2

ANTI-STATIST STATISM

A Brief History of a Peculiarly American Conservatism

广告：个人专属 VPN，独立 IP，无限流量，多机房切换，还可以屏蔽广告和恶意软件，每月最低仅 5 美元

At the end of World War II and into the 1950s, American conservatism faced a difficult set of challenges. It had grown out of step with the broad changes wrought by the New Deal and the war and with what appeared to be the political consensus that had emerged in their wake. Cold War liberalism, or the “liberal consensus,” effectively defined the post-war dominant political bloc. Domestically, the liberal consensus affirmed the positive role of the state in the economy. This meant the essential acceptance of Keynesian economic principles, heavy government investment in infrastructure and defense industries, and the preservation of the most important New Deal programs and institutions. Pushed by the social democratic commitments of a powerful labor movement, the Roosevelt administration brought some degree of public control over markets. Still, state intervention under the New Deal was designed to ameliorate market failures and mitigate the most unequal income distributional patterns but by no means was to displace private enterprise. Capitalist economic growth was seen as the key to prosperity and the diminution of social conflict. While at the outset there was contemplation of extensive state supervision through initiatives such as the National Recovery Administration, after the first few years of the Roosevelt administration, government intervention largely aimed to perform crisis management and foster economic growth through spending, to regulate but not plan economic activity or radically redistribute income. The so-called second New Deal of 1935–6 placed less emphasis on government planning and more upon restoring competition among smaller economic units. This formulation is too neat, of course. Most scholars suggest that the Roosevelt administration put forward any number of economic policies with mutually contradictory rationales, hoping that some would work.1 The New Deal order was built on a unionized workforce with good wages and benefits in mass-production industries subject to various kinds and levels of government regulation. Safety-net institutions minimally provided for those unable to work. Industries undermined by various economic forces, including excess competition, were stabilized by subsidies, price supports, and entry controls.2 Politically, the New Deal consisted of a coalition of liberals, big-city political machines, labor unions, ethnic, racial, and religious minorities (especially urban Catholics, Jews, and, as time went on, African-Americans), some farm groups, and, crucially, the South.3

In foreign affairs the liberal consensus affirmed another version of the positive role of the state. But first, a quick primer on the key schools of thought. Scholars speak of four basic conceptual approaches or schools to international relations. Realists see rivalry and conflict among nation-states as unavoidable and thus they approach the international system in terms of states exercising power, whether military, economic, or diplomatic. They orient policies and actions according to what they see as in the best national interests of the United States. Realists have little concern for the internal nature of other regimes or human rights issues; what matters is the external behavior of states. Paleo-conservatives (sometimes called Jacksonian nationalists) tend to take a narrow, security-related view of American national interests. They strongly distrust multilateralism and international institutions such as the United Nations, and at the far end of the continuum tend toward anti-foreign and anti-immigrant sentiments (otherwise known as nativism) and isolationism. They take as a watchword John Quincy Adams’s 1821 declaration that “[America] goes not abroad in search of monsters to destroy.”4 Liberal internationalists aspire to transcend the amoral nature of power politics. While they don’t forswear the use of military force in international conflicts, they place trust in multilateral institutions, international law, and diplomacy. The United States must pursue its national interests in foreign affairs, but liberal internationalists view those interests far more broadly than do realists or paleo-conservatives. Human rights and the internal nature of other regimes are very important in their worldview; diplomacy is much preferred to military force. Like liberal internationalists, neoconservatives tend to be internationalist in basic orientation, concerned with democracy, human rights, and the internal politics of states. They believe that U.S. power, including, notably, military power, can – and must – be used for moral purposes. But unlike liberal internationalists, neoconservatives exhibit deep skepticism about the ability of international law and institutions to solve serious security problems and they tend toward unilateral American actions.5 At the risk of simplification, we can say that realists and paleo-conservatives are oriented toward interests, whereas liberal internationalists and neoconservatives are oriented toward values. All of these schools believe, with varying degrees of intensity, in American exceptionalism, that the United States is a special nation whose democratic values are universal and whose policies are designed to bring the blessings of liberty to other peoples of the world. Although these categories are useful markers, one needs to be careful not to hypostasize them. People and groups do not always fall cleanly into any particular school, and on any given foreign policy issue – especially in the context of a national security crisis – there may be marginal coherence between a school’s principles and the policy adopted.

The post-World War II liberal consensus in foreign policy consisted of the acceptance of a permanent role for the United States in international affairs, manifesting in large military outlays to limit communist expansion and support for new international institutions such as the United Nations, the World Bank, and the International Monetary Fund. The policy order of the day – to become known as the Truman Doctrine, after the Democratic president – reflected a balance of power realism: the containment of communism through a combination of diplomacy, permanent American military presence abroad (particularly in Europe, through the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, or NATO), and military and economic assistance to nations deemed vulnerable to the blandishments or depredations of the communist movement. The Marshall Plan for European Recovery to rebuild a war-devastated Europe embodied the approach toward foreign aid: make American capital available to governments that chose an open economy and the development of capitalist markets. Scholarship has revealed that much if not most foreign aid outside of Europe was actually military; U.S. military assistance included covert operations, assassinations, and secret financial infusions to political organizations and parties deemed favorable to “western,” that is to say, liberal capitalist, interests. Even within Europe, the Marshall Plan’s economic assistance was complemented by covert political actions and subterfuge.6 The Truman Doctrine’s realism consisted of an overt commitment to international institutions and a covert one to subversive actions.

The Korean War set the pattern of engaging the communist enemy with U.S. conventional military forces or by proxy armies in conflicts in the colonial or semi-colonial “periphery” or “Third World.” This included the support of dictators if they were perceived as forestalling communism and safeguarding western interests. As the historian Odd Arne Westad puts it in startlingly neutral terms, the Cold War marked an elemental ideological clash between the United States and the Soviet Union over the concept of modernity – in ideal typical form, market-based liberal capitalist vs. state-centered, “social justice” collectivism – whose clash largely played out in the countries emerging from colonial domination.7 In President Truman’s view, broadly shared by Americans, the Cold War also represented a fundamental spiritual conflict pitting those who believed in God and morality and the dignity of the individual against atheism and materialism and the apotheosis of the state. Containment policy thus had a distinct theological dimension.8 And while the clash over the model of modernity frequently devastated the Third World countries that played host to superpower hostilities, for example the wars in Korea, Vietnam, Angola, and a host of others, the superpowers observed a generally successful effort to keep any given conflict bounded. U.S. containment policy entailed a practice not to engage the Soviet Union directly or in its post-war geographic sphere of influence much beyond a war of words and spies. The Truman Doctrine committed the United States to building a large nuclear arsenal but not to using nuclear weapons offensively. Ideally, the atomic bomb would never be used again; it was to act as a deterrent to Soviet aggression and as a key asset in the complicated game of international power politics. Containment, in other words, was not the “rollback” of communism. Containment policy was designed to restrain Soviet expansionism in the short run without risking the expansion of hostilities into direct, out-and-out, and especially nuclear, war. The grand theorists of containment hoped that the Soviet system would change or collapse in the long run.9

This summary is, admittedly, absurdly condensed. Although the Truman Doctrine recognized that a nuclear war was generally not winnable, much post-war military policy was concerned with how to use the nuclear option. Nuclear weapons arsenals were built to stupendous levels.10 Moreover, the existence of the Bomb underlay the evolution of the national security state and consolidated power in the Office of the President, contributing mightily to the “imperial presidency” characteristic of post-war American politics.11 Still, containment meant putting limits on U.S. military actions, including threats to use nuclear weapons. And I do not mean to suggest that the post-war liberal foreign policy consensus simply emerged casually, without debate or conflict. President Truman had to vanquish Commerce Secretary Henry Wallace’s much more dovish “Popular Front” liberalism in the 1948 presidential election. Wallace, considered the heir to Franklin Delano Roosevelt (or FDR), campaigned on his Progressive Party platform of turning American nuclear weapons over to the United Nations and of funding a large reconstruction program for America’s war-ravaged ally, the Soviet Union. Truman fired Wallace as Secretary of Commerce in 1946 after the latter publicly opposed containment. On the other side of the political ledger, Truman had to contend with the right’s nascent preventive war position and its embodiment in a very popular General Douglas MacArthur.12

The old right, the New Deal, and containment

The original sin of the New Deal, in the eyes of the pre-war old right, was its fostering of the growth of federal power. As discussed in the introductory chapter, the fundamental political concern of American conservatism is the threat to liberty and property from centralized state power. In conservative political theory, property makes liberty possible. Indeed, in the sociologist Karl Mannheim’s analysis, the concept of property in the conservative worldview retains the scent of the set of pre-modern inarticulate privileges of personhood and honor conveyed in the relationship of an owner and his property. “Property in its old ‘genuine’ sense carried with it certain privileges for its owner – for instance, it gave him a voice in affairs of state, the right to hunt, to become a member of a jury. Thus it was closely bound up with his personal honour and so in a sense inalienable.”13 Mannheim’s articulation may yet be too European with its focus on honor. Still, in the American context, the notion that property conferred the liberty and independence necessary to be a citizen of the republic was a central theme of Jeffersonian democracy and largely echoes Mannheim’s observations.

By intervening in the market and limiting what an owner could do with his property, the state thus was seen to imperil liberty. Accordingly, the old right demonized the New Deal, seeing it as the American variant of collectivism and the enhancement of state power characteristic of fascism and communism. Franklin Roosevelt had betrayed the true meaning of American liberalism: laissez-faire. The American Liberty League, organized in 1934 by some prominent conservative Democrats (including the 1924 and 1928 party nominees for president, John W. Davis and Al Smith, respectively) and funded by several big industrialists (especially the du Pont family), opposed the New Deal along these lines, as did leading Republicans such as 1936 presidential candidate Alf Landon and the prominent GOP senator from Ohio, Robert A. Taft. The Liberty League denounced the New Deal as an unconstitutional centralization of power. It characterized FDR’s Agricultural Adjustment Administration, for example, as “a trend toward Fascist control of agriculture.”14 The old right was galvanized by businessmen reacting to the practical weakening of their prerogatives. The National Association of Manufacturers (NAM), the trade association of small and medium business, worked hard against the New Deal. NAM mobilized businessmen to oppose labor unions and advocated for the rights of management, both practically and ideologically. Opposition to the New Deal found intellectual cogency in the critique of economic planning by the Austrian-born economists Ludwig von Mises and Friedrich Hayek (with the occasional reach back to the ideas of Edmund Burke and Alexis de Tocqueville).15 Some businessmen engaged in efforts to institutionalize conservative ideas, among other things subsidizing academic appointments for Mises and Hayek through the William Volker Fund, and bankrolling the post-war Mont Pelerin Society, the elite international society of intellectuals and businessmen devoted to defending the free market against economic planning and socialism. Business supported other groups devoted to conservative causes and ideas, such as the libertarian Foundation for Economic Education, publisher of the monthly magazine The Freeman.16

Congressional conservatives, Democrat and Republican alike, opposed the spread of federal power and bureaucracy, defended states’ rights, and rebuked deficit spending and welfare. Some of the conservative congressional opposition was principled, some personal, and some based on the usual assortment of sectional interests, including, prominently, southern Democratic legislators’ efforts to preserve white supremacy. Most southern congressional Democrats were happy to support FDR on economic matters – especially since much New Deal spending essentially created projects in the South paid for by taxes from northerners – but fought his administration on civil rights. Southern congressmen also evinced hostility toward labor unions and opposed any government policy thought either to assist organized labor or potentially deprive southern farmers of cheap black labor. The Roosevelt administration’s need for southern Democratic support, as well as the fact that southern legislators dominated the congressional committee system, dampened whatever initiatives might have been proposed to alleviate the condition of African-Americans. New Deal liberals failed even to go after the infamous poll tax. As the historian George Mowry observes, until the Truman administration, the Democratic Party operated with a subtle understanding: the South would support the national party in its leftward ideological evolution in exchange for the party leaving the South alone with regard to white supremacy and labor relations.17

To the more fiery congressional conservatives, the expansion of the federal government under the New Deal was an odious transgression of the American way. In the words of one, it was akin to “Hitlerism.” Democratic Senator Carter Glass of Virginia, for example, described the New Deal as “an utterly dangerous effort of the federal government to transplant Hitlerism to every corner of the nation.”18 Congressional conservatives formulated a bipartisan “Conservative Manifesto” in 1937 calling for tax cuts and a balanced budget (just as present-day Republicans do).19 Unlike elite sources of opposition to the New Deal, populist opponents, organized around charismatic public figures such as the “radio priest” Charles Coughlin, tended to be hostile to capitalism (or at least evinced anti-corporate and anti-Wall Street rhetoric) but shared the anxiety about the concentration of governmental power, especially governmental power in the hands of a secular elite (and that was often identified as Jewish).20

Yet incensed laissez-faire industrialists and congressional conservatives, not to mention the furious right-wing groups on the populist fringes of opposition to the New Deal, had to swim against the tide. New Deal Keynesian economics and the establishment of the rudiments of a welfare state were widely perceived as having succeeded, their results popular with voters. Franklin Roosevelt was reelected in 1936 with 60.8 percent of the popular vote, winning all states but Maine and Vermont. When FDR’s policies didn’t work, especially the cutback in federal spending largely responsible for the recession of 1937, Republicans gained at the polls. The GOP picked up eighty-one House and six Senate seats in the 1938 midterm election. But conservative opposition to the New Deal on utilitarian grounds – that welfare economics destroyed individual initiative and hazarded general prosperity – appeared counterfactual, even nonsensical. Indeed, between 1933 and 1940, U.S. gross domestic product increased from $68.3 billion to $113 billion (in 1929 dollars), one of the strongest eight years in U.S. economic history, exceeded only by the World War II period.21 The continuation of prosperity in the post-war period defied widespread expectations of an economic slowdown. As Richard Hofstadter put it in the context of the 1964 Goldwater campaign,

As they [the ultra-right spokesmen] see it, we have been committed for many years, for decades, to economic policies which are wrong morally and wrong as expedients, destructive of enterprise, and dangerous to the fabric of free society. At the same time, every informed person recognizes that we have become much richer doing all these supposedly wrong and unsound things than we were when we had hardly begun to do them.22

On the foreign policy front, the pre-war old right tended toward non-interventionism and unilateralism, if not outright isolationism. In today’s foreign policy terms it would be labeled paleo-conservative. The opposition to internationalism had several sources but at bottom was rooted – naturally – in the old right’s wariness of the state. Old right intellectuals such as Felix Morley, one of the founders of the weekly newsletter Human Events, and Frank Chodorov, who edited the previously mentioned conservative journal The Freeman (and who, with William F. Buckley, Jr., founded the Intercollegiate Society of Individualists in 1953), noted that modern war, and an interventionist foreign policy more generally, centralized power in the state and promoted socialism – and thus threatened freedom. The military draft, moreover, commandeered and regimented citizens for war, further aggrandizing state power and weakening individual freedom.23 The old right generally supported war in the aftermath of Pearl Harbor (although the more conspiratorially inclined always claimed that the Roosevelt administration had had advance knowledge of the Japanese attack and allowed it to transpire in order to rally a properly reluctant United States to war). But true to isolationist form, the old right counseled the retreat from foreign commitments at the end of World War II. Yet with Europe laid waste and vulnerable, and with the Soviet Union widely perceived to be pursuing an aggressive, expansionist program, broad opinion – stoked by dire pronouncements from the Truman administration – held that the United States was the only world power capable of checking Soviet expansion. The Truman administration, convinced of the danger of Soviet totalitarianism, met the post-war challenge by centralizing foreign policy and military affairs in the executive branch under the National Security Act of 1947. Among other things, the National Security Act created the National Security Council, the Central Intelligence Agency, and the Air Force – which had been a branch of the Army, and now was given primary responsibility for the U.S. nuclear arsenal. Actual responsibility for the atomic bomb was vested in the president.24

Pre-war old right positions carried over into the immediate post-World War II period. Their ablest articulator was Ohio GOP Senator Robert A. Taft. On the domestic front, Taft engineered – over President Truman’s veto – a reduction of union power with congressional passage of the Taft–Hartley Act in 1947.25 By imposing limits on labor’s ability to strike, restricting union shops, and requiring labor leaders to affirm non-communist credentials, Taft–Hartley helped demobilize the labor movement and hence diminished its power in terms of broader social movement politics. This helped halt any further expansion of the New Deal. In the foreign policy arena, too, Taft reflected old right proclivities. He had opposed U.S. entry into World War II prior to Pearl Harbor because he did not see Nazi Germany as a serious threat to the liberty of the United States. A militant anti-communist, Taft laid the blame for the post-war Soviet threat at the feet of liberals and Democratic leaders who “preferred wishful thinking to facts, and convinced themselves that Stalin would co-operate with them to create a free world of permanent peace,” as he wrote in his slim, accessible 1951 treatise, A Foreign Policy for Americans. He denounced the postwar settlement: “So at the negotiating summits at Teheran, Yalta, and Postdam they handed Stalin the freedom of eastern Europe and Manchuria, and prepared our present peril.”26 Likewise, Taft saw the State Department as having lost China to the communists.

Although he condemned liberals and Democrats, Taft did not accuse them of treason, as did many on the right. That charge underlay Senator Joseph McCarthy’s attacks on the presence of communists in the federal government, and was echoed by others who, for example, accused the State Department of selling out the Nationalist Chinese to the Chinese communists, and General George Marshall of conspiracy at the Yalta Conference.27 Taft hewed to traditional conservative non-interventionism, arguing that the post-war international role of the United States should be limited. He especially opposed committing U.S. armed forces for the protection of Europe. “War should never be undertaken or seriously risked except to protect American liberty,” Taft declared, and the military assistance of post-war Europe surely did not meet that criterion.28 Despite its evil, Soviet communism posed no immediate threat to the United States, Taft asserted. Rather, the Truman administration imperiled the liberty of Americans by concentrating state power through its secret centralization of national security policy. To meet the communist menace, Taft advocated mild forms of strategic action: publicity, spying and infiltration, support for forces in friendly or neutral countries – and the purge of communists and fellow travelers from the U.S. government.29

Taft’s positions reflected the key themes of pre- and early post-war old right thinking on foreign policy. But the non-interventionist position was in many respects internally contradictory. If the USSR was understood as just a state with interests adversarial to the United States, normal international relations or even a hands-off approach could be pursued as American foreign policy. But if Soviet communism was, instead, as many, including conservatives, believed, anathema to human liberty and by its very nature bent on enslaving the world, then the mild strategies put forward by Taft and fellow non-interventionists to meet the communist challenge did not really seem up to the task. After Pearl Harbor and World War II, America might well have to go “abroad in search of monsters to destroy” to maintain its own liberty and security. As President Truman told Congress in the 1947 address that established the doctrine that bears his name (a request of $400 million in military and economic assistance for post-war Greece and Turkey), “This is no more than a frank recognition that totalitarian regimes imposed upon free peoples, by direct or indirect aggression, undermine the foundation of international peace and hence the security of the United States.”30

Truman’s view that a threat to freedom anywhere was now a threat to the freedom of the United States carried the day, so much so that by the early 1950s the old right’s non-interventionist anti-communism became a political liability. Taft lost the 1952 Republican presidential primary to the ideologically moderate former Army general Dwight Eisenhower. Notwithstanding the tough language of the 1952 Republican Party platform, Eisenhower stuck with the Truman Doctrine upon assuming the presidency. Eisenhower was a convinced internationalist. This prompted a debate among conservative intellectuals about the correct policy toward world communism. The debate also played out in Congress in the fight over the Bricker Amendment. Reintroduced in the Senate by old right isolationists in early 1953, the Bricker Amendment was the name for a series of proposed amendments to the Constitution designed to restrict presidential authority in foreign policy and to serve as a weapon in the right’s fight against the United Nations. Unhappy with the assertion of foreign policy preeminence in the presidency, conservatives also feared that various U.N. conventions would bring American citizens under the jurisdiction of foreign courts without the protections of the U.S. Bill of Rights (not unlike arguments against the International Criminal Court decades later). Although the defeat of the Bricker Amendment was only a narrow one, it signaled the end of any serious policy of isolationism.31 By the mid-1950s, the debate within conservatism was won by the rising interventionist wing, marked by the founding of what would become the key conservative journal of opinion, National Review, under the leadership of William F. Buckley, Jr. In a sign of how far conservative opinion on foreign affairs had shifted, Human Events, the isolationist old right journal founded in 1944 with historic links to the America First Committee, had also become an advocate of interventionism in foreign affairs. In short, the unique danger of post-war international communism and the perceived domestic political price of an isolationist foreign policy under these new conditions induced the old right to shed its traditional anti-interventionism.

The triumph of the post-war liberal consensus fused aggressive anti-communism with the power of the presidency and signaled the acceptance of the supremacy of the executive branch in foreign policy. From then on, the vast majority of conservatives joined the post-war foreign policy consensus, but with their own piercing spin. They continued to direct their ire at liberal duplicity not only because, in their judgment, it was the liberals’ appeasement of Soviet expansion that had created the post-war communist problem in the first place – always the cry of the sellout at Yalta – but also on account of liberal weakness and half-heartedness in facing the communist menace.

Anti-establishment conservatism: Interventionism and fusionism

The switch from foreign policy isolationism marked the emergence of anti-establishment conservatism. Now interventionist, the new wing of conservatism called for total mobilization against communism and for unilateral preventive military action against the Soviet Union and China. Rejecting the logic of mere containment, anti-establishment conservative intellectuals, some of whom were former communists who had turned on their past creed, committed themselves to the military paradigm of all-out war, quick victory, and limited losses – even in a nuclear age.32 Barry Goldwater’s Why Not Victory?, published just a decade after Taft’s A Foreign Policy for Americans, placed a capstone on the shift in anti-establishment conservative foreign policy thinking. In Goldwater’s view, the Truman Doctrine was flawed because it implied the possibility of peaceful coexistence. Instead, the United States should engage in an aggressive policy of rolling back communism, of liberating subject populations from their communist overlords.33

Anti-establishment conservatives now saw the New Deal and international communism in roughly similar terms. Both were threats to liberty; both had to be rolled back. President Truman was wrong to commit American troops to Korea without congressional approval, they complained, but now that the United States was involved militarily in the Korean peninsula, it should go all-out and take the war to the Chinese puppet masters directly. The new conservative interventionists thus backed General Douglas MacArthur’s aggressive designs to strike bases inside China during the Korean War, and denounced Truman’s cashier of the decorated general. MacArthur stood in favor of preventive military attack, with nuclear weapons no less. Anti-establishment conservatives also applauded Senator Joseph McCarthy’s efforts to purge the federal government of alleged communists (although some conservative intellectuals were wary of McCarthy himself).34 If the Cold War represented a practical and spiritual struggle between freedom and despotism, between religion and atheism, in the view of anti-establishment conservatives it was a struggle that liberals (and many establishment Republicans) were manifestly unfit to lead.35 Yet lead the liberals did, often, in the eyes of the anti-establishment right, treacherously and viciously. That America was beset by internal subversion was a strong theme in the early post-war period. McCarthyism writ large had resonance in popular and conservative congressional circles because of the conflict between the elevated sense of U.S. power and the country’s apparent impotence in making international affairs conform to its designs. Such impotence, McCarthy and his followers argued, could only be explained by internal betrayal.36 Notwithstanding that the loyalty oaths had been set in motion by the Truman administration as part of the post-war national security state, in the eyes of the right it was the liberals who embodied domestic treachery.37 The New Deal and containment represented, in McCarthy’s famous soundbite, “twenty years of treason” by the elite, by “the bright young men who are born with silver spoons in their mouth.”38 Part of McCarthy’s success was in his weaving of class resentment with anti-communism. Whereas McCarthy was a figure of fear and revulsion to liberal America, the senator became a martyr of the anti-establishment right. The lesson drawn by conservatives from his fall was not that his anti-communist crusade had violated the democratic process, rather that the liberal establishment would use its great power to crush its critics.39 The strident defense of McCarthy against the treacherous liberal establishment continues to this day.40

Linked by anti-communism and revulsion toward the New Deal, early 1950s anti-establishment conservatives fell into two main theoretical tendencies: libertarianism and traditionalism.41 Property, as we have seen, was considered the foundation of liberty, especially in the libertarian analysis. The market, too, was understood a virtuous institution because of its economic efficiency and its promotion of individual freedom. The libertarian Austrian economists Ludwig von Mises and Friedrich Hayek (and from them through the Mont Pelerin Society to Milton Friedman and the Chicago school of economics) brought a political-economic dimension to the notion of the virtuous market. They argued that the nature of knowledge in a modern economy was local and concrete; the myriad decentralized preferences and decisions of buyers and sellers made the market system succeed. Centralized planning could never work because planners could never know enough to manage an economy. The knowledge possessed by economic planners was arid and abstract, whereas the dispersed knowledge that guided ordinary participants in economic life was concrete and rational, imbued with everyday, personal significance. Indeed, the elite’s presumption of the rationality of planning was dangerous hubris. Any attempt at economic planning not only skewed the economy and undercut the rights of the individual but also led inexorably to the creation of a powerful, centralized state and hence ultimately to totalitarianism. The state thus posed an existential threat to individual liberty. The formula was simple and bold: state interventionism in the economy led to centralized planning led to totalitarianism. In its opposition to the state, the libertarian strain of anti-establishment conservatism drifted toward a kind of market fundamentalism. The market was a wise and moral institution whose genius must not be second-guessed. In the heat of their opposition to planning and socialism, cemented by fear of totalitarianism, libertarians seemed to elevate the market to an almost sacred status.42 Libertarianism’s most famous spokespersons in the immediate post-war period were the economist Hayek and novelist Ayn Rand. There were key differences within libertarianism, of course. For Hayek, the “road to serfdom” began with economic planning; for Rand, following in the Social Darwinist footsteps of Herbert Spencer and William Graham Sumner, that road was paved by misplaced altruism.43 Capitalism was a naturally moral system that allowed heroic risk-takers to rise to the top. Their risk-taking added to the overall value of society. (In today’s political rhetoric, capitalists are the vaunted “job creators.”) Any fuzzy-headed disruption of this system traduced individual liberty and undermined the lessons of personal responsibility and self-reliance. For Rand, selfishness was a virtue; altruism leads to collectivism leads to dependence and moral degradation.44

Anti-establishment conservatism’s other strain, traditionalism, had a more communal understanding of society. It recognized the mutual obligations that bind individuals to one another, united by belief in an objective moral order guaranteed by God. Edmund Burke was traditionalism’s key influence. Burke’s horror at the excesses of the French Revolution led him to propose a social contract theory based not on reason (which ultimately led to regicide and terror), but on a partnership across the living, the dead, and the not yet born, the visible and the invisible world – secured by a transcendental power that confines human liberties and curbs passions. Without the restraint of human passions, individuals do not learn personal responsibility. Untrammeled selfhood leads to the disintegration of civil society, argued Burke. The restraining power is government. Within a bounded liberty, other social institutions and practices that foster “public affections,” including the attachment to the family and “the little platoon we belong to,” manners, and particularly religion and property, facilitate the perpetuation of society itself.45 “We begin our public affections in our families. … We pass on to our neighbourhoods, and our habitual provincial connections.”46 Each generation is indebted to the cumulative achievement of generations past. Notwithstanding the importance of tradition and habit, there is a flexibility in Burke, an unwillingness to participate in the spouting of political abstractions. Even as he maintained that government must limit liberties and restrain human passions, he declared, “But as the liberties and the restrictions vary with times and circumstances, and admit of infinite modifications, they cannot be settled upon any abstract rule; and nothing is so foolish as to discuss them upon that principle.”47 Burke’s conservatism was an orthodoxy built on notions of tradition and incrementalism. Unlike libertarianism, Burkean traditionalism did not display a strict adherence to a pre-set ideology. That is to say, it was not fundamentalist.

Drawing on the lessons of Burke, the traditionalist strain of conservatism held that civilization is fragile and easily disrupted. Modern western societies in particular are weak and unstable, a consequence of liberalism’s abandonment of belief in an objective moral order and the transcendental values that emanate from that order. Indeed, for many traditionalists, the abandonment of the idea of an objective moral order underlay the affinities between liberalism and communism. Like communists, liberals were said to believe in human perfectibility through the use of reason and sought to achieve the elimination of social defects and individual differences through the exercise of state power. Roman Catholic theology constituted another philosophical tradition that fed this strain of anti-establishment conservatism. Catholicism linked liberalism and communism through materialism. Materialism denies the existence of both deities and souls, and makes humans and their natural inclinations the measure of all things. In the eyes of traditionalists, human beings are inherently flawed, hence individuals must be subordinated to an objective, religious order. New Deal liberalism had broken with this conception. Instead, the New Deal represented an advanced stage in the long process of secularization and the rupture with classical teachings. At bottom suspicious of democracy and equality, traditionalist conservatives believed that the survival of the republic presupposed the virtue of citizens and required a highly educated elite as guardians of civilization.48 William F. Buckley, Jr. served as both a great interlocutor and disseminator of these ideas, and a practical organizer of those of like mind. Buckley’s grand aim was to create an intelligent, respectable Burkean conservative movement. In addition to National Review, Buckley’s column, “On the Right,” was syndicated in 1962 to more than 300 newspapers. An occasional panelist on Answers for Americans, an early 1950s televised conservative public affairs program, Buckley hosted Firing Line on network television from 1966 until 1999.49

Although libertarianism and traditionalism each expressed belief in the inviolability of private property and condemned “collectivism,” some traditionalists worried about the rampant individualism that could accompany raw capitalism. In their own way, traditionalists understood the rationalizing, destabilizing juggernaut of the capitalist mode of production. The elemental insight of Karl Marx was that capitalism’s dynamism tended to unsettle every aspect of human existence, transforming social life into an impersonal, abstract, and calculating form of experience. As capitalism advances in a society, Marx wrote, “[a]ll that is solid melts into air.”50 Traditionalists clearly did not draw on Marx, but they understood that capitalism could weaken the habits of the past they so valued. Government, in their view, thus had a responsibility to deal somehow with the consequences of capitalism. (Even Hayek believed this, much to the disgust of Rand.) But the traditionalists submerged this responsibility within a broader requirement that government regulate morality because, unguided, the masses could turn to cultural and political evil. Government had an obligation to foster virtue – not so much in regulating the market as in enforcing public, that is, Christian, morality.

Seeking to strengthen the intellectual basis of conservatism, a new generation of intellectuals under the leadership of James Burnham, Richard Weaver, Russell Kirk, Frank Meyer, and William F. Buckley, Jr. (all of whom were heavily involved with National Review, by all accounts the hearth of post-war American intellectual conservatism) inaugurated the fusion of libertarianism and traditionalism. “Fusionism” and anti-establishment conservatism are one and the same. In the United States – and perhaps only in the United States, because of its standing as the unique nation, beacon of liberty, democracy, and equality of opportunity to the rest of the world – the libertarian concern with individual freedom and the traditional concern with moral order and virtue coincided. What made the fusion of libertarianism and traditionalism fraught is that the order it wished to maintain rested not on traditions emanating from the mists of time and scores of generations à la Burke, but on founding documents – the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution – and revolutionary doctrine forged, in the words of Peter Berkowitz, “by men in the heat of the political moment and constructed with numerous painful compromises.”51 In contrast, European conservatism derived from its reaction to the French Revolution. This is the basis upon which the celebrated political scientist Louis Hartz could claim that liberalism – in the classical sense of individual freedom and natural rights – is the foundational American political ideology from which all American political ideologies, including conservatism, cleave. Americans are by nature Lockean liberals, in Hartz’s view, because America lacked a feudal tradition that had to be destroyed. The state’s purview was generally seen as limited to protecting property relations among equal producers.52 And as American conservatism developed, a faith in the abstract, ultra-rational market became one of its distinguishing features.

In comparison with European conservatism, the American variant is more optimistic, more materialistic, and more individualistic.53 God could be said to stand behind capitalism. Among religiously inclined anti-establishment conservatives of the 1950s, the market, especially because of its contrast to communist planning and collectivism, acquired a kind of biblical sanctity.54 The market is where individual freedom is exercised and realized. This permitted anti-establishment conservatives to criticize the welfare state not on the basis of a utilitarian argument (that state intervention in the economy didn’t work – we already noted that post-war prosperity clearly contradicted that contention), but on the basis of a moral claim: the welfare state undercuts the fundamental conservative principle that effort should lead to reward. It thus destroys human dignity, individual autonomy, and personal responsibility. And ramping up this lesson, the welfare state therefore places freedom, democracy, and virtue in jeopardy. The perceived decline of freedom and capitalism went hand in hand with the decay in the belief in God and absolute truths.55 As Barry Goldwater stated on the campaign stump in 1964, “Something basic and dangerous is eating away at the morality, dignity, and respect of our citizens – old as well as young, high as well as low.”56 Hence another link to anti-communism: the unbridled growth of the welfare state destroys the society’s morals, making society submissive and weak in the arduous fight against communism. Goldwater intoned, there “could be no peaceful coexistence with Communist power as long as they do not believe in God.”57 And, squaring the political circle, he declared, “You will search in vain for any reference to God or religion in the Democratic platform.”58

Fusionism established the key features of mid-twentieth-century American anti-establishment conservatism that carry on to the present day: militant anti-communism, libertarian defense of freedom, individualism, and the market; and traditional concern with the moral order and community. This is not to say that fusionist doctrine magically smoothed over the conflicts between its libertarian and traditionalist strands. Those strands stood in serious intellectual tension, and lively debates appeared in National Review throughout the 1950s and 1960s. Libertarians today still clash with traditionalists. At the most obvious level, the libertarian championing of capitalism is based on a view of human freedom that prizes reason, change, growth, social mobility, and, in the idiom of the 1950s, “rugged” individualism. In contrast, traditionalism values authority, continuity, stability, local attachment, virtue, and the existence of social hierarchy. For that reason, some traditionalists, such as Russell Kirk and Richard Weaver, admired agrarian societies and harbored nostalgia for the antebellum South. Libertarians, rooted in the Enlightenment, speak of freedom and natural rights. Traditionalists, ultimately tied to religious philosophy, speak of virtue.59 What united the tendencies in the 1950s were their common loathing of New Deal liberalism, especially its creation of a large federal bureaucracy and a commanding presidency, and their fear and hatred of communism.60 Perhaps not surprisingly, Protestants drifted toward the libertarian strain of fusionism, while those with Catholic roots tended toward traditionalism. It is worth noting that, in the context of the history of American conservatism, fusionism signaled the arrival of Catholics and the Catholic philosophical tradition.61

But for both libertarian and traditionalist intellectual strains of anti-establishment conservatism, the new embrace of interventionist anti-communism in foreign policy meant the “dejected” acceptance, in William F. Buckley’s phrase, of the growth and centralization of the otherwise evil state in the realm of military affairs.62 The exemption of national security from anti-establishment conservatism’s high-minded anti-statist critique is of considerable significance. It meant that in the post-war transformation of conservative ideology, notwithstanding the anguish about the size, power, and intrusiveness of government – particularly the federal government – conservatives of every stripe tended, over time, to support the foreign policy purview of the president in ways that undercut Congress’s role and that justified the concentration of power in the executive branch. In this respect they joined the liberals who, since Woodrow Wilson’s academic days, had advocated the centralization of power under an agenda-setting president. This shift was rather breathtaking, even if it was desultory and evolved over several decades. Senator Robert Taft had denounced President Truman’s unilateral dispatch of American troops to South Korea, charging that Truman had “simply usurped authority, in violation of the laws and the Constitution.”63 The struggle over the Bricker Amendment in 1953 reflected a serious effort on the part of congressional conservatives to pare back the power of the president in the arena of foreign policy, aiming to limit his ability to make executive agreements. But by the Nixon presidency, anti-establishment conservatives such as Barry Goldwater, who had argued against presidential power as a principled position in the 1960s, reversed themselves. Now, strikingly, it was the conservatives who defended the imperial presidency. And in the aftermath of the attacks of September 11, 2001 and the advent of an unlimited war on terrorism, a prominent strain of conservatism went even further. It put forward a theory of extraordinary presidential power not only to conduct foreign policy unilaterally, but also to ignore congressional legislation and to surveil, detain, interrogate, torture, and assassinate based on the president’s commander-in-chief constitutional authority, known as the theory of the “unitary executive.”64

But let’s not get ahead of ourselves, as the reversal of conservatives on the issue of presidential power evolved over two decades. What was always a little strange about American conservatism, in the historian and political scientist Clinton Rossiter’s summary evaluation, was its worship of free enterprise, because unchecked capitalism creates some degree of social devastation. Accompanying the esteem of the market was an audacious anti-statism – except, as we have seen, with regard to national security, where this was trumped by anti-communism.65 As Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. noted early on, American conservatism’s embrace of the market and its demonization of the state tended to come into conflict with its avowed allegiance to Edmund Burke’s notion of established traditions and institutions. This was true even of the traditionalists. Writing of Russell Kirk and his traditionalist compatriots, Schlesinger observed that once “they leave the stately field of rhetoric and get down to actual issues of social policy, they tend quietly to forget about Burke and Disraeli and to adopt the views of the American business community.” Kirk, for one, denounced federally sponsored school lunch programs as a “vehicle for totalitarianism” and Social Security as bearing the marks of “remorseless collectivism.” Schlesinger concluded acidly, “But for all his talk about mutual responsibility and the organic character of society, Professor Kirk, when he gets down to cases, tends to become a roaring Manchester liberal of the Herbert Hoover school.”66 In other words, the conservative traditionalists tended to defer to the libertarian champions of laissez-faire capitalism.

From the grassroots

Thus far this account has focused largely on the emergence of the movement of intellectual conservatism that emerged in the mid-twentieth century. It is important also to understand the practical political and the populist conservatism that lay in the grassroots, and how these strands met up, informed, and invigorated one another. As Karl Mannheim argued long ago, we can never really understand changes in a style of thought unless we study the social groups that are the carriers of these changes.67 This, of course, raises the question of the complex relationships between elite factions and the grassroots base on which they often depend. It points to the importance of the institutions that mediated between elite and base – the journals like The Freeman and National Review, the conservative intellectual talk-shops like the Mont Pelerin Society and Foundation for Economic Education, the early think tanks like the American Enterprise Association (to become the American Enterprise Institute), whose views and positions trickled down into more popular conservative vehicles – and the businessmen who funded these efforts and also brought the ideas into their boardrooms, factories, and labor contract negotiations.68 One striking example of the interpenetration of elite and grassroots anti-establishment conservatism was the unusual popularity of Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom, which stemmed in part from the fact that the book was condensed, popularized, and distributed by the editors of Reader’s Digest in April 1945. Mass media, of course, are of signal importance in circulating ideas and mediating between intellectual elites and the grassroots. It may be a grossly self-serving claim by Hayek’s followers that the condensed version was read by millions of Americans. Still, Reader’s Digest had a circulation at the time of more than five million, and the condensed version of The Road to Serfdom was provided to subscribers, as well as each American serviceman, at home and abroad. An additional 600,000 copies of the condensed version were later printed and distributed through the Book of the Month Club and by non-profit civic groups. In February 1945, a picture-book version was published in the mass-circulation Look magazine, later made into a pamphlet and distributed by General Motors.69

And then there is the matter of the grassroots itself. Underneath the post-war liberal consensus, challenging and refuting it, lay a powerful undercurrent of still largely inchoate – or at least largely unorganized – disagreements, anxieties, animosities, fears, and resentments. A central point of Rick Perlstein’s study of the making of the 1964 Goldwater presidential campaign is how the post-war consensus was something of a myth, a liberal piety. The academic literature was celebrating an American consensus even as it was breaking apart.70 In many respects Perlstein’s claim should not be all that surprising. After all, the supposedly placid 1950s were punctuated by a sharp, sometimes virulent anti-communist nationalism whose most visible manifestations were the crusades by Senator Joseph McCarthy and the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC). The trade unions purged communists from their leadership in the early post-war years. Loyalty oaths and blacklists pervaded the 1950s.71 HUAC distributed hundreds of thousands of copies of FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover’s report, Communist Target: Youth, and commissioned the film Operation Abolition, both of which documented how communists duped American young people into opposing HUAC’s efforts.72 In short, a fervent anti-communist popular culture permeated the country in those years. Numerous far-right organizations abounded in the late 1950s, such as the radio ministries of Christian fundamentalists Carl McIntire and Billy James Hargis. The Christian Anti-Communism Crusade, led by Dr. Fred Schwarz and backed by several large corporations and hosted by notable popular culture celebrities, put on mass rallies asserting that, among other things, Soviet Premier Khrushchev’s disciplined apparatus operated in American cities and could start a riot or a strike at any time.73

Among the most prominent of these groups was the John Birch Society (JBS), which helped spur local conservative mobilization by providing organizing strategies and resources. The Society’s frenzied anti-communism exercised considerable early influence on grassroots conservatism.74 It played a prominent role in the movement that thrust forward Barry Goldwater as the conservative standard-bearer of the Republican Party in the early 1960s. Built by Robert Welch from the anti-New Deal National Association of Manufacturers and the libertarian Foundation for Economic Education, the JBS proclaimed the progressive income tax, the Federal Reserve, and increased business regulations to be part of the Soviet takeover of the United States. President Eisenhower, especially vilified for his support of a nuclear test ban, was said by the Birchers to be under the control of the Communist Party, as, they claimed, was 40 to 60 percent of the federal government.75 Other JBS positions resonated with those of many right-wing groups of the period: support of states’ rights, repeal of the income tax, impeachment of Supreme Court Chief Justice Earl Warren, withdrawal from NATO, elimination of foreign aid. The JBS, incidentally, was a principal distributor of the FBI’s Operation Abolition at the community level. Welch warned apocalyptically of an October 1952 attack on America by Stalin.76 Conversely, the JBS sometimes dismissed the actual threat from the Soviet Union as fiction, a ploy by internal communists to increase the power of government and hence move the United States toward the hated creed. The boundary between “legitimate” anti-establishment conservatism and the radical right was often murky in the 1950s, a fact that led National Review to break with the John Birch Society – first, in a polite 1962 critique of Welch, and later, in a denunciation of the JBS generally – in order to separate right-wing conspiracy theorists from respectable, if anti-establishment, conservatism.77 The aim of National Review was a stridently anti-communist conservatism that would champion a Goldwater against the “me-too” eastern Republican establishment, but a conservatism that struck a distance from utopian and conspiracy theories.

The conviction that a liberal consensus prevailed in the 1950s and 1960s required an account and dismissal of the importance of groups such as the John Birch Society. Indeed, it was the assessment of the right wing as “extremist” and in decline that allowed mainstream commentators to visualize the maintenance of a post-war liberal consensus.78 The standard critique of the right wing in this period depicted its adherents as uneducated and dispossessed, part of a declining class suffering from status anxiety and exhibiting a paranoid style of politics owing to a futile revolt against modernity. The members and supporters of right-wing groups were understood as motivated by fear of displacement. Daniel Bell put the thesis most succinctly in a widely noted 1955 volume he edited called The New American Right (updated and expanded as The Radical Right in 1963):

What the right wing is fighting, in the shadow of Communism, is essentially “modernity” – that complex of attitudes that might be defined most simply as the belief in rational assessment, rather than established custom, for the evaluation of social change – and what it seeks to defend is its fading dominance, exercised once through the institutions of small-town America, over the control of social change. But it is precisely these established ways that a modernist America has been forced to call into question.79

The radical right needed to be taken seriously. But the danger it posed would pass. As modern, rational, science-guided administration solves social problems and helps elevate people to a new middle class, Bell argued, these atavistic malcontents would be integrated into the fabric of progressive American life.80

Whereas the authors of The Radical Right believed the populist right wing of the mid-century was a reactionary, declining small town anti-modern rump, subsequent empirical scholarship showed that this right wing consisted rather of educated, white-collar, even professional men and women who saw their own lives and communities as tributes to individual entrepreneurial success and moral steadfastness.81 This was particularly true in what has become known as the Sunbelt, where the long post-war economic boom, fueled initially by federal public works projects such as dams and then by federal defense spending, created new sources of wealth and new communities. An estimated 82 percent of all manufacturing jobs created between 1950 and 1962 could be traced to aerospace expenditures in the Los Angeles, San Diego, Orange, and Santa Clara counties of California and accounted for 62 percent of the net influx of new residents.82 A similar dynamic, if smaller in overall numbers, affected other western states. By 1962 about one-third of Utah’s personal income was dependent on defense.83 In the South, defense and other federal spending was instrumental in moving rural populations into more urban settings, creating employment and raising their standards of living considerably.84 Nourished by federal outlays that subsidized suburbanization, southern and especially western conservative populists weren’t anti-modern throwbacks; on the contrary, they thrived in the new scientific industries connected to defense industry research and development and the precision engineering of the aerospace plants.

Lisa McGirr’s study of Orange County, California provides a compelling snapshot of mid-century grassroots conservatism, which celebrated the free market and entrepreneurial endeavor while fiercely defending traditional values and denouncing liberal collectivism. Even though the fulcrum of post-war economic life in Orange County and other burgeoning cities of the Sunbelt rested on the enormous sustained federal government outlays for defense and the indirect government subsidization of suburbanization, these communities tended to demonize government, its regulations, and the institutions of the welfare state. In defense of their status as homeowners, taxpayers, and parents of schoolchildren, they articulated an anti-statist libertarian outlook, yet steadfastly exempted the military-industrial complex from the perceived evils of government growth and spending. In this respect, grassroots anti-establishment conservatism largely mirrored the intellectual version of the fusionist National Review. Indeed, McGirr shows how ideas proffered by the John Birch Society and journals such as National Review were disseminated at the local level, providing the core ideas around which the local movement could be built.85 The influence of Ayn Rand’s novels was also felt in grassroots conservatism.86

For both the national anti-establishment conservative intellectuals and the Sunbelt grassroots, vocal hatred of centralized state power grew profoundly mute in the face of the defense outlays deemed necessary to challenge communism abroad. In a parallel exercise of ideological work, economic success was understood as the result of individual risk-taking, self-reliance, and hard work – not the result of opportunities directly made possible by extensive state intervention through defense spending. Woven within this libertarianism were normative concerns over the decline in religiosity, morality, individual responsibility, and family authority – the perceived decay of which, in anti-establishment conservatives’ perspective, went hand in hand with the growth of centralized federal power. McGirr’s most intriguing argument is that conservative individualism was embedded in the built environment. Orange County’s privatized, sprawling suburban model of development resulted in a form of built environment that served to reinforce individual property rights, home ownership, and isolation at the expense of public space and town centers that might have created a different sense of public and community responsibility and belonging. And when liberal political culture was perceived to have begun creeping into Orange County – at first through a 1960 Anaheim ACLU meeting to abolish the House Un-American Activities Committee, later through progressive educational policies (the theory of evolution, new reading materials, the United Nations as a subject of study) in the public schools – conservative political activism became an important avenue of sociability, largely through the actions of women.87 In a new region where change seemed unremitting, the right offered a reassuring message of solidity, of moral certitude, of strong moorings to the Dust Bowl Protestants who had streamed into southern California a generation earlier. Delighted to find employment opportunities in the West, they were resistant to challenges to their traditional religious worldview and institutions.88 Orange County became known as a fervently conservative Republican haven, a region where a rising class diagnosed social problems as the result of liberal tampering with an otherwise harmonious, self-regulating social system.89 In short, the exemption of defense spending from right-wing anti-statist ideology allowed grassroots conservatives to project an individualist, self-reliant political subjectivity.

The web of identifications, concerns, and resentments emanating from the grassroots conservative undercurrent of the early post-war decades was much more widespread than the limited membership roles of the John Birch Society would indicate. Indeed, one can more adequately account for the extent and depth of the phenomenon by appreciating the exhilaration that accompanied the presidential candidacy of Barry Goldwater, around whose persona the grassroots and the intellectuals converged. Elected to the Senate from Arizona in 1952, Goldwater made his political mark in the chamber as champion of state “right to work” laws and taking the fight to “union bosses” whom he considered both corrupt and dangerous in their socialism. These stances and his denunciation of the Eisenhower administration’s 1958 Keynesian-inspired federal budget brought Goldwater to the attention of the industrialist rump that had maintained its staunch opposition to the New Deal and organized labor, and found itself intensely disaffected with moderate “me-too” Republicans. The latter were increasingly identified as the eastern establishment, the perceived highest representative of which was New York Governor Nelson Rockefeller.90

As the historian Michael Kazin notes, the longstanding American class and sectional antagonism of the South and West toward the Northeast was articulated early in the nineteenth century with the rise of Andrew Jackson. Jacksonian Democrats championed honest frontier producers against the consumers of the Northeast – the rich, the proud, the privileged corrupted by European atheism and decadence.91 By the mid-twentieth century the impulse described by Kazin played an important part in internal Republican Party politics. Born of contempt for New Deal liberalism, the nascent anti-establishment conservative movement also displayed a profound feeling of homelessness within the Republican Party. The “Committee of One Hundred,” led by Clarence Manion, a lecturer, weekly radio commentator, and former dean of the University of Notre Dame Law School, was a group of conservative industrialists unhappy with moderate Republicanism. Together with National Review, young collegiate conservatives, and anti-communist groups such as the John Birch Society, the committee initiated a subterranean grassroots campaign to draft Goldwater for president in 1960.92 Of course, the buzz around Goldwater had to be stoked, channeled, and funded. F. Clifton White, the draft Goldwater movement’s young captain, claimed that his efforts simply “gave direction and focus to a great grassroots movement.”93 There is some truth to White’s claim of modesty. Clearly, as this account suggests, there was a broad and deep conservative populist undercurrent in American society. But most scholars also point to White and company’s brilliant under-the-radar strategy that engineered the early 1960s takeover by anti-establishment conservatives of GOP county and state organizations as key to Goldwater’s nomination in 1964.94 It is safe to say that a mutually constitutive relationship evolved among an embryonic grassroots conservative populism, an invigorated anti-establishment conservative intellectual movement, and a talented, funded, cadre of right-wing political activists and entrepreneurs in the early 1960s.

Particular organizations and outlets of the new anti-establishment conservatism were of signal importance in Goldwater’s rise. The recently established organizations such as the Intercollegiate Society of Individualists (founded 1953) and Young Americans for Freedom (founded 1960), nurtured by the new generation of intellectuals and sustained by the journals The Freeman, Human Events, Modern Age, and National Review, tapped into and helped shape the populist undercurrent into a political movement by giving it a name, a philosophy, a brand, and, with Barry Goldwater, a leader. William Rusher, the political professional who published National Review and served as senior editor of the journal, was, with Clarence Manion, another political entrepreneur important to the draft Goldwater movement. Manion conceived the idea for a book to give life to the emerging anti-establishment conservative doctrine. He enlisted L. Brent Bozell, one of the founders of Young Americans for Freedom, and friend, eventual brother-in-law, and co-author with William F. Buckley, Jr. of a 1954 defense of Senator Joseph McCarthy,95 to ghostwrite such a book under Goldwater’s imprimatur. The book was envisioned not only to burnish Goldwater’s national presence, but also to convey in popular form the principles of the new fusionist, anti-establishment conservative creed. William Rusher provided financial backing.

Goldwater’s resulting 1960 manifesto, The Conscience of a Conservative, marked the ideological shift from Taft non-interventionist conservatism to the pro-interventionist anti-establishment conservatism of the fusionists. The book extolled liberty, property, and individualism, leaning toward the libertarian side of the fusion. “Every man, for his individual good and for the good of his society, is responsible for his own development. The choices that govern his life are choices that he must make: they cannot be made by any other human being, or by a collectivity of human beings.”96 Government, necessary only for the maintenance of the social order, historically has proved to be the chief instrument for thwarting individual liberty. Conscience declared the United States a “republic, not a democracy” – for only a republic, characterized by limited government subject to checks and balances, can halt the tendency toward statist collectivism. The Constitution was at its core a means to restrain government power, particularly centralized power. Thus Goldwater championed states’ rights – not, he claimed, because he opposed the civil rights of Negroes, but because constitutionally the federal government must not impose its will upon the states.97 He denounced the “socialistic” programs of the Democrats and government intervention in agriculture because, echoing Hayek’s Road to Serfdom, “[f]arm production, like any other production is best controlled by the natural operation of the free market.”98 Indeed, much of Conscience was an unacknowledged ode to Hayek. The overweening power of labor union leaders posed a grave threat to economic stability and political processes. The graduated income tax was a confiscatory scheme whose purpose was the redistribution of wealth. Welfarism was the form that collectivism now took in the effort to subordinate the individual to the state: it created dependence and gave government the ultimate in political power. In sum, the danger to America lay in those who champion the state: the liberals.

Turning to foreign policy in the second half of the book, Goldwater declared the Soviet Union a dire threat. Yet, he charged, American leaders were searching desperately for a means to appease the Soviet Union as the price of national survival. But survival was less important than freedom. The United States had been a patsy to communist determination; Soviet expansionism had been made possible by American weakness and the fantasy of coexistence. The Soviet Union was incapable of change, and had declared its intention to bury the West. Thus our strategy, Goldwater declared, must be offensive in nature. We must win the struggle. To do this the United States must achieve military superiority, withdraw diplomatic recognition of communist nations, use foreign aid sparingly and strategically, encourage captive peoples to revolt against their communist masters, and embrace the development and use of tactical nuclear weapons. “We must … make … the cornerstone of our foreign policy … that we would rather die than lose our freedom.”99 The Conscience of a Conservative was in William F. Buckley’s view the key text of the era, consulted by conservative politicians and studied by newly initiated young Republicans.100 To the extent that the extensively distributed Conscience reformulated in a more accessible way the tenets of Mises and Hayek, the book continued the percolation of elite conservative ideas to a grassroots distressed at the reigning liberal consensus and desperate to have its unease acknowledged and suitably articulated in the political arena. In Conscience Goldwater gave voice to the three passionate resentments of mid-century anti-establishment conservatives: loathing for the ever-growing power of the federal government and the liberals who made that growth possible, hatred of the impotence of American foreign policy vis-à-vis Soviet belligerence, and despair over me-too moderate, establishment Republicanism.

Goldwater, always professing diffidence at the effort to draft him in 1960, threw his support to Richard Nixon at the Republican convention. But the conservative juggernaut with Goldwater as its poster-child was only in its beginning phase. During the Kennedy years of the early 1960s the undercurrent of unhappiness with liberalism and moderate eastern establishment Republicanism grew, and into the legions of the draft Goldwater movement came many skilled activists who would later serve as political entrepreneurs in forging the new right in the 1970s. Among these was Phyllis Schlafly, president of the Illinois Federation of Republican Women. Schlafly authored a scathing denunciation of hidden eastern establishment “kingmakers” who had engineered a policy of aiding and abetting Soviet communism, and had continually sabotaged strong, authentic conservative presidential candidates. If The Conscience of a Conservative marked the effort to concretize the intellectual basis of anti-establishment conservatism in a slim, accessible primer, Schlafly’s A Choice Not an Echo was a campaign book that captured and reflected the conspiratorial view of politics characteristic of grassroots conservatism of the time. Labeling Democratic foreign policy an “America Last” policy, Schlafly accused the secret kingmakers of setting American foreign policy as a way to protect their personal investments in Britain and Western Europe. The Marshall Plan and foreign aid were a huge boon for them. And who were these kingmakers who moved with ease in and out of both political parties? A power elite of financiers, publishers, government officials, and some foreigners revolving around the Morgan and Harriman banking interests, eastern establishment Republican figures Nelson Rockefeller, Henry Cabot Lodge, and C. Douglas Dillon, with the New York Times acting as the chief cheerleader and propaganda arm. A Choice Not an Echo crystallized the popular suspicion that the United States was beset by domestic subversives – including senior established Republicans – who lorded over the machinery of power. And while intensely pro-capitalist, the book reflected reigning conspiracy theories toward big-business internationalists.101

Schlafly’s remarkably successful little book championed Goldwater. Unlike the eastern establishment Republicans, Goldwater represented a choice, not a me-too echo (although Schlafly’s vilification did not include President Eisenhower, just the people around him). To Schlafly, Goldwater was guardian of the beauty and necessity of simple solutions – in stark contrast, for example, to the “egghead complexities” of the State Department. (The State Department was always a particular bugaboo for the right.) The book was a kind of conservative populist inversion of the left-wing sociologist C. Wright Mills’s famous 1956 book The Power Elite. Whereas Mills discerned the emergence of a post-war elite in politics, business, and the military that acted to instantiate the military-industrial complex and a cruel corporate capitalism, in Schlafly’s reading of that same historical period a largely secret group of internationalists had sabotaged the Republican Party’s conservative candidates and undermined capitalism and democracy. A Choice Not an Echo seemed to distill (and shape) many of the core beliefs of the period’s conservative populists. Hundreds of thousands of copies of Schlafly’s book proliferated on the campaign trail in 1964. By election day, it had reputedly sold 3.5 million copies.102

Out of the ashes: The Goldwater defeat, new mediating institutions, and the remobilization of resources

Lyndon Johnson trounced Barry Goldwater in the 1964 election (61.1 to 38.5 percent of the popular vote), but that did not much diminish the conservative undercurrent. What the electoral drubbing did do was facilitate the reassertion of moderate Republicans over the party machinery.103 The able activists who were so dynamic in the Goldwater campaign, now purged from high GOP posts by the Republican establishment, regrouped, learned from their mistakes, and continued to create organizations and institutions that took the best models from the liberal enemy. Thus, institutionally, anti-establishment conservatism used the Goldwater defeat as a lesson and a springboard to fight the liberal establishment (which, of course, included not just liberal Democrats but also the moderate wing of the GOP). As William Rusher and others argue, the Goldwater defeat laid the foundations for the eventual conservative victory in 1980 and beyond.104 While Rusher’s conclusion is self-serving, there is no reason to doubt the basic trajectory of his claim. Just as William F. Buckley, Jr. established National Review because he felt that The Nation and the New Republic had provided the key debating forums and intellectual firepower for the New Deal, so the anti-establishment conservatives laid a parallel set of institutions and networks in the 1960s that largely aped those of the left. The Intercollegiate Society of Individualists (ISI) and Young Americans for Freedom (YAF) had been organized to counter the liberal National Student Association (NSA); Americans for Constitutional Action (ACA) and the American Conservative Union (ACU) were organized both to counter the liberal Americans for Democratic Action and to take on the Republican Party establishment; the American Enterprise Institute and the Hoover Institution were intended as conservative think tanks to counter the Brookings Institution. The John Olin Foundation was to serve as the conservative version of the Ford Foundation. The Wall Street Journal positioned itself as the conservative counterpoint to the New York Times.

These organizations were consciously created to set up a conservative “counter-establishment.”105 The ISI and YAF offered a kind of conservative apprenticeship service, which, it was hoped, would in time expand into a national young conservative training ground – an idea that would be adopted by the Heritage Foundation and other conservative think tanks in the 1980s. John A. Andrew, III, a former YAFer, shows the YAF lineage of many important conservative politicians and political entrepreneurs, including Richard Viguerie, Howard Phillips, Patrick Buchanan, Lee Edwards, M. Stanton Evans, Richard V. Allen, and John Terry Dolan, among others.106 These and other able operatives, a great many of whom were veterans of the Goldwater campaign, not only built organizations, they became consummate political entrepreneurs in later periods, skilled at brokering contacts, cementing intellectual affinities, raising seed money, and bringing together previously separate organizations on the anti-establishment right. The growth and proliferation of conservative think tanks in particular marked a new phase in the mobilization of resources – money, ideas, expertise, media access, personal and institutional networks – on behalf of conservative causes. As Sidney Blumenthal suggests, this was the rise of a conservative counter-establishment in which the anti-establishment conservative movement largely displaced the institutions of the Republican Party both as a wellspring of political ideas and in the exercise of power. William Rusher’s hope for a principled conservatism that would flourish within the GOP and perhaps take it over was largely realized in the late 1970s. The interlocking networks of think tanks, journals, and foundations were key institutions in that takeover.

The American Enterprise Institute (AEI, née Association) began in 1943 as a business counterweight to the New Deal brain trust inside the Roosevelt administration. In its early years the AEI examined then-current public policy or laws as judged within the context of free-market ideology, and published hundreds of pamphlets under a series called National Economic Problems. William Baroody, Sr., who, as an impresario of conservative intellectuals, built the AEI with the contributions of many leading corporations, served as the policy and speech-writing adviser in the Goldwater campaign. He envisioned the think tank as an alternative “intellectual reservoir,” outside the left-controlled university system.107 But the AEI was a minor player until it received a big boost in the early to mid-1970s, attracting financial support from conservative organizations such as the Lilly Endowment and the Scaife, Earhart, and Kresge foundations, and from corporate donors including General Motors, U.S. Steel, Republic Steel, Mobil Oil, and Standard Oil. The AEI began not just to evaluate proposed public policies but also to advocate policies, especially the deregulation of the economy. Echoing time-honored anti-establishment conservative themes, AEI reports declared that regulation not just was costly and inefficient, but also undercut freedom. William Baroody, Jr., who took over the AEI, continued his father’s intellectual entrepreneurialism, drawing into the institute’s orbit many neoconservatives, those former liberals who had moved to the right (the focus of chapter 4). Some of the AEI’s prominent associates joined the Nixon administration. By 1977, the AEI was spending $1.6 million on its public outreach programs. The institute’s corporate donor base grew considerably, and in the 1980s additional gifts from the Bradley Foundation and Olin Foundation permitted further expansion.108

A central figure in envisioning this conservative counter-establishment was Wall Street mogul and Nixon Treasury Secretary William E. Simon. It was Simon who, with (perhaps more accurately, under the guidance of) Irving Kristol, putative father of neoconservatism, advocated the establishment of foundations to seed conservative think tanks that in turn might halt anti-corporate sentiment and policies. Simon served as president of the Olin Foundation and as a trustee of the Templeton Foundation, and on the boards of the Heritage Foundation and Hoover Institution.109 Together with Kristol, Simon formed the Institute for Educational Affairs (IEA) in 1978 to funnel money to conservative causes. A primary aim of the IEA was to cultivate young people by providing fellowships to promising conservative students and funding nearly two-score conservative student publications on various college campuses. This was but a small step in an effort to recapture the universities, mass media, and liberal foundations from the “elitist … political intellectuals” who had fostered the “egalitarian-authoritarian” programs responsible for the destruction of the country.110 Kristol and Simon were hardly alone in advocating a pro-capitalist mobilization. Lewis F. Powell, Jr., before he was appointed to the Supreme Court, pointedly warned the U.S. Chamber of Commerce in 1971 that “the American economic system is under broad attack,” and that corporate philanthropy was supporting the very institutions – the college campuses, the liberal pulpit, the media, the intellectual and literary journals – that were attacking business. Effectively aligning himself with the cause urged by Kristol and Simon, Powell argued it was high time that business defended itself by entering into the realm of public ideas to “enlighten public thinking.”111 In short, business needed to cultivate a cadre of intellectuals able to participate in the routines and conventions of policy expertise and savvy enough to elicit media attention. Hayek, in fact, had been advocating this since 1949.112 Businessmen finally heeded the advice. From the early 1970s, they increased corporate donations to conservative think tanks and greatly enlarged business’s lobbying presence in Washington. Through such associations as the Business Roundtable and a reinvigorated Chamber of Commerce, backed by reports from the conservative think tanks they helped fund, business lobbied hard and successfully against legislation that was seen to increase the purview of regulatory agencies or augment the power of unions and consumers. In the 1970s, employers began to abandon good-faith labor bargaining, exploiting loopholes in the National Labor Relations Act to delay the National Labor Relations Board’s administrative proceedings, sometimes for years. Business lobbying aided in the defeat in the House of Representatives in 1977 of the effort to create a Consumer Protection Agency; likewise, business pressure led to the scuttling in 1978 of proposed legislation that would have made it easier for unions to organize workers. The perceived inability of Keynesianism to deal with the simultaneous phenomena of high inflation, unemployment, and economic stagnation (“stagflation”) provided the discursive space for new business-friendly intellectuals to insert ideas about “capital formation” and supply-side economics into policy discussions. Indeed, supply-side economics, the theory that cutting taxes (particularly the taxes of those with high incomes, including capital gains) and reducing regulation would expand the economy, reduce inflation, and raise government revenues, was peddled by Irving Kristol and the economist Jude Wanniski as a political strategy under the guise of an economic theory.113

The Heritage Foundation, further to the right than the AEI and more actively involved in conservative political advocacy especially on Capitol Hill, commenced in 1973 under the leadership of Edwin Feulner and Paul Weyrich, with initial financial support from beer magnate Joseph Coors and later big money from Richard Mellon Scaife. More interested in influencing policy than simply analyzing it, Heritage aggressively targeted policy-makers and the opinion-making elite, closely tracking bills and legislation, providing experts for key legislators and their staffs, and peddling opinion pieces in elite media outlets. Upon assuming the presidency of the foundation in 1977, Feulner created a “Resource Bank” which, in the words of the foundation, was designed “to take on the liberal establishment and forge a national network of conservative policy groups and experts.” Over the years, according to Heritage’s self-report, the Resource Bank grew to encompass more than 2,200 policy experts and 475 policy groups in the United States and other countries.114 A favorite of the Reagan administration, Heritage issued a “Mandate for Leadership: Policy Management in a Conservative Administration,” which was said to be the policy blueprint of the newly elected administration in 1981. By the late 1970s and early 1980s, the AEI and Heritage were complemented by a large number of additional conservative think tanks or centers at universities to concentrate on particular policy issues. The Cato Institute, perhaps the most important of the later wave of think tanks, began in 1977 with the expressed purpose of defining a libertarian policy agenda. Other entrants included older organizations that were invigorated with new funding, such as one of the longest established of the libertarian organizations in the United States, the Foundation for Economic Education, founded in 1946 through the Los Angeles Chamber of Commerce and publisher of the influential monthly magazine The Freeman. Newer organizations and think tanks include the Center for the Study of Public Choice (1957), the Hudson Institute (1961), the Center for Strategic and International Studies (1962), the Institute for Contemporary Studies (1974), the Ethics and Public Policy Center (1976), the Manhattan Institute (1978), and many more. Various big businessmen, the energy and chemical billionaires David and Charles Koch first among them, bankroll right-wing foundations and lobbying groups to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars.115

The importance of ideas

Institutions are crucial to the understanding of social change, but the simple existence of institutions does not explain change. How the ideas they disseminate come to claim allegiance and help create political identities is vital. Ideas take root under specific historical conditions. The historical circumstance of key relevance here is the dialectical success and ultimate fragility of the New Deal coalition – of the concrete development of modern liberalism itself. Recall that the New Deal coalition rested in part on a balance between Keynesian state intervention in the economy and a playing down of civil rights. As the national Democratic Party began moving toward the support of civil rights, what with President Truman’s decision to racially integrate the armed forces in 1948, the inclusion of civil rights legislation as part of his Fair Deal agenda, and especially Lyndon Johnson’s strong support of the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts in 1964 and 1965, the political proclivities of anti-establishment conservatives and previously New Deal-supporting southern white supremacists began to coalesce. Barry Goldwater’s position on states’ rights created an ideological opening for the anti-establishment wing of the Republican Party with white Democrats in the South, especially in the wake of the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision outlawing the segregation of public schools and the vortex of politics surrounding race and civil rights.116 A pragmatic coalition between racial and economic conservatives in Congress had already been in evidence in political maneuvering during much of the 1940s and 1950s, where conservative Republicans agreed to vote with the South against civil rights legislation in exchange for southern Democrats voting with conservative Republicans against some of Truman’s economic legislation. Indeed, the anti-labor Taft–Hartley Act was the result of this inter-party conservative alliance.117 The ideological alignment between racial and economic conservatism also was in evidence in the doings of Charles Wallace Collins, founder of the States’ Rights Democratic (“Dixiecrat”) Party in 1948. Collins had discerned and denounced the link between civil rights and increased federal power, warning in his Whither Solid South? A Study in Politics and Race Relations of the dual dangers of “Negro equality and State capitalism.”118 This was an astute political observation, for any piece of legislation that extended the planning capacity of the federal government could in principle become a direct challenge to the local, white supremacist arrangements of the South. The Dixiecrats thus initiated the linkage between racial stratification and property rights and states’ rights, creating the ideological basis for an alliance with conservative Republicans outside the South.119 The intellectual discussion for this would-be alliance was facilitated by the inclusion in National Review of a consistent flow of essays on states’ rights, local autonomy, and southern anti-liberal politics.

One indicator of the fruits of this nascent alliance – and of the foundering of the New Deal order over the issue of race – was the presidential electoral map. Whereas southern whites maintained their Democratic political identities and party affiliations, as the national Democratic Party began pushing a civil rights agenda they typically crossed over to support Republican (and white supremacist) presidential candidates. Four-fifths of southern whites voted for Roosevelt in 1944, but only half voted for Truman in 1948.120 The white supremacist States’ Rights Democratic Party, running Strom Thurmond as its candidate, took Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, and South Carolina in the 1948 presidential election. In 1964, Barry Goldwater took those previously “solid Democratic South” states plus Georgia. And George Wallace, the Democratic Governor of Alabama, who inherited this alliance and broadened it in his quasi-racist American Independent Party bid for the presidency in 1968, took the same states as did Goldwater, with Arkansas substituting for South Carolina. Again, southern whites clearly still considered themselves Democrats, and the combination of that strong traditional political identification, incumbency, and safe seats maintained the Democratic Party’s lock in the South in local and regional political contests through the 1980s. White southerners only began considering themselves Republicans with Ronald Reagan, and then really only after 1984.121 But the post-Goldwater stances of anti-establishment conservatism on matters of race and, increasingly for the growing ranks of middle-class southern whites, economics, eventually built ideological links with southern white voters generally. Collins, Thurmond, Goldwater, and Wallace initiated a shift in political identity that eventually undermined the New Deal political coalition, particularly, though not exclusively, in the South.

This alliance between anti-statist economic conservatism and the maintenance of white privilege was hardly inevitable; as discussed earlier, southern white supremacist Democrats historically were among the strongest supporters of New Deal economic interventionism. Working-class northern white ethnic voters also backed the New Deal. But a series of divisive social issues in the 1960s and 1970s created conditions for polarization and the realignment of political identities. Much of this revolved around race and the federal government’s various actions to realize the constitutional rights of African-Americans. Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society programs were designed, among other things, to give substantive significance to the Brown v. Board decision and the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts, to pull African-Americans into the economic and political mainstream. The federal courts, following the logic of the expansive reading of the due process and equal protection clauses of the Fourteenth Amendment, pursued a parallel path with regard to affirmative action, school busing, welfare rights, and so on. These efforts led to resentment and backlash, especially among economically vulnerable whites.

George Wallace’s appeal to the working-class or lower-middle class male, who was depicted as pushed around by an invasive federal government, threatened by crime and social disorder, discriminated against by affirmative action, and surrounded by increasing moral degradation, joined a barely coded racism to a populist anti-statism. Wallace’s anti-statism extended mostly to issues surrounding race. Pro-labor (or, at least, pro-worker), Wallace never embraced laissez-faire economics. In that regard, he maintained the old southern link to the New Deal. It was race, the civil rights struggle, and the role of the federal government in that struggle, which lay at the center of the white anxiety Wallace tapped into, in the South and among working-class Democratic constituencies outside the South as well.122 Wallace gave clearest shape to the new us vs. them metric of political identity, a political identity very different from that rooted in the New Deal. Wallace championed the little guy, the (white, moral) working middle class against an unholy alliance of liberal bureaucrats, permissive judges, the very rich, anti-war protesters, rioters, criminals, and welfare recipients. Wallace channeled resentments, giving voice to the presumably unrepresented (white) producer against government bureaucrats who spent public money on the undeserving (black) poor. As Wallace explained his support in a 1976 memoir:

What kind of people backed me? Concerned parents who wanted to preserve the neighborhood schools, homeowners wanting to protect their investment, union members wanting to protect their jobs and seniority, small businessmen who wanted to preserve the free-enterprise system, attorneys who believed in the Constitution, police officers who battled organized demonstrators in the streets, and all the little people who feared big government in the hands of phony intellectuals and social engineers with unworkable theories.123

This was an early formulation of the “New Class” theory promulgated by neoconservative intellectuals. New Class theory mirrored Wallace’s racial populism – the embattled honest little guy against the intrusive government eggheads – but without the racism. Like Wallace’s rhetoric, the theory pitted virtuous producers consisting of business and the working class who were victimized by an adversarial, anti-capitalist elite of public sector professionals, lawyers, teachers and academics, union officials, mass media, and liberal foundations.124

Wallace ran in the 1964 Democratic presidential primaries and did surprisingly well in some northern states. But by the time the discourse had electoral salience – in the 1968 election of Richard Nixon – Wallace’s overt racism was outmoded. It was Nixon who was able to capitalize on the racial unrest of the mid-1960s and the increasing white resentment of the efforts to tinker with wealth and power posed by the Johnson administration’s Great Society programs. Nixon’s so-called southern strategy in the 1968 presidential election conceded the overt racist vote to Wallace, replacing it with a softer, seemingly color-blind appeal to white metropolitan and suburban voters that aimed at tapping into their desire to protect their prosperous and (largely racially segregated) communities and treating this desire as innocent of racial animus. Nixon defended residential segregation as the class-based outcome of meritocratic individualism rather than the product of structural racism.125

Matthew Lassiter discerned in the “New South” a political identity and a new complicated dynamic of race and class roughly similar to that found by fellow historian Lisa McGirr in southern California, sociologist Jonathan Rieder in the white ethnic middle-class boroughs of New York City, and journalist and author J. Anthony Lukas in Boston.126 The newly arrived white middle class had got where they were through hard work and initiative by the pluck of their bootstraps and their devotion to family and neighborhood. They saw themselves in the classic populist mold as producers – the people who worked hard and paid the taxes, increasingly squeezed by the welfare parasites below and the power-wielding, tax-avoiding upper-income liberals above.127 The proto-libertarians whom McGirr found in Orange County differed profoundly in their support of laissez-faire capitalism from the longstanding New Deal orientation of the Jews and Italians of Rieder’s Canarsie section of Brooklyn or the white working class whom Jefferson Cowie writes about in his history of the 1970s, Stayin’ Alive.128 But they were joined in their experience of feeling besieged by the external political forces they saw in liberalism. That by the late 1960s the federal government was expanding the reach of the Fourteenth Amendment, pushing the busing of children to integrate public schools, placing housing for the poor in middle-income neighborhoods, enforcing affirmative action for African-Americans in workplaces and universities, expanding welfare rights, was anathema to the self-conception of these working-class and middle-class whites, their understanding of legitimate politics, and their interests. They rejected race-conscious or equal protection liberalism as an illegitimate exercise in social engineering and a violation of the principle of merit. They were, and felt themselves, unwilling martyrs, aggrieved victims of the social experimentation of the liberal state, and vulnerable to the perceived lawlessness and immorality that encroached upon their communities by virtue of that experimentation.

In urban, predominantly white ethnic enclaves, often Catholic, communities like New York’s Canarsie, perched at the edge of the black ghetto, the increase in street crime and the resulting experience of everyday insecurity rankled deeply and largely poisoned whatever empathy those whites might have had with blacks. In California’s Orange County, it was the perceived liberal invasion in the form of the progressive school curriculum. In southern neighborhoods and some northern cities such as Detroit and Boston, it was school busing. The fact that government was seen as abetting these invasions and encroachments meant these largely blue-collar, middle-class whites felt themselves the objects of others’ will – a sense of their circumstances that generated deep resentment. The resentment ensconced within tense local controversies resonated robustly with larger cultural and political tensions, especially over the Vietnam War, and created new higher-order political identities. The lack of respect and absence of moral discipline often attributed to African-Americans were ascribed in slightly different form to the anti-war movement and the youth counterculture of the 1960s. The cry for “law and order” was not just a roar about crime; it reflected a fear of the untrammeled self, let loose by the pluralistic attitude of the era. Liberal permissiveness in language, deportment, and sexuality was perceived as a threat to public space, and, crucially, to the integrity of the family. The opposition to the Vietnam War was understood not simply as a different judgment about the wisdom of U.S. foreign policy; it was felt to question America’s leadership in the international order, denigrate the deaths of American soldiers, insult citizens in uniform, the style of dissent so disrespectful it smacked of treason.129 These resentments had electoral consequences. As Jonathan Rieder put it incisively, “The upheavals of race, war, and morality did not simply create conservative temptations; rather, they exploded the Democratic container that had kept them within the party.”130

Richard Nixon reaped the fruits of this emerging political identity of victimized producers. Nixon employed similar rhetorical strategies to Wallace, constructing a similar political identity, but moderated these and thickened the coding so that he (and presumably his supporters) could not be accused of appealing to racism. Nixon framed the racial and youth unrest of the 1960s in a way that spoke to concerned and angry whites: as a decline in respect for public authority and the rule of law. In a widely noted reflection in Reader’s Digest in 1967, Nixon gave voice to the moral panic that accompanied the race riots, the rise in illicit drug use, and campus unrest of the 1960s. “Far from being a great society,” Nixon wrote with direct allusion to the Johnson administration’s slogan, America “is becoming a lawless society.” How to account for this?

First, there is the permissiveness toward violation of the law and public order by those who agree with the cause in question. Second, there is the indulgence of crime because of sympathy for the past grievances of those who have become criminals. Our judges have gone too far in weakening the peace forces as against the criminal forces. Our opinion-makers have gone too far in promoting the doctrine that when a law is broken, society, not the criminal is to blame.

Nixon thus tied the social ills of the era to the tried and true conservative principle of personal responsibility and its decline into untrammeled selfhood, and to a system that had gone too far in coddling criminal and otherwise outrageous behavior. His short-term solution to social unrest? Increase the number of police, their pay, and their training.131

Nixon’s was an anti-elitist law and order strategy, not an overtly racist one. Indeed, Nixon consciously, if duplicitously, denied that race was an issue in the problem of permissiveness and lawlessness. “The fact that whites looted happily along with Negroes in Detroit is ample proof that the affliction is not confined to one race,” he wrote in “What Has Happened to America?” With his own personal loathing of the eastern establishment and the press to draw upon, Nixon’s campaigns of 1968 and especially 1972 deployed a strategy of stoking white resentment toward both liberal elites and to a lesser degree the undeserving (the black poor). It is in this regard that Nixon’s was less a “southern strategy,” in the sense of an appeal to old-style southern racism, than it was a Sunbelt and suburban strategy, based on an appeal to the homeowner populism, class privilege, and geographically determined racial exclusion made possible in part by the success of the New Deal and the fruition of post-war subsidization of suburbanization.132

The success of Nixon’s campaigns finally inverted the presidential electoral map in the South, bringing the South into the Republican column and beginning the peeling off of some northern white ethnics from the old New Deal coalition.133 Although Nixon’s presidency was desultorily centrist, not particularly conservative, his anti-statist, coded racial populist appeal to “Middle America” or the “Silent Majority” or the “forgotten Americans” has been the logic of the right since. Fear has always been a foundational element of the conservative playbook. In the 1950s and early 1960s, the fear of communism had central billing. By the late 1960s, it was racial fear submerged under the appeal to law and order and social stability that moved to the fore. As Garry Wills has written, “The desire for ‘law and order’ is nothing so simple as a code word for racism; it is a cry, as things begin to break up, for stability, for stopping history in mid-dissolution.”134 By the 1970s, the fears over race and law and order were complemented by a more religiously inflected fear of moral breakdown. These anxieties and their constituencies converged in the “new right” and the Republican victory of 1980. With the election of Ronald Reagan as president, institutional change (institutional in the sense that Congress changed hands in addition to the presidency) accompanied the discursive one. The conservative era was finally born. The new right was not really new – it clearly grew from the Goldwater movement of the 1960s and the anti-New Deal businessmen before that – but the apparent dominance of what came to be called “social issues” signaled the new importance of religious conservatives in the movement.

The forces that made for conservative ascendancy, which have lasted from 1980 to the present, with a brief interregnum between 2006 and 2009 (and perhaps after the reelection of Barack Obama in 2012), were an alliance between a conservative bottom-up movement consisting of pro-capitalist, pro-property, anti-tax economic laissez-faire-cum-libertarians, joined by religious social traditionalists who wanted to stop the expansion of the Fourteenth Amendment as it moved into their institutions and secularized American society. This also helped mobilize unhappy Democrats – particularly northerners concerned about creeping ghettoes and busing to inner-city schools, and who tended to oppose abortion and sexual permissiveness – to vote for conservative Republicans. The tensions between these groups were first papered over by anti-communism, then by a shared attack on each group’s bête noire: the New Class of secular humanist elitist professionals and their “liberal activist” allies in the judiciary. Neoconservatives were crucial in providing the ideas and forging the networks that maintained the anti-establishment right-wing alliance. Institutionally, the foresight of conservative intellectual entrepreneurs such as William Baroody, Sr., William E. Simon, Lewis F. Powell, Jr., and especially Irving Kristol created an interwoven web of largely non-university scholars, policy intellectuals, media commentators and columnists, media outlets, think tanks, and the foundations that supported them. The next two chapters examine the history and nature of the alliance that re-galvanized the anti-establishment conservative movement.

Notes

1 Alan Brinkley, “The New Deal and the Idea of the State,” in Steve Fraser and Gary Gerstle, eds., The Rise and Fall of the New Deal Order, 1930–1980 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989), pp. 85–121.
2 William E. Leuchtenberg, Franklin D. Roosevelt and the New Deal (New York: Harper & Row, 1963); Robert B. Horwitz, The Irony of Regulatory Reform: The Deregulation of American Telecommunications (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989); Jerome L. Himmelstein, To the Right: The Transformation of American Conservatism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990).
3 Everett Carll Ladd, with Charles D. Hadley, Transformations of the American Party System: Political Coalitions from the New Deal to the 1970s (New York: Norton, 1978).
4 John Quincy Adams, Speech of July 4, 1821, at http://rcocean.blogspot.com/2009/06/adams-american-does-not-go-abroad-in.html as of October 2012.
5 E.H. Carr, The Twenty Years’ Crisis, 1919–1939 (London: Macmillan, 1939); Francis Fukuyama, America at the Crossroads: Democracy, Power, and the Neoconservative Legacy (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006).
6 Sallie Pisani, The CIA and the Marshall Plan (Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 1991).
7 Odd Arne Westad, The Global Cold War: Third World Interventions and the Making of Our Times (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005).
8 Harry S. Truman, Speech to Federal Council of Churches (March 6, 1946), at http://www.trumanlibrary.org/publicpapers/index.php?pid=1494&st=&st1= as of October 2012.
9 George F. Kennan, “Long Telegram,” U.S. Department of State, Foreign Relations of the United States: Eastern Europe; the Soviet Union, Vol. VI, 1946 (Washington, DC: GPO, 1969), pp. 696–709; Kennan, “The Sources of Soviet Conduct,” Foreign Affairs, Vol. 25, No. 4 (1947), pp. 566–82.
10 Fred Kaplan, The Wizards of Armageddon (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1983).
11 Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., The Imperial Presidency (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1973); Garry Wills, Bomb Power: The Modern Presidency and the National Security State (New York: Penguin Press, 2010).
12 Mark L. Kleinman, A World of Hope, a World of Fear: Henry A. Wallace, Reinhold Niebuhr, and American Liberalism (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2000).
13 Karl Mannheim, “Conservative Thought” [1953], in Kurt H. Wolff, ed., From Karl Mannheim, 2nd edition (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 1993), p. 290.
14 Frederick Rudolph, “The American Liberty League, 1934–1940,” American Historical Review, Vol. 56, No. 1 (October 1950), pp. 19–33; George Wolfskill, The Revolt of the Conservatives: A History of the American Liberty League, 1934–1940 (Boston: Houghton-Mifflin, 1962).
15 Ludwig von Mises, “Economic Calculation in the Socialist Commonwealth,” in F.A. von Hayek, ed., Collectivist Economic Planning: Critical Studies on the Possibilities of Socialism (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1935); Mises, Human Action: A Treatise on Economics (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1949); Friedrich Hayek, The Road to Serfdom (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1944); Hayek, The Constitution of Liberty (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1960); Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France (London: J. Dodsley, 1790); Alexis de Tocqueville Democracy in America (London: Saunders and Otley, 1835).
16 Kim Phillips-Fein, Invisible Hands: The Businessmen’s Crusade against the New Deal (New York: Norton, 2009).
17 George W. Mowry, Another Look at the Twentieth Century South (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1973), p. 66.
18 Cited in James T. Patterson, Congressional Conservatism and the New Deal: The Growth of the Conservative Coalition in Congress, 1933–1939 (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1967), p. 13.
19 John Robert Moore, “Senator Josiah W. Bailey and the ‘Conservative Manifesto’ of 1937,” Journal of Southern History, Vol. 31, No. 1 (February 1965), pp. 21–39.
20 Alan Brinkley, Voices of Protest: Huey Long, Father Coughlin, and the Great Depression (New York: Knopf, 1982).
21 National Bureau of Economic Research, Real Gross Domestic Product and Gross National Product, NBER Series 08166, at http://www.huppi.com/kangaroo/GDPreal.htm as of October 2012.
22 Richard Hofstadter, “Goldwater and Pseudo-Conservative Politics,” in The Paranoid Style in American Politics, and Other Essays (New York: Knopf, 1965), p. 119.
23 Felix M. Morley, Freedom and Federalism (Chicago: Regnery, 1959); Frank Chodorov, Out of Step: The Autobiography of an Individualist (New York: Devin-Adair, 1962); Ayn Rand, Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal (New York: Penguin, 1967).
24 National Security Act of 1947 (Public law 253, 61 Stat. 495, enacted July 26, 1947).
25 Labor – Management Relations Act (Public law 80–101, 61 Stat. 136, enacted June 23, 1947).
26 Robert A. Taft, A Foreign Policy for Americans (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1951), p. 6.
27 Joseph McCarthy, America’s Retreat from Victory: The Story of George Catlett Marshall (New York: Devin-Adair, 1951); Freda Utley, The China Story (Chicago: Regnery, 1951).
28 Taft, A Foreign Policy for Americans, p. 12.
29 Ibid., p. 118.
30 President Harry S. Truman, Address to Congress (March 12, 1947), at http://millercenter.org/scripps/archive/speeches/detail/3343 as of October 2012.
31 Cathal J. Nolan, “The Last Hurrah of Conservative Isolationism? Eisenhower, Congress, and the Bricker Amendment,” Presidential Studies Quarterly, Vol. 22, No. 2 (Spring 1992), pp. 337–49.
32 William Henry Chamberlin, Beyond Containment (Chicago: Regnery, 1953); James M. Burnham, Containment or Liberation? An Inquiry into the Aims of U.S. Foreign Policy (New York: John Day, 1953).
33 Barry M. Goldwater, Why Not Victory? A Fresh Look at American Foreign Policy (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1962).
34 Himmelstein, To the Right, p. 42; Jeffrey Hart, The Making of the American Conservative Mind: National Review and Its Times (Wilmington, DE: ISI Books, 2005).
35 John T. Flynn, The Road Ahead: America’s Creeping Revolution (New York: Devin-Adair, 1949); Whittaker Chambers, Witness (New York: Random House, 1952); James M. Burnham, Containment or Liberation?; Burnham, Suicide of the West; An Essay on the Meaning and Destiny of Liberalism (New York: John Day Co., 1964).
36 Hofstadter, “The Pseudo-Conservative Revolt – 1954,” in The Paranoid Style in American Politics, p. 46.
37 Harry S. Truman, Executive Order 9835 (March 21, 1947), at http://teachingamericanhistory.org/library/index.asp?document=930 as of October 2012.
38 Joseph McCarthy, Speech at Charleston, West Virginia (February 1954), at http://www.nndb.com/people/490/000051337/ as of October 2012; McCarthy, speech at Wheeling, West Virginia (February 9, 1950), at http://www.h-net.org/∼hst306/documents/mccarthy.html as of October 2012.
39 Niels Bjerre-Poulsen, Right Face: Organizing the American Conservative Movement, 1945–65 (Copenhagen: Museum Tusculanum Press, 2002), p. 75.
40 Ann H. Coulter, Treason: Liberal Treachery from the Cold War to the War on Terrorism (New York: Crown Forum, 2003).
41 George H. Nash, The Conservative Intellectual Movement in America since 1945 (New York: Basic Books, 1976).
42 Philip Mirowski and Dieter Plehwe, The Road from Mont Pelerin: The Making of the Neoliberal Thought Collective (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009).
43 Hayek, “The Use of Knowledge in Society,” American Economic Review, Vol. 35, No. 4 (September 1945), pp. 519–30; Ayn Rand, The Fountainhead [1943] (New York: New American Library, 1971); Rand, Atlas Shrugged (New York: Random House, 1957).
44 Jennifer Burns, Goddess of the Market: Ayn Rand and the American Right (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009).
45 Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France; Thomas Paine, The Rights of Man (Garden City, NY: Dolphin Books: 1961), pp. 59, 64, 73, 110–16.
46 Ibid., p. 213.
47 Ibid., p. 73. A personal rumination. Notwithstanding its importance as a key statement of conservatism, upon rereading Reflections on the Revolution in France after thirty-five years I found it to be a tedious book punctuated by a few intellectual gems, and deeply flawed by a constant anti-Semitism that made me wonder about the real limitations to Burke’s “public affections.” It is perhaps not for nothing that his reference to the “swinish multitude,” although directed at French revolutionists, utterly enraged English radicals at the time.
48 The key articulation of post-war traditionalism can be found in two books, Richard Weaver, Ideas Have Consequences (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1948), and Russell Kirk, The Conservative Mind: From Burke to Santayana (Chicago: Regnery, 1953). The work of political philosopher Leo Strauss was also important to traditionalism. Strauss, The Political Philosophy of Hobbes (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1952) and Natural Right and History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1953).
49 William F. Buckley, Jr., God and Man at Yale: The Superstitions of Academic Freedom (Chicago: Regnery, 1951); Buckley, Jr., Up from Liberalism (New York: McDowell, Obolensky, 1959); John B. Judis, William F. Buckley, Jr., Patron Saint of the Conservatives (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1988).
50 Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, “Manifesto of the Communist Party” [1848], in Selected Works (New York: International Publishers, 1974), p. 38.
51 Peter Berkowitz, Review of Patrick Allitt, The Conservatives: Ideas and Personalities throughout American History, in Policy Review, No. 156 (August/September, 2009), at http://www.hoover.org/publications/policyreview/51579192.html as of October 2012.
52 Louis Hartz, The Liberal Tradition in America: An Interpretation of American Political Thought since the Revolution (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1955).
53 Clinton Rossiter, Conservatism in America: The Thankless Persuasion (New York: Knopf, 1955), p. 201.
54 Carl McIntire, “What is the Difference between Capitalism and Communism?” at http://www.carlmcintire.org/booklets-capitalismVcommunism.php as of October 2012; McIntire, “What is the Difference between Marxism and Christianity?” at http://www.carlmcintire.org/booklets-mVc.php as of October 2012.
55 Frank S. Meyer, ed., What is Conservatism? (New York, Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1964). Belief in God was pretty much de rigueur for conservative fusionism, at least at the institution of its intellectual articulation, National Review. Hart, The Making of the American Conservative Mind, pp. 109–24.
56 Cited in Hofstadter, “Goldwater and Pseudo-Conservative Politics,” p. 117.
57 Barry Goldwater, New York Times Magazine (September 17, 1961), cited in Lisa McGirr, “A History of the Conservative Movement from the Bottom Up,” Journal of Policy History, Vol. 14, No. 3 (July 2002), p. 337.
58 Cited in Hofstadter, “Goldwater and Pseudo-Conservative Politics,” p. 117.
59 See, for example, the exchange between L. Brent Bozell and Frank Meyer over conservative fundamentals. Taking aim at libertarianism, Bozell championed the concept of virtue over that of freedom. Meyer’s response held that the freedom of the individual person was the decisive foundation of a good political order. L. Brent Bozell, “Freedom or Virtue?” National Review (September 11, 1962); Frank Meyer, “Why Freedom,” National Review (September 25, 1962). But atheism was anathema at National Review. William F. Buckley, Jr. constantly attacked Ayn Rand over her hostility to religion.
60 James M. Burnham, Congress and the American Tradition (Chicago: Regnery, 1959).
61 Patrick Allitt, Catholic Intellectuals and Conservative Politics in America, 1950–1985 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1993). Perhaps more than any other factor, Catholic anti-communism may have eased Catholicism’s way into the American religious and cultural mainstream. The pre-war old right, primarily Protestant, had been associated with anti-Catholicism and anti-Semitism. The fact that Joseph McCarthy was Catholic, as were many of the most prominent intellectuals forging the new post-war conservatism, began to contribute to the easing of the old accusation against Catholics of “dual loyalty” to America and to the Vatican. Bjerre-Poulsen, Right Face, p. 73.
62 William F. Buckley, Jr., Letter to the Editor, The Freeman, Vol. 5, No. 7 (January 1955), p. 244.
63 Cited in Louis Fisher, “Invoking Inherent Powers: A Primer,” Presidential Studies Quarterly, Vol. 37, No. 1 (March 2007), pp. 1–22.
64 The most visible public proponent of this view is former Vice-President Dick Cheney. The key intellectual works are those of John Yoo, The Powers of War and Peace: The Constitution and Foreign Affairs after 9/11 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005); Yoo, Crisis and Command: The History of Executive Power, from George Washington to George W. Bush (New York: Kaplan Publishing, 2009). The unitary executive has resonances with the Nazi-linked political theorist Carl Schmitt. In Schmitt’s The Concept of the Political, human relationships reduce to friend or foe, and the leader who embodies the nation effectively assumes the authority of Hobbes’s Leviathan. Garry Wills maintains that the actual concentration of power began with the secrecy of the Manhattan Project and in the vesting of control over the atomic bomb in the Office of the President. This moved almost inexorably into the president controlling virtually all foreign policy. In the name of the national security state, the president amalgamated an ever-growing range of powers that are not actually constitutionally granted. The war on terrorism intensifies an already permanent constitutional crisis into a kind of permanent state of emergency in which presidential power is virtually supreme and barely challengeable. Note the irony that Wills has in effect resurrected the mid-twentieth-century conservative arguments of Robert A. Taft that liberals at the time denounced as “demonstrably irresponsible.” Cheney and Yoo have elevated the old liberal advocacy of strong, sometimes labeled “heroic,” presidential power to the near-fascistic plane of Carl Schmitt. Carl Schmitt, The Concept of the Political, George Schwab, trans. (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1976); Schmitt, The Leviathan in the State Theory of Thomas Hobbes: Meaning and Failure of a Political Symbol, George Schwab and Erna Hilfstein, trans. (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1996); Wills, Bomb Power; Giorgio Agamben, State of Exception, Kevin Attell, trans. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005). Jack Goldsmith’s review of the Wills and Yoo books provides a particularly succinct overview of the changing ideological positions on presidential power. Jack Goldsmith, “The Accountable Presidency,” The New Republic (February 18, 2010), pp. 33–9.
65 Rossiter, Conservatism in America.
66 Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., “The Politics of Nostalgia” [1955], in Schlesinger, The Politics of Hope (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1963), pp. 76, 77.
67 Mannheim, “Conservative Thought,” p. 263.
68 See Phillips-Fein, Invisible Hands.
69 “Taking Hayek Seriously,” at http://hayekcenter.org/?p= as of October 2012; “The Road to Serfdom as a Comic Book,” American Digest, at http://americandigest.org/mt-archives/enemies_foreign_domestic/the_road_to_serfdom_in_ca.php as of August 2012. Likewise Hayek’s rival in mid-century libertarianism, Ayn Rand. The initial press run of Rand’s The Fountainhead was 7,500 copies, but by 1950 half a million copies were circulating the country. Atlas Shrugged had an initial press run of 100,000 copies. Three days after the publication date of October 10, 1957, the novel appeared on the New York Times best-seller list at number six. It remained on the list for twenty-one weeks, peaking at number four for a six-week period beginning December 8, 1957. Net sales of the book were nearly 70,000 copies in the first twelve months. The initial press run for the first paperback edition by New American Library in 1959 was 150,000 copies. It, too, had net sales of nearly 70,000 copies in the first twelve months. Rand’s novels evoked widespread and sometimes intense intellectual conversions. They remain popular to this day, a staple of adolescent rebels and conservative activists. Their popularity was renewed again with the Great Recession of 2008. “History of Atlas Shrugged,” at http://atlasshrugged.com/book/history.html as of October 2012; Burns, Goddess of the Market.
70 Rick Perlstein, Before the Storm: Barry Goldwater and the Unmaking of the American Consensus (New York: Hill and Wang, 2001).
71 Robert Caute, The Great Fear: The Anti-Communist Purge under Truman and Eisenhower (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1978).
72 Federal Bureau of Investigation, Communist Target: Youth: Communist Infiltration and Agitation Tactics (Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1960); HUAC, Operation Abolition (1960), at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AVQnFpzU5h8 and http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l00IAGwKjDE&feature=relmfu, as of October 2012.
73 Perlstein, Before the Storm, p. 149; Sara Diamond, Roads to Dominion: Right-Wing Movements and Political Power in the United States (New York: Guilford Press, 1995), pp. 37–65.
74 Perlstein, Before the Storm; Lisa McGirr, Suburban Warriors: The Origins of the New American Right (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001).
75 Robert H. Welch, The Politician (Belmont, MA: Belmont Publishing Co., 1963). The John Birch Society’s publication, American Opinion, issued an annual “Scoreboard” edition. In the 1965 “Scoreboard” the percentage of the country the Society declared was communist-dominated drifted up from 40–60 to 60–80. Cited in “The John Birch Society and the Conservative Movement,” National Review (October 19, 1965), at http://www.nationalreview.com/nroriginals/?q=YzM0ODg0YTEyNzhkM2RjNGQzOTY5ODI5MWVkZjk3NWI=&w=MQ== as of October 2012.
76 Robert Welch, May God Forgive Us (1952), cited in Hofstadter, “The Paranoid Style in American Politics,” p. 30.
77 Hart, The Making of the American Conservative Mind, pp. 153–60.
78 Michael Paul Rogin, The Intellectuals and McCarthy: The Radical Specter (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1967).
79 Daniel Bell, “The Dispossessed,” in Bell, ed., The Radical Right: The New American Right Expanded and Updated (Garden City, NY: Anchor Books, 1963), p. 16.
80 Richard Hofstadter, Anti-intellectualism in American Life (New York: Vintage, 1962); Hofstadter, The Paranoid Style in American Politics; Seymour Martin Lipset, Political Man: The Social Bases of Politics (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1960); Lipset, with Earl Rabb, The Politics of Unreason: Right-Wing Extremism in America, 1790–1977 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978); Bell, ed., The Radical Right. Much of the analysis rested ultimately upon social psychological models rooted in Erich Fromm and Theodor W. Adorno’s studies of authoritarianism. Erich Fromm, Escape from Freedom (New York: Rinehart, 1941); T.W. Adorno, Else Frenkel-Brunswik, Daniel J. Levinson, and R. Nevitt Sanford, The Authoritarian Personality (New York: Harper, 1950). This intellectual move was resuscitated in John Dean’s analysis of the conservatism of the George W. Bush administration. John W. Dean, Conservatives without Conscience (New York: Viking, 2006). Gunnar Myrdal’s influential volume on white racism did not partake of Frankfurt School social psychology, but it, too, helped set the agenda that racism was the irrational reaction of the uneducated, and that the solution to the oppression of African-Americans was the education of poor whites. Gunnar Myrdal, An American Dilemma: The Negro Problem and Modern Democracy (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1944).
81 Michael Rogin found that backers of Joseph McCarthy came from higher status groups in The Intellectuals and McCarthy. According to Arnold Forster and Benjamin R. Epstein, over 50 percent of Fred Schwarz’s Christian Anti-Communism Crusade supporters were businessmen or professionals, and over half were college graduates with good incomes. Forster and Epstein, Danger on the Right (New York: Random House, 1964), pp. 58–9. Lisa McGirr found that most of the members of the John Birch Society and those active in highly conservative causes in Orange County, California in the 1960s were solidly middle class, including businessmen, engineers, and physicians. McGirr, Suburban Warriors, pp. 54–110.
82 From 1951 to 1965, $67.2 billion or about 20 percent of all the Department of Defense’s prime contracts for supplies, services, and construction went to California. When veterans’ benefits are added to this sum, DOD spending from 1946 to 1965 accounted for nearly 11 percent of personal income in California and was the principal cause of the large population growth in southern California in particular. NASA, the space agency, also played a role. From 1961 through 1965, an estimated additional $5.3 billion was spent by NASA in California, amounting to 41 percent of its total expenditures during those years. When indirect income is added in, defense spending probably accounted for $100 billion in California by 1965. James L. Clayton, The Economic Impact of the Cold War: Sources and Readings (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1970), pp. 65–81.
83 Ibid., p. 78.
84 Bruce J. Schulman, From Cotton Belt to Sunbelt: Federal Policy, Economic Development, and the Transformation of the South, 1938–1980 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1994); Kenneth T. Jackson, Crabgrass Frontier: The Suburbanization of the United States (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985).
85 McGirr, Suburban Warriors; McGirr, “A History of the Conservative Movement from the Bottom Up.”
86 Burns, Goddess of the Market.
87 McGirr, Suburban Warriors, pp. 56–9, 71–110.
88 On the heavily southern, independent Baptist and Pentecostal origins of Depression-era migrants to southern California, see Darren Dochuk, From Bible Belt to Sunbelt: Plain-Folk Religion, Grassroots Politics, and the Rise of Evangelical Conservatism (New York: Norton, 2011).
89 It is too strong an argument to claim a necessary connection between post-war suburbanization and conservative political tendencies. Still, the basic pattern of post-war suburbanization – white middle-class abandonment of urban cores to cheap single-family housing in the outlying areas beyond the city’s political jurisdiction – exacerbated racial and class segregation in ways that accelerated the deterioration of the city and abetted suburban political conservatism. Housing innovations from Washington, including the Federal National Mortgage Association (Fannie Mae) and the Government National Mortgage Association (Ginnie Mae), made possible the easy transfer of savings funds out of the cities of the Northeast and Middle West and toward the new developments of the South and the West. Jackson, Crabgrass Frontier, pp. 190–219.
90 Nicol C. Rae, The Decline and Fall of the Liberal Republicans from 1952 to the Present (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989).
91 Michael E. Kazin, The Populist Persuasion: An America History (New York: Basic Books, 1995), pp. 19–22.
92 Perlstein, Before the Storm, pp. 4–16, 43–52.
93 F. Clifton White, with William J. Gill, Suite 3535: The Story of the Draft Goldwater Movement (New Rochelle, NY: Arlington House, 1967), p. 37.
94 Perlstein, Before the Storm; Donald T. Critchlow, Phyllis Schlafly and Grassroots Conservatism: A Woman’s Crusade (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005). Goldwater received campaign contributions from almost two million individuals, according to former Young Americans for Freedom stalwart John Andrew. By contrast, just 40,000 gave money to the party in the 1960 election. John A. Andrew, III, The Other Side of the Sixties: Young Americans for Freedom and the Rise of Conservative Politics (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1997), p. 210.
95 William F. Buckley, Jr. and L. Brent Bozell, McCarthy and His Enemies: The Record and Its Meaning (Chicago: Regnery, 1954).
96 Barry Goldwater, The Conscience of a Conservative (Shepherdsville, KY: Victor Publishing Co., 1960), p. 12.
97 Goldwater himself may have believed that the cause of African-American civil rights was just but federal preemption of states’ rights wrong. As a Phoenix businessman he had hired African-Americans and contributed to the local National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. Kazin, The Populist Persuasion, p. 226. But he duly voted against the Civil Rights Act of 1964. For many conservatives at mid-century, however, the claim of states’ rights was mostly cover for racism and white supremacy. To the degree that Richard Weaver’s Ideas Have Consequences was a key founding text of post-war conservatism, it is important to underscore that its southern agrarianism could easily be read as an apology for white supremacy. Even the usually sophisticated William F. Buckley, Jr. was not immune from the fundamental assumption of black inferiority. In a 1957 National Review editorial on civil and states’ rights he wrote: “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. … National Review believes that the South’s premises are correct. If the majority wills what is socially atavistic, then to thwart the majority may be, though undemocratic, enlightened.” Buckley, National Review (August 24, 1957), partially quoted in John B. Judis, William F. Buckley, Jr.: Patron Saint of the Conservatives (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1988), pp. 138–9.
98 Goldwater, The Conscience of a Conservative, p. 41.
99 Ibid., p. 91.
100 William F. Buckley, Jr., Flying High: Remembering Barry Goldwater (New York: Basic Books, 2008), pp. 147–8.
101 Phyllis Schlafly, A Choice Not an Echo (Alton, IL: Pere Marquette Press, 1964).
102 C. Wright Mills, The Power Elite (New York: Oxford University Press, 1956). Publication figures from Critchlow, Phyllis Schlafly and Grassroots Conservatism, p. 125.
103 The Ripon Society, From Disaster to Distinction: A Republican Rebirth (New York: Pocket Books, 1966).
104 William A. Rusher, The Rise of the Right (New York: William Morrow, 1984).
105 Sidney Blumenthal, The Rise of the Counter-Establishment: From Conservative Ideology to Political Power (New York: Times Books, 1986).
106 Andrew, The Other Side of the Sixties, pp. 215–220; Niels Bjerre-Poulsen, “The Heritage Foundation: A Second-Generation Think Tank,” Journal of Policy History, Vol. 3, No. 2 (April 1991), pp. 152–72.
107 Cited in Phillips-Fein, Invisible Hands, p. 63.
108 Blumenthal, The Rise of the Counter-Establishment, pp. 32–45; Donald T. Critchlow, The Conservative Ascendancy: How the GOP Right Made Political History (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007), pp. 118–22; Thomas Medvetz, Think Tanks in America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012).
109 William E. Simon, A Time for Truth (New York: Reader’s Digest Press, 1978).
110 Ibid., pp. 215–16, 221. Published by Reader’s Digest, A Time for Truth featured a preface by Milton Friedman and a foreword by Friedrich Hayek.
111 Lewis F. Powell, Jr., “Confidential Memorandum: Attack of American Free Enterprise System,” to Eugene B. Sydnor, Jr., Chairman, Education Committee, U.S. Chamber of Commerce (August 23, 1971), at http://www.reclaimdemocracy.org/corporate_accountability/powell_memo_lewis.html as of October 2012.
112 F.A. Hayek, “The Intellectuals and Socialism,” University of Chicago Law Review (Spring 1949), pp. 417–33.
113 Franklin Foer, “Ideas Rule the World,” The New Republic (April 7, 2011). Supply-side economic theory, with roots in the Austrian economics of Mises and Hayek, is typically attributed to the libertarian Arthur Laffer and was popularized by the economic journalist Jude Wanniski.
114 The Heritage Foundation, at http://www.heritage.org/About/35thAnniversary.cfm as of October 2012. After just ten years of existence, Heritage commanded an annual budget of more than $10 million and a staff of 105. In parallel, the AEI’s budget grew ten times between 1970 and 1980, to $10.4 million with a staff of 135. Robert K. Landers, “Think Tanks: The New Partisans?” Editorial Research Reports, Vol. 1, No. 23 (June 20, 1986), pp. 455–72.
115 Jane Mayer, “Covert Operations: The Billionaire Brothers Who Are Waging a War against Obama,” The New Yorker (August 30, 2010).
116 Brown v. Board of Education, 347 U.S. 483 (1954).
117 Earl Black and Merle Black, The Rise of Southern Republicans (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2002), pp. 53–4.
118 Charles Wallace Collins, Whither Solid South? A Study in Politics and Race Relations (New Orleans: Pelican Press, 1947), pp. ix–x, cited in Joseph E. Lowndes, From the New Deal to the New Right: Race and the Southern Origins of Modern Conservatism (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008).
119 Ira Katznelson, “Was the Great Society a Lost Opportunity?” in Fraser and Gerstle, eds., The Rise and Fall of the New Deal Order, pp. 185–211; Lowndes, From the New Deal to the New Right, pp. 34–9, 48–54.
120 Black and Black, The Rise of Southern Republicans, p. 207.
121 Ibid., pp. 24–7, 206–40.
122 Lowndes, From the New Deal to the New Right, pp. 79–80; Kazin, The Populist Persuasion, pp. 222–42.
123 George C. Wallace, Stand Up for America (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1976), pp. 86–7.
124 Irving Kristol, Two Cheers for Capitalism (New York: Basic Books, 1978), pp. 3–70; Norman Podhoretz, “The Adversary Culture and the New Class,” in B. Bruce-Briggs, ed., The New Class? (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Books, 1979), pp. 19–32.
125 Matthew D. Lassiter, The Silent Majority: Suburban Politics in the Sunbelt South (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006).
126 Ibid. McGirr, Suburban Warriors; Jonathan Rieder, Canarsie: The Jews and Italians of Brooklyn against Liberalism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1985); J. Anthony Lukas, Common Ground: A Turbulent Decade in the Lives of Three American Families (New York: Knopf, 1985).
127 Kazin, The Populist Persuasion.
128 Jefferson Cowie, Stayin’ Alive: The 1970s and the Last Days of the Working Class (New York: The New Press, 2010).
129 Rieder, Canarsie; Cowie, Stayin’ Alive; Lukas, Common Ground.
130 Jonathan Rieder, “The Rise of the ‘Silent Majority,’ ” in Fraser and Gerstle, eds., The Rise and Fall of the New Deal Order, p. 253.
131 Richard Nixon, “What Has Happened to America?” Reader’s Digest (October 1967), pp. 49–54.
132 For a comprehensive account of Nixon’s career and how he narrated and fed white resentment, see Rick Perlstein, Nixonland: The Rise of a President and the Fracturing of America (New York: Scribner, 2008).
133 Kevin Phillips, The Emerging Republican Majority (New Rochelle, NY: Arlington House, 1968).
134 Garry Wills, Nixon Agonistes: The Crisis of the Self-made Man (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1970), pp. 51–2.