Seeking a New Majority assembles an international group of scholars to move beyond the ideas and activities of party leaders who have hitherto received the bulk of historical attention. It illuminates how the Republican Party expanded its regional base, especially in the South, appealed to new constituencies ranging from blue-collar workers to Christian fundamentalists, and enhanced the political appeal of conservatism. It also examines how Republicans engaged in a remarkable organizational and intellectual mobilization to challenge Democratic Party dominance—in search of a new majority.
Seeking a New Majority assembles an international group of scholars to move beyond the ideas and activities of party leaders who have hitherto received the bulk of historical attention. It illuminates how the Republican Party expanded its regional base, especially in the South, appealed to new constituencies ranging from blue-collar workers to Christian fundamentalists, and enhanced the political appeal of conservatism. It also examines how Republicans engaged in a remarkable organizational and intellectual mobilization to challenge Democratic Party dominance—in search of a new majority.
Seeking a New Majority: The Republican Party and American Politics, 1960-1980
248
Seeking a New Majority: The Republican Party and American Politics, 1960-1980
248Hardcover
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Overview
Seeking a New Majority assembles an international group of scholars to move beyond the ideas and activities of party leaders who have hitherto received the bulk of historical attention. It illuminates how the Republican Party expanded its regional base, especially in the South, appealed to new constituencies ranging from blue-collar workers to Christian fundamentalists, and enhanced the political appeal of conservatism. It also examines how Republicans engaged in a remarkable organizational and intellectual mobilization to challenge Democratic Party dominance—in search of a new majority.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780826518897 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Vanderbilt University Press |
| Publication date: | 02/25/2013 |
| Pages: | 248 |
| Product dimensions: | 7.00(w) x 10.10(h) x 1.10(d) |
About the Author
Robert Mason is Senior Lecturer in History at the University of Edinburgh, and author of The Republican Party and American Politics from Hoover to Reagan.
Read an Excerpt
Seeking a New Majority
The Republican Party and American Politics, 1960â"1980
By Robert Mason, Iwan Morgan
Vanderbilt University Press
Copyright © 2013 Vanderbilt University PressAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8265-1889-7
CHAPTER 1
The Rise of Conservative Republicanism
A History of Fits and Starts
Donald T. Critchlow
One of the most significant developments in modern American political history was the rise of a self-identified conservative movement, which would turn the Republican Party into a voice of conservatism. Increasingly the Republican Party became a home to conservatives, driving out liberal Republicans, the so-called eastern wing of the party. This transformation came slowly, often by fits and starts, and with a good deal of bitterness, infighting, and recrimination. As conservatives slowly won their battle to make the Grand Old Party into their bailiwick, Republicans continued to battle the Democrats for political office. The struggle between the two parties involved its own political drama, and at no time was the outcome certain. The main lesson to be learned from the rise of conservative Republicanism is that whenever it appeared knocked down and out for the count as a political force, Democrats and the Left allowed it to get up off the canvas to go on for another round. In short, there was a good deal of fortune in the rise of the Right and its transformation of the GOP and an even greater deal of political miscalculation by the Left. This is to say that the course of the conservative movement was not preordained, nor was its political triumph through the agency of the Republican Party inevitable.
To presume that the conservative ascendancy was a linear development elides the circumstance of history and good political fortune. The GOP could have remained a party of moderation instead of becoming a force for conservatism, and conservative Republicanism could have been vanquished by the Democrats. Nonetheless, the GOP Right ultimately triumphed over its intraparty foes and put liberalism—both the New Deal variety and post-1970s progressivism—on the defensive. One indication of these changes was the political complexion of presidents. From 1932 to 1968, the only Republican to win the White House amid a quartet of liberal Democrats, Dwight D. Eisenhower, ran as a moderate rather than a conservative. Conversely, no Democrat won the presidency as a liberal between the victories of Lyndon B. Johnson in 1964 and Barack Obama in 2008. Any assumption that the latter's triumph heralded the restoration of the liberal ascendancy contravened the reality that approximately 35 to 40 percent of the electorate still identified itself as "conservative."
A successful political brand in the last third of the twentieth century and beyond, conservatism seemed a lost cause before then. Indeed, one of the challenges for the modern Right was to escape from the somewhat disreputable shadow cast by the old Right. Associated with intransigent reaction to the political changes of the 1930s, American conservatism manifested a peculiar crankiness and eccentricity that prevented it from developing a sustainable political movement until the 1960s. Still, much conservative criticism of the New Deal economic program—expressed by the likes of the Liberty League, University of Chicago economists, business organizations, and independent financial journalists—revealed a good deal of intellectual rigor and was by no means as nonsensical as political and ideological opponents then (or later) made it appear. The Right's general, though by no means unanimous, pre—Pearl Harbor opposition to Franklin D. Roosevelt's policies to aid Britain in its war against Nazi Germany further allowed critics to dismiss it as outlandish. In particular, the anti-Semitic attitudes of some prominent anti-intervention leaders, including female ones, saddled conservatism with a reputation for bigotry.
Postwar conservatives, most eminently William F. Buckley Jr., the founding editor of the nation's most influential conservative magazine, National Review, quickly disassociated their movement from isolationist foreign policy and anti-Semitic polemicists. Buckley's most significant initiative to this end was in breaking relations with the increasingly anti-Semitic American Mercury in 1951. This set the foundation for the emergence of the Right in modern American politics. However, the growth of conservatism as an intellectual force and a political movement did not immediately endow it with respectability. Startled by its rapid development, which eventually culminated in the nomination of Barry Goldwater to head the Republican presidential ticket in 1964, liberals were not sure what to make of it.
Influenced by the fight against fascism in the 1930s and social science analysis of that ideology, some liberals envisaged American conservatism as a protofascist movement. In an influential critique, historian Richard Hofstadter framed the rise of the Right within what he called "the paranoid style" of American politics that gave voice to "status resentment" by groups undergoing economic and social displacement. In his assessment, their sense of powerlessness found expression in ire against established politicians, government officials, corporate leaders, intellectuals, and other experts. This framework enabled Hofstadter to group the Ku Klux Klan, Prohibitionists, nativists, and ordinary grassroots anticommunists in the 1950s into a tradition of populist anti-intellectualism.
Other critics used similar approaches to depict the emergent conservative movement and conservative intellectuals as mentally and psychological disturbed. In Danger on the Right: The Attitudes, Personnel, and Influence of the Right and Extreme Conservatives (1964), journalists Arnold Forster and Benjamin R. Epstein warned that the so-called radical Rightists "constitute a serious threat to our democratic process." In his etiological study of the modern Right, Harry Allen Overstreet, another popular writer of the early 1960s, diagnosed right-wing thinking as a mental disease. A succession of other studies presented unflattering images of conservatism that were perfectly encapsulated in their titles: The Challenges of Democracy: Consensus and Extremism in American Politics; The American Ultras: The Extreme Right and the Military Industrial Complex; The Christian Fright Peddlers; and Men of the Far Right.
This backlash interpretation of American conservatism—the view that conservatives were reacting to modern society—held some truth. After all, William F. Buckley Jr. had announced in the opening pages of the first issue of National Review that a conservative is a fellow standing athwart history yelling, "Stop!" This typified the prevailing sentiment of conservatives—that they had witnessed enough "progress" under New Deal liberalism to last a lifetime. They wanted to draw the line against the continued expansion of the liberal state to prevent further erosion of constitutional principle, individual liberty, self-responsibility, and national capacity to confront Soviet communism abroad and at home. Notwithstanding its reactionary and antimodern aspects, however, idealism and projections of an alternative future (not just turning the clock back) lay at the core of postwar conservatism as a political and intellectual movement.
The backlash interpretation continued to hold a powerful, if not wholly dominant, influence on historians of American conservatism, especially with the rise of the so-called New Right in the 1970s. Scholars in the 1960s increasingly focused their attention on issues of race and of racial and gender inequality in America. As a consequence, many placed the conservative movement within the context of a white male backlash against the black civil rights movement and the feminist movement. This scholarship ushered in new understanding of the importance of race and gender in American society and their influence on modern American politics. An important example of it is Dan T. Carter's biography of Alabama segregationist George Wallace, Politics of Rage (1995). Based on extensive primary research, Carter's book argues that Wallace provided a conduit for turning white voters, upset about and fearful of gains made by the black civil rights movement, from being Democrats into Republicans.
Carter's monochromatic linear account of the Republican capture of the South beginning in the 1970s was challenged by a younger generation of southern historians who offer considerably more nuanced interpretations of the ascendancy of the GOP in the South. Scholars such as Matthew D. Lassiter, Kevin M. Kruse, and Joseph Crespino, for example, maintain that Repubican strategists consciously and instinctively seized on white suburban voter discontent with affirmative action, school desegregation, and busing to win them for the GOP column. Such interpretations exerted considerable influence on historical scholarship by generating debate over the importance of race in explaining the Republican takeover of the South.
According to political scientists Byron Shafer and Richard Johnston, however, GOP regional ascendancy was built on economics rather than race. Their sophisticated analysis of voting behavior indicates that the Republican rise in the South had begun on the presidential level in the 1950s. It involved a gradual shift that commenced in the suburbs and then followed on the district level in statewide races in the 1960s. In Shafer and Johnston's assessment, suburban voters in the South were primarily concerned with issues such as low taxes, antiunionism, and family values. This burgeoning constituency went overwhelmingly Republican in 1980, and in the elections that followed, because the GOP stood for tax reduction and a smaller federal government. Especially interesting in this regard was the pattern of voting for third-party presidential candidate George Wallace in 1968 and Democratic presidential candidate Jimmy Carter in 1976 and 1980. In 1976, when Carter first ran for president, he won majorities in 79 percent of the districts in the South that had voted for Wallace in 1968, while gaining majorities in only 59 percent of the districts that had gone for Nixon in 1968. In the 1980 election, when Ronald Reagan swept the region, the majority of districts that voted for Carter had gone to Wallace in 1968. This suggests that Wallace was not a bridge candidate for white voters in the South into the Republican Party.
Variants of the backlash interpretation found expression in other studies of conservatism. Feminist scholars examining the role of women in conservative causes, such as opposition to the Equal Rights Amendment and abortion, and support for school prayer, maintained that many of the participants expressed traditional values resistant to the changing status of women within the workplace and society. In his expansive survey of nativism and right-wing politics, The Party of Fear (1988), historian David H. Bennett offers a general assessment of the American Right as a movement founded on periodic expressions of anger and anxiety on the part of groups threatened by social and demographic change. Other, more specialized studies of conservative groups also suggest reactionary missions. In Invisible Hands (2009), Kim Phillips-Fein argues that corporate and small business interests, threatened by the New Deal economic order and the rise of organized labor, funded and promoted the postwar conservative movement. Meanwhile, Nancy MacLean, a historian of women in the Ku Klux Klan, argues that conservatism represented a reaction to changing roles of race, gender, and organized labor.
Scholars interested in historicizing the conservative movement and the Republican Party by examining how conservatives and Republican activists and leaders perceived the world, and their motivations in acting on those perceptions, present a different side of the story. Particularly revealing in this regard is Lisa McGirr's pathbreaking Suburban Warriors (2001). In her study of California right-wing women, McGirr seeks to understand them on their own terms, while placing them within the context of the booming defense industry economy of Southern California. This book helped to shape a new historiography of the American Right. By the end of the first decade of the twenty-first century, scholarly studies of the interior workings of the conservative mind, movement, and influence on the Republican Party had become so numerous that they became nearly impossible to keep up with.
Representative of the approach that sought to understand critically conservatism on its own terms is Jennifer Burns's insightful biography of Ayn Rand, Goddess of the Market (2009), which explores how the influential conservative thinker and novelist perceived the socialist threat to the free market. Breaking with the liberal orthodoxy, economic historian Brian Domitrovic offers a positive assessment of supply-side economics and its intellectual origins in Econoclasts (2009). Other studies offer engaging portraits of Friedrich Hayek, including works by Alan Ebenstein and Bruce Caldwell. John E. Moser gives a perceptive account of libertarian thinker John Flynn in Right Turn (2005). Research by Sean P Cunningham on the ascent of the Republican Party in Texas, which he discusses in Chapter 6, shows how rising politicians such as John Tower won a segment of the Hispanic vote to the Republican Party. Along similar lines, Laura Gifford in The Center Cannot Hold (2009) explores how party factionalism helped boost Republicans to power in South Carolina. In a terse critical synthesis of prewar and postwar conservatism, The Conservative Century (2009), Gregory L. Schneider historicizes the protean character of American conservatism.
These studies reveal a complex relationship between the Republican Party and the conservative movement. Furthermore, they demonstrate that modern liberalism proved to be a formidable opponent. The modern welfare and administrative state created in the Progressive era at the turn of the twentieth century, expanded during Roosevelt's New Deal and further enlarged by Lyndon B. Johnson's Great Society, was not easily dismantled by conservative Republicans coming to power. The modern American welfare state had become institutionalized. Moreover, as Republican candidates continued to discover in running for and then holding office, American voters tended to support federal programs, especially those that appeared to benefit the middle class—notably Medicare, Social Security, student loans, and federal aid to education.
This placed conservatives within the Republican Party in an ideological dilemma. While proclaiming the principles of small government, individual responsibility, and free enterprise as an alternative to modern liberalism, they recognized that voters generally accepted the essential role that federal programs had come to play in their lives. Electoral realities consequently impelled conservative politicians to voice support for the core elements of the modern welfare state. Those advocating privatization of Social Security, rising medical deductibles for Medicare, or cutting funds for education quickly discovered that such proposals alienated voters and projected ideological extremism. Indeed, Barry Goldwater's staff initially hesitated at having Ronald Reagan on television in support of the Republican presidential candidate in the last days of the 1964 campaign, because they feared that he might endorse Social Security privatization. Although the Arizonan had won the GOP nomination by running as a conservative, his aides tried to position him more toward the center in the general election campaign, hoping to recover the large numbers of Republican-leaning and independent voters alienated by the "Extremism in defense of liberty is no vice!" remarks in his acceptance speech at the Republican national convention in San Francisco.
Whatever the ideological tensions and contradictions conservatives faced in gaining power, liberalism faced its own problems in holding on to it. Established in the 1930s, the New Deal coalition—a polyglot alliance of urban voters in the North, labor unions, ethnic and racial minorities, and southern whites—experienced considerable stress after World War II. Southern Democrats initially accepted the New Deal because it channeled federal funds into their underdeveloped region and heavily subsidized its agricultural sector, but they became increasingly concerned at the eventual pro-labor and pro-welfare orientation of Franklin D. Roosevelt's program. Their particular fear was that the expansion of national government would eventually impinge on states' rights in matters of race. Signaling the likelihood of growing divisions with liberal elements of the New Deal coalition in the future, southern Democrats had blocked enactment of a federal antilynching law, integration of the House cafeteria, and other civil rights measures in the 1930s. Harry Truman's support for civil rights initiatives and the national platform's endorsement of federal civil rights legislation provoked so-called Dixiecrats to contest the 1948 presidential election under the banner of the States' Rights party. The rupture was not permanent, but the uneasy postelection truce within Democratic ranks did not look like it would last. The defection of white southern voters toward the Republican presidential ticket in 1952 and 1956 marked the first signs of regional realignment, but this would proceed in fits and starts. Dwight D. Eisenhower's 1957 intervention in Little Rock, Arkansas, in support of school integration slowed the disintegration of the one-party South until the civil rights revolution of the 1960s put it into fast gear once more.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Seeking a New Majority by Robert Mason, Iwan Morgan. Copyright © 2013 Vanderbilt University Press. Excerpted by permission of Vanderbilt University Press.
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Table of Contents
CONTENTS
Introduction: Republicans in Search of a New Majority
- Robert Mason and Iwan Morgan
The Rise of Conservative Republicanism: A History of Fits and Starts
- Donald T. Critchlow
Race, Region, and the Shadow of the New Deal
- Timothy N. Thurber
"The Republican Party Is Truly the Party of the 'Open Door'": Ethnic Americans and the Republican Party in the 1970s
- Joe Merton
Building the Republican Party and the Problem of Diversity, 1968-1975
- Catherine E. Rymph
Republican Populism in the Quest for a New Majority: Pat Buchanan in the White House
- Tim Stanley
John Tower, Texas, and the Rise of the Republican South
- Sean P. Cunningham
Uneasy Alliance: The Religious Right and the Republican Party
- Robert Freedman
Building Consensus: The Republican Right and Foreign Policy, 1960-1980
- Sandra Scanlon
Foreign Policy and the Republican Quest for a New Majority
- Robert Mason
Taxation as a Republican Issue in the Era of Stagflation
- Iwan Morgan
Rendezvous with Destiny: The Republican Party and the 1980 Election
- Dominic Sandbrook
Epilogue: The Ongoing Republican Search for a New Majority since 1980
- Robert Mason and Iwan Morgan