Newly updated and available for the first time in paperback, it continues to offer the best account of the conservative struggle to reverse the momentum of the New Deal. On the campaign stump, the fiery candidate lambasted hippies, antiwar protesters, and government bureaucrats.Hailed as “perhaps the best scholarly overview of the conservative movement in print” ( American Conservative), Donald Critchlow's The Conservative Ascendancy has depicted, as no other book has, the wild ride of the Republican Right.
Wallace’s populist message also resonated with blue-collar voters in the industrial North who felt left behind by the rights revolution. Wallace’s record as a staunch segregationist made him a hero in the Deep South, where he won five states as a third-party candidate in the 1968 general election. Liberalism no longer seemed to offer the great mass of white Americans a road map to prosperity, so they searched for new political solutions.įormer Alabama governor and conservative Democrat George Wallace masterfully exploited the racial, cultural, and economic resentments of working-class whites during his presidential runs in 19. At the same time, slowing wage growth, rising prices, and growing tax burdens threatened many working- and middle-class citizens who long formed the core of the New Deal coalition. To many white Americans, the urban rebellions, antiwar protests, and student uprisings of the late 1960s signaled social chaos. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, Black Power, affirmative action, and court-ordered busing of children between schools to achieve racial balance brought “white backlash” in the North, often in cities previously known for political liberalism. All of these occurred under Democratic leadership, pushing white southerners toward the Republican Party. The civil rights movement, along with the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act, challenged the racial hierarchy of the Jim Crow South. Race also drove the creation of the New Right. The expansive social and economic agenda of Johnson’s Great Society reminded anticommunists of Soviet-style central planning and deficits alarmed fiscal conservatives.
New York Times columnist James Reston wrote that Goldwater had “wrecked his party for a long time to come.” 5ĭespite these dire predictions, conservatism not only persisted, it prospered. Conservative”-in the 1964 presidential election, many observers declared American conservatism finished. Following Lyndon Johnson’s resounding defeat of Republican Barry Goldwater-“Mr. But in general, the far right lacked organizational cohesion. Buckley tapped into a deep vein of elite conservatism in 1955 by announcing in the first issue of National Review that his magazine “stands athwart history yelling Stop.” 4 Senator Joseph McCarthy and John Birch Society founder Robert Welch stirred anticommunist fervor. Eisenhower declined to roll back the welfare state. Even two-term Republican president Dwight D. In the first two decades after World War II the New Deal seemed firmly embedded in American electoral politics and public policy. The Reagan Revolution marked the culmination of a long process of political mobilization on the American right.
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