and more accurately, to the broader trends that the New Deal was said to represent. This continuity is what makes the conservative intellectuals of the 1950s and 1960s sound a lot like Herbert Hoover or the American Liberty League and what makes Ronald Reagan sound a lot like all of them. To get at this core stance let us return to the writings of Frank Meyer, longtime National Review editor and one of the most important formulators of a reconstructed conservative ideology in the 1950s and 1960s. Immediately after characterizing the American conservative movement as the "delayed reaction" to the "revolutionary transformation" of America begun by the New Deal, Meyer went on to say:

That revolution itself has been a gentler, more humane, bloodless expression in the United States of the revolutionary wave that has swept the globe in the twentieth century. Its grimmest, most total manifestations have been the phenomena of Communism and Nazism. In rather peculiar forms in late years it

has expressed itself in the so-called nationalism typified by Nasser, Nkrumah, and Sukarno; in Western Europe it has taken the forms of the socialism of England or that of Scandinavia. Everywhere, however open or masked, it represents the aggrandizement of the power of the state over the lives of individual persons. Always that aggrandizement is cloaked in a rhetoric and a program putatively directed to and putatively concerned for "the masses."^[2]

This passage nicely captures the assessment of the modern world that lies at the heart of American conservative ideology. Note the assumptions made explicit here or lurking just beneath the surface:

1. The central peril facing humankind in the twentieth century is the "aggrandizement of the power of the state," the growing tendency of the state to organize or plan social life (a trend that conservatives call statism, collectivism, rationalism, or, at an extreme, totalitarianism).

2. The growth of the state results primarily from—or is at least justified as—an effort "putatively directed to and putatively concerned for 'the masses.' " That is, it has occurred in the name of equality, social welfare, or building an earthly utopia.

3. A variety of apparently different political phenomena, including communism, fascism, Third World nationalism, European social democracy, and American New Deal liberalism, are all in essence similar because they all tend toward statism or collectivism.

4. By implication, only two kinds of society are possible—collectivism and what most conservatives would call free society, which is in effect capitalism understood in a particular way. In principle, at least, to depart from the latter substantially is to put oneself on a slippery slope to totalitarianism; the middle ground is precarious.

Although their core concern remained the same, conservatives transformed their case against collectivism both abroad and at home in the 1950s and early 1960s. First, conservatism moved dramatically from an isolationist to an interventionist anticommunism. Coming out of World War II, conservatism, while certainly anticommunist, maintained the classic objections of prewar isolationism to an active international role in the United States. Isolationism, however, was increasingly out of step with political reality, or at least with the dom-

inant interpretation of that reality. In the early 1950s conservatism shifted to an interventionist anticommunism, which managed to distinguish itself from liberal anticommunism by stressing liberation rather than containment. In this way conservatism accommodated to the dominant political consensus while remaining critical of it.

Second, conservatives attempted to revise their argument against the growing domestic state and their defense of laissez-faire (or what I shall soon call "pristine") capitalism. As the 1950s approached, the conservative position tended to have a utilitarian bent, criticizing big government for hampering economic prosperity, and celebrating unfettered capitalism for promoting it. Although this argument obviously has never disappeared, it lost credibility for a time in the 1950s and 1960s as increased government spending seemed to coincide with economic health and as the liberal consensus successfully appropriated the language of economic growth and prosperity to justify a growing, if circumscribed, role for government. Conservatives, as a result, sought to make their case in an alternative way as well, arguing that whatever their short-term consequences, unfettered capitalism and the kind of economic freedom that goes with it were inherently good. That is, they attempted to make a moral case for capitalism to go along with the utilitarian one. The conservative concern with how best to promote unfettered capitalism provided the rationale for a philosophical discussion about how to bring together two very different kinds of conservative language—a libertarianism that emphasized individualism and freedom, and a traditionalism that stressed moral order and community.

The Transformation of Anticommunism

As it emerged from World War II, conservative thought was largely isolationist or noninterventionist. It was wary of the broad new role the United States was taking in the world in the name of anticommunism and critical of high levels of defense spending and the growing power of the president in military and foreign affairs. It feared that an anticommunist crusade would simply be an excuse for supporting old corrupt empires and governments or for establishing a new American imperialism; it worried that global overcommitment would wreck the American economy or lead to a third world war with

more dire consequences than the first two; it believed that mobilizing to oppose the Soviet Union might be a greater threat to American liberty than the Soviet Union itself. This is not to say that conservatives yielded anything to liberals and Democrats in regard to anticommunism but merely that their anticommunism was initially of a different kind, one that would prove unviable in the postwar world.

Beginning roughly in 1947, the year James Burnham published his influential The Struggle for the World , a second kind of conservative anticommunism, interventionist in nature, began to appear; by 1955, the year the National Review began publishing, it had all but pushed aside noninterventionist anticommunism among conservatives. Rather than being skeptical of America's new global role as leader of an anticommunist crusade, it pressed this crusade with a vengeance. It was critical of the foreign policy of the Truman administration for doing too little and being too disorganized, not for doing too much.

The shift from noninterventionism to interventionism was the occasion for a split on the Right between self-labeled conservatives and self-labeled libertarians. The latter, who did not make the transition and thus found themselves outside the new conservative camp, often pictured the transition as an abrupt break or a brazen intellectual theft. Libertarian Murray Rothbard contrasts the Right of the 1930s and 1940s, which worried about the growth of the "leviathan state" abroad as well as at home and which provided "the main political opposition to the Cold War," to the newer Right of the 1950s and 1960s, whose only goal, he argued, was the annihilation of the Soviet Union. Conservative historian George Nash, however, emphasizes the ease with which the transition took place. Nash is more nearly correct: noninterventionist anticommunism gave way relatively smoothly to interventionist anticommunism, partly because historical circumstances had rendered the former obsolete and partly because despite their obvious differences, the two had some less obvious similarities. Noninterventionist anticommunism could become interventionist after selective, if dramatic, ideological pruning.^[3]

Prewar Noninterventionism

To understand postwar noninterventionist anticommunism, one needs first to understand the so-called isolationism of prewar years; and the first step in doing that is to recognize that the label is misleading in at least two ways.^[4] First, isolationism did not mean total noninvolvement of the United States

with the rest of the world. What isolationists typically rejected were long-term or entangling political commitments, especially involving European affairs. In this sense, the term noninterventionism is probably more accurate, especially in the context of the 1930s and early 1940s, when the central issue was nonintervention or neutrality toward the growing conflicts in Europe, which in effect meant not going to war with Germany.

Second, there were many isolationisms, not just one. Rather than being one consistent ideology or movement, isolationism or noninterventionism was a feature of a variety of political positions and drew on a range of arguments. Some students of the movement err by focusing wholly on its conservative, anticommunist tendencies; others by highlighting its radical, anti-imperialist variants. Thus, some noninterventionists were pacifists; others, like the America First Committee, advocated strong air and naval forces to defend the Western Hemisphere. Some were noninterventionist out of ethnic sensibilities—the anti-English bias of Irish Americans or the pro-German bias of German Americans; others were noninterventionist out of a broader anti-imperialism. Some were anti-Semitic, blaming war on Jews, though most were not. Some were conservative advocates of a laissez-faire capitalism; others were liberals, progressives, and socialists. The Midwest may have been especially fertile ground for isolationism, but regional sensibilities were not essential to it. Certainly through the mid-1930s noninterventionism had broad and diverse support, and it would be wrong to see it simply as a product of the Midwest, specific ethnic minorities, fascist sympathies, or xenophobia.^[5]

In the late 1930s, to be sure, public support for noninterventionism declined markedly as the practical difficulties of neutrality became manifest, as evidence of German aggression increased, and as public sympathy shifted to Britain and France. Noninterventionism, moreover, became more closely allied to anti-New Deal conservatism. While noninterventionist organizations still spanned the political spectrum, the major liberal journals were strongly in favor of going to war against fascism; the leading noninterventionist organization, the America First Committee, tilted distinctly to the right; and noninterventionist liberals often found themselves pushed in that direction for want of an audience on their customary political terrain.

Despite the drift to the right, however, noninterventionists on the

eve of American entry into World War II still drew on a diverse repertoire of arguments. Among the most prominent arguments against going to war, especially with Germany, were the following:

1. America should avoid entangling alliances and expensive long-term commitments that undermine its independence, threaten to bankrupt its economy, and limit its ability to retain control over its own foreign policy. The crucial feature of a viable foreign policy, in short, should be unilateralisrn .

2. Europe is so corrupt and problem-ridden that America can do nothing to help it. Getting involved will simply drag America down.

3. War or a war-oriented economy necessarily aggrandizes the state, concentrates power in the presidency, and otherwise threatens democracy and freedom at home. War has never done anything to spread democracy and freedom abroad.

4. There is no compelling moral reason for America to go to war against Nazi Germany, a country that is no worse than Britain or France. Going to war against Germany inevitably would mean American support for British and French imperialism and perhaps ultimately the growth of an American empire. European conflicts, and perhaps wars in general, are not ideological or moral battles in which one side is markedly better than the other; they are economic and territorial contests between self-interested states.

5. Going to war with Nazi Germany would mean an alliance with the Soviet Union, which would ultimately promote communism.

6. The Nazi regime in Germany may be horrible, but it is practically no direct threat to the United States. We can hardly expect a German invasion across the Atlantic Ocean, especially if we maintain strong air and naval defenses. Moreover, Germany's natural aspirations lie to the east, where we can hope Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia will bleed themselves to death in a prolonged war.

7. Wars are always the result of conspiracy and manipulation; they are fought not because of external threats but to deal with domestic problems. Bankers, munitions makers, and other war profiteers manipulated the United States into World War I. Faced with the domestic failures of the New Deal, FDR is maneuvering us into war with Germany and Japan.

In short, prewar noninterventionism appealed to a range of themes: unilateralism, dislike of Europe, antistatism, anticommunism, anti-imperialism, realpolitik, and a distrust of elites.

Noninterventionist Anticommunism

At the close of World War II the conservative noninterventionist could advance many of the same arguments to oppose the foreign policy of the Truman administration. Everything from the United Nations to the Atlantic Pact to the Truman Doctrine smacked of entangling alliances and overreaching commitments. The high levels of defense spending and the secrecy with which a number of postwar agreements and policies was made threatened to increase state power and undermine democracy. If conservatives agreed on the evil of the Soviet Union, they hardly looked favorably on our allies, especially Britain, which was doubly damned for its empire and its Labour government. The Soviet Union, many conservatives argued, was not a direct threat to the United States; we would overburden ourselves if we tried to protect every nation potentially threatened by it. A third world war against Russia, moreover, might paradoxically lead to the strengthening of world communism just as the first two wars had. The real communist threat was domestic and took two forms: first, policies of appeasement, and perhaps outright treason, that since the wartime and postwar conferences had ceded big pieces of the world to the communists; and second, the economic crisis and totalitarianism that militarization and global overinvolvement might bring.

A prime example of noninterventionist anticommunism was the speech delivered to the Senate by Senator Robert Taft, the acknowledged leader of the Republican party in Congress and a longtime noninterventionist, on January 5, 1951, part of the "great debate" on American foreign policy. Taft was unequivocal that the Soviet Union was an aggressive totalitarian power bent on world domination and that America "must be the leader in the battle to prevent the spread of communism and defend liberty." Yet he had little good to say about the anticommunist foreign policy of the Truman administration.^[6]

Taft strongly criticized the secret, centralized, undebated way that policy was being made—the very way, he added, that Democratic administrations in the 1930s and 1940s had made the policies that had appeased the Soviet Union, helped make it a world power, and led to the problem that current policies were trying to solve. "It is part of

our American system that the basic elements of foreign policy shall be openly debated," Taft argued, but the Roosevelt and Truman administrations had concentrated foreign policy-making power in the executive and "assumed complete authority to make in secret the most vital decisions and commit this country to the most important and dangerous obligations." A "dangerous" new theory of bipartisanship had even arisen that "there shall be no criticism of the foreign policy of the administration" because such criticism undermined national unity and aided the enemy. President Truman had committed American troops to Korea without consulting Congress; now, Taft warned, the president even claimed the right to use atomic weapons without consultation, and a secret agreement seemed to be in the offing to send American troops to Europe.

Taft also attacked what he regarded as three false premises underlying Truman administration policies: that the United States had broad moral responsibilities around the globe; that the Soviet Union sought direct military conquest of the world and hence that war with it was inevitable; and that a high level of defense spending was necessary and acceptable. The goals of American foreign policy ought to be limited and realistic, he argued, not "to reform the entire world or spread sweetness and light and economic prosperity" but simply to maintain American liberty. Although the Soviet Union certainly planned to spread communism throughout the world, Taft continued, it hardly envisioned military conquest or a war with the United States. Stationing American troops in Europe, however, might provoke war with the Soviet Union because "however defensive and pacific our intentions, the building up of this force must look like aggression when it is completed." Finally, Taft argued that the high level of military spending required by the foreign policy of the Truman administration would lead to high taxes and inflation, domestic economic disaster, and, ultimately, loss of liberty.

In short, Taft combined classic noninterventionist positions—a limited international role for the United States, the downplaying of the immediate enemy threat, a fear of military spending, and even the thinly veiled accusation that the administration was warmongering—with a compelling sense that America nonetheless had to act forthrightly against the Soviet Union. The specific proposals in Taft's speech reflected this mix of views. He rejected stationing American troops in Europe, criticized the Korean War as unwise, and counseled

against any obligations that required extensive use of land-based forces. Instead he advocated reliance on sea and air power to defend the Western Hemisphere, "island nations" like Japan and Great Britain, and potentially Western Europe as well; a counteroffensive by Chiang Kai-shek against the Communist Chinese, at least until peace was made in Korea; "aggressive methods of propaganda" for promoting the "philosophy of liberty"; and efforts to organize insurgencies in Soviet satellite countries. Taft also urged his fellow senators to recognize that in reality the United States was at war with China in Korea and to "untie the hands of our military commanders."

Other conservatives made a noninterventionist case similar to Taft's. Former president Herbert Hoover, a senior statesman of conservative Republicanism, ringingly condemned the evils of communism and chastised the Democrats for years of "acquiescences and appeasements" but nonetheless opposed the Truman administration's military buildup to fight communism as disastrous for the American economy. Rather than shouldering the entire burden of defending the world against communism, Hoover counseled, America should either convince its allies to join the mobilization or, failing that, retreat to a defensive posture, developing its air and sea power to defend the "Western Hemisphere Gibraltar of western civilization," and perhaps Great Britain and Japan, but no more.^[7]

Felix Morley, founder and onetime editor of Human Events before it forsook noninterventionism, argued that the militarism and military establishment that inevitably went with an interventionist anticommunist foreign policy would lead to imperialism abroad and concentration of power at home—both policies incompatible with "republican institutions." Frank Chodorov, who edited both Human Events and The Freeman , ratified this argument and added that if communism came to America, it would not be by conquest—the Soviet Union was not strong enough for that—but because Americans wanted an expanded state: "Communism will not be imported from Moscow; it will come out of Wall Street and Main Street." Murray Rothbard, already distancing himself in the early 1950s from the main conservative camp in favor of a purer libertarianism, argued that the real enemy was not the Soviet Union or even communism but the state itself. Because all states were inherently coercive, repressive at home and imperialist abroad, the proper goal was limiting state power in general.^[8]

Interventionist Anticommunism

By way of contrast with noninterventionism, consider the writings of the most able and influential interventionist conservative, James Burnham, later an editor at the National Review , who presented his position in a series of books in the first decade after the war: The Struggle for the World (1947), The Coming Defeat of Communism (1950), and Containment or Liberation? (1953). Although the emphasis and argument of each of these books differ somewhat, reflecting in part the last stages of Burnham's odyssey from left to right, together they present a fairly consistent stance.^[9]

Even before World War II had ended, Burnham argued, World War III had begun between the United States and the Soviet Union, a struggle that would decide who would control the world. The Soviet Union brought to this conflict immense population and resources; the United States, a more economically, politically, and culturally advanced society. What had been telling thus far, however, was that the Soviet Union recognized that it was at war and pursued its goal of world dominance single-mindedly and wholeheartedly. The United States, because of its immaturity on the world stage, had failed to grasp geopolitical realities, take on its new international responsibilities, and mobilize accordingly. The crucial factor, therefore, Burnham argued, would be "politics and political will."

Burnham had nothing but scorn either for advocates of appeasement, who counseled getting along with the Soviet Union, or for the isolationists, who resisted America's new global role and seemed willing to surrender the European continent. He aimed his main criticism, however, at the emerging doctrine of containment, as codified in George Kennan's writings and put into practice in the Truman Doctrine, the Marshall Plan, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, aid to Greece and Turkey, and American rearmament. As its name indicates, this policy sought to contain Soviet expansionism wherever it might strike in the hope that such determination would eventually pressure Soviet leaders into giving up their expansionary goals and moderating their policies. To be sure, Burnham saw containment as a step in the right direction, and he believed the coherence of U.S. foreign policy to be greatly enhanced by the centralization of policy-making in the executive branch that accompanied it—the creation of the National Security Council, the Department of Defense, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and the Policy Planning Staff of the State Department.

Nonetheless, Burnham regarded containment as fatally flawed on

a number of grounds. Containment seemed to imply that the United States could ultimately coexist peacefully with the Soviet Union once its leaders had modified their geopolitical goals. As a purely defensive strategy, it in effect let the Soviet Union choose the time and place of confrontation to its own advantage; it also did nothing to weaken Soviet power in its European base or its subversive, aggressive power abroad. Above all, containment was not a sufficiently lofty or inspiring goal to sustain the "moral and spiritual demands" required by the "heavy expenditures of resources, talents, and courage" that fighting communism required. "Who," Burnham asked, "will willingly suffer, sacrifice, and die for containment?"^[10]

Underlying all these flaws, Burnham argued, lay a failure to recognize three realities of the postwar world. First, the United States and the Soviet Union were already at war; the apparent peace was illusory. Second, in the modern world the lines between war and peace, military and civilian, had broken down. War was now fought by a host of nonmilitary—political and ideological—means. Third, the Soviet Union was not a conventional state but the "main base of a world communist movement, an unprecedented enterprise" that was at once a secular religion, a world conspiracy, and new kind of army, irrevocably pledged to world domination.^[11]

What, then, was to be done? According to Burnham, the United States had to make the "destruction of the power of Soviet-based communism" the central objective of foreign policy and focus its energy accordingly. To accomplish this objective would require, first of all, stopping communist expansion not only through direct containment but also by breaking the power of communist movements within noncommunist countries. More important, it demanded an offensive strategy, what Burnham variously called a "policy of liberation" or an "Eastern European strategy," which would openly seek to overthrow communist regimes in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe through "political-subversive" warfare—a massive propaganda campaign and the support of refugee liberation movements.^[12]

Burnham, in short, summoned the United States to take an active leadership role in the world and to mobilize for the war for world power already under way with the Soviet Union. He believed the stakes were high, the moment late, the enemy dangerous and powerful, and victory attainable only with immense sacrifice and expense. Yet if the United States did mobilize, he thought, the Soviet

Union would be overwhelmed. The Soviets' great advantage lay in the capacity of their leadership to define and pursue wholeheartedly the goal of world domination. If American leaders showed a similar determination, that advantage would evaporate and the inherent weaknesses of the Soviet Union would come to the fore. But for all his talk about war, Burnham did not expect his policy of liberation to lead to direct armed conflict between the United States and the Soviet Union.

The Transition

Despite their shared anticommunism, the noninterventionist and interventionist positions were clearly as different as day and night. The noninterventionists in effect called for retrenchment, a foreign policy of limited goals and limited means. They pictured a United States with clearly circumscribed world responsibilities. They were wary of political power and its unintended consequences and hidden motives. The interventionists called for total mobilization, for throwing all resources into the struggle to defeat communism utterly. They envisioned a United States as leader of nothing less than a world empire. They were virtually intoxicated with power, with the capacity to define, pursue, and attain goals. They worried little about abuses of American power or its unintended consequences.

Yet after all was said and done, the shift from noninterventionism to interventionism occurred rather smoothly. To be sure, conservatives sometimes debated the alternatives angrily, and a few agonized in print over the choices. There was, however, surprisingly little wrangling, and once the transition had taken place, largely with the founding of the National Review in 1955, conservatives hardly gave it a second thought.

One reason for the smoothness of the transition undoubtedly was the emergence of a new generation of conservative leaders in politics and political journalism who no longer viewed the 1950s through the lens of the 1930s and 1940s. The Goldwaters replaced the Tafts, and the Buckleys replaced the Chodorovs. They were heavily influenced as well by writers whose background lay not in conservative Republicanism but in various kinds of radicalism from which they were in flight—James Burnham, Whittaker Chambers, and William Schlamm, to name three.^[13]

More fundamentally, the transition went off smoothly because in

the political context of the 1950s noninterventionist anticommunism had become an ideological liability. Its problems are manifest in Taft's speech. It was anticommunism with a troubled conscience: Taft urged America to take the lead against the Soviet menace, but he raised all sorts of scruples about the international use of American power. It was anticommunism fraught with contradiction: Taft condemned the Truman administration for at once being too aggressive and not aggressive enough; he simultaneously rejected troops in Europe as unnecessarily provocative and supported other measures that were at least as provocative; he condemned the decision to send troops to Korea but urged taking the war to China. Finally, noninterventionist anticommunism was vulnerable to liberal counterattacks precisely because of its scruples and contradictions: in the debate following his speech, Taft found himself under attack from Senators J. William Fulbright and Wayne Morse (who in later years would take the lead in opposing the Vietnam War) for being, in effect, soft on communism or at least unwilling to do what was necessary to confront the Soviet Union.

The liabilities became increasingly clear to conservatives themselves. In a famous exchange in The Freeman in 1954, interventionist William Schlamm drove the point home in an exchange with noninterventionist Frank Chodorov. Surely, Chodorov argued, the lesson of the 1940s was clear enough: mobilizing against the external enemies of freedom inevitably diminishes freedom at home by enlarging the state, raising taxes, and generally militarizing society. Schlamm replied that it was no longer 1940, when conservatives could hope that if the United States stayed out of the European war, Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union would destroy each other. In the world of the 1950s there was no effective counter to Soviet power but that of the United States, hence it was simply contradictory to inveigh against the ultimate evil of the Soviet Union and world communism while voicing grave doubts about the rectitude of an all-out anticommunist crusade.^[14]

One need not share Schlamm's politics to recognize that given the dominant political assumptions of America in the 1950s, the noninterventionist anticommunist had a choice to make. He could be an anticommunist or a noninterventionist but he could not be both—at least not convincingly. In a political context in which it was assumed that the Soviet Union was not only evil but also intent on world con-

quest and capable of carrying out that intent, noninterventionist anticommunism had become anticommunism hobbled by its moral scruples. Interventionist anticommunism so readily won conservatives over precisely because it had none of the liabilities of noninterventionism. In adopting it, conservatives simply gave up a collective bad conscience about the use of state power in one sphere.

Interventionism also triumphed so easily because although it required conservatives to give up a host of moral and political concerns about the military power of the state, it still incorporated two important noninterventionist themes intact, unilateralism and a preoccupation with liberal perfidy. First, interventionists as well as noninterventionists sought a foreign policy that would preserve the independence of the United States by avoiding entangling alliances and open-ended commitments. They criticized the Truman Doctrine from different perspectives but agreed that its essentially defensive strategy threatened to bog America down in an unending struggle. Noninterventionists could agree with the interventionist enthusiasm for an offensive policy of liberation, which seemed to offer a less costly, less entangling alternative. Both groups shared a frustration at apparent American impotence and a preference for quick solutions. Noninterventionists might assert that the Korean war—a land war against numerically superior forces undertaken by a president without consultation with Congress—was dreadfully wrong, but they often believed that once involved, the United States ought to take the war to China by bombing supply lines and staging areas. From this perspective the danger lay not in the anticommunist crusade itself but in one that was half-hearted and led to stalemate. Interventionists might castigate noninterventionists for their immaturity in foreign-policy matters and call for America to assume the role of world leadership. They might picture the struggle against communism as long-term and costly. Still, they also argued that given determined leadership, political will, and correct strategies, the United States would overwhelm the Soviet Union.

Second, interventionists could agree with noninterventionists that decades of appeasement by Democratic and liberal leadership had created the communist menace and that the Soviet threat was largely a function of liberal lack of determination and flawed policies. They thus shared a gut distrust of any policy, whatever its content, that developed under the auspices of liberals and Democrats. Both of

them favored the rooting out of the sympathizers, fellow travelers, and subversives from American government.

Emblematic of their large areas of agreement, noninterventionists and interventionists alike could rally behind Senator Joseph McCarthy on the issue of domestic communism and General Douglas MacArthur on issues of military strategy. Senator Taft, who never fully made the transition, remained a hero for all conservatives long after the triumph of interventionism.

In a broad sense the shared emphases on unilateralism and liberal perfidy reinforced each other. The former demanded a world in which problems were subject to straightforward solutions; the latter proclaimed that only wrongheaded leadership prevented finding such a solution for the problem of communism. The penchant for what Eric Goldman called the "quick, total solution of any world problem" informed conservative interventionism as much as noninterventionism, especially in contrast to the anticommunism of the liberal consensus, with its commitment to an open-ended process of containment.^[15]

The greater political suitability of interventionism and its incorporation of some noninterventionist themes made the transition so smooth that those who lived through it seemed quickly to lose all memory that conservatives had ever believed otherwise. The intellectual journey of William F. Buckley, Jr., in this regard is instructive. As an adolescent in 1940, Buckley had supported the America First Committee. As late as 1954 Buckley's writings still reflected noninterventionist themes; one article of his in The Freeman criticized military training for encouraging unquestioning deference to authority, the suppression of individuality, and regimentation. Such traits, he argued, were undoubtedly good for "effective war-making" but hardly constituted the "trademarks of the free man." What the demobilized military personnel needed, Buckley suggested half-seriously was a libertarian deorientation.^[16]

In August 1954 Buckley noted with concern that conservative anticommunists were implicitly dividing themselves into noninterventionist and interventionist camps, disagreeing over the immediacy of the Soviet threat and the dangers posed by militarizing American society. He offered no immediate resolution of these differences.^[17] In early 1955, after these two camps explicitly clashed in the Chodorov-Schlamm debate, Buckley wrote to The Freeman that he had "deject-

edly" made his choice. Yes, going to war against the Soviet Union would aggrandize the American state, and undoing that aggrandizement afterward would be difficult. Still, he decided, there would be a better chance against an aggrandized American state than against passively accepted Soviet tyranny. For that reason, Buckley concluded, "I number myself, dejectedly, among those who favor a carefully planned showdown, and who are prepared to go to war to frustrate communist designs."^[18]

In this carefully measured decision the ultimate choice has openly acknowledged costs and stands only as the lesser of two evils. What is striking about the newly founded National Review a few months later is that although Buckley's decision stood, the agony, dejection, and weighing of costs that went into its making ceased to be discussed. Once made, the choice appeared self-evident, and its costs were conveniently forgotten, buried in silence. A whole set of noninterventionist arguments, which had been common in the pages of The Freeman , were abandoned by its effective successor, the National Review , even as topics for debate. The magazine's writers spent little time worrying about imperialism or militarism, the domestic consequences of anticommunist mobilization, or defense spending and the military establishment. By the early 1960s Frank Meyer could dismiss criticism of anticommunist militarism from a fundamentally noninterventionist position as something alien to the conservative political universe.^[19]

Banished from conservative discourse, the debate over interventionism persisted instead on the fringes of conservatism as a battle between conservatives and those who called themselves libertarians. Libertarians took the conservative abandonment of noninterventionism as the prime example of a broader retreat from a principled antistatism on the right. Conservatives, libertarians charged, not only promoted a belligerent foreign policy and sanctioned imperialism abroad but also sought to suppress civil liberties and extend the power of the state in other ways at home. The conservatives responded that libertarians indulged in a dogmatic or fundamentalist antistatism whereas they themselves held a more flexible presumption against state power that they were willing to modify as circumstances warrant, the better to fight communism, preserve domestic order, combat drug abuse, and the like.^[20]

From Barry Goldwater's Conscience of a Conservative (1960) to Richard Viguerie's The New Right: We're Ready to Lead (1980), the basic ten-

ets of interventionist conservatism remained the same: an emphasis on American weakness and vulnerability due to a failure of liberal political leadership and will; a call for recognizing the de facto state of war with the Soviet Union and making victory in that war the central goal of foreign policy; and a summons to total mobilization against the enemy. Similar themes, in less extreme form, appeared in Ronald Reagan's rhetoric throughout much of his presidency and expressed themselves as well in his administration's liberation strategy of supporting insurgencies in Nicaragua, Angola, and Afghanistan.^[21]

The Synthesis of Libertarianism and Traditionalism

The reconstruction of the conservative case against domestic collectivism took the form of a debate over whether that case could best be made in a libertarian language that stressed the decline of individualism and freedom, a traditionalist language that emphasized the loss of moral order and community, or some combination of the two. Conservatives never fully resolved the issue; indeed, given the different, even contradictory, natures of the two languages, they could not. The center of ideological attention became an attempted synthesis most commonly called fusionism , and the two languages came to coexist more or less harmoniously in a revised conservative ideology.

Why conservatives tried so hard to combine such disparate ideas and how they did so are questions that cannot be answered by viewing the effort as a philosophical matter of deciding on first principles, as most observers have done. At stake as well was precisely the concrete social and political problem of how best to make a case for laissez-faire capitalism. Conservatives turned to traditionalist themes to help construct a moral defense of capitalism to supplement the utilitarian one that usually emerged from libertarianism. To be sure, traditionalism at first seems an odd place to look since most of its variants were heavily critical of both capitalism and individualist philosophies. Still, conservatives attempted to isolate from traditionalism an emphasis on transcendent moral truths and integrate it into a basically libertarian outlook.

Libertarianism

The libertarianism discussed in this section is different from the particular antistatist, noninterventionist movement that has called itself libertarian and that I have just discussed in the

previous section. It refers to a broad philosophical perspective characteristic of a wide range of politicians and intellectuals on the right—leaders of the Old Republican Right like Herbert Hoover and Robert Taft; neoclassical economists like Friedrich Hayek, Ludwig von Mises, and Milton Friedman; and a variety of iconoclastic individualists and objectivists like Albert Jay Nock and Ayn Rand, as well as self-labeled libertarians. Despite their obvious differences, all share a basic worldview that its proponents have variously called individualism, true liberalism, philosophy of liberty, or libertarianism.

The central features of the generic libertarian position are the following:

1. The root problem of the modern world is the loss of individual freedom. For libertarianism, freedom is primarily understood in the negative: Its major precondition is an absence of coercion, by force or fraud, of life, limb, or property. The most dangerous source of this coercion is the state since it monopolizes the legitimate use of force; hence a limited state (or even no state at all) is the precondition for freedom. The primary freedom, moreover, is economic, both as precondition and paradigm: the unrestricted right to use one's property, spend one's money, and sell one's skills and labor. To be sure, libertarianism recognizes other valuable freedoms, but it regards economic freedom as necessary for other freedoms and as a model for understanding them.

2. Freedom so understood presupposes an individualist image of society. In the libertarian view, society is nothing more than an association of self-directed (but not necessarily selfish) individuals. It is not itself an entity; it has no goals, interests, or rights other than those of all the individuals who make it up. Any effort to hypostatize society, to impute to it an existence of its own or to define a distinct common good, necessarily undermines individual freedom by providing the potential basis for collectivism. The libertarian view of society assumes that individuals have the capacity for self-control and self-direction, but it rarely examines how that capacity develops. It also assumes that these self-directed individuals intent on purely personal goals can live together harmoniously in society. Finally, since it treats values as the province of the individual, it rarely asks how individuals come to have certain values or which ones they ought to have.

3. The main supports of individual freedom in the modern world are the major elements of capitalism—private property, the market, and the organization of economic life around private profit. The major threat to individual freedom is the growing state direction of economic life. In the libertarian view, freedom and capitalism are two sides of the same coin. The defense of one implies the defense of the other.

It is important to note for understanding both libertarianism and the conservative synthesis of which it is a part that the libertarian defense of capitalism is a defense of not just any capitalism, nor is it just any defense of capitalism. Libertarianism is above all a defense of what is best called pristine capitalism, the more common term laissez-faire being too narrow. Pristine capitalism is capitalism in which the original, most distinctive features of the system do not give way to their opposites in the normal course of development. In pristine capitalism the market and commodity relations do not give way to a growing state role in structuring economic relations and distributing income; individual entrepreneurship does not give way to the bureaucratic corporation; competition, to monopoly; concrete, owner-controlled property, to abstract stock ownership; individualism and contractual relations, to growing rationalization. The existence of the latter elements is not denied; they are simply regarded as extrinsic and inessential to the system. This image of pristine capitalism is implicit in both libertarianism and the conservatism that incorporates it.

The libertarian defense of this pristine capitalism has often tended to be materialist and secular in nature. Capitalism is justified by its superior efficiency, its promotion of technological innovation and material progress, and its ability to deliver goods. The appeal is to individual self-interest: capitalism maximizes individual prosperity, happiness, and the capacity to pursue personal goals.

Libertarian arguments were the mainstay of the anti-New Deal politics of the 1930s and 1940s. They dominated the arguments of right-wing Republicans like Hoover and Taft and the pamphlets of the American Liberty League.^[22] In the postwar years perhaps the most powerful libertarian influence on conservatism was Friedrich Hayek's The Road to Serfdom . Hayek situated himself squarely in the individualist tradition, the development of which he traced from the

Renaissance to the nineteenth century. This tradition stressed "respect for the individual man qua man," which meant treating each person's own views and tastes as supreme in his or her own life and believing that "men should develop their own individual gifts and bents." It dictated as well that in constructing society, "we should make as much use as possible of the spontaneous forces of society, and resort as little as possible to coercion." It encouraged a belief in the "unbounded possibilities" of improving the human condition and a "new sense of power" over human fate.^[23]

Since the late 1800s, however, this tradition had been in eclipse, Hayek argued, as Western societies had sought to replace "the impersonal and anonymous mechanism of the market by collective and 'conscious' direction of all social forces to deliberately chosen goals." This is what Hayek called "collectivism," and he argued that all collectivisms, whatever their goals, tended alike toward totalitarianism. What mattered were the means, not the ends:

The various kinds of collectivism, communism, fascism, etc., differ among themselves in the nature of the goal toward which they want to direct the efforts of society. But they all differ from liberalism and individualism in wanting to organize the whole of society and all its resources for this unitary end and in refusing to recognize autonomous spheres in which the ends of individuals are supreme. In short, they are totalitarian in the true sense of this new word.^[24]

Any attempt to direct society toward a collective goal, Hayek maintained, necessarily encroached on democracy because it required central planning and a degree of consensus that democratic decision making could not yield. It undermined the rule of law because governmental planning required a degree of discretion that was incompatible with the predictability and regularity of laws. Finally, it diminished individual freedom because central planning necessarily led to state control over consumption (hence what goods people could buy) and production (hence who got what jobs).

Nor could one confine planning to limited economic goals, such as an equal distribution of income, and leave society otherwise untouched, Hayek continued. Economic control meant power over the resources needed for pursuing all noneconomic ends and thus conferred the power to define which ends were desirable. Once the mar-

ket was impeded, moreover, the need for planning multiplied; once people decided that government was responsible for their fate, their demands on it rose. In short, no middle ground was possible.

Above all, Hayek stressed that at the heart of collectivism lay a false view of morality and the role of the state. "It [collectivism] presupposes . . . the existence of a complete ethical code in which all the different human values are allotted their due place." That is, it assumed some transcendent or absolute scheme of values on which collective goals could be based. "We do not possess moral standards which would enable us to settle those questions," Hayek argued. "The growth of civilization," in fact, coincided with "a steady diminution of the sphere in which individual actions are bound by fixed rules. The rules of which our common moral code consists have progressively become fewer and more general in character." Given this, values must be the province of the individual. "It is this recognition of the individual as the ultimate judge of his ends," Hayek maintained, "that forms the essence of the individualistic position" (rather than the belief that "man is egoistic or selfish"). Such a view does not rule out common action for social ends, but it regards such ends as "merely identical ends of many individuals" and thus limits common action "to the fields where people agree on common ends." Usually common ends will not be ultimate goals "but means which different persons can use for different purposes" because consensus is more likely on such things. The state, then, has a role to play, but it is largely limited to setting the terms for individual pursuit of individual goals, not to defining the goals themselves. In Hayek's terms, its role is utilitarian rather than moral.^[25]

Traditionalism

The traditionalism that conservatives sought to add to libertarianism, like its counterpart, embraced a range of positions and a diversity of thinkers. It included arguments rooted in natural law, Christian theology, and nineteenth-century European conservatism and its notions of tradition. Among its proponents in the late 1940s and 1950s who influenced the developing conservative synthesis were Leo Strauss, Eric Voegelin, Robert Nisbet, Russell Kirk, and Richard Weaver, to name but a few.^[26] Despite the diversity, a distinct set of arguments emerged from most traditionalist writing:

1. The major problems of the modern world, according to traditionalists, are the decay of belief in a divinely rooted, objective moral

order and the decline of community, processes that have unfolded over several centuries. The loss of transcendent, spiritual values—a belief in an absolute good independent of human preferences and desires—has left human beings without an overarching purpose and justification for life other than the worldly, materialist goals of pleasure, success, and worldly perfection. The decline of shared beliefs and of institutions like family, church, community, and guild that bind individuals to each other have left human beings atomized and rootless. The ultimate effect of these twin processes is totalitarian, because they leave human beings craving for both the promise of an earthly utopia and a substitute sense of belonging.

2. Underlying this analysis is an image of society as more than an association of individuals who pursue purely personal goals and are tied to others purely by bonds of self-interest. It requires moral or emotional bonds, a set of compelling shared beliefs, and it easily falls apart in the absence of a shared sense of moral order or public virtue. The task of maintaining these shared beliefs may fall to the state or "intermediate" institutions like families, neighborhoods, or churches. The individual capacity for self-control, and hence freedom, requires such a society—as a moral order and a network of binding institutions.

3. A decay in the belief in absolutes and the decline of community are tied closely to the general development of modern Western society over several centuries, including the growth of capitalism. For most traditionalists, collectivism and totalitarianism are not twentieth-century departures from the general direction of Western societies but their logical culmination. Furthermore, in the traditionalist view, capitalism often appears not at all in its pristine image: a growing state, the large corporation, abstract property, monopoly, and rationalization appear to be part of the logic of the system, rather than as alien, extrinsic growths.

Of all the important traditionalist texts, Richard Weaver's Ideas Have Consequences (1948) was probably the most revered and influential among conservatives. The central philosophical question for Weaver was "whether there is a source of truth higher than, and independent of, man," and he regarded the answer to that question as "decisive for one's view of the nature and destiny of humankind."

The root problem of modern human beings, he argued, is that they have become "moral idiots": they have lost the capacity to believe in any transcendent or absolute moral standards, a loss that Weaver located as far back as the fourteenth-century doctrine of nominalism, which denies that universal concepts have any real existence.^[27]

The denial of a higher truth, Weaver continued, undermines both social stability and individual self-control. A common "metaphysical dream," a shared image of how the world ought to be, is the necessary basis for coherent individual action and for cohesive community. Without it, societies fall apart: hierarchical relations and social norms lose all justification; no one has a fixed place in society; persons of different social ranks no longer feel they participate in a common enterprise. Consequently, suspicion, hostility, and rootlessness abound. In the absence of any compelling goals or values outside themselves, individuals lose all capacity for self-control, becoming enslaved to their own passions and preoccupied with material comfort.

Weaver saw capitalism ("the bourgeois ascendancy") as the very embodiment of the "materialistic civilization" that emerged from the loss of transcendent truths. He rejected socialism as merely the "materialistic offspring of bourgeois capitalism," in which the state simply takes over the responsibility of ensuring the comfort and security demanded by the people.^[28] Central to the obsession with material progress in modern society, Weaver added, is the use of science and technology to subdue nature. The decline of belief in a transcendent order undermines the idea that nature is fundamentally good or sacred. The result is a "metaphysic of progress through aggression," which Weaver deemed central to the "modern western mentality": "For centuries now we have been told that our happiness requires an unrelenting assault upon [the order of nature]. . . . Somehow the notion has been loosed that nature is hostile to man or that her ways are offensive or slovenly, so that every step of progress is measured by how far we have altered these."^[29]

In addition, Weaver argued, the denial of absolute truths leads to the degradation of work by undermining the notion that work can be an effort to embody an ideal in material form. Capitalism reinforces this destructive process by reducing both labor and its products to commodities and by driving "a wedge between the worker and his product." Craftsmanship cannot survive commercialism.^[30]

A this-worldly, materialist society, Weaver concluded, is bound to lead to totalitarianism. The denial of transcendental goals and hence all compelling forms and duties undermines any basis for self-control, leaving human beings open to external direction. The "failure to maintain internal discipline," Weaver argued, "is followed by some rationalized organization in the service of a single powerful will. In this particular, at least, history, with all her volumes vast, has but one page." The emphasis on material comfort and happiness leads to the same end. People who expect that "redemption lies through the conquest of nature," "progress is automatic," and happiness in this world is a veritable right are headed toward that "disillusionment and resentment which lay behind the mass psychosis of fascism."^[31]

What, then, is to be done? Not surprisingly, Weaver contended that "the first positive step must be a driving afresh of the wedge between the material and the transcendental," a denial that "whatever is, is right." He added that this begins with "the right of private property, which is, in fact, the last metaphysical right remaining to us." Modern society has swept away all other absolute rights, but "the relationship of a man to his own has until the present largely escaped attack." Because "the middle class rose to power on property," it consecrated "property rights at the same time that it was liquidating others." However, Weaver hastened to note, this defense of property did not extend to prevalent forms of capitalist property, which violate "the very notion of proprietas ":

The abstract property of stocks and bonds . . . actually destroy[s] the connection between man and his substance [and] makes impossible the sanctification of work. . . .

Big business and the rationalization of industry thus abet the evils we seek to overcome. . . . Respecters of private property are really obligated to oppose much that is done today in the name of private enterprise, for corporate organization and monopoly are the very means whereby property is casting aside its privacy.^[32]

What Weaver had in mind instead was "the distributive ownership of small properties"—independent farms, small businesses, owner-occupied homes, and the like—"where individual responsibility gives significance to prerogative over property." For the eradication

of such property, "monopoly capitalism must be condemned along with communism."^[33]

Contrasts and Similarities

Libertarianism and traditionalism certainly shared some common ground. Both were preoccupied with the growth of the state as organizer and planner of all social life. Both sought a more "organic" social order, one that functions and changes like a living organism, without explicit, conscious direction. The libertarian Hayek, while stressing the differences between the two camps, noted that both shared a fondness for "spontaneously grown institutions." The traditionalist Weaver, who more eagerly sought a synthesis, argued that both believed "that there is an order of things which will largely take care of itself if you leave it alone."^[34] Both libertarians and traditionalists, moreover, defended private property and were skeptical of any egalitarian impulse.

The differences between the two, however, were greater than their similarities. To begin, they understood the central problem of the modern world very differently. Libertarianism argued that the central problem is the tendency to restrict individual freedom especially in the name of a spurious common good or higher set of values, a tendency that at an extreme leads to totalitarianism. Traditionalism argued, in contrast, that totalitarianism arises in effect from too much individualism, not too little: the real danger is that the breakdown of social bonds and transcendent values will yield a mass of rootless, atomized individuals preoccupied with material goals, who will ultimately yearn for the ersatz community and utopian lure of totalitarianism. Freedom and individualism, in the libertarian view, presuppose a certain dilution of a "common moral code" and the prying loose of individuals from social institutions; for the traditionalist, in contrast, moral order implies constraints on both freedom and individualism.

The two positions also had very different notions of society. Libertarianism pictured society as an association, a set of practical, contractual relations between self-contained, self-directed individuals; it looked askance at any effort to treat society as a reality sui generis or to define an overarching common good. Traditionalism viewed society as a community, a web of values and institutions that bind individuals together; it was wary of any effort to treat society simply as a collection of individuals.

These differences between libertarianism and traditionalism were tied as well to different views of self-control and freedom, the nature of morality, and the role of the state. Libertarianism took for granted that the individual has the capacity for self-direction and self-control, for defining and ordering goals, and for pursuing those goals in a disciplined way. It did not spend much time examining how such a capacity develops and the conditions necessary for it. By default, if for no other reason, libertarianism took an optimistic view of the ability of individuals to direct their own lives in the absence of strong shared beliefs and social bonds. Its view of the conditions necessary for individual freedom, therefore, was primarily negative—an absence of constraint. Traditionalism, in contrast, regarded self-control and self-direction as problematic. It spent considerable time examining how these develop. Central to its argument was the insight that self-direction requires compelling shared beliefs and strong social bonds. In their absence individuals lack a clear orientation to the world or orderly way of acting in it. Traditionalism necessarily took a less sanguine view of the ability of individuals standing alone to direct their lives. Its notion of freedom had a positive component: certain social conditions are necessary to enable individuals to be free.

Libertarianism simply assumed that individuals have goals they wish to pursue, and it was scarcely concerned with what those goals ought to be or how one ought to live one's life. It avoided these questions because it was wary of the collectivist implications of any definition of a higher or common good, because it regarded values as largely the province of individuals, and because consequently it believed the central concern of social and political thought should be to establish the conditions under which individuals can pursue their own goals, not to define goals for them. Libertarianism thus tended toward a certain moral agnosticism; it did not so much deny the existence of an absolute good as sidestep the issue.^[35] Traditionalism, in contrast, was preoccupied with examining how individuals ought to live because it was wary of the collectivist implications of a moral vacuum, because it regarded values as the province of society as well as the individual, and because consequently it regarded defining the good as central to social and political thought.

Everything about libertarianism reinforced an antistatist stance—its diagnosis of the problems of the modern world, its image of society, its view of self-control and freedom, and its approach to morality.

None of these justified more than the minimal state action required to assure a negative freedom. With traditionalism, the situation was more complicated. Although it was certainly wary of the state, it also defined a sphere of positive state action. Its notion of society as more than a collection of individuals, its unqualified belief in a higher good, and its assumption that certain positive conditions must be maintained for individual self-control and freedom all could justify an active role for the state. From the traditionalist perspective, the goal of politics was more than simply ensuring negative freedom.

Finally, libertarians and traditionalists differed on their stance toward capitalism. The libertarian position saw a pristine capitalism as the solution to the problem of collectivism. The traditionalist position, again, was more complicated. Although not thoroughly anticapitalist, many traditionalists viewed existing capitalism as part of the problem. Capitalism, in their view, opens the way to collectivism by undermining community, centralizing property and transforming its nature, reducing the majority of people to dependent wage and salary earners, alienating the worker from his work, and propagating materialist values. Traditionalists opted for no clear, comprehensive alternative, but the distributist vision of a society of decentralized industry and small property gripped many of them.

The Rationale for a Synthesis

The contradictions between libertarianism and traditionalism were not lost on conservatives themselves. Attempts at synthesis inevitably met with uneasiness, disagreement, and even rancor from one side or the other. Conservatives never ceased to reexamine the fundamental principles of their thought because they never felt they had fully eliminated the inconsistencies. Even into the 1980s conservative journals continued to bristle with articles expressing the unfinished, uneasy quality of conservative thought: "Conservatives and Libertarians: Uneasy Cousins"; "The American Conservative Movement of the 1980s: Are Traditionalist and Libertarian Elements Compatible?"; "Conservatives and Libertarians View Fusionism: Its Origins, Possibilities, and Problems"; "Traditionalism and Libertarianism: Two Views."^[36] The apprehension that conservatives might have no common principles after all voiced itself clearly within conservative ranks over the years. "Self-avowed conservatives are having difficulty agreeing among themselves as to what it is precisely they stand for," wrote one conservative in 1964.

"American conservatism has yet to decide exactly what it is," wrote another in 1970. "On a purely philosophical level, American conservatism did not speak with a single voice," wrote an intellectual historian of the movement in the mid-1970s; "It had never done so and probably never would." The same feeling remained strong as the age of Reagan dawned, with one prominent conservative wondering what, "besides a common dislike of liberals," held conservatives together, and an important conservative newsletter remarking that although conservatives "have always prided themselves on being the party of first principles, . . . the nature of these principles has yet to be agreed on."^[37]

In the light of the obvious difficulty of combining libertarianism and traditionalism, why conservatives so persistently sought to do so and how they went about it become all the more intriguing questions. We can answer them by examining the writings of three of the principle architects of fusionism, Frank Meyer, M. Stanton Evans, and William F. Buckley, Jr.

Meyer argued that libertarianism and traditionalism, despite a "fundamental clash of emphasis," were simply different elements of "the consciousness of Western civilization," which had separated from each other as nineteenth-century European conservatism and liberalism. Nineteenth-century conservatism had stressed objective moral order, tradition, and the pursuit of virtue to such an extent that it had tended to support "authoritarian political and social structures" and to de-emphasize individual freedom. Nineteenth-century liberalism had firmly supported individual freedom, a limited state, and a free economy but played down moral order and tradition.

But these fundamental differences, Meyer continued, were of little importance in the context of American political culture. The "American constitutional settlement," he argued, "brought into common synthesis . . . the acceptance of the authority of an organic moral order together with a fierce concern for the freedom of the individual person." Contemporary libertarians and traditionalists, he added, had a good deal in common, not only a reverence for "the Constitution as originally conceived" with its mandate for a "federal system of strictly divided powers" but also an antipathy to utopianism and collectivism, an opposition to state control of the economy, and a recognition that communism is an "armed and messianic threat to the very existence of Western civilization."^[38]

Neither shared enemies nor a common reverence for the Constitution, however, got to the heart of what Meyer and other fusionists saw as uniting libertarianism and traditionalism in a common conservative position. The central point for them was that the libertarian concern with individual freedom and the traditionalist concern with objective moral order and virtue, far from being antithetical, actually coincided. To be sure, a doctrinaire libertarianism might reject as coercive any effort to define the good and hence specify the proper goals of human action. Similarly, a doctrinaire traditionalism might support authoritarian political and social structures aimed at encouraging or enforcing a notion of virtue. Historically, though, the fusionists argued, freedom and belief in an objective moral order had been entwined as had collectivism and secularization.

On the one hand, Meyer maintained that the pursuit of virtue is impossible without freedom because an act cannot be virtuous unless freely chosen and because coercion at best yields a merely negative virtue, not "active, positive, creative virtue." On the other hand, freedom would be aimless and empty without a transcendental goal. In this sense, freedom is an end in itself only in the political realm; in the moral realm, it is a means for the human pursuit of the good and the true.^[39]

Most important for the fusionists, however, was the argument that unless freedom and the capitalism they deemed integral to freedom are seen as inherently good—in effect divinely ordained—they are easily undermined. Purely secular or materialist justifications simply did not work. In the relatively prosperous days of the 1950s and 1960s, it seemed foolish for conservatives to argue that the welfare state and government regulation of the economy spelled economic disaster. As long as the previously accumulated wealth of capitalism lasts, Meyer argued in 1958, a welfare state or democratic socialism might indeed work. The real objections instead should be moral or spiritual; even if it leads to a better material life, the welfare state inherently undermines human dignity and autonomy.^[40]

Buckley made a similar case the following year in Up from Liberalism . "The conservative demonstration" failed, he lamented, partly because it presented itself as a "crassly materialist position." Conservatives erred, for example, in opposing Social Security on the grounds that it would bankrupt the nation. Buckley conceded that this claim was probably false: America could afford such a program.

The better argument would be principled, not practical: compulsory programs like Social Security are inherently bad, independent of their material effects, because they violate economic freedom, "the most precious temporal freedom." Evans, writing in 1964, added that appeals to material self-interest are not adequate for defending freedom and capitalism because people are all too eager to give up their freedom for the short-term benefits of the welfare state.^[41]

The argument for a distinctly moral defense of individual freedom and capitalism came across, too, in conservative criticism of those who tended toward the libertarian end of the right-wing spectrum. In the case of Hayek, whom conservatives generally revered, Meyer made the point rather gently: despite his stirring critique of the welfare state, Hayek regrettably justified freedom on utilitarian grounds as the condition under which individuals can best achieve their private goals, material progress advances most quickly, and would-be social engineers are most easily held in check. The trouble with such arguments, Meyer noted, is that they assume specific preferences, without which they fall apart. What if people decide that individual goals are unimportant, material progress unnecessary, or social engineering desirable? A firmer case for freedom can be built only by arguing that freedom is "the true condition of man's created being," "the truth of the order of things."^[42]

In the case of Ayn Rand, whose militant atheism repelled most conservatives, Whittaker Chambers and Evans made the point with full force. Acknowledging that "a great many of us dislike much that Miss Rand dislikes," Chambers nonetheless condemned her "forthright philosophical materialism," her denial of God, and her enthronement of the pursuit of happiness as the moral purpose of human life. The single-minded pursuit of happiness, Chambers warned, degenerates quickly into the pursuit of mere pleasure (and hence a softening of the human spirit) and from there into a desire for the state to solve all problems. Without some higher purpose or justification, freedom and individualism yield easily to passivity and an openness to manipulation. If human happiness is the justification for freedom, Chambers concluded, then freedom will be jettisoned as soon as it seems not to lead to that end. Evans argued simply that attempting to be at once profreedom (and procapitalist) and anti-Christian flouts the lessons of history because Christianity originated

the notion of the sacredness of the individual personality, whereas all collectivist systems espoused "atheist humanism."^[43]

In a 1966 article Evans made the general point most sharply and broadly by taking aim at the whole libertarian tradition—the classical liberal tradition, as he called it—from David Hume to Ayn Rand. He agreed with what the exponents of this tradition defend but not with how they defend it: the "economic views of the classical liberals" are fine, and Herbert Spencer's account of the "secular modulations of freedom" is "hard to surpass." Evans, however, parted company with "classical liberalism's most famous spokesmen . . . in their mechanical, materialist, and relativist view of human nature and ethical principles." Their fundamentally secular worldview paved the way for the transformation of classical liberalism, the defender of freedom, into modern liberalism, the purveyor of the welfare state. Classical liberals "helped lay the ethical foundation for the rise of the total state they wanted to avoid." "The maintenance of freedom," Evans concluded, "is not, and cannot be, purely secular." It requires an "underpinning of religion and moral sentiment derived from Judeo-Christian revelation."^[44]

Here indeed lay the central rationale of the fusionist synthesis. By trying to join traditionalism to libertarianism, conservative fusionists were above all saying that the decline of freedom and pristine capitalism went hand in hand with the decay of belief in God and absolute truths. Freedom and capitalism required a religious, moral, or spiritual justification. The secular, materialist bent of the mainstream defense of pristine capitalism had paradoxically helped to undermine the system being defended.

What the fusionists sought to articulate, in short, was a religious defense of pristine capitalism. Given this goal, their synthesis of libertarianism and traditionalism leaned heavily to the former. What the fusionists required of libertarianism as they brought it into harness with traditionalism was not that it give up its largely negative, economic concept of freedom, its individualist concept of society, or its preference for pristine capitalism but merely that it base all its arguments on an objective moral order preferably rooted in the Judeo-Christian tradition.

In contrast, the fusionists demanded of traditionalism that it give up virtually everything except its emphasis on objective moral order.

They had little use for the traditionalist notion of society as an organic whole and still less use for its critical insights into capitalism. Meyer argued vehemently that society is "but a set of relations between persons, not . . . an organism morally superior to persons." Any idea that society has an existence and a moral claim of its own, not reducible to individual rights, could justify limitations on individual freedom. The anticapitalist dimension of traditionalism slipped out of sight. Traditionalists like Weaver, preoccupied more with the common collectivist enemy, de-emphasized anticapitalist elements in their later work and, at any rate, wrote mostly about issues in which those elements did not directly figure. Conservative discussion of traditionalist work ignored these elements. In a 1970 appreciation of Richard Weaver, for example, Meyer argued that Weaver's Ideas Have Consequences prefigured the union of traditionalism and libertarianism with its traditionalist emphasis on objective moral order and its libertarian stress on private property. In quoting Weaver on private property as the "last metaphysical right," however, Meyer ignored his subsequent condemnation of modern capitalist forms of property as the very negation of what private property ought to be and mean. He also ignored the anticapitalist themes throughout Weaver's book.^[45]

For some conservatives, the synthesis of libertarianism and traditionalism seemed commonsensical; for others it was deeply problematic. Either way, however, most conservatives accepted somehow bringing the two languages together to criticize domestic collectivism. For those sympathetic to synthesis, these languages conjoined to provide a unified utilitarian and moral case for pristine capitalism and for freedom understood in capitalist terms. For those who remained skeptical, libertarianism and traditionalism were two distinct languages applicable to distinct issues. If their former use was immediately apparent, their latter use would become evident with the emergence of the distinction between economic and social issues in the 1970s.

From Ideological Liabilities to Ideological Assets

Reconstructing conservative ideology was the first act in the drama of the rise of the Right in America. From the 1950s into the 1960s,

conservatives reworked the terms in which they understood and justified their case against collectivism, both foreign and domestic, to fit new political realities at least as these appeared within the dominant political assumptions that I have called the liberal consensus.

Conservatives entered the 1950s burdened with a doubly problematic ideology. First, they had maintained many noninterventionist scruples about the use of American power abroad, which were ill-suited to a political world in which nearly everyone—conservatives included—took for granted the need for the United States to lead in actively opposing the Soviet Union and world communism. Second, they had continued to make a primarily utilitarian case for pristine capitalism and against government intervention in the economy at a time when the dominant political assumption was that economic growth and prosperity required government action and when in fact the two developed in tandem.

To become effective political contenders, conservatives had to deal with both these ideological problems. They moved fairly easily in the early 1950s from a noninterventionist anticommunism to a distinct kind of interventionist anticommunism. The new position jettisoned the moral objections to the use of American power in the world while preserving the noninterventionist desire for a unilateralist approach to world affairs. Thus was born what Theodore Draper in the mid-1980s called "global unilateralism"—though he erroneously ascribed to it a much more recent vintage—which continued to characterize conservative thought into the age of Reagan.^[46]

With more difficulty, conservatives recast their defense of pristine capitalism by making a more explicitly moral, rather than a merely economic, case for it. The result was a complicated combination of libertarian and traditionalist themes that remained a hallmark of conservatism into the 1980s. Together these changes created the distinctive characteristics that constitute conservative ideology as we have known it—militant anticommunism, a libertarian defense of freedom and individualism, and a traditionalist concern with moral order and community.

In each case conservatives reconstructed their ideology in the light of dominant political assumptions even while maintaining its distinctive thrust. Conservative interventionism incorporated the less problematic strategic and practical noninterventionist themes even as it left behind the more troublesome moral ones. The reworked defense

of pristine capitalism did not forsake the basic libertarian argument but merely buttressed it with traditionalist themes.

In each case, too, conservatives exchanged ideological liabilities for assets. If noninterventionism had been an obvious contradiction, conservative interventionism was an effective weapon. It pictured a straightforward world situation amenable to American control if only the political will could be mustered and the resources mobilized. If matters appeared otherwise, that was the result of the inadequate political will of liberals and the hesitation and unevenness of their policies. Similarly, if a purely libertarian defense of pristine capitalism often seemed implausible, the addition of traditionalist themes gave conservatives alternative arguments. Just as important, from a combined libertarian-traditionalist position pristine capitalism appeared immune to the twin deformations of collectivism and secularization. Conservatives imagined a capitalism in which the pursuit of profit and worldly success led neither to the decline of individual entrepreneurship and the market nor to the decay of belief in transcendent moral values. Again, if the ideal did not match the reality, the blame fell on liberal policies that unnecessarily encouraged the growth of the state and liberal ideas that fostered a secular, materialist orientation to the world. In short, both elements of the dual reconstruction of conservative ideology played nicely to what was, and would continue to be, the ideological strength of conservatism: the capacity to picture a natural, spontaneous order (whether in American society or the world) and to blame the disruption of that order on liberal elites and their policies and ideas.

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.