Movement conservatism

Editor William F. Buckley Jr. (left) and former President Ronald Reagan were dominant leaders of the movement from the 1950s to the 1980s

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 an editorial he titled “Why the South Must Prevail”. https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2017/05/13/william-f-buckley-civil-rights-215129

The movement also gathered support from such disparate sources as libertarian Monetarists like economist Milton Friedman and neoconservatives like Irving Kristol. Friedman attacked government intervention and regulation in the 1950s and thereafter. Other free market economists began rejecting the expansion of the welfare state embodied in President Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal. Friedman also associated himself with the 1964 presidential campaign of Barry Goldwater, the first time a movement conservative ran for president, unsuccessfully in this case. Irving Kristol and the magazine The Public Interest were another source of intellectual direction for the movement. During the 1960s, Kristol and his associates argued against the Great Society policies of President Lyndon B. Johnson, which had expanded the welfare state through Medicare and the War on Poverty.[8]

Robert W. Welch Jr. founded the John Birch Society in 1958 as a secret grass-roots group to fight Communists, who Welch said controlled much of the American establishment, and whose agents included even Eisenhower himself. Welch used the dues to build an elaborate organizational infrastructure that enabled him to keep a very tight rein on the chapters.[11] Its main activity in the 1960s, says Rick Perlstein, "comprised monthly meetings to watch a film by Welch, followed by writing postcards or letters to government officials linking specific policies to the Communist menace".[12] After its quick rise in membership William F. Buckley, Jr. and National Review mobilized movement conservatives, including Goldwater himself, to denounce the John Birch Society as an extremist fringe element of the conservative movement.[13][14]

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.[15][16]

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.[17] 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.[18]

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.[19] For example, in 1958 Barry Goldwater referred to influential union leader Walter Reuther as a "more dangerous menace than the Sputnik or anything Soviet Russia might do to America." While unions had a strong presence in major northern manufacturing industries, many southern and western states had significantly less union presence, and many business leaders wanted them to remain that way.[20][21]

In the late 1960s and 1970s, movement conservatives persuaded wealthy individuals and businesses to establish a conservative intellectual and political infrastructure. This includes think tanks that resemble academic institutions but publish studies supporting conservative and libertarian arguments. The American Enterprise Institute was founded in 1943, but was expanded dramatically with new funding in 1971. The Heritage Foundation was created in 1973, and the Cato Institute was founded in 1974.[8]