New Right (United States)

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For the extreme-right movements in Europe and the U.K., see New Right. No, they're not the same.

In the United States, the New Right refers to the conservative political movement with its roots in the post-World War II era, first emerging after the McCarthyism scare of the early 1950s and the 1953 death of Ohio Senator Robert Taft. Its origins are often traced to William F. Buckley and his National Review magazine, founded in 1955. The movement was so named because it set itself apart from the isolationist and laissez-faire Old Right.

The term New Right was first used in 1962 in an article for "Young Americans for Freedom," and the term became popular as a general descriptor for this movement after 1975.[1] Other writers also cite such New Deal opponents of the 1950s as Clarence Manion and L. Brent Bozell (who first attempted what later became the Southern strategy),[2] Peter Viereck, who may have been one of the immediate intellectual forebears of the New Right (but would soon denounce what it became),[3] and Friedrich Hayek.

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[edit] Origins

Manion and Bozell first attempted to build a coalition fusing anti-New Deal fiscal conservatism with an inherently anti-civil rights "states rights" platform, and talked of forming a third political party during the late 1950s. The 1956 independent presidential campaign of T. Coleman Andrews running on such a platform went nowhere, carrying only one county each in Virginia and Tennessee, and 0.17% of the nationwide popular vote.[4] Under the influence of Buckley they soon dropped the third party talk, and set out to draft Barry Goldwater to run as a Republican.[5] Another meeting was sponsored in 1959 by Kent Courtney and endorsed by several others on the right (Utah governor J. Bracken Lee, Dan Smoot, Thomas J. Anderson) also calling for a new conservative party; Courtney would also soon get on the Goldwater bandwagon but continue advocating for a new third party on the far-right.[6]

The nascent New Right coalesced around the 1964 presidential campaign of Barry Goldwater. William F. Buckley got to work purging elements such as Ayn Rand and her followers, Willis Carto and his supporters, and the John Birch Society from the pages of National Review, effectively reading them out of the New Right (while modifying their ideas). Meanwhile, a new batch of personalities came out of the Goldwater campaign. They included:

  • Phyllis Schlafly, whose book A Choice, Not An Echo was widely distributed to promote Goldwater
  • Ronald Reagan, whose last-minute "TV for Goldwater-Miller" ad[7] established him as an up and coming conservative politician
  • Richard Viguerie, pioneer of political direct mail

[edit] Post-Goldwater

After Goldwater lost in a landslide, some of the New Right again flirted with third party strategies, most notably the American Independent Party. This turned out to be a sideshow. Most of the New Right set out to take over the Republican Party and remake it from the bottom up, bringing in new allies as part of the conservative coalition. Although the New Left got much of the attention on college campuses at the time, William F. Buckley's youth group, Young Americans for Freedom, was also very active.[8] After the social changes of the 1960s, the Religious Right and neoconservatism formed in reaction and were both added to the mix. Supply-side economics was also influential. Several groups were founded during this period, such as:

The movement got a big boost when a tax revolt movement in the 1970s culminated in the passage of California Proposition 13 in 1978, rolling back property taxes.[9] Viguerie asserted that the biggest boost, even more than the late 1970s tax revolt, was public opposition to the Panama Canal treaties and the New Right's ability to mobilize that opposition.[10] He also cited as another big boost the influence of the Religious Right in flipping evangelical voters, a key constituency, from voting overwhelmingly for Jimmy Carter in 1976 to overwhelmingly for Reagan just four years later.[11] The New Right soon had its biggest success when one of its own was elected president in 1980.

[edit] Post-Reagan

After the fall of the Berlin Wall and the effective end of the Cold War, the New Right coalition started to fracture. The Old Right was revived under the paleoconservatism label by people such as Pat Buchanan, a new populism fed into movements not part of the New Right such as the Reform Party, while the New Right was effectively supplanted by a newer, some would say nastier, brand of conservatism typified by conservative talk radio, Pat Robertson's Christian Coalition, and in 1994 by the Newt Gingrich-led Republican takeover of the United States House of Representatives. This brand of conservatism led to the disaster that was the George W. Bush administration.

One of the lingering successes of the New Right was to make "liberal" a snarl word as it drove the center of American politics away from the left. That said, the New Right's style once got them far, but has not exactly aged well. One reason for this is its fondness for creationism, anti-gay bigotry and continuing to use Cold War style red-baiting two decades after the fall of Communism — things even many conservatives today consider embarassments. Groups continuing to hearken back to the New Right style come across today as possible parodies; examples might include the AIM website, the Tea Party, and anything coming out of the mouth of Rick Santorum.

[edit] External links

[edit] Footnotes

  1. Viguerie, Richard. The New Right: We're Ready to Lead. 1981, Caroline House, p. 53
  2. Perlstein, Rick. Before the Storm: Barry Goldwater and the Unmaking of the American Consensus. 2001, Hill and Wang.
  3. Viereck Revisited, The American Conservative
  4. 1956 Presidential General Election Results, David Leip's Atlas of U.S. Presidential Elections
  5. Perlstein, ibid.
  6. Kent Courtney, Our Campaigns
  7. "A Time for Choosing Poorly" by Ronald Reagan
  8. For all the details see Rebecca Klatch, A Generation Divided: The New Left, the New Right, and the 1960s, University of California Press, 1999
  9. "Proposition 13, Then, Now and Forever", Cato Institute
  10. Viguerie, The New Right: We're Ready to Lead, p. 65-72
  11. Viguerie, The New Right: We're Ready to Lead, p. 123-128
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