The Conscience of a Liberal

6 MOVEMENT CONSERVATISM

Even as Dwight Eisenhower was preaching the virtues of a toned-down, “modern” Republicanism, a new kind of conservative was beginning to emerge. Unlike the McKinley-type conservatives who fought first FDR and then Eisenhower—men who were traditional, stuffy, and above all old—these “new conservatives,” as they came to be known, were young, brash, and media savvy. They saw themselves as outsiders challenging the establishment. They were, however, well-financed from the start.

William F. Buckley blazed the trail. His 1951 book, God and Man at Yale, which condemned the university for harboring faculty hostile to or at least skeptical of Christianity, not to mention teaching Keynesian economics, made him a national figure. In 1955 he founded the National Review.

It’s worth looking at early issues of the National Review, to get a sense of what movement conservatives sounded like before they learned to speak in code. Today leading figures on the American right are masters of what the British call “dog-whistle politics”: They say things that appeal to certain groups in a way that only the targeted groups can hear—and thereby avoid having the extremism of their positions become generally obvious. As we’ll see later in this chapter, Ronald Reagan was able to signal sympathy for racism without ever saying anything overtly racist. As we’ll see later in this book, George W. Bush consistently uses language that sounds at worst slightly stilted to most Americans, but is fraught with meaning to the most extreme, end-of-days religious extremists. But in the early days of the National Review positions were stated more openly.

Thus in 1957 the magazine published an editorial celebrating a Senate vote that, it believed, would help the South continue the disenfranchisement of blacks.

The “catalog of the rights of American citizens, born Equal” dismissed by the editorial would, presumably, be the document known as the Constitution of the United States. And what was the editorial referring to when it talked of the “terrible price of violence” that might sometimes be worth paying if society is not to regress? William F. Buckley cleared that up later in 1957, in his “Letter from Spain”:

The “regime so grotesque” overthrown by Generalissimo Francisco Franco—with crucial aid from Mussolini and Hitler—was in fact Spain’s democratically elected government. The methods Franco used to protect Spain’s “soul” included mass murder and the consignment of political opponents and anyone suspected of being a political opponent to concentration camps. Nor was this all in the past when Buckley praised the dictator: As the historian Paul Preston notes, Franco’s opponents were “still subject to police terror and execution” as late as the 1970s.[3]

In the half-century since those articles were published, movement conservatives have learned to be more circumspect. These days they claim to be champions of freedom and personal choice. From the beginning, however, the movement was profoundly undemocratic, concerned, above all, with defending religion and property. Chapter 1 of God and Man at Yale denounced the school for not being “pro-Christian,” and Chapter 2, although titled “Individualism at Yale,” was mainly an attack on professors who taught Keynesian economics and had kind words for progressive taxation and the welfare state. And if democracy wouldn’t produce an environment sufficiently protective of religion and property, so much the worse for democracy.

The fact, however, was that there was no Franco in America, and no real prospect of one arising. To gain power in this country, the new conservatives would have to take control of a political party and win elections.

In 1964 a coalition of conservative activists seized control of the Republican National Convention and nominated Barry Goldwater for president. It was, however, a false dawn for the right. The fledgling conservative movement was able to nominate Goldwater only because the Republican establishment was caught by surprise, and the movement still had no way to win national elections: Goldwater went down to humiliating defeat. To achieve its goals movement conservatism needed a broader base. And Ronald Reagan, more than anyone else, showed the way.

On October 27, 1964, Reagan gave a TV speech on behalf of Goldwater’s doomed campaign that the reporters David Broder and Stephen Hess would later call “the most successful national political debut since William Jennings Bryan electrified the 1896 Democratic Convention with the ‘Cross of Gold’ speech.” In later years Reagan’s address—formally called “A Time for Choosing”—would come to be known simply as “the speech.”

Lincoln’s speech at Cooper Union it wasn’t. Reagan’s speech might best be described as a rant—a rant against the evils of big government, based not on logical argument but on a mix of gee-whiz statistics and anecdotes.

The statistics were misleading at best, and the anecdotes suspect. “Federal employees number 2.5 million, and federal, state, and local, one out of six of the nation’s work force is employed by the government” declared Reagan, conveying the impression of a vast, useless bureaucracy. It would have spoiled his point if people had known what those useless bureaucrats were actually doing: In 1964 almost two-thirds of federal employees worked either in the Defense department or in the postal service, while most state and local employees were schoolteachers, policemen, or firemen. He attacked Aid to Families with Dependent Children with a story about a woman with seven children who wanted a divorce because her welfare check would be larger than her husband’s paycheck—a story he claimed to have heard from an unnamed judge in Los Angeles.

Reagan also displayed a remarkable callousness. “We were told four years ago that 17 million people went to bed hungry each night,” he said, referring to one of John F. Kennedy’s campaign lines. “Well that was probably true. They were all on a diet.”

At the end, seemingly out of nowhere, came a sudden transition to what sounded like a demand for military confrontation with communism:

It wasn’t a great speech by any normal standard. Yet Broder and Hess were right: it made a huge impact. The National Review, with its arch High Tory rhetoric, spoke only to a tiny if wealthy, self-consciously elitist minority. Reagan had found a way to espouse more or less the same policies but in language that played to the perceptions—and prejudices—of the common man. His speeches resonated with people who wouldn’t have been able to follow Buckley’s convoluted sentences and neither knew nor cared about how Generalissimo Franco saved Spain’s soul. What Reagan had discovered was a way to give movement conservatism a true popular base.

In part Reagan did this by using small-government rhetoric to tap into white backlash without being explicitly racist. Even when he wasn’t railing against welfare cheats—and everyone knew whom he was referring to—his diatribes against armies of bureaucrats wasting taxpayers’ money were clearly aimed at voters who thought their money was being taken away for the benefit of you-know-who.

Reagan also, however, tapped into genuine grassroots paranoia over the Communist threat.

It’s no accident that George Clooney chose to make Good Night, and Good Luck, a dramatization of Edward R. Murrow’s confrontation with Joe McCarthy, in 2005: Communism was the terrorism of the 1950s. The realities of the enemy were very different: A nuclear-armed Soviet Union posed a true existential threat to the United States in a way Islamic terrorists don’t, and the Warsaw Pact, unlike the “axis of evil,” really existed. Psychologically, however, the response to the Communist threat of the 1950s seems familiar and understandable today.

Ironically, one problem with being a superpower is that it’s hard to explain to its citizens the limits of that power. Canadians don’t wonder why their government is unable to impose its will on the world. Americans, however, are all too easily convinced that those who threaten the nation can simply be eliminated by force—and that anyone who urges restraint is weak at best, treasonous at worst.

In reality there was no sane alternative to a restrained approach. Like modern terrorism, communism in the fifties and sixties was a threat that could be contained but not eliminated. Moreover, in the end, the strategy of containment—of refraining from any direct attempt to overthrow Communist regimes by force, fighting only defensive wars, and combating Soviet influence with aid and diplomacy—was completely successful: World War III never happened, and the United States won the Cold War decisively. But it was a strategy that, like a rational response to terrorism, seemed cowardly to people who saw only weakness and degeneracy in restraint. Reagan’s caricature of containment as the belief that “if we’ll only avoid any direct confrontation with the enemy, he’ll forget his evil ways and learn to love us” was echoed forty years later by Dick Cheney’s ridicule of John Kerry for saying that the “war on terror” should best be seen as a policing problem.

Reagan thought that those advocating containment were weak fools, who advocated a “utopian solution of peace without victory.” Others on the right, notably Joseph McCarthy, thought they were traitors—and many maintained that belief even after McCarthy’s downfall. For McCarthyites the frustrations of a superpower, in particular America’s inability to prevent Communist victory in China, could only be explained by treason at the highest levels:

Another great irony of the situation was that anticommunism was far more virulent and extreme in America, where there were hardly any Communists, than in Western Europe, where Communist parties remained a potent political force until the collapse of the Soviet Union. Not that Western European anticommunism was weak: European parties of the right were, in many cases, defined by their opposition to communism. And European anticommunism, even—or perhaps especially—if it came at the expense of democracy, had its American admirers: As we’ve seen the staff at the National Review, the original house organ of movement conservatism, were ardent admirers of Generalissimo Francisco Franco.

Outside Spain, however, European anticommunists were traditional conservatives, defenders of the existing democratic order. In the United States, anticommunism—directed against shadowy enemies who supposedly controlled the nation’s policy—became a radical, even revolutionary movement. As the historian Richard Hofstadter put it in his famous 1964 essay “The Paranoid Style in American Politics,” the modern American right wing

Oddly, this feeling of dispossession and victimization found special resonance in America’s rapidly growing suburbs—above all in Orange County, California, the home of Disneyland and at the time the embodiment of the new American dream. There was, it seemed, something about being a new homeowner, someone who moved both west and out to get away from it all—from the Midwest to the coast, from the city to the suburbs—that made people especially anxious about threats that it would all be taken away, especially willing to believe in dark conspiracies against their way of life. (It also didn’t hurt that Orange Country was at the heart of the military-industrial complex: As the home of many defense contractors, it was a place where many people had a personal financial stake in high tension between the West and the Soviet Union.) In recent years the Bush administration has carefully stoked the anxieties of “security moms,” but in the fifties and sixties the rebellion of the “suburban warriors” was a true grassroots movement, ready to rally behind politicians who seemed to share its concerns.[6]

The founders of movement conservatism, however high-minded their rhetoric may have been, showed little hesitation about riding the wave of paranoia. The political philosopher Peter Viereck was one of the few “new conservatives” to break with the movement as it evolved into movement conservatism proper. In a 1962 article in the New Republic, “The New Conservatism: One of Its Founders Asks What Went Wrong,” he pointed out that many of the most prominent new conservatives “failed the acid test of the McCarthy temptation of the 1950s in the same way that the fellow-traveler failed the acid test of the Communist temptation of the 1930s.” Indeed, as Viereck pointed out, Goldwater—who, like Reagan, has been reinvented by popular history as a much less extreme and threatening figure than he really was—“ardently defended the McCarthy tyranny to the very end.”[7] And while movement conservatives eventually dissociated themselves from Robert Welch, the founder of the John Birch Society, they were careful not to condemn the society itself, or its conspiracy-theory beliefs.

Movement conservatism, then, found a mass popular base by finding ways to appeal to two grassroots sentiments: white backlash and paranoia about communism. The emergence of this popular base went a long way toward turning the politically marginal “new conservatives” of the 1950s into a force to be reckoned with. And the rise of the popular base was supplemented by the creation of a different kind of base, which couldn’t deliver votes but could deliver cash: fervent support on the part of the business community.

Today we take it for granted that most of the business community is solidly behind the hard right. The drug industry wants its monopoly power left undisturbed; the insurance industry wants to fend off national health care; the power companies want freedom from environmental regulations; and everyone wants tax breaks. In the fifties and sixties, however, with memories of the New Deal’s triumphs still fresh, large corporations were politically cautious. The initial business base of movement conservatism was mainly among smaller, often privately owned businesses. And the focus of their ire was, above all, unions.

It’s hard now to grasp how important that issue was. Time’s readers were probably a bit puzzled in 1998, when the magazine named Walter Reuther, who was president of the United Automobile Workers from 1946 until his death in 1970, one of the one hundred most influential people of the twentieth century. By the century’s end, American unionism was a shadow of its former self, and Reuther had been all but forgotten. But once upon a time Reuther was a towering—and, to some people, terrifying—figure. In 1958 Barry Goldwater declared Reuther a “more dangerous menace than the Sputnik or anything Soviet Russia might do to America.”

In the 1950s America was a nation in which organized labor played a powerful, visible role. More than 30 percent of nonagricultural workers were union members, compared with less than 12 percent today. America’s unionization rate was higher than that of Canada, Italy, or France, and not far short of that in West Germany. Aside from their economic effects, unions played a central political role, providing the backbone of the Democratic Party’s strength outside the South. Unions were not, however, accepted by everyone as a fact of life.

It might have seemed that the issue of the political and economic legitimacy of unions had been settled by the extraordinary labor victories of the 1930s and 1940s. Those victories were, however, incomplete, in two important ways. First, the New Deal created a welfare state, but one that fell short of those achieved in other wealthy countries, especially when it came to health care. Unions had to push for private-sector benefits to fill the gaps. As they did, they ran into renewed opposition. Second, despite the relatively high rate of unionization, there were big regional disparities: Large parts of the country remained hostile territory for unions, and fertile ground for antiunion politicians.

Let’s start with the incomplete welfare state. All Western democracies emerged from the stresses of the Great Depression and World War II with some kind of welfare state. The extent of these welfare states varied, however. In Social Security the United States created a relatively generous public guarantee of retirement income, comparable to or better than that of other wealthy countries. On other matters, however, the U.S. welfare state was much less comprehensive than those of other countries. In particular, we’ve never had guaranteed health insurance.

Yet by the 1960s most Americans did have health insurance, many workers had disability insurance, a substantial number had generous unemployment benefits and retirement benefits—with none of these things provided by the government. Instead they were provided by private employers. As the political scientist Jacob Hacker has pointed out, postwar America evolved a welfare state that, measured in terms of social welfare spending as a share of the economy, was almost as big as those of Western Europe. But in the United States much of that spending came from private employers rather than the state.[8]

Why did the private employers provide all these benefits? In part because insurance was a good way to attract employees, especially during World War II, when wage controls prevented companies from competing for scarce labor by raising wages. Also, compensation that takes the form of benefits has the advantage of not being subject to income tax, so that a dollar given to an employee in the form of health benefits is worth more to the recipient than a dollar paid in straight salary. But after the war benefits became a prime target of union negotiations. In its explanation of why Reuther belonged in the top one hundred, Time wrote that

These demands didn’t place an unacceptable burden on auto companies and other large employers: In an age before widespread foreign competition they could pass on the higher costs to consumers. After all, each auto maker, each steel company, knew that its domestic competitors were negotiating the same deal.

However, from the point of view of the owner of a medium-size business—say, a department store—union demands didn’t look so tolerable. Such a business might not face international competition, but it faced competition from other businesses that might not be unionized, including ultrasmall businesses, mom-and-pop operations, that were too small to become union targets. For owners of medium-size businesses the growing demands of unions were infuriating, even threatening.

Barry Goldwater’s family owned a department store in Phoenix. As Rick Perlstein puts it in his remarkable book Before the Storm: Barry Goldwater and the Unmaking of the American Consensus, Goldwater was a “merchant prince”—a member of the class most likely to push back against the growing demands of the union movement. Perlstein points out that owners of medium-size, family-run businesses were the core constituency of the “Manionite” movement, one of the founding sources of movement conservatism. (Clarence Manion, the dean of the Notre Dame law school, was a pioneering direct-mailer who crusaded against the “Internationalists, One-Worlders, Socialists, and Communists” he believed infested the government.[10])

Goldwater also came from Arizona—a state where the “right to work,” a legal prohibition on contracts requiring that a company’s workers be union members, is embodied in the state constitution. This illustrates the second reason labor victories of the New Deal era hadn’t settled the role of unions in the American polity: Although unionization was securely established in the nation’s industrial heartland, unions were much less prevalent and powerful in what would eventually be known as the Sunbelt. In the fifties manufacturing workers in the South were only about half as likely to be unionized as those in the Midwest. As the nation’s industrial base and population shifted south and west, many influential people—particularly much of the existing power structure in the Sunbelt—wanted to make sure that the labor movement didn’t follow.

Strident antiunionism was what initially gave Goldwater national prominence. His remark about the menace of Walther Reuther was made during a Senate investigation of alleged union corruption. Despite the best efforts of the investigators, they couldn’t find any malfeasance on Reuther’s part: He was so scrupulous that he even paid his own dry-cleaning bills when traveling on union business. For real corruption, you had to look at Jimmy Hoffa’s Teamsters, one of the few unions that supported Republican candidates. Nonetheless Goldwater’s role in the investigation solidified his position as a leader of the emerging right wing of the Republican Party.

Antiunionism gave movement conservatism its first solid base in the business community. From the 1960s on, business owners who hated unions were a solid source of financial support. And this support was rewarded. As I’ll explain in chapter 8, in the seventies and eighties America’s political shift to the right empowered businesses to confront and, to a large extent, crush the union movement, with huge consequences for both wage inequality and the political balance of power.

As movement conservatism was acquiring a popular base and a solid base in the business community, it was also acquiring what amounted to a party intelligentsia. To be sure, the original “new conservatives,” exemplified by Buckley and the National Review, were intellectuals—but they didn’t provide the kind of steady drumbeat of studies and articles, combining seemingly serious scholarship with relentless support for the right’s position, that nowadays always accompanies any debate on public policy. Movement conservatism’s intelligentsia didn’t really take shape until the “new conservatives” were joined by the neoconservatives, a quite different group, and both were given regular employment by a powerful institutional infrastructure.

The origins of neoconservatism can be traced largely to two groups: Chicago economists led by Milton Friedman, who led the pushback against Keynesian economics, and sociologists led by Irving Kristol and associated with the magazine The Public Interest, who rebelled against the Great Society.

The conservative economic intelligentsia emerged first, because the real truths of economics create a natural propensity in economists to go all the way to free-market fundamentalism. As Adam Smith saw, and many generations of economists have elaborated, markets often have a way of getting self-interest to serve the common good. Individuals seeking only gain for themselves are led, “as by an invisible hand,” to produce goods that other people need, when they need them. It’s a powerful and true insight. Even liberal economists have a healthy respect for the effectiveness of markets as a way of organizing economic activity.

On the other hand, sometimes markets don’t work. This point was driven home to economists, as well as everyone else, by the searing experience of the Great Depression. In the early years after World War II, with the memory of the depression still fresh, most economists believed that keeping the economy on track required an extensive role for the government. Mainstream economics rejected calls for a planned economy, but it did accept the need for government intervention to fight recessions, as well as a generally increased role of government in the economy as a whole.

Once the crisis had passed, however, it was inevitable that some economists would return to the old faith. By the late 1940s Friedman and his colleague George Stigler were already inveighing (with considerable justification) against the evils of rent control. Over the course of the 1950s this expanded into a broad attack on government intervention and regulation in general. By the early 1960s Friedman had made almost a complete return to free-market fundamentalism, arguing that even the Great Depression was caused not by market failure but by government failure. His argument was slippery and, I’d argue, bordered on intellectual dishonesty.[11] But the fact that a great economist felt compelled to engage in intellectual sleight of hand is, itself, an indication of the powerful allure of free-market fundamentalism. Free-market economists began rejecting not just the New Deal, but the reforms of the Progressive Era, suggesting that even such government actions as policing food and drug safety were unjustified. And Friedman associated himself with the Goldwater campaign.

The revolt of the sociologists came later than the return of free-market fundamentalism, and had a darker tone. Where Friedman and his associates radiated Panglossian optimism, the group that coalesced around Kristol and The Public Interest, founded in 1965, were skeptics, even cynics. They were rebelling against Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society, which they saw—with some justice—as a foolish, doomed exercise in social engineering. “We were especially provoked,” Kristol would later write, “by the widespread acceptance of left-wing sociological ideas that were incorporated in the War on Poverty.”[12]

And so you had Daniel Patrick Moynihan rejecting liberal pieties by arguing that the roots of much black poverty lay not so much in discrimination as in the rise of female-headed families, Edward Banfield rejecting the claim that urban riots were about racism by arguing that most rioters were not so much protesting injustice as simply engaging in looting.

The Friedmanites and the neoconservatives saw themselves as outsiders, alienated from the liberal establishment. To a remarkable extent the heirs of these movements still manage to feel this way. Yet by the 1970s the intelligentsia of movement conservatism had an establishment of its own, with financial backing on a scale beyond the wildest dreams of its liberal opponents. To put it bluntly, becoming a conservative intellectual became a good career move.

In a 1996 report, “Buying a Movement,” People for the American Way described the career of Dinesh d’Souza, who rose to prominence with his 1991 best seller Illiberal Education, an attack on affirmative action and political correctness on campus. Leaving aside the merits of his work, the interesting point is the way D’Souza’s career differed from those of a previous generation of conservatives.

The original modern conservative intellectuals were, for the most part, scholars who happened to be or become conservative. Milton Friedman, to take the most spectacular example, was in the first instance a professional economist, whose work on consumer behavior, monetary forces, and inflation is accepted and honored by the vast majority of economists, whatever their political persuasion. He would have won the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics whatever his politics. Similarly most of the “dozen or so scholars and intellectuals” who Kristol says formed the “nucleus” of The Public Interest were academic sociologists who built their careers on more or less nonpolitical work, and came to conservatism only later.

D’Souza, however, has had a very different kind of career. He moved from editing a conservative college publication, the Dartmouth Review, to editing a conservative alumni publication, Prospect. After writing a complimentary biography of the evangelist Jerry Falwell, he became a senior domestic policy analyst in the Reagan administration. He then moved to a position at a conservative think tank, the American Enterprise Institute, where he wrote Illiberal Education and a later book, The End of Racism (in which he declared that “for many whites the criminal and irresponsible black underclass represents a revival of barbarism in the midst of Western civilization”), with support from the conservative Olin Foundation. His books have been promoted by conservative magazines, especially the National Review.

D’Souza, in other words, is something that didn’t exist forty years ago: a professional conservative intellectual, who has made his entire career inside an interlocking set of essentially partisan institutions.

Where did these institutions come from? The story, in brief, is that in the late 1960s and early 1970s members of the new conservative intelligentsia persuaded both wealthy individuals and some corporate leaders to funnel cash into a conservative intellectual infrastructure. To a large extent this infrastructure consists of think tanks that are set up to resemble academic institutions, but only publish studies that play into a preconceived point of view. The American Enterprise Institute, although it was founded in 1943, expanded dramatically beginning in 1971, when it began receiving substantial amounts of corporate money and grants from conservative family foundations. The Heritage Foundation was created in 1973 with cash from Joseph Coors and Richard Mellon Scaife. The libertarian Cato Institute relied heavily on funds from the Koch family foundations.

Media organizations are also part of the infrastructure. The same set of foundations that have funded conservative think tanks also gave substantial support to The Public Interest, as well as publications like The American Spectator, which obsessively pursued alleged scandals during the Clinton years.

In seeking the support of foundations and business groups, neconservatives cheerfully accepted a coarsening of their ideas. “We say, repeatedly,” Kristol wrote in 1995, “that ideas have consequences, which is true but what we have in mind are complex, thoughtful, and well-articulated ideas. What we so easily overlook is the fact that simple ideas, allied to passion and organization, also have consequences.” You might think that this was a lament—but Kristol was actually congratulating himself and his comrades-in-arms for going along with crude formulations of conservatism in order to achieve political success.

This was especially true in economics, where The Public Interest, along with the editorial page of the Wall Street Journal, became the principal advocate of supply-side economics. Supply-side doctrine, which claimed without evidence that tax cuts would pay for themselves, never got any traction in the world of professional economic research, even among conservatives. N. Gregory Mankiw, the Harvard economist who was the chairman of Bush’s Council of Economic Advisers between 2003 and 2005, famously described the supply-siders as “cranks and charlatans” in the first edition of his textbook on the principles of economics. (The phrase vanished from later editions.) Why, then, was Kristol convinced that the supply-siders were right? The answer is that he wasn’t—he didn’t care whether they were wrong or right. Kristol’s only concern was that the supply-siders’ ideas were politically useful. Here’s how he put it in his 1995 essay:

Remarkably this statement comes just a few paragraphs after Kristol’s declaration that The Public Interest was effective in its early days because “most of us were social scientists, and as Pat Moynihan put it, the best use of social science is to refute false social science.” One guesses that it all depends on the use to which false social science is put.

Ronald Reagan’s 1966 California campaign marked the first great electoral success for movement conservatism. Reagan’s achievement was, however, overshadowed by the rise of Richard Nixon to the presidency, and his landslide victory in 1972. Nixon’s success, however, can’t be regarded as a triumph for movement conservatism, because Nixon was a transitional figure. He used the movement’s political strategy—indeed, to a large extent he invented it. But he didn’t share the movement’s goals. For Nixon it was all personal.

It’s almost impossible to overstate Nixon’s impact on the way American politics is conducted. Nixon, after all, showed how you could exploit racial divisions, anxiety about social change, and paranoia about foreign threats to peel working-class whites away from the New Deal coalition. He introduced the art of media manipulation: Roger Ailes, the president of Fox News, was Nixon’s media consultant, and is a central figure in Joe McGinniss’s 1969 book The Selling of the President. Later, Nixon pioneered the media intimidation that so successfully suppressed dissent for much of the Bush administration, as well as the tactic of blaming the news media for reporting bad news.

It was during the Nixon years that the successful execution of dirty tricks became a passport to advancement in the Republican Party. In 1970 a young Karl Rove printed fake leaflets advertising free beer on campaign stationery stolen from a Democratic candidate, disrupting a campaign rally; the next year Rove dropped out of college to become the paid executive director of the College Republican National Committee.[14] Two years later, when Rove ran for chairman of the College Republicans, he cheated his way to victory—with the blessing of the then chairman of the Republican National Committee, one George H. W. Bush.[15]

Movement conservatives applauded these tactics. What they didn’t like were Nixon’s policies. When Rick Perlstein, the author of Before the Storm, gave a talk (to a group of conservatives) about the conservative role in the Nixon administration’s dirty tricks, one of the other panelists protested that Nixon hadn’t been a conservative, adding, “I didn’t like Nixon until Watergate.”[16]

Indeed Nixon’s actual policies, as opposed to his political tactics, were not at all what movement conservatives wanted. In domestic affairs he governed as a moderate, even a liberal, raising taxes, expanding environmental regulation, even seeking to introduce national health insurance. In foreign affairs he showed equal pragmatism, opening a dialogue with Communist China while simultaneously continuing to fight the Communist China–allied North Vietnamese. Nixon, it became clear, hated many things, but he did not share the conservative movement’s hatred for government intervention and the welfare state. In any case the times weren’t yet right.

By the mid-1970s movement conservatism was, in a sense, in a position similar to that of the movement that eventually became the New Deal in the late 1920s. The ideas were there; the organization was there; the intellectual cadres were in place. To achieve power, however, the movement needed a crisis.

What it got was a double crisis, both foreign and domestic.

In foreign affairs the fall of Vietnam was followed by what looked at the time like a wave of Communist victories in Southeast Asia and in Africa, then by the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan and—unrelated, but feeding the sense of anxiety—the Islamic revolution in Iran and the humiliation of the hostage crisis. On the domestic front a combination of bad policy and the energy crisis created the nightmare of stagflation, of high unemployment combined with double-digit inflation.

In retrospect the hand-wringing over Communist advances looks ludicrous; the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, in particular, turned out to be the beginning of communism’s collapse. The Islamic revolution in Iran was a real setback, but it’s hard to see how an aggressive foreign policy could have done anything except worsen the situation. As for the economic crisis, it was caused by a combination of bad luck and bad monetary policy, neither of which had anything to do with liberalism.

Nonetheless the dire mood of the 1970s made it possible for movement conservatives to claim that liberal policies had been discredited. And the newly empowered movement soon achieved a remarkable reversal of the New Deal’s achievements.