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January 16 - January 23, 2021
They tried to convince voters to reject the laws that protected workers, promoted social welfare, and undertook national improvement projects such as the interstate highways. The New Deal government was tantamount to communism, they insisted. But their argument didn’t work. The Supreme Court’s 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision and Eisenhower’s enforcement of racial equality at Little Rock Central High three years later enabled Movement Conservatives to enlist racism in their cause. Just as slaveholders had done in the 1850s, they took the stance that no matter how popular an activist
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As party leaders gradually came to embrace the ideology of Movement Conservatives, they undermined democracy, using the same pattern their southern predecessors did. In 1968, Richard M. Nixon—once a congressman from California—abandoned federal support for desegregation with his “southern strategy,” and adopted the practice of building a base by attacking people of color as lazy people who wanted handouts. By 1970, he had also ostracized women who demanded government policies, including reproductive rights, that would guarantee them equality before the law. Movement Conservatives went further,
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Once in office, Reagan began to shape policy according to the Movement Conservative view, a process that would gradually concentrate wealth at the top of society. In 1979, the top 1 percent of Americans claimed 33.5 percent of the nation’s capital income. By 2010, that same cohort claimed 54 percent. Americans of color, workers, and women fell far behind white men economically; they also suffered disproportionately from the structure of criminal laws and policing.4 As their policies began to hurt even their own supporters, Movement Conservatives first bled the Republican Party of those who
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At first, so many poor Virginians died in the colonies that the few who survived posed little threat to their former masters. Once free, they managed to buy land and rise into security. But when death rates stabilized, men outliving their indentures began to threaten planter rule. In the 1640s, leaders tried to make it harder for former servants to become free men. They lengthened the time of servitude and increased penalties for those who ran away, stole food, or conceived children.23 It didn’t work. By the 1660s, there was a large population of poor men who could not afford prime land. They
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If women and black people were at the bottom, southern white men were an “aristocracy” by virtue of their descent from “the ancient cavaliers of Virginia . . . a race of men without fear and without reproach,” “alike incapable of servility and selfishness.” Any man outside that class was excluded because of his own failings or criminal inclinations.17 In the 1840s, the majority of white southern men, who worked their own fields alongside their wives and children and, if they were wealthy enough, owned one or two enslaved people, fell into the category Balcombe celebrated. These “plain folk”
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In the early part of the twentieth century, southern towns began to erect statues to Confederates, making them into western-style heroes and individualists. No longer were Confederate soldiers
fighting for slavery. Instead, as the dedication speaker for the statue that stood on the University of North Carolina campus put it, they fought for states’ rights against “consolidated despotism.” Their heroic individualism had preserved democracy for northerners, who were finally coming around to see the light. Confederate wives, sisters, and mothers had nurtured the soldiers, cheered them on, remained devoted to the cause, and kept alive the memory of the dead.11
Dunning’s students followed in his footsteps in the 1920s and 1930s, producing a large body of similar work that dominated scholarship on the era. It was not much of a leap from Dunning’s work to declaring that perhaps slavery wasn’t such a bad thing. That was the direction taken by Dunning’s student U. B. Phillips, another progressive. Phillips argued that the slave system was economically inefficient, that for the most part masters were kind and benevolent, and that masters and slaves were locked into an unequal relationship from which both of them benefited, the slaves by being tutored in
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The California Supreme Court used the same reasoning to decide Perez v. Sharp, declaring that the state could not prohibit interracial marriage. This ruling undercut the marriage laws that were the basis for racial discrimination across the western states. They also set the stage for Brown v. Board of Education, the sweeping court decision that would change American history.5 Asian Americans, too, successfully challenged laws based on the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act. Americans began to distinguish Filipino, South Asian, and Chinese allies from Japanese enemies, and in 1943, Congress finally
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The dominance of the liberal consensus infuriated old-school Hoover Republicans, libertarians, and fundamentalist Christians who hated the New Deal’s secular reforms. Led by Republican Senator Robert Taft of Ohio, the son of former president William Howard Taft, these men insisted that any government intervention in the economy was socialism. It would erase individualism and destroy America. Firmly convinced they alone were defending the Constitution, they wanted to return America to the world of the 1920s, when businessmen ran the country and Protestant Christianity held sway.
Recognizing that they had little chance of recovering popular support, they abandoned reasoned argument and instead turned to the use of narrative to regain control. They hammered on the idea that the New Deal liberal consensus was destroying America by making it communist. As soon as the war was over, Republicans in Congress, with Taft as their leader, first cut back on the rights of workers by prohibiting unions from donating to national political campaigns, among other things, then launched investigations into whether communists had infiltrated Hollywood and were spreading their dogma
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Published by a small, right-wing press, Buckley’s book garnered little attention, and the election of General Dwight D. Eisenhower to the presidency the next year reinforced the dominance of the liberal consensus. Eisenhower tried to quiet the Taft Republicans by supporting the addition of the words “under God” to the Pledge of Allegiance and saying little about McCarthy, but it didn’t work. Taft’s men hated Eisenhower for taking the 1952 Republican nomination from their beloved senator, and Taft’s death the following year hardened their enmity. When the new president embraced the premises of
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the direction of Internationalists, One-Worlders, Socialists, and Communists.” Their money was being used to “socialize” the United States.17
the Liberals,” a name they capitalized to make this general leaning sound like a political cabal. The term swept in almost everyone in America, for Buckley and Bozell made no distinction between Soviet-style communism and the widely popular liberal consensus. They praised McCarthy for challenging the orthodoxy of the New Deal and called for a movement that would purge the country of Liberals and create a new orthodoxy of strict Christianity and individualism. They called themselves Conservatives, though their determination to overthrow a popular, stable system of government was, in fact, quite
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road,’ ‘progressivism,’ and ‘bipartisanship.’ ” Despite the fact that the American economy was the strongest it had ever been, he insisted that politicians who believed in the liberal consensus were destroying both individualism and material progress by strengthening labor unions, which, he said, had “doctrinaire socialist objectives.”20
John Birch Society, a secret organization with the goal of stopping the creep of communism under the Eisenhower administration. Backed by powerful industrialists who loathed government regulations—including Fred Koch of Wichita’s Koch Engineering and Koch Oil Corporation—Welch attracted supporters by explaining that the civil rights movement roiling the country was really communism: “The trouble in our southern states has been fomented by the Communists . . . to stir up such bitterness between whites and blacks in the South that small flames of civil disorder would inevitably result. They
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Labeling all opponents—including former president Eisenhower—as communists, Birchers forced Republican politicians to tolerate them out of fear they would be the next victims of such attacks. Between 1964 and 1968, white southerners opposed to integration opened more than 160 all-white private academies for their children, with state legislatures getting around the prohibition on using tax dollars for segregated schools by offering tuition grants or state tax credits.32
Goldwater nonetheless maintained that his family’s fortune came from hard work, and he resented the laws that he claimed gave too much power to workers, sucked tax dollars, and would inevitably lead to riots, bloodshed, and class warfare. He stood with Joe McCarthy to oppose the Democrats’ policies, and opposed both the Brown v. Board decision and Eisenhower’s desegregation of Little Rock Central High School. When Eisenhower proposed federal expenditures of $71.8 billion in his 1958 budget, Goldwater turned on him, accusing a president of his own party of embracing “the siren song of
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In 1960, the Republican National Committee passed over Goldwater and gave the presidential nomination to Eisenhower’s vice president, Richard Nixon. Nixon lost to Kennedy, who continued to expand equality of opportunity. He used the government to promote black equality and also began to work to promote women’s rights. In 1961, he established a government commission on the status of women, chaired by former First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt. The commission endorsed equal pay for women, called for an end to sex discrimination in hiring, and advocated paid maternity leave and universal child care. The
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Concluding that the nation was falling to communism as their ideas continued to be sidelined, Movement Conservative leaders resolved to not to give up, but to “reverse the whole trend of American intellectual history from the days of Lincoln to those of Franklin Roosevelt and Dwight Eisenhower,” as the National Review put it. They promised to turn the clock back to the days of the 1850s. To do that, it was imperative to secure the 1964 Republican nomination for Goldwater, and when the party’s front-runner, Nelson Rockefeller, the governor of New York, spectacularly self-destructed over an
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White delegates to the convention heckled and threatened black attendees. Baseball legend Jackie Robinson—until then a keen Republican—left the Cow Palace shaken. “A new breed of Republicans has taken over the GOP. It is a new breed which is seeking to sell to Americans a doctrine which is as old as mankind—the doctrine of racial division, the doctrine of racial prejudice, the doctrine of whit...
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Goldwater won only 38.5 percent of the vote and carried only six states in 1964. He carried his own western state of Arizona—candidates almost always carry their home states—and he also carried five states of the Deep South: South Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, and Louisiana. The Old South and the New West had come together to stand against the liberal consensus. Dixiecrat South Carolinian Strom Thurmond switched from the Democratic Party to the Republican Party and publicly supported Goldwater. Thanks to Movement Conservative ideology, southern Democrats had ...
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The 1968 Republican nomination for president came down to a contest between Reagan, the darling of Movement Conservatives, and Richard Nixon, whom Republicans in general perceived as the establishment candidate. To bring Movement Conservatives to his standard, Nixon went after the southern states Goldwater had won in 1964. He courted Strom Thurmond with the promise that he would not use the federal government to pursue desegregation. This was the point at which the Republican Party made the decision to abandon its attempts to attract black voters and instead to focus on attracting whites
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Nixon’s campaign hired a young television producer named Roger Ailes to stage “town halls” in which the candidate answered questions from hand-picked “regular” people. No press was allowed, and Ailes arranged the questions, the set, the camera angles, the cheering crowds, and even the shading of Nixon’s makeup. The campaign carefully packaged advertising, too, presenting the choice between Nixon and his Democratic opponent, Hubert Humphrey, as one between “peace and progress for all the people in the world,” on the one hand, and “war and chaos,” on the other. To develop the “us versus them”
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And then there were the feminists. Some deemed them such a threat to American society that in 1967 men determined to stop the church from embracing rights for people of color and women launched a takeover of the Southern Baptists, the nation’s largest Protestant denomination, to turn the religion away from the new ways and back to fundamentalism. These fundamentalists purged moderates, insisted on a literal interpretation of the Bible, barred women from positions of authority, and in 1998 oversaw an addition to the Baptist Faith and Message advising wives to “submit . . . graciously” to their
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In 1971, television producer Norman Lear skewered this division in his hugely popular sitcom series All in the Family, which explored the cultural divide at play in America. Set in Queens, New York, the show featured Archie Bunker, a working-class white man who dominated his stay-at-home wife, Edith, and was constantly at odds with his feminist daughter and his hippie son-in-law, who supported civil rights and opposed the Vietnam War. The show’s opening song, “Those Were the Days,” sung together by Archie and Edith, lamented the loss of the past and encapsulated the show’s ethos: “Guys like us
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the period when the adherents of Movement Conservatism came increasingly to believe that there was a “liberal” conspiracy against America. In 1971, business lawyer Lewis Powell warned the director of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce that socialism was destroying the American system of free enterprise. He urged the director to start a crusade to dominate media, education, politics, and the courts. Nixon appointed Powell to the Supreme Court later that year, and his plan, which only came to light after his confirmation, worked. The board of the Chamber of Commerce pulled together business executives
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Nixon initially tried to steer a middle course between traditional Republicans and the party’s growing Movement Conservative faction, but his own political crisis helped boost the latter’s narrative. Worried about his chances for reelection in 1972, Nixon and his handler...
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Party by politicizing the issue of abortion. Until the 1970s, abortion had been seen largely as a civil rights issue, with NOW organizer Betty Friedan noting in 1969 that “there is no freedom, no equality, no full human dignity and personhood possible for women until we assert and demand the control over our own bodies.” In 1971, even the Southern Baptist Convention supported abortion rights, taking the position that life began at birth, and a Republican campaign document from 1972 revealed data showing that “a sizeable majority of Americans, including Roman Catholics, now favoring liberal
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Working on Nixon’s behalf, in 1971, Pat Buchanan set out to attract Democrats to the Republican Party over the issue of abortion, which he called “a rising issue and a gut issue with Catholics,” who tended to vote Democratic. Obligingly, Nixon parted with his former policy to declare he ha...
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women’s rights in general. In early 1972, in her first commentary on the abortion issue, Phyllis Schlafly focused not on morality but on women’s rights, arguing that “women’s lib is a total assault on the role of the American woman as wife and mother and on the family as a basic unit of society. . . . Women’s libbers are promoting free sex instead of the ‘slavery’ of marriage. They are promoting Federal ‘day-care’ centers for babies instead of homes. They are promoting abortions instead of families.” In 1972, Buchanan planned to attack Democratic presidential candidate George McGovern—whose
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“pro-life” activists felt that selfish “pro-choice” women undermined th...
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Movement Conservatives supported private organizations that defended individualism, religion, and a traditional family structure and that viewed postwar liberalism as a plot to make America socialist. So pervasive was their narrative that when Nixon’s paranoia about enemies led him to bug the headquarters of the Democratic National Committee in Washington’s Watergate Hotel, supporters believed him when he claimed that he had to resign not because he had committed a crime but because the “liberal” press made it impossible for him to do his job.57
Oligarchy Rides Again When Reagan tapped the thirty-five-year-old Michigan Congressman David Stockman to be his Budget Director, Stockman, who had grown up on Conscience of a Conservative, set out to bring Goldwater’s dream to life. As soon as he took office in 1981, Reagan proposed cutting $47 billion from the previous year’s budget. To do that, Stockman slashed funding for food stamps, education, job training, and unemployment insurance. Then the administration turned to tax cuts. When computer simulations at the Office of Management and Budget showed that the proposed tax cuts would not
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Eventually, the Republicans had to back down in the face of popular anger and reopen the government, and the Contract with America was all but forgotten by March 1996. But Gingrich’s conservatives had permanently changed the government. Not only had they put tax cuts at the center of Republican policy, they had also reoriented the mechanics of lawmaking. After decades of Democratic power in Congress, lobbyists had close ties to Democratic power brokers. Under Gingrich, Republican leaders had warned lobbyists that they must favor Republicans with contributions and hiring. This “K-Street
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Beginning in the 1990s, western men marginalized in the new economy increasingly took their cue from Red Dawn and vowed to stand against the government that talk radio hosts told them was socialistic or communistic. Western individualism dovetailed with evangelical Christianity. Francis Schaeffer’s 1981 bestseller A Christian Manifesto argued that America had initially been a Christian nation but was corrupted by secularism. More and more evangelical families, particularly in the western states, took their children out of public schools to homeschool them without the corrupting influence of
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These two themes ran together, and in August 1992, they came to a violent conclusion at Ruby Ridge, Idaho, when government forces tried to arrest Randy Weaver, a former factory worker who had moved his family to northern Idaho to escape what he saw as the corruption of American society. Weaver had failed to show up for trial on a firearms charge, and when federal marshals tried to arrest him, a firefight left Weaver’s fourteen-year-old son and a deputy marshal dead. In the aftermath of the shooting, federal and local officers laid an eleven-day siege to the Weavers’ cabin, and a sniper wounded
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While a Republican investigation cited “overwhelming evidence” that exonerated the government of wrongdoing, talk radio hosts nonetheless railed against the administration, especially Attorney General Janet Reno, for the events at Waco. Rush Limbaugh stoked his listeners’ anger with reports of the “Waco invasion” and talked of the government’s “murder” of citizens, making much of the idea that a group of Christians had been killed by a female government official who was single and—as opponents made much of—unfeminine (reactionary rocker Ted Nugent featured an obscene caricature of her for
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In the long term, Republicans could cement their power through the courts. Reagan’s attorney general, Edwin Meese, had deliberately politicized the Department of Justice in an attempt, as he said, to “institutionalize the Reagan revolution so it can’t be set aside no matter what happens in future elections.” Reagan appointed more judges than any other president in history, including three Supreme Court justices and one chief justice. The rightward swing of the court continued thanks to the elevation of George W. Bush, who appointed two Supreme Court justices, including a chief justice. To stop
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Republicans wrapped their actions in a cloak of paternalism, but in 2016, Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump, a former reality-show television host who read audiences remarkably well, revealed the core of their ideology. He played to the fears Republicans had stoked for a generation, declared that he alone could save America from the dangerous forces arrayed against it, and actively cultivated the support of white supremacist groups. He announced his candidacy by calling Mexican immigrants murderers and rapists, and openly denigrated women. A leaked videotape in which Trump boasted
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room talk” indicated that many of them shared Trump’s worldview.32
Stephen Moore, a nominee for the Federal Reserve Board of Governors, who withdrew amid criticism of his public comments about women and his disproven claims about economics, said that “capitalism is a lot more important than democracy.”35
In that, most of all, the Trump administration reflected the ideology of oligarchy. Government was not designed to promote equality of opportunity by guaranteeing equality before the laws. Rather, such meddling interfered with the ability of a few to arrange society as they saw fit; they, and they alone, truly understood what was best for everyone. In that understanding, President Trump showed an affinity with other autocratic leaders: Russia’s Vladimir Putin, Turkey’s Recep Tayyip Erdogan, Saudi crown prince Mohammed bin Salman, and North Korea’s Kim Jong Un. Like them, he brooked no
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