Movement conservatism
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Movement conservatism is a term used by political analysts to describe
Recent examples of writers using the term "movement conservatism" include
History
Paul Krugman described the rise of movement conservatism in his 2007 book The Conscience of a Liberal as occurring in several phases between 1950 and Reagan's election as president in 1980. These phases included building a conceptual base, a popular base, a business base, and an institutional infrastructure of think tanks. By the 2000s, movement conservatives had substantial control over the Republican Party.[8]
Conceptual base
![](http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/b/b9/William_Buckley_and_Ronald_Reagan.jpg/250px-William_Buckley_and_Ronald_Reagan.jpg)
Author and magazine editor William F. Buckley Jr. was one of the founding members of the movement. His 1951 book God and Man at Yale argued against Keynesian economics, progressive taxation and the welfare state and gave him a national audience. In 1955, he founded National Review, which provided a platform for arguing the movement conservative viewpoint. His emphasis was on an anti-Communist foreign policy and a pro-business, anti-union domestic policy. However, in its early days the magazine also included sentiments of white supremacy. In the August 24, 1957 issue, Buckley's editorial "Why the South Must Prevail" spoke out explicitly in favor of segregation in the South. It argued that "the central question that emerges... is whether the White community in the South is entitled to take such measures as are necessary to prevail, politically and culturally, in areas where 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.".[9][10] When Buckley ran for mayor of New York in 1965, he may have been the first conservative to endorse affirmative action, or, as he called it, “the kind of special treatment [of African Americans] that might make up for centuries of oppression.” He also promised to crack down on labor unions that discriminated against minorities, a cause even his liberal opponents were unwilling to embrace. Buckley pointed out the inherent unfairness in the administration of drug laws and in judicial sentencing. He also advanced a welfare “reform” plan whose major components were job training, education and daycare.
In 1969, in his capacity as founding editor of National Review, launched a decade and a half earlier as a “conservative weekly journal of opinion” that stood in opposition to the dominant liberal ethos of the time, Buckley toured African-American neighborhoods in Cleveland, Detroit, Chicago, San Francisco, Oakland, Los Angeles and Atlanta organized by the Urban League and afterward singled out for special praise “community organizers” who were working “in straightforward social work in the ghettos.” In an article in Look magazine months later, Buckley anticipated that the United States could well elect an African-American president within a decade, and that this milestone would confer the same reassurance and social distinction upon African Americans that Roman Catholics had felt upon the election of John F. Kennedy. That, he said, would be “welcome tonic” for the American soul. This Buckley, who emerged in the years after 1965, bore little resemblance to the one who, eight years earlier in 1957, had penned "Why the South Must Prevail".[11]
The movement also gathered support from such disparate sources as libertarian
Popular base
Ronald Reagan was a key figure in expanding the popularity of movement conservatism from intellectual circles into the popular mainstream, by emphasizing the dangers of an excessively large federal government. In October 1964, Reagan delivered a speech as part of his support for candidate Goldwater titled "A Time for Choosing". The speech represented the ideology of movement conservatism, arguing against big government bureaucracy and welfare while also denouncing foreign aid. The speech was widely applauded and gave Reagan a national audience. He was elected Governor of California in 1966 and 1970.[16][17]
In the wake of civil rights legislation passed in 1964 and 1968, many white southern Democrats began shifting to the Republican Party. This ended the exceptionalism of the "one-party South" in presidential elections and brought significant additional political power to the Republican Party, although these voters were not necessarily movement conservatives.[18] In 1994, for the first time the Republicans controlled the majority of the house seats from the South, and by 2014 had gained a virtual monopoly of state and national offices throughout most of the South.[19]
Business base
Movement conservatives embraced an anti-regulation and anti-union message as part of their appeal to business interests, with whom they had common ground in terms of tax policy.
Institutional infrastructure
In the late 1960s and 1970s, movement conservatives persuaded wealthy individuals and businesses to establish a conservative intellectual and political infrastructure. This includes
Impact of the movement
![](http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/d/dd/U.S._economic_variables_related_to_the_distribution_of_wealth_and_income.png/400px-U.S._economic_variables_related_to_the_distribution_of_wealth_and_income.png)
According to Krugman, movement conservatives drove America's shift to the political right in the 1970s and 1980s and "empowered businesses to confront and, to a large extent, crush the union movement, with huge consequences for both [increasing] wage inequality and the political balance of power." Union representation nationally in the U.S. declined from over 30% in the 1950s to 12% by the early 2000s.[8] Fareed Zakaria stated in November 2016 in describing a book about conservative Alan Greenspan: "It's also a vivid portrait of the American establishment as it moved right from the 1970's to the 1980s and 1990s."[23]
Political roles
Scholars have traced the political role of movement conservatives in recent decades. Political scientist
Historian William Link, in his biography of Jesse Helms, reports that "By the mid-1970s, these movement conservatives wanted to control the Republican Party and, ultimately, the national government."[25]
Phyllis Schlafly, who mobilized conservative women for Reagan, boasted after the 1980 election that Reagan won by riding "the rising tides of the Pro-Family Movement and the Conservative Movement. Reagan articulated what those two separate movements want from government, and therefore he harnessed their support and rode them into the White House."[26]
However, movement conservatives had to compete for President Reagan's attention with fiscal conservatives, businessmen, and traditionalists. Nash (2009) identifies a tension between middle-of-the-road republicans and "movement conservatives."[1]: 346 Conservative historian Steven Hayward says, "Movement conservatives bristled at seeing the GOP establishment so well represented in Reagan's inner circle", and they did not realize how well this arrangement actually served Reagan.[27]
To sabotage movement plans, the fiscal conservatives sometimes would leak movement conservatives' plans to the press.[28]
New Left historian Todd Gitlin finds that, "movement conservatives of a religious bent had to be willing to accept a long-term strategy for limiting abortion (via legislation banning partial-birth abortion, and certain statewide bans), rather than go for broke with a probably doomed constitutional amendment."[29]
Movement conservative publications and institutes
- American Enterprise Institute
- The American Spectator magazine, a conservative political magazine
- Manhattan Institute
- First Things, magazine on religion
- FreedomWorks, a conservative activist group
- The Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank
- Humanitas, a traditionalist conservative publication
- Independence Institute, a conservative think tank
- Intercollegiate Studies Institute, a traditionalist conservative academic organization
- Leadership Institute, an organization for conservative activists
- Manhattan Institute for Policy Research
- Media Research Center, conservative organization which monitors and reports on liberal media bias
- Modern Age, a traditionalist conservative intellectual journal
- William F. Buckley, Jr.
- Policy Review magazine, a conservative academic magazine
- Project for a New American Century, a neoconservative think tank
- Townhall.com, conservative news, information, and commentary
See also
References
- ^ ISBN 978-1-935191-65-0.
- ISBN 978-1-59555-272-3.
- ISBN 978-0-275-95597-7.
- ISBN 978-0-87113-984-9.
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- ISBN 978-0-230-61479-6.
- .
- ^ ISBN 978-0-393-06069-0.
- ISBN 978-0-7432-1797-2.
- ISBN 978-0-06-074481-6.
- ^ Felzenberg, Alvin (May 13, 2017). "How William F. Buckley, Jr., Changed His Mind on Civil Rights". Politico.
- ISBN 978-0-19-515726-0.
- ISBN 978-0-7867-4415-2.
- ISBN 978-1-4165-2288-1.
- ISBN 978-0-7656-1761-3.
- .
- ^ Ronald Reagan, "A time for choosing" (1964) Online Archived 2015-01-19 at the Wayback Machine.
- ISBN 978-0-674-03249-1.
- S2CID 144826349.
- .
- ISBN 978-0-19-975400-7. excerpt
- from the original on 2016-03-06.
- ^ "Fareed Zakaria GPS November 20, 2016". CNN Fareed Zakaria GDP. Retrieved November 25, 2016.
- ISBN 978-1-4384-3232-8.
- ISBN 978-0-312-35600-2.
- ISBN 978-0-691-07002-5.
- ISBN 978-1-4000-5357-5.
- ISBN 0-201-47963-X.
- ISBN 978-0-471-74853-3.
Further reading
- Frohnen, Bruce et al. eds. American Conservatism: An Encyclopedia (2006) ISBN 1-932236-44-9.
- Perlstein, Rick. "Thunder on the Right: The Roots of Conservative Victory in the 1960s," OAH Magazine of History, Oct 2006, Vol. 20 Issue 5, pp 24–27.