The Rise of the Republican Right

From Goldwater to Reagan

Brian M. Conley

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9781138478794
• eBook ISBN: 9781351067119
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Few scholars have paid close attention to the factors internal to the Republican Party that helped the Right to consolidate its power within the party between the 1960s and the 1980s. Plugging the gap in party literature, The Rise of the Republican Right: From Goldwater to Reagan provides a comprehensive account of the rise of the Republican Right in the years between Barry Goldwater's 1964 presidential defeat and the election of Ronald Reagan as president in 1980. Specifically, it offers a historical-institutional analysis of the organizational factors internal to the Republican Party that helped the conservative Right maintain, and then expand its ascendant position within the GOP in the critical years between Goldwater and Reagan.

Brian M. Conley demonstrates how the growth of the Right during this period was aided by a desire on the part of many Republican leaders to rebound from electoral defeat by rebuilding the party organizationally, rather than reforming it politically, through the introduction of a more "service" -oriented party structure.

The Rise of the Republican Right will interest academics, party scholars, and researchers eager to gain a more nuanced understanding of the factors that helped the Right become a dominant force within the Republican Party.

1

INTRODUCTION

Rejoicing in Ronald Reagan’s 1980 presidential victory, conservative commentator George Will remarked that Barry Goldwater, the Republicans’ otherwise hapless 1964 presidential nominee, had actually won the election, “it just took sixteen years to count all the votes” (Will 1998; Hayward 2016). Reagan’s election, or the election of someone equally conservative was, in other words, inevitable, in Will’s estimation. Indeed, in his thinking, this was true as early as 1964. Something, that is, was afoot in the country politically, culturally or otherwise during this period that made the election of an avowed conservative to the presidency only a matter of time.

Scholars might be justified in dismissing Will’s comment as little more than partisan hyperbole, made in the heady days following an election win. But the idea that the US witnessed some sort of conservative Republican renaissance in the years between Goldwater’s loss and Reagan’s victory is widely shared among party scholars and pundits alike. In their study of conservatism in the US, for instance, authors John Micklethwait and Adrian Wooldridge (2004) marvel at the pace of change they believe took place in the country between the 1960s and the 1980s. Following Lyndon Johnson’s sweeping victory over Goldwater, “big government liberalism was in a triumphant mood,” they write (p. 63). Yet, four years later, after embroiling the country in a seemingly unwinnable war in Vietnam, and driving deep wedges into the “New Deal” coalition, Johnson “handed over the key to the Republicans,” they write, who would go on to occupy the White House for “twenty of the next twenty-four years” (Micklethwait and Wooldridge, 2004, 63–64). Others are equally emphatic about the swiftness of the political change that took place in the 1960s. “The early years of the [1960s] sounded a note of high liberal promise,” argues Jonathan Rieder (1989, p. 243). Yet, “by the end of the decade,” he writes, “liberalism was in full rout, with the Democratic Party embroiled in internal warfare and the Republicans ascendant.” Johnson’s victory in “1964 was widely interpreted as proof that a conservative ideologue could not achieve victory in America,” Rieder continues, while in reality “the outlines of Reagan’s popular victory may be glimpsed in shadowy form in the Goldwater debacle” (Rieder, 1989, p. 243).

Such claims about the transformative nature of the changes that gripped the country in the 1960s are commonly relied upon in the academic literature to explain the so-called “Rise of the Right,” or the growth of a more conservative Republican Party following Goldwater. It has played a particularly prominent role, for instance, in arguments that the growth of the Right during these years rested on a white “backlash” against Democratic liberalism (Lowndes, 2008). The claim, in short, is that the Republican Right’s rise to power followed from President Johnson and the Democrats moving too far, too fast, to the left on civil rights and on social policy, which swiftly alienated large swaths of their traditional base of supporters, notably white, working class voters, first in the South, then in the North.

However, despite the scope of the transformations that took place in the 1960s, and the clear ways in which they reshaped the calculus of how the two major parties competed for power in the country, such changes do not on their own account for specific shifts, whether in policy, ideology or organization that took place within the Republican Party—or the Democratic Party for that matter—during this period. They tell us little, in particular about how institutionally, or within the party itself, the Right was able to rapidly expand its influence during this time. Other research has offered a more detailed look at the inner workings of Republican Party itself in the 1960s, particularly the internal struggles, often of a factional nature, that beset the Republican Party at the time. Yet, most of this research is historical in nature, and unlike the Rise of the Right literature, does not seek to offer a theoretical account as to why the Right assumed a more dominant position within the party in the mid-1960s. As a result, both approaches largely fail to analyze the unique organizational mode of thinking that, on close examination, played a critical role in the Republican Right’s rapid political rise in the years between Goldwater and Reagan, namely the decision by party leaders to embrace, an organizational or “service-based” model of party building rather than political reform. It was an approach to party building that developed at the national level during two distinct phases, but under similar conditions, specifically following electoral defeat, first in 1964 and then in 1976 when as an “out-party,” national Republican Party officials were confronted with the challenge of recovering from defeat, but were able to do so without the interference of an elected party head.

Although it would take hold nationally in the 1960s and 1970s, the Republicans had experimented with a more service-oriented party model at the state level, notably in postwar Ohio at the direction of then-state party chair Ray Bliss (Conley 2010). At both levels, the introduction of the service model came in the wake of sharp election losses. It is not uncommon, as Paul Herrnson notes, that defeat, especially at the presidential level, will serve as a sort of “catalyst for change” within a party (Herrnson, 2002, p. 52). Following Goldwater, then Ford’s defeat, coming as it did in the wake of Nixon’s ignominious resignation, this was precisely where the Republican Party found itself: defeated, deeply divided, and without an elected leader. Yet, it is precisely during such a “crisis competition,” Herrnson writes, that the traditional barriers to change and innovation within political parties, namely an established party leader, or leadership reluctance to embrace new ideas or strategies, start to come down (Herrnson, 2002, p. 52). In 1964, and again in 1976, the Republican Party lacked the leadership and the luxury to put off change. Instead, as an “out-party,” overwhelmed by defeat and internal division, the party chose new leaders who were either proven or known advocates for change. Widely regarded as one of the most successful state party chairs in the country at the time, Bliss was given wide latitude when appointed the new RNC Chair in early 1965 to tackle what was understood to be a daunting task, namely repairing the damage done by the Goldwater loss. His success opened the way for the transformative party-building of Bill Brock in the 1970s following Ford’s 1976 loss as well as by subsequent party chairs in the 1980s and 1990s (Bibby, 1994).

In this way, the service party model, as it was initially introduced and subsequently institutionalized within the Republican Party in the 1960s and 1970s, was fundamentally a “out-party” phenomenon. It took hold, and gained legitimacy, in other words, during periods when the Republicans did not control the White House, and were seeking to recover from electoral defeat. These were periods when the Congressional leadership was nominally in charge of the party, but also when the party chair, and national committee staff were more likely to play an outsized role shaping the direction of party policy and strategy. Prior to Reagan, it was only during such periods, when those in leadership positions saw only the benefit and little risk in party-building for party-building’s sake that the service party concept was able to gain traction. The Republicans did win the presidency in 1968, and might have been able to bring the type of attention and resources to building the party that only a president can. But, as Daniel Galvin notes in work on “presidential party building,” the nature and scope of presidential power, and the desire presidents have not only to respond to but to change the political context in which they are elected, mean that even when a president engages in “party-building,” they rarely do so for purely selfless or “altruistic” reasons (Galvin, 2009, p. 8). When a president seeks to build the party, “it is never fully about building the ‘the party’ per se, as an independent political entity separate from the president, or as a responsible instrument of democracy,” Galvin writes (Galvin, 2009, p. 8). As such, even in instances where presidents do decide to help their party, rather than ignore it, which, as Galvin argues, Republican presidents responding to their competitive disadvantage were more likely to do than Democrats in the postwar period, they nonetheless do so as a means of advancing their own agenda. It was, as a result, essentially unheard of during this period for a president of either party to engage in the type of sustained, on the ground capacity and infrastructure building that characterized the work associated with the service party model. This would only begin to change for the Republicans with the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980, when, as president Reagan recognized the strategic benefit of supporting ongoing, “independent” party-building, for the sake of the health and competitiveness of both the party and his presidency over the course of his time in office.

But, as a model of change, the service approach extended only so far. The service party approach did promote change, but only in party organization, and only to the extent that it did not impair party unity. Policy matters, by contrast, given their frequently contentious nature were implicitly excluded from the change envisioned by advocates for a service party model. Indeed, in the thinking of most service-minded party leaders, among the key benefits of focusing on organizational growth rather than policy reform was that, unlike the latter, building a stronger party not only promised to make the party more competitive, but was a goal that otherwise competing interests and groups within the party were likely to support. As a result, service-minded party officials tended to eschew the need for policy reform. This was true even following defeat, or in cases where the party’s politics threatened to undermine its competitiveness. In Washington and Columbus, Bliss (1960) did talk about the importance of something he described as “party image” (pp. 168–169). But his concern was less with substantive policy issues than with strategies to promote otherwise unpopular policy positions taken by the party. For Bliss and Brock, maintaining some semblance of party unity necessitated that they step back from policy considerations. But more significantly, the service model implicitly encouraged it. Rebuilding required, first and foremost, party unity, that is, a stable party to work with. As such, the first instinct of service party leaders was to forego policy concerns, given the partisan divisions they tended to foster, and when necessary, the ideals of competitiveness whenever they endangered party cohesion and unity.

This is not to say that the service party concept did not affect the Republican Party politically. On the contrary, by focusing on organizational strength, and minimizing the need for policy reform following the Goldwater and Ford losses, the service approach implicitly sanctioned, and ultimately helped institutionalize the conservative ideas, issues and factional elements that had, with the 1964 Goldwater nomination, become ascendant within the Republican Party (Conley 2013). Indeed, the result during the formative years in the development of the modern Republican Party nationally between Goldwater and Reagan, was a tacit embrace by party leaders of the conservative ideology of the party’s then-dominant conservative rightwing. In Ohio and in Washington, the service approach did help an out-party Republican leadership rebuild and unify after defeat. But in both cases, particularly at the national level, the service model, by preempting the possibility of policy reform also played a key role, independent of the range of exogenous social changes chronicled in the Rise of the Right literature in the Right’s steady rise to preeminence and formal institutionalization within the Republican Party after Goldwater.

The Rise of the Right

As a history of the period, backlash accounts of the Rise of the Right in the 1960s are replete with tales of how the excesses of Democratic liberalism rebounded, in short order, to the benefit of the Republican Right. Amid the tumult of the decade, the Right’s political fortunes were transformed, the argument goes, by the political and cultural overreach of liberals in and outside of government. Confronted by the failures of liberalism—an escalating crime rate, urban unrest, a defeatist foreign policy and a growing and increasingly intrusive regulatory state—millions of Americans began voting with their feet and supporting conservative, Republican alternatives to the New Deal Democratic order. Democratic liberalism, in other words, punctuated by a disregard for the traditional contours of American political culture and values, was the central force that facilitated the rise of the modern Republican Right in the 1960s and 1970s.

It is an argument that is as plausible as it is specious. There can be little doubt that the sweeping social changes that occurred in the 1960s impacted, if not significantly reshaped the national political landscape. But, rather than probe what happened within the Republican Party over this period, and how the climactic events of the decade may have strengthened the claims and thus the institutional position of the conservative Right within the Party, researchers have too often simply presumed that the Right was bolstered by the rising levels of anger and disaffection with liberalism in the country. As Michael Schaller and George Rising (2002) succinctly explain, “by 1968, [the] pressures [of the 1960s] had incited a conservative backlash, weakened the New Deal coalition and ended the Democratic age that had begun in 1932” (p. 21). One, two, three.

Indeed, given how neatly it seems to explain Democratic decline since the 1960s, the backlash claim became what Adolph Reed and Julian Bond (1991) describe as an “unexamined orthodoxy” (p. 733). The danger in adopting such a claim is not only that we risk ignoring the important role institutional factors within the Republican Party played in the post-Goldwater rise of the Right, but, as Reed and Bond note, we spend our time trying to diagnose what liberal Democrats did wrong in the 1960s and since, and what might be done to recover from such political miscalculations. This is precisely what happened in much of the academic literature: the more eccentric the account, the more insight it seemed to offer researchers eager to understand and possibly reverse Democratic misfortunes.

We can clearly see elements of this “orthodoxy” at work in most of the more historically-minded works of the period. In his study, America’s Right Turn, William Berman (1998) contends, for example, that “a conservative New Right … emerged as a growing force in the ranks of the Republican Party” in the 1960s in “respon[se] to the cultural upheaval of the times” (p. 3). “Politics,” he explains, “became the medium by which the great cultural and racial upheavals of the sixties and seventies were eventually absorbed into the political system for the benefit of a powerful new conservative establishment” (Berman, 1998, p. 1). Or put more simply: “A white backlash, resulting from fear of urban disorder and opposition to open housing, helped revive the Republican Party” in the mid-1960s, he argues (Berman, 1998, p. 6). Other historical accounts provide a more sophisticated analysis of how the Right came to dominate the GOP in the 1960s and 1970s, but they too tend to neglect the importance of institutional variables, as well as the power of ideas and organizational philosophies in the conservative transformation of the post-Goldwater Republican Party. In her analysis of what she describes as the “conservative capture of the GOP,” for instance, Mary Brennan (1995) stresses the importance of “grassroots organization” and the “guidance and vision” of a politically maturing conservative movement to the Right’s rapid success in the latter half of the 1960s (p. 3). Moreover, she highlights the inept, even “arrogant” way that Liberal leaders within the GOP first discounted, then disparaged Conservatives, underestimating their growing organizational strength at every opportunity. What she misses is the manner in which these same Republican Party leaders would effectively embrace Conservatives after the 1964 Goldwater loss by rallying behind Ray Bliss and a service-centered approach to organizational recovery.

However, arguably the most well-developed articulation of the backlash orthodoxy can be found in research that seeks to analyze the interaction of “race and liberalism” in the 1960s, or the ways in which liberals, often operating at the state or local level tried to make good on Democratic Washington’s pledge to confront the scourge of racial inequality in the country. In his study of 1960s and 1970s New York City, for instance, Jim Sleeper (1990) struggles to convey the heartfelt sympathy that New Yorkers had customarily felt for the downtrodden and dispossessed. Violating this venerable tradition of tolerance, and effectively guaranteeing policy failure, he explains, were the ill-conceived civil rights initiatives pushed by legions of “black leaders and … their white apologists” in the 1960s (p. 26). The result was a near revolt by white residents, Sleeper writes, and the rapid erosion of the ethnic neighborhood infrastructure that had provided the foundation for relative racial calm in the city for most of the century. The reformers reacted to white opposition not by attenuating their policies or modifying their approach but by “redoubling their efforts,” Sleeper contends (Sleeper, 1990, p. 33).

Liberal activists were not inclined to reflect critically on the impact, or “political fallout,” as Thomas and Mary Edsall (1991) describe it that resulted from an overheated commitment to civil rights. Instead, “under siege, Democratic liberalism became unreceptive, if not hostile to new, contradictory, and sometimes frightening information,” they explain (Edsall and Edsall, 1991, p. 15). The Edsalls’ book, Chain Reaction, offers probably the most nuanced, and complete articulation of the backlash narrative. Though more academically rigorous than Sleeper, and conscious of how the Republicans sought to exploit divisions within the Democratic Party, the Edsalls nonetheless exhibit the same willingness to fault civil rights activists and Democratic Party reformers for the collapse of liberalism and the subsequent rise of a more conservative Republican Party. “The association of the national Democratic Party with the newly empowered, frequently controversial groups it sought in the 1960s and 1970s to enfranchise and protect created a backlash” they write, “among ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• 1. Introduction
• 2. Ohio and the Akron Fox
• 3. Building the Republican Service Party
• 4. In Service to the Republican Right
• 5. Nixon’s the One?
• 6. Nixon and the Organizational Interlude
• 7. Rebuilding the Republican Right
• 8. Serving the Reagan Revolution
• 9. Conclusion
• Index