The Birth of American Conservatism, 1946-1972
Roosevelt Country
To the casual observer, postwar America was inhospitable to the rise of a conservative movement. The New Deal had seemingly rescued the nation from the despair of the Great Depression of 1929, cohering an improbable coalition around promises of employment, social welfare, labor rights, and economic development.
Under the Democratic Party’s ticket, a heterogenous working class, the most militant elements of which were organized in the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO), was joined to the Catholic and Jewish “white ethnics” of the urban political machines. Poor farmers across the country, badly hit by the Dust Bowl of the 1930s, voted with the reactionary, populist party bosses of the Jim Crow South.
Its architect, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, died only a few weeks before the Red Army raised its flag over the Reichstag to confirm the Allied victory. In his death, he became the country’s uncrowned Pater Patriae, a worthy heir of Washington and Lincoln, having successfully refashioned its economic order and guarded its national security.
The American Creed, Jefferson’s unwritten patriotic catechism, had now become Rooseveltian liberalism. Its sacraments could be found in the Second Bill of Rights proposed in 1944, with its guarantees of employment, a fair income, housing, medical care, social security, and protection from monopolies. Its salvation was incarnate in the Four Freedoms of 1941: freedom of speech, freedom of worship, freedom from want, and freedom from fear.
Alternatives left and right of the New Deal were dead in the water. Having chafed under the sacrifices made for the wartime economy (forced austerity and a no-strike pledge) and finding itself historically powerful (a record 35.5% of the American workforce was unionized in 1946), the labor movement launched a historic strike wave in 1945 and 1946. That year, the CIO even launched Operation Dixie, an ambitious attempt to unionize the segregated, authoritarian South. Spooked, Congress passed the anti-labor Taft-Hartley Act in 1947. It drastically restricted organizing and enabled a red scare within the labor movement itself, dividing it. Both the strike wave and Operation Dixie failed. Labor’s strength was tamed: from now on, it would defend its gains in the Rust Belt, careful not to move left, and never again going on such an offensive.
As the labor movement’s ambitions faltered, so too did those of the political left. Roosevelt’s vice president from 1941 to 1945, the progressive Henry A. Wallace, lost in his 1948 third-party bid for the presidency, thereafter seeing his Progressive Party disappear into obscurity. Harry Truman, Wallace’s centrist successor as vice in the last months of Roosevelt’s administration, beat him that year and consolidated the New Deal.
The Republican Party, which by 1946 had not won a presidential election in eighteen years, was out of ideas, and thus tacked to the center. Its presidential candidates, Alf Landon in 1936, Wendell Willkie in 1940, and Thomas Dewey in 1944 and 1948, were all bona fide Liberal Republicans, accepting the New Deal as irreversible and content with trimming some of its fat.
The diehard conservatives of the Old Right, stalwartly opposed to this new order, had been thoroughly discredited by their participation in the isolationist America First Committee (AFC), which opposed American entry in World War II. Its thinkers, men like Frank Chodorov and Albert Jay Nock, would no longer write in the nation’s most prestigious magazines. Their peculiar mix of traditionalism, localism, isolationism, and libertarianism had been excised from American life.
Historian and intellectual Arthur M. Schlesinger embodied the liberal consensus in The Vital Center (1949), writing that “the New Deal approach will endure because it addresses the real needs of the people.”
The Red and the Black
On the potential for a conservative resurgence, literary critic Lionel Trilling wrote in 1950 that “in the United States at this time, liberalism is not only the dominant, but even the sole intellectual tradition. For it is the plain fact that nowadays, there are no conservative or reactionary ideas in general circulation… the conservative impulse and the reactionary impulse do not… express themselves in ideas but only… in irritable mental gestures which seek to resemble ideas.”
Often, Trilling is misunderstood as arguing for the wholesale absence of conservatism from American society. This is false. Trilling said that it lacked intellectual respectability, and thus a capacity for government. Conservatism, as he knew well, lurked just below the surface of New Deal America.
Taft-Hartley had been just one reaction to the 1945-1946 strike wave: the Second Red Scare. Initially, it focused on the labor movement. But by 1949, the situation abroad had radically changed. Communism hadn’t just gained a foothold in America itself, many observers thought, but was unquestionably winning around the globe. The Soviets had successfully tested a nuclear bomb, China had gone Red, and there were rumors of communist influence in the vast apparatus of the federal government the New Deal had expanded.
In 1950, Republican Senator Joseph McCarthy was thrust into the spotlight for claiming to have “a list of 205—a list of names that were made known to the Secretary of State as being members of the Communist Party and who nevertheless are still working and shaping policy in the State Department.” All the worst rumors, the wildest speculation, McCarthy was ready to confirm. After all, how else were those communist victories possible?
Technological change facilitated his crusade. McCarthy exploited the widespread diffusion of television to speak directly to the masses, bypassing traditional media to gain a significant following. As a consequence, McCarthyism was born. Its sights would soon be set on the whole of American society, from Hollywood to its churches.
In 1948, President Truman ordered the desegregation of the Armed Forces and the federal workforce, reflecting a broader reassessment of the party’s values. Southern Democrats, previously crucial for the New Deal coalition as Dixie’s unquestioned masters, were incensed. White supremacy was a way of life in their eyes. When that year’s Democratic National Convention confirmed the party’s commitment to civil rights, 35 Southern delegates left in anger and disgust, hastily forming the States’ Rights Democratic Party, or Dixiecrat Party. In the presidential elections, it carried four Southern states and 2.4% of the vote. Truman still won, despite pollsters’ predictions, and the Dixiecrats disbanded to continue their struggle within the party.
But Democrats were not the only party sympathetic to the cause of civil rights for Black Americans. The Republican Party was still the Party of Lincoln and had less to lose in alienating the South. Supporting civil rights was relatively riskless for the first Republican president in twenty years, the eminently moderate Dwight D. Eisenhower. His Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, Earl Warren, was firmly committed to the cause. When he ruled for the desegregation of public schools in 1954’s Brown v. Board of Education, Eisenhower sent federal troops to enforce it. Having lost in Washington, “massive resistance” within the Southern states seemed the only recourse for segregationists.
The Seeds of the Movement
The permanence of the New Deal, the menace of communism, and the unstoppable tide of civil rights sowed the seeds for conservative rebirth. A nascent coalition of two important electorates was emerging: the aforementioned Southern whites and middle-class suburbanites.
The Scots-Irish and WASPs (White, Anglo-Saxon Protestants) in the historic petite bourgeoisie had always been reliably conservative. Products of a prior stage of capitalist development, one preceding the rapid rise of American industry, they were small business owners and professionals, traditionalist and deeply hostile to organized labor. Their volunteer organizations, such as the American Legion and the Daughters of the American Revolution (DAR), which required direct descendance from the heroes of 1776, clung to the reverence for hierarchy expected of those who felt born to a privileged caste.
A new base surfaced in the Sun Belt, that immense stretch of land from Los Angeles to Miami. The Sun Belt's western half had always been peopled by farmers and ranchers. With the mechanization of agriculture being far from complete in their vast holdings, they nurtured an individualism with markedly conservative affinities. But after the war, industrial capitalism generated a new middle class. The rapid wartime development of the region’s defense, aerospace, oil, and chemicals industries continued unabated after 1945, stimulated by lax labor laws (guaranteed by Taft-Hartley, of course), a weak union presence (estimates vary, but probably around 5-15% of the workforce) and continued federal investment. In turn, these industries produced a vast crop of skilled workers and administrators whose families dotted its sprawling suburbs. Stimulating the region's economy, small businesses grew to serve these affluent consumers.
In Mothers of Conservatism (2014), historian Michelle Nickerson details the key role suburban women played in shaping the Sun Belt’s emerging, grassroots conservatism. Mostly housewives, they viewed the increasing authority of the federal government over the education of their children as an illegitimate encroachment on their rights as mothers. Culturally conservative, they were anxious about the shift in racial attitudes. And of course, at the heart of it all, they saw a Red conspiracy.
In response, they developed sprawling networks of right-wing bookstores, book clubs, and volunteer groups which would soon develop greater political ambitions. They were often very talented activists. The conservative political philosopher Russell Kirk lavished praise: “most of our voluntary organizations, which support our established society of justice, order, and liberty, are kept vigorous by American women.”
Their activities were part of a broader ecosystem of conservative, anti-communist civil society that saw its heyday in McCarthyism. Its most important and extreme group was without a doubt the John Birch Society (JBS). Founded by Robert Welch Jr. in 1958, it made McCarthy’s sensationalist anti-communism seem downright milquetoast.
Historian Richard Hofstadter’s seminal essay for Harper’s Magazine, “The Paranoid Style in American Politics” (1964), describes his politics succinctly: “a full scale interpretation of our recent history in which Communists figure at every turn: They started a run on American banks in 1933 that forced their closure; they contrived the recognition of the Soviet Union by the United States in the same year, just in time to save the Soviets from economic collapse; they have stirred up the fuss over segregation in the South; they have taken over the Supreme Court and made it “one of the most important agencies of Communism.”’
Another prolific conspiracist was Mormon author W. Cleon Skousen. His 1958 book, The Naked Communist, claimed to have spectacular insights into the all-encompassing plan for Red domination. Naturally, The Naked Communist was mostly nonsense. It was, however, a classic for the Society’s adherents.
Like the paranoid anti-Masonic and anti-Catholic movements Hofstadter identifies as their forerunners, Welch’s followers tended towards bigotry. Anti-Semitism and anti-Black racism were common currency for JBS members, who were unable to shake their extreme image.
The Birchers knew what they wanted: a rollback of the state, the perpetuation of segregation, a nationalist foreign policy, and expulsion of the left from American life. They grew rapidly. By 1960, estimates pointed to 60,000 members nationally. They were McCarthyism’s Marines.
But by the mid-1950s, the country began to tire of McCarthy and regard the JBS with contempt. The culture ridiculed them mercilessly. In 1963, a young Bob Dylan even released the “Talkin' John Birch Paranoid Blues,” poking fun at their absurdity: “Well, I quit my job so I could work alone, Then I changed my name to Sherlock Holmes. Followed some clues from my detective bag And discovered they wus red stripes on the American flag!”
Although they were effective in building up the grassroots conservatism which galvanized suburbanites and Southern whites, the Birchers were the very definition of Trilling’s “irritable mental gestures,” with conspiracies that “seek to resemble ideas.” That didn’t matter to them. What they embodied, more than any respectable ideology, was a paranoid and reactionary mentality. And this mentality would outlive them and their organizations, remaining the language of the grassroots.
What the Birchers and their allies could not do, regardless of their influence, is achieve respectability. As long as American culture was still dominated by the New Deal, they could not create a hegemonic conservatism. Others would succeed in that task.
A Connecticut Yanqui
William F. Buckley Jr. could not have been more different from the suburbanites of the Sun Belt. Born in New York City, but raised between Mexico City, Paris, and London, Buckley was intensely cosmopolitan (his first language was Spanish), sharing none of their provincialism. Thanks to his father, a prosperous lawyer and oil magnate who made his fortune in Mexico before being thrown out by Álvaro Obregón’s revolutionary government, he was also intensely conservative. Albert Jay Nock, that icon of the Old Right, was a close family friend, meeting Buckley when he was 12. This unique background inculcated both traditionalism (the Buckleys, of Irish stock, were devout Catholics) and libertarianism.
After an uneventful stint in the military, he would pursue an education at Yale in 1946, where he excelled on its debate team. It was there that he formed a lasting bond with L. Brent Bozell Jr., his future brother-in-law and debate partner. Bozell shared his politics and much of his background. He, like Buckley, was Catholic; and he, like Buckley, was the son of a prosperous provincial executive, this time in advertising.
His university experience, where he was shocked by his professors’ left-wing politics, would lead him to write God and Man at Yale (1951), perhaps the first salvo in what would later become an intense conservative war on higher education. Buckley’s prose, replete with Latinisms and cascading turns of phrase, was striking, memorable. It left a mark on its readers. His biographer, Sam Tanenhaus, would compare it to Nabokov’s. It would propel him to stardom as an eloquent conservative commentator, a rarity in New Deal America.
Fresh from a gig in the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), Buckley continued his career as commentator in The American Mercury, the country’s most prestigious right-wing magazine. He soon left, dissatisfied by the experience, but solidified his role as public intellectual with McCarthy and His Enemies (1954), a passionate defense of the Senator co-written with Bozell. Buckley was a dedicated Cold Warrior, firmly committed to American leadership and rollback of communism. But his interest in McCarthy had a deeper meaning. In his attacks on the allegedly communist bureaucrats in Washington, Buckley saw a hammer striking the New Deal order, a way to revindicate the right's patriotism and dismantle Roosevelt's legacy.
It was around this time that Buckley became dedicated to building lasting conservative institutions. Conservatives were a minority in the country’s college campuses, so he founded the Intercollegiate Studies Institute (ISI) with another Old Right great, Frank Chodorov, in 1953. Its purpose was to organize the few conservatives (or “individualists,” to use Chodorov’s words) trapped in the Ivory Tower. On September 11, 1960, he helped found the Young Americans for Freedom (YAF), a powerful conservative youth group, on his ancestral estate in Sharon, Connecticut. Its founding document, the influential Sharon Statement, was the intellectual child of his greatest creation: National Review.
Marrying Money and Ideas
Around 1955, Buckley realized that there were no conservative magazines capable of intellectually challenging the New Deal. The liberals had refined, influential publications in The New Republic, The Nation, and Partisan Review, covering politics, economics, and culture with effortless brilliance. The burgeoning conservative grassroots could not rely on similar quality. The American Mercury, his previous employer, had been sold to Russell Maguire in 1952. Maguire chose to take an active role in management, publishing his own, virulently anti-Semitic articles in its pages. The magazine’s reputation soon declined.
The Mercury’s conservative rivals, publications like The Freeman and Human Events, either had a miniscule readership, a dated ideology, or were plagued by internal rivalries. For a man who made it his mission to provide the nascent conservative movement with a respectable voice, this would not do. Taking advantage of his father’s wealth, he first offered to purchase Human Events and the liberal Catholic magazine Commonweal, but was turned down.
He then took it upon himself, bringing Bozell and a diverse team of intellectuals along, to found his own publication. This project was slightly more expensive than revamping an existing operation. He looked to Wall Street, the captains of American industry, and the various titans of big capital for money. Buckley’s pleas went unanswered. Astonished, he would later write that “the capitalists didn’t seem all that interested in the project of saving capitalism.”
He should not have been surprised. Although left-wing historians often emphasize the labor movement’s indispensable role in creating the New Deal, with the burning militancy of the CIO and its allies during the Great Depression pushing Roosevelt to the left, the shifting composition of American capital itself was just as important. Adolf A. Berle, an important New York lawyer and intellectual, was a key member of Roosevelt’s circle of advisors, the “Brain Trust.” His seminal book, written together with the economist Gardiner Means and published the year of Roosevelt’s inauguration, The Modern Corporation and Private Property (1932), explained why.
For Berle, the multiplying complexity and concentration of capital led to the emergence of a new, oligopolistic capitalism embodied in massive, publicly traded corporations. Thanks to the broad distribution of shares in these firms, control shifted from owners and shareholders to a class of elected bureaucrats, the managers, who were less attached to providing their shareholders with dividends than to the long-term survival of the firm. To quote the book, the “separation of ownership from control produces a condition where the interests of owners and of control are not necessarily the same.”
With the right regulations, these new interests could be reconciled with the social interests of the broader economy. The capitalist could be replaced with something like an economic statesman. Even the labor movement, formerly an implacable foe of American industry, could be integrated thanks to the oligopolistic firm’s lower vulnerability to labor costs. For Berle, this marriage of big government with big business was the foundation of the New Deal consensus.
This was expressed in the revolving door between the private sector and the state. The Ford Motor Company was revolutionized with the 1946 hiring of the “Whiz Kids,” former Air Force technocrats specialized in modern management. Many would return to public service; future Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara was among them, fully at home in both the administrative state and the managerial firm.
In Monopoly Capital (1966), the Marxian economists Paul Sweezy and Paul A. Baran argued that this marriage of capital and state produced a form of military Keynesianism, where the vast surplus of American capitalism was absorbed by government spending in the private sector, particularly in defense, facilitated by the revolving door and justified by the Cold War. This was distinct from the Keynesianism of European social democracy, which was more adversarial to capital and rooted in a more powerful labor movement. As a consequence, the managers of big business were largely disinterested in the rollback of the New Deal Buckley proposed.
But there was a different class of capitalists interested in his Gospel, one on the periphery of the American economy. They weren’t the managers or executives of vast, publicly traded firms, the products of the cutting-edge capitalism Berle admired. They didn’t frequent New York high society or mingle with the Washington bureaucracy. They were the lesser millionaires: the immensely prosperous proprietors of mid-sized, unlisted companies that didn’t thrive in the New Deal, they survived it. Their companies operated in labor-intensive industries, vulnerable to labor unions and government regulations they feared could put them out of business. Generally, they either inherited a family concern or built it up themselves.
They were the quintessential capitalists, men still in the mold of Andrew Carnegie, Henry Clay Frick, and Henry Ford. They were men like Fred C. Koch, the Texas oilman who founded Koch Industries, today the second-largest unlisted company in the United States; or Harry Lynne Bradley of Wisconsin’s Allen-Bradley factory equipment firm. Both helped found the John Birch Society. They were men like Russell Maguire, the new owner-publisher of The American Mercury, who became one of the country’s wealthiest men producing the Thompson submachine gun during the war. They were men like Buckley and Bozell’s fathers, who fit the bill exceptionally.
And for Buckley in 1955, they were men like Henry Regnery, a militant Illinois conservative who transformed his family’s textile fortune into a publishing empire that had founded Human Events and published both of Buckley’s books. It was Regnery who could provide him with the capital necessary to finance his new magazine, National Review.
Athwart History, Yelling Stop
Finally, Buckley had found his patrons. The inaugural issue’s mission statement included a striking quote: “[National Review] stands athwart history, yelling Stop, at a time when no other is inclined to do so, or to have much patience with those who so urge it.”
To fulfill this mission, he needed a broad spectrum of thinkers on the masthead, uniting even those who did not entirely share his vision. He already had Bozell, to whom he would add the philologist Revilo P. Oliver. He soon recruited ex-communist Whittaker Chambers, whose participation in the Red Scare and memoir of conversion to freedom’s cause, Witness (1952), made him nationally famous.
He convinced Russell Kirk, the country’s foremost conservative philosopher, whose The Conservative Mind (1953, naturally published by Regnery) first linked American conservatism to the thought of Edmund Burke. Kirk was a Tory, defending order, traditionalism, and restraint. He emphasized the “conserve” in conservatism, particularly the importance of historical continuity. The natural consequence was a reformist gradualism which avoided rocking the boat. He also had isolationist tendencies, sharing much of the foreign policy of the Old Right, but was prepared to sacrifice his commitments in the Cold War.
Willmoore Kendall joined, too. Buckley’s former Trotskyist professor of political philosophy at Yale, Kendall shared Kirk’s reverence for order, rooting it in a defense of localism and majoritarianism. He drew much from John C. Calhoun, slavery’s principal defender in the antebellum South, whom Hofstadter had once famously called the “Marx of the master class.” Kendall’s influence would soon be tempered by that of Harry Jaffa, who despised Calhoun and championed, to Kendall’s dismay, a conservative defense of Abraham Lincoln.
Both, however, shared an affection for Leo Strauss, the German-Jewish theorist of natural rights and critic of modernity’s relativism. Strauss’ thought was markedly different from Kirk’s: natural rights were granted by nature and the divine, they were not subordinate to history. In the face of the relativism of socially determined, evolving rights and duties (how dare Roosevelt compare employment to freedom of speech?), Kendall and Jaffa’s thought could be used to defend a radical conservatism distant from Kirk’s gradualism. Continuity was irrelevant when liberals guided history’s path.
Buckley also added another ex-Trotskyist, James Burnham, to the group. Burnham’s defining work, The Managerial Revolution (1941), offered a unique interpretation of the managerialism examined by Berle and Means nine years earlier. His politics were a reprise of the Italian elitists Gaetano Mosca, Vilfredo Pareto, and Robert Michels: egalitarianism was an illusion and utopianism a dangerous lie. Societies were guided by a select few and the hegemony of capital was preferable to any communist nomenklatura. Although largely moderate domestically, he preferred an imperial foreign policy in line with Buckley’s own.
With these distinct contributions, National Review quickly set about synthesizing a new conservative creed, combining the economic liberalism and social conservatism of the Old Right with the rollback of communism Buckley considered indispensable.
Frank Meyer, another former communist, was up to the task. His creation was fusionism, the fusion of libertarianism and traditionalism in the context of an open society. Freedom and virtue were reconciled, in Meyer’s thought, only when virtue was freely chosen in the absence of the state’s coercion. In books like In Defense of Freedom (1962, Regnery), Meyer affirmed that it would be the individual’s responsibility, not the state’s, to lead a moral life. In foreign policy, he prescribed an unrelenting crusade against communism.
It was precisely the existential threat of communism, regardless of the tools used to fight it and secondary quibbles over the precise ferocity with which to fight the Cold War, that disciplined National Review’s (and the entire conservative movement’s) diverse components. Although fusionism was criticized by men like Kirk and Bozell, who were skeptical of subordinating virtue to freedom, it would come to define the movement’s thought for a generation. The YAF’s Sharon Statement was one of its first expressions.
It is easy to confuse the magazine’s ideological coherence with moderation and civility, as many modern conservatives do. The purpose of the magazine was not to moderate the movement, but to make it respectable. As David Austin Walsh argues in Taking America Back (2024), it still saw itself as merely one expression of the same forces that generated the Birchers and the Dixiecrats. As such, throughout much of the 1950s, National Review was implacably committed to the contentious issues of white supremacy and segregation.
In 1957, Buckley published a now-notorious editorial, “Why the South Must Prevail.” He argued that the “central question that emerges…is whether the White community in the South is entitled to take such measures as are necessary to prevail, politically and culturally, in areas in which it does not predominate numerically? The sobering answer is Yes -the White community is so entitled because, for the time being, it is the advanced race.”
He added that “the axiom on which many of the arguments supporting the original version of the Civil Rights bill were based was Universal Suffrage. Everyone in America is entitled to the vote, period. No right is prior to that, no obligation subordinate to it; from this premise all else proceeds.” He concluded: “...that, of course, is demagogy.” By and large, he was not out of step with his colleagues.
For years, Buckley kept white supremacists and anti-Semites, like the increasingly extreme Revilo P. Oliver, on the masthead (only expelling him in 1961). He allowed his writers to publish in discredited magazines like the Mercury.
Walsh argues that the metaphor of an evolving right-wing “popular front” is an accurate description of how National Review related to the broader right. Buckley kept up a fraught correspondence with Mercury writer George Lincoln Rockwell, who would later found the American Nazi Party in 1959. Although he would eventually repudiate Rockwell, even referring him to a priest, Rockwell would never respond in kind, viewing his transition to Nazism as continuing Buckley’s fight by other means. Although Walsh holds that Buckley’s Catholicism tempered his racism, eventually drawing him to condemn it tout court, his disagreements with much of the era’s far-right were primarily strategic.
An example was the split, much lauded by conservative intellectuals, between Buckley and the John Birch Society. When in 1962 he was forced to disavow Welch’s shocking statement that President Dwight D. Eisenhower was “a dedicated, conscious agent of the Communist conspiracy…based on an accumulation of detailed evidence so extensive and so palpable that it seems to put this conviction beyond any reasonable doubt,” he emphasized that the Birchers could no longer be in the conservative leadership.
Naturally, their grassroots should continue their activism, but National Review could not afford to taint its image by openly supporting it. Buckley knew the base well, and the movement could not afford to continue without it. Intellectually, the task may have been to police conservatism’s borders, as the sidelining of Ayn Rand and Murray Rothbard shows. But politically, it was establishing a division of labor. The Birchers would galvanize the base, while National Review would extend conservative influence beyond it, laundering more refined positions to liberals and policymakers.
Thanks to Buckley’s efforts, National Review had successfully enforced this division of labor. The stage was set for greater things: the fight for the Republican Party.
Extremism in Defense of Liberty
As the ‘50s gave way to the ‘60s, the Republican Party was still firmly under the control of its moderates. Faithfully following its centrist course, its most prominent politicians were men like President Eisenhower, Senator Henry Cabot Lodge Jr., Governor Nelson Rockefeller, Senator Jacob Javits, Representative John Lindsay, and Governor George W. Romney. Rockefeller, Javits, and Lindsay were New Yorkers. Lodge was from Massachusetts. Observers would christen them the “Eastern Establishment.” Although resolutely anti-communist, they were no friends of the conservative movement.
But there were signs of a change, a Southwestern wind could be felt in Washington’s stagnant air. The right saw its first political victory in the Congressional elections of 1952. In an otherwise uneventful election, Republican Barry Goldwater was elected Senator in Arizona. Defeating the Senate Majority Leader and 12-year incumbent Ernest McFarland, he was the first of the new conservatives elected to office, galvanized by the Sun Belt’s ranchers and suburbanites. Even as McCarthyism subsided and the Democrats were set for a national landslide, Goldwater kept his seat in 1958.
Nicknamed “Mr. Conservative,” he was a libertarian, generally progressive on social issues and personally sympathetic to civil rights. His rhetoric emphasized the evils of the New Deal, the value of free enterprise, and the importance of anti-communism more than the traditionalism valued by many movement conservatives. His opposition to government increasingly made him a tactical ally against desegregation, such as when he opposed Eisenhower’s use of federal troops to enforce Brown v. Board. And when open white supremacy, such as in “Why the South Must Prevail,” became more distasteful to the American public, Goldwater’s sincere libertarianism was a convenient cover for those opposed to civil rights. Many took advantage.
National Review saw him as their man in Washington: the living, breathing proof that a right-winger distant from the Eastern Establishment’s moderation could prosper politically. When Richard Nixon, Eisenhower’s vice president, seemed destined for the Republican presidential nomination in 1960, National Review launched a “Draft Goldwater” campaign. Its failure would be a catalyst for YAF’s foundation.
Nixon embodied a more populist incarnation of Eisenhower’s politics, particularly on the question of communism, where he made his name as one of the party’s leading “Red-Baiters.” Although from Sun Belt California, he was no movement conservative, and sought to placate the Eastern Establishment by nominating Henry Cabot Lodge Jr. vice president. After narrowly losing to John F. Kennedy in 1960, he ran for Governor of California in 1962, losing yet again. Nixon did not share Eisenhower’s rapport with the American press. In his concession speech, he told the assembled journalists and reporters they wouldn’t “have Nixon to kick around anymore because, gentlemen, this is my last press conference.”
It seemed that a scene change was in order. In 1964, the stage was set for a rematch with the Democrats. In the last four years, the Cold War had escalated with Kennedy’s (subsequently disproven) allegations of a “missile gap” with the Soviet Union, the failure of 1961’s Bay of Pigs attempt to oust Fidel Castro, and worrying developments in Vietnam. A Cold Warrior was needed, and the moderates, discredited by Nixon’s loss in 1960, were unable to provide one.
The 1964 Republican primaries saw Goldwater, with his base in the Sun Belt, narrowly beat Rockefeller, Cabot Lodge, and others from the Eastern Establishment for the nomination by early June. The full spectrum of the conservative movement: the John Birch Society, the Young Americans for Freedom, and National Review energetically campaigned on his behalf. L. Brent Bozell Jr. even ghost wrote Goldwater’s book, The Conscience of a Conservative (1962), a classic for a generation of right-wingers. Mr. Conservative’s victory seemed to finally realize the realignment his allies had fought for.
At the Republican National Convention that year, held in San Francisco, Goldwater’s acceptance speech electrified the base. He staunchly defended his politics, despite allegations of extremism. He proclaimed, through repeated interruptions of applause, that “extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice…moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue.”
But seizing the Republican Party did not mean winning the country. Many were disturbed by his vote against President Lyndon B. Johnson’s landmark Civil Rights Act a month before, a minority position amongst Congressional Republicans. He opposed, on libertarian grounds, its provisions regulating employment discrimination. But at the Convention, his supporters were less motivated by libertarianism than rank racism. The famous baseball player Jackie Robinson, the first Black player to break the color line and enter Major League Baseball, arrived in San Francisco a dedicated Republican. Goldwater delegates unfurled Confederate flags and hurled racial slurs, targeting him. He left, astonished. His experience with the Goldwaterites led him to believe that he knew “how it felt to be a Jew in Hitler's Germany…if Goldwater wins, the Negroes are through as far as the Republican Party is concerned.”
When Goldwater’s racial politics were combined with his hardline positions on the Cold War (he believed that American generals should use tactical nuclear weapons without presidential permission and repeatedly joked or implied the necessity of launching a nuclear war), the American public could not miss the inescapable impression of extremism. Johnson’s campaign took full advantage, winning a landslide in the general election: 486 electoral votes to 52, 61.1% of the popular vote to 38.5%.
But the defeat was less crushing for the conservatives than the numbers would suggest. It had three important consequences: the realignment of the Sun Belt, the emergence of personalities and institutions crucial for the future of the right, and the Republican Right's consolidation.
Although the party had utterly lost whatever goodwill it had from Black Americans, Goldwater’s opposition to the Civil Rights Act and federal power struck a chord with many Southerners. Of the six states he won, five were in Dixie: Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, and South Carolina. This was the first national experiment in what Republican strategists would later call the “Southern Strategy,” a visionary maneuver exploiting reactionary Southern Democrats to anchor a new Republican coalition. Although Goldwater’s Southern voters would still vote Democratic in Congressional and local elections, some saw the tides changing.
The sixth state was Arizona. This was also the first national demonstration that the implicit conservative coalition of Southern whites and Southwestern suburbanites born in the late ‘40s could be a reliable electoral bloc for the Republican Party. Its future leaders made their mark in 1964. Ronald Reagan, Hollywood actor and former union leader, began his political career with an iconic speech on Goldwater’s behalf: “A Time for Choosing.” Its rhetoric, soaring yet intransigent, made a mark on the audience.
In 1966, running on a strongly conservative platform, Reagan won the California gubernatorial election with over 15% more of the vote than his Democratic opponent. In 1962, Nixon trailed him by 5%. The future, it seemed, was in the Sun Belt. The future was Ronald Reagan.
Buckley responded, as always, by building new institutions. In December, one month after Goldwater’s defeat, he met with Frank Meyer and others to found the American Conservative Union (ACU), a lobbying group for right-wing policies now famous for scoring conservative legislators and hosting the annual Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC). It intended to weather the storm of Barry’s loss, preventing the moderates from exploiting it to regain control over the party. Buckley and others were not dismayed by Goldwater’s failure, they saw it as merely the first battle in a long campaign: one they intended to win.
Sources
Berle, Adolf A., and Gardiner C. Means. The Modern Corporation and Private Property. Macmillan, 1932.
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