Donald T Critchlow: The Conservative Ascendency: How the GOP Right Made Political History (2007, Harvard University Press)

Another general history of the conservative political movement in the US, starting after WWII. One thing I found is that the history seems quaint until 1968, despite widespread anticommunist hysteria and plenty of hawkish saber rattling. That's really because the first political character who sounds like the modern right is George Wallace. Nixon and Agnew, especially through their speechwriter Pat Buchanan, tried to pick up Wallace's voice, and thereby his votes, and that was what finally gave the Republican right it's shot at mass support.

(p. 13):

Right-wing opponents of the New Deal were overwhelmed by what they saw as the New Deal revolution, but they offered no programmatic alternative to modern liberalism. [Irving] Babbitt, [Albert J] Nock, [Ralph Adams] Cram, and the Southern Agrarians were reactionaries, eloquent in their criticisms of democratic culture, pristine in their condescension toward the masses, and confirmed in their elitism. They offered little alternative to the industrialism or mass democracy that they so vehemently derided. They held little faith in the future, the dynamic quality of capitalism, or the character of the American people. At heart, they remained pessimists. The success of New Deal liberalism in the 1930s deepened this sense of defeatism and confirmed their expectation that the advance of the collectivist state was inevitable. By the war's end, New Deal liberalism stood indomitable, a Gulliver untied, able to ignore its Lilliputian critics.

(pp. 14-15):

[Friedrich] Hayek, an Austrian-born economist, gained world-wide fame for his book The Road to Serfdom, which appeared in 1944 while he was a professor at the London School of Economics. First published in England by Routledge, The Road to Serfdom became a best seller. Believing that England was poised to nationalize its industries, Hayek intended the book to reach a large audience of educated men and women who would be warned about the dangers that centralized planning posed to liberty. The point of the book was that private ownership in a society was essential to freedom and democracy. Socialism, in any guise, would lead to a totalitarian state, even if it was brought about by democratic means. He believed that free-market capitalism was essential to the maintenance of democracy. In a socialist economy, he warned, the individual would become little more than the means for realizing the schemes of a planner. He argued that socialism was inimical to liberty because it devalued individual rights, personal freedom, and economic choice.

Hayek believed that individualism lay at the core of Western civilization, as demonstrated in the Hebrew conception that all men and women were equal in the eyes of God, the Christian conception of Christ's love for all, and the Roman belief in equality before the law. In his view, the government could play an essential role in maximizing individual liberty. Thus the belief that government should not interfere in society or set rules and regulations was misguided. Still, he maintained, a liberty-maximizing society should make "the best possible use of the forces of competition as a means of coordinating human efforts . . . It is based on the conviction that where effective competition can be created, it is the better way of guiding individual efforts that any other." In making this argument, Hayek disclaimed any role as defender of the status quo. The fundamental principle of a society that preserves liberty should be to make best "use . . . possible of the spontaneous forces of society" and resort "as little as possible to coercion." This principle was capable of infinite variation, and Hayek stressed "the difference between deliberately creating a system within which competition will work as beneficially as possible and passively accepting institutions as they are."

(p. 19):

In 1953 Russell Kirk, a young instructor in the history of civilization at Michigan State University, published The Conservative Mind. Kirk had taken a leave from Michigan State to complete his doctorate at St. Andrews University in Scotland. While in Scotland, Kirk wrote his doctoral dissertation, "The Conservatives' Rout." Acquired by Henry Regnery, a small conservative publishing house in Chicago, the dissertation renamed The Conservative Mind gained immediate national acclaim. In the book, Kirk defined a conservative as a person who is convinced that "civilized society requires orders and classes, believes that man has an evil nature and therefore must control his will and appetite," and accepts that "tradition provides a check on man's anarchic impulse, and maintains a belief in a divine intent that rules society as well as conscience." Before the publication of the book, members of the American Right had rejected the label conservative because they saw themselves as vigorous defenders of the nineteenth-century liberal tradition of individual rights, property rights, and distrust of centralized government. Franklin D. Roosevelt and the New Deal had usurped this liberal tradition and redefined it to mean the regulation of capitalism by centralized government, state welfare, and social equality.

The Conservative Mind offered a sweeping account of the conservative tradition, which Kirk found rooted in the "moral imagination" of Edmund Burke and his defense of tradition, order, and "permanent things." He believed that conservatives had been routed by "a world that damns tradition, exalts equality, and welcomes changes" and a "world smudged by industrialism; standardized by the masses, consolidated by government." He refused to condense the conservative tradition into "a few pretentious phrases," but outlined the canons of conservatism as a belief in a transcendent order, affection for "the proliferating variety and mystery of human existence," a conviction that civilized society requires orders and classes, a faith that "man's anarchic impulse" needs to be checked, and "recognition that change may not be salutary reform."

(pp. 48-49):

Meanwhile, a highly reluctant Goldwater gave the go-ahead for a book to be written in his name outlining the conservative philosophy, although he made it clear in a private meeting with Manion in early November 1959 that he had no wish to run for president. In fact, Goldwater continued to publicly promote Richard Nixon for the 1960 nomination. Nonetheless, Manion proceeded with the arrangement for Brent Bozell, Jr., to ghost-write under Goldwater's name. Unable to receive an advance contract for an unfinished manuscript, Manion decided to publish and distribute the book through his newly formed nonprofit company, Victor Publishing. Batches of the manuscript were sent to Manion and Goldwater's political operative Stephen Shadegg in Arizona for review as soon as pages rolled off Bozell's typewriter. As astounding as this sounds, it remains unclear whether Goldwater read any of the manuscript, but when the book appeared in March 1960 it became an instant best seller.

In what was many Americans' first introduction to the topic, The Conscience of a Conservative defined conservatism as a philosophy that upheld "the dignity of the individual human being" and was "at odds with dictators who rule by terror, and equally those gentler collectivists who ask our permission to play God with the human race." The book gave much attention to the necessity of winning the Cold War against the Soviet Union. It warned, contrary to the liberal perspective, that winning the Cold War was not simply a matter of domestic reform at home and foreign aid abroad. It called for an aggressive foreign policy that began with American military superiority. The Conscience of a Conservative declared that "the Communists' aim is to conquer the world," even though few in the West seemed willing to believe this "central political fact of our time."

(p. 85):

Sensing the first cracks in the liberal regime, George Wallace left the Democratic party to exploit working-class white resentment toward African Americans, rising crime rates, growing welfare rolls, inner-city riots, and the war dragging on in Southeast Asia. Running on the American Independent ticket, he appealed to less-educated white voters, who shouted with rollicking enthusiasm at his attacks on pointy-headed intellectuals, government bureaucrats, black militants, hippies, welfare mothers, and "bearded anarchists." Despite Wallace's popularity among poor and lower-middle class whites in the North and the South, few right-wing leaders rallied to his campaign, with the exception of John Schmitz, a southern California community college instructor and John Birch Society member. Most Republican conservatives refused to support Wallace, even though he called for law and order and expressed open disdain for welfare and opposed court-ordered busing. For all of his conservative rhetoric, the GOP Right did not see Wallace as a conservative at all. Rather, right-wingers viewed him as a typical New Deal southerner who welcomed federal monies for public works and welfare in his state, while demanding that the federal government recuse itself from enforcing civil rights laws concerning voting rights and integration of public places.

(p. 90):

In reality, however, Nixon was above all an opportunist. He was an anti-Communist and a cold warrior, but his outlook proved to be remarkably flexible. As an avid reader of English history, Nixon saw himself as a Disraeli, the nineteenth-century conservative prime minister who had undertaken liberal reforms as necessary steps for the survival of the Tory party. Nixon had entered the Republican party as a "Moderate Republican," eager to disassociate the party from the isolationism of Robert Taft. He wanted to transform the GOP into the party of internationalism. Nixon's views on domestic policy were determined by what he thought could garner political strength. As vice president under Eisenhower, he had played a pivotal role in pushing through the Civil Rights Act of 1957, the most important such legislation enacted since Reconstruction. Nixon believed that the GOP could regain the African-American vote that had been lost to Franklin Roosevelt in the 1930s. But following the 1960 election, when blacks overwhelmingly voted for Nixon's rival, John F. Kennedy, Nixon retreated from a strong civil rights stance, and during the 1968 election he criticized forced busing to integrate schools.

(p. 105):

Just as neoconservatives were voicing their disaffection, conservative think tanks emerged to provide technical expertise to the GOP. The Goldwater campaign and the Nixon regime taught conservatives that they needed specific policy proposals to combat the hegemony of liberalism in the policy arena and to present a case to voters (and Republican party leaders) that there were real alternatives to the status quo. Policy entrepreneurs such as William Baroody, Edwin Feulner, and Paul Weyrich began to institutionalize conservatism through research institutes, fellowship and student-training programs, and new publications. They brought to these endeavors a single goal: to erect countervailing sources of power to undermine the liberal establishment. The Left had the prestigious Brookings Institution and the liberal academy to influence policy makers and public opinion, and conservatives wanted to create their own sources for what Washington insiders called "policy innovation." To this end, they expanded established moderate-conservative research institutes such as the American Enterprise Institute and launched the Heritage Foundation. Drawing support from philanthropies such as the Scaife Fund, the John M. Olin Foundation, and the Bradley Foundation, as well as from wealthy conservative benefactors such as Joseph Coors, these research institutes emerged as vital centers for conservative policy innovation.

The development of think tanks marked an important shift in the history of conservatism and would have important implications for the shaping of the GOP Right in subsequent years. A kind of "managerial conservatism" arose that reoriented conservative thinking on actual governance toward a more ready acceptance of the exertion of federal government power acting within the broad principles of conservatism. Neoconservativism was not welcomed in some right-wing circles, but it imparted energy and expertise to the conservative movement in the 1980s.

(pp. 113-114):

Many neoconservatives remained in the Democratic party, even though they supported Richard Nixon in 1972. [Norman] Podhoretz joined Democrats like Senator Henry Jackson, Hubert Humphrey, journalists Max Kampelman, Ben Wattenberg, international relations professor Jeane Kirkpatrick and her husband, Evron Kirkpatrick, and Daniel Moynihan to form the Coalition for a Democratic Majority with the intention of taking back the Democratic party from the McGovernite wing. This group was openly critical of the "New Class" of radicals who held antibourgeois values and had captured the Democratic party in 1972. Jeane Kirkpatrick spoke for the coalition when she declared in Commentary in February 1973 that "an embattled revolutionary elite united under the banner of George McGovern" had transformed liberalism into an "ideology of the privileged." She maintained that McGovernites were upper-middle-class feminists, high-income homosexuals, and college-educated whites who despised blue-collar ethnic workers, white southerners, and traditional American values. As a consequence, she observed, conservatism had become the "position of the less privileged." Conservatives, she suggested, upheld traditional values of hard work, family, and patriotism. From this perspective it was a short step to Republicanism. [ . . . ]

The issue that caused the greatest divide between McGovernite liberals and neoconservatives was foreign policy and how to deal with Communist nations. Anti-Communism united Podhoretz and Kristol intellectually. Both men believed that many on the McGovern left misunderstood the imperial nature of Communism and overestimated the good intentions of Soviet Leadership. Both agreed on the need to fight for democracy in the world, and it was this belief that became a defining characteristic of what became known as "neoconservatism."

(p. 128):

[President Gerald] Ford's centrist policies created a political vacuum on the Right that was quickly filled by a groundswell of grassroots activism. From this activism emerged the New Right -- a term coined by the longtime activist Paul Weyrich. The media identified the leaders of the New Right as Richard Viguerie, Howard Phillips, Paul Weyrich, and Terry Dolan, but these people were certainly not new conservatives. Phyllis Schlafly's involvement in conservative Republican politics and anti-Communism went back to the 1950s, before other leaders of the New Right had become politically active. Viguerie, Phillips, and Weyrich were children of the 1960s who became involved in right-wing politics through Young Americans for Freedom. By 1978 the National Conservative Political Action Committee (NCPAC), founded by three young conservatives -- Charlie Black, Roger Stone, and Terry Dolan (the chairman) -- became the largest conservative political action committee in the country, distributing more than $1.2 million in cash and in-kind contributions to political campaigns in its first five years.

The New Right's ability to tap into grassroots discontent over social and moral issues such as abortion, prayer in school, and the ERA caught both liberals and the Republican establishment off-guard. These New Right activists challenged the status quo and the power structure in both parties. They saw themselves as radicals who wanted to overthrow entrenched elites and professional experts. Paul Weyrich later declared, "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." They believed that liberalism was a dying force in American politic sand that the political future belonged to conservatism. "The liberals have not only lost confidence in themselves but in their ideas," Viguerie declared. "We're convinced we have the ability to govern and will govern in the not-too-distant future."

(pp. 129-130):

Weyrich's principal talent was teaching conservatives how to form and make use of coalitions involving antitax groups, antiabortion groups, veterans' organizations, small business associations, and conservative pro-family advocates.

In his work, Weyrich was joined by Howard Phillips, the founder of the Conservative Caucus, in late 1974. The mission of the caucus was to recruit conservative leaders, organize the grassroots, and help set the conservative agenda. Phillips developed hsi political skills as a Harvard University undergraduate and as one of the founders of the Young Americans for Freedom in 1960. In 1964, he became Republican party chairman in Boston and then managed Richard Schweiker's successful race in Pennsylvania for the U.S. Senate in 1968. In 1970, he lost his own race for Congress in Massachusetts and accepted an appointment by Richard Nixon as head of the Office of Economic Opportunity (OEO). Nixon had talked about shutting down OEO, but a Democratic-controlled Congress prevented Phillips from doing so. By 1979 the Conservative Caucus had a base of 300,000 contributors. It also launched the Religious Roundtable, which reached out to evangelical Protestant leaders and brought them together for briefings on public policy issues.

Richard Viguerie brought new technical skills to the Right through his use of sophisticated computer technology to raise money and garner support among the grassroots. Viguerie had gained valuable experience in mass fundraising by working int he 1950s for Marvin Liebman, whose Committee of One Million had pioneered the use of fundraising on the Right through mass mailing. Viguerie took direct mailing to new levels of effectiveness through the use of the computer. In doing so, he advanced the conservative cause well beyond the technological capabilities of the Left.

(p. 162):

The ERA battle taught conservatives three important lessons that changed the course of American politics from its leftward drift to the right: First, the STOP ERA organization and the antiabortion movement showed the importance of social issues in mobilizing unheard numbers of average Americans. Second, the anti-ERA campaign provided a casebook example of how evangelical Protestants, Roman Catholics, and Mormons could be united into a single cause. In particular, the antifeminist crusade revealed that there was a huge reservoir of potential voters in the evangelical Protestant revival of the 1970s that could be tapped by the Republican party. Finally, the defeat of the ERA taught conservatives that they could win when they mobilized around the right causes. Ever since Barry Goldwater's defeat in 1964, the conservative movement had lacked confidence that it could ever win nationally, but on the issue of the ERA it had triumphed.

(pp. 174-175):

The Reagan campaign realized that if Carter was successful in making the 1980 election into a replay of 1964, Republicans would lose. To prevent this outcome, Reagan needed to emphasize the poor economy while reassuring the public that he would not slash benefit programs indiscriminately. This was a tricky strategy because Reagan was on record as opposing many of the entitlement programs proposed to help workers hurt by economic dislocation. GOP strategists realized that the key to victory rested in winning traditional Democrats to their cause. As a result, when Senator Paul Laxalt nominated Reagan at the convention, he pointed to Reagan's record as governor of California in increasing aid to the truly needy, increasing funding to higher education, protecting the environment, and undertaking welfare reform.

(p. 177):

These were minor mistakes compared with the controversy that followed a speech in Philadelphia, Mississippi, the place where three civil rights activists had been murdered in 1964. In his first speech following his nomination, Reagan declared, "I still believe the answer to any problem lies with the people. I believe in states' rights . . . I believe we have distorted the balance of our government today by giving powers that were never intended to be given in the Constitution to the federal establishment." Reagan's use of the words "states' rights" in a town known for the murder of civil rights workers gave immediate offense to black leaders. Following these remarks, Carter's secretary of health and human services warned that black voters "will see the specter of a white sheet" behind Reagan. Carter's former ambassador to the United Nations, Andrew Young, said that Reagan's remarks seemed like code-words implying "it's going to be all right to kill n---- when he's President." Coretta Scott King, the widow of Martin Luther King, Jr., told the press she was frightened that if Reagan won the election "we are going to see more of the Ku Klux Klan and a resurgence of the Nazi Party."

In 1976, Carter had swept the South. Reagan's campaign strategists assumed that if Reagan could take the South, he would win the election. Mississippi was a good place to start because Carter had won the state by less than two percentage points of the popular vote.

(p. 184):

In the early spring of 1985, a year after his landslide victory for reelection to the White House, President Ronald Reagan addressed his critics on the Right who complained that the Republican revolution had stalled. Reagan reassured them that the "tide of history is moving irresistibly in our direction" because liberalism had become "virtually bankrupt of ideas. It has nothing more to say, nothing to add to the debate. It has spent its intellectual capital, such as it was, and it has done its deeds." He concluded, "We in this room are not simply profiting from their bankruptcy; we are where we are because we're winning the contest of ideas. In fact, in the past decade, all of a sudden, quietly, mysteriously, the Republican party has become the party of ideas. All of a sudden, Republicans [are] not defenders of the status quo but creators of the future."

(pp. 187-188):

Reagan's core beliefs led him to the worldview that the best government is that which governs least so individual citizens can reach their full potential. Reagan believed that centralized government weakened a free people's self-reliance and capacity for self-government. In his inaugural address, he declared, "In this present crisis, government is not the solution to our problem, government is the problem. From time to time we've been tempted to believe that society has become too complex to be managed by self-rule, that government by an elite group is superior to government for, by, and of the people. Well, if no one among us is capable of governing himself, then who among us has the capacity to govern someone else?"

(p. 189):

Banking deregulation had begun under Carter with the enactment of the Depository Institutions Deregulation and Monetary Control Act of 1980. Further deregulation was continued into the Reagan administration in the Garn-St. Germain Depository Institutions Act of 1982. Backed by Federal Reserve Chairman Paul Volcker, these acts deregulated the savings and loan industry while tightening federal control over the banking industry. One of the unforseen consequences of this policy was the collapse int he late 1980s of many savings and loans owing to over-expansion and, in some cases, fraudulent loans.

(pp. 246-247):

The final weapon in the battle for control of Congress came in the form of a clever election proclamation signed by 337 Republican candidates for the House, the "Contract with America." The ten-point legislative program was promoted as a covenant with the voters -- a promise to introduce ten specific pieces of legislation if Republicans became a majority party in the House. The Contract with America had evolved out of extensive polling and focus-group interviews which revealed that voters wanted "accountability" in government. The contract called for welfare reform, anticrime measures, a line-item veto, regulatory reform, and tax reduction. In addition, hot-button issues such as abortion, pornography, and school prayer were not included in the plan in order to avoid the charge that Republicans represented only the Religious Right. Although the exclusion of social issues upset social conservatives like Paul Weyrich, this program gave Republicans the offensive. As the 1994 mid-term elections approached, Republicans were on the march, energized by their victory over the Clinton health-care plan.

(pp. 256-257):

In the process [the 2000 presidential campaing], [George W] Bush put his own stamp on conservatism. His proclamation of himself as a "compassionate conservative" during the 2000 election was more than campaign rhetoric. Through this identity Bush sought to combine traditional conservative principles of individual responsibility, free enterprise, low taxes, and resistance to government spending with an acceptance of the important role that government had come to play in American life. He sought to use activist government for conservative ends by allowing faith-based charitable organizations to provide social services to the poor; by making public schools more accountable by linking federal aid to national standards; and by expanding federal health insurance for prescription drugs to the elderly. He believed that the federal government could help promote moral values, regulate abortion, and encourage individual responsibility. At the same time, he called for reform of Social Security through limited privatization. Bush's compassionate conservatism reflected his religious faith as a born-again Christian who believed in the responsibility to be "thy brother's keeper." The Bush vision of government was far from what the first generation of postwar conservatives -- Hayek, Rand, or Buckley -- had called for when they sought to overturn the New Deal liberal order.