Rise of the Conservative Movement | From Buckley to Goldwater
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- čas přidán 23. 07. 2024
- In this episode, we discuss the rise during the 1950s and 1960s of a new movement in Republican politics, on which would ultimately claim the heart of the party-the conservative movement.
By the 1950s, the old right faction of Senator Bob Taft was fading from relevance. The Republican Party was now firmly in the hands of its establishment faction of Eisenhower, Dewey, and Rockefeller. The party believed it had no choice but to accept the New Deal consensus as now simply the American consensus.
Then a young man came onto the scene determined to, as he would put it, stand athwart history yelling stop. That man was William F. Buckley, Jr., and he would soon build a movement that would ultimately remake the leadership of the Republican Party.
This episode explains the rise of Buckley new conservative movement from his founding of a tiny political magazine called National Review. Buckley would collect there a strange menagerie of writers and thinkers-from traditionalists like Russell Kirk, to former communists like Whittaker Chambers, to libertarians like the follower of Friedrich Hayek and Ayn Rand, to religious conservatives like Brent Bozell. Buckley would seek to forge this squabbling group of thinkers into one united movement around one united philosophy.
That task fell to another former communists at National Review, Frank Meyer. Meyer would develop a new philosophy that sought to unite all the different groups who opposed the New Deal consensus, from traditionalists to libertarians, that he called fusion conservatism or simply fusionism. Fusionism became the new philosophy of National Review, and through it Buckley’s growing conservative movement.
After uniting these New Deal opponents around his new philosophy, convincing them that they weren’t simply uneasy allies in a temporary alliance but in fact factions of one united movement, Buckley and his group decided to launch their ideas into practical politics. They sought a seat at the table of a Republican Party holding them at arms length. So they decided to find a candidate to run for president.
They decided on Arizona Senator Barry Goldwater.
Buckley and his movement would create a committee to draft Goldwater into a race he wasn’t even intending to run. They would inflate a bubble around his candidacy. They would supply him with his ideas, the fusion ideas of National Review. They would energize an army of young Baby Boomers to support him. They ultimately would engineer his nomination for president.
Goldwater of course lost that race in 1964, and the old establishment would temporarily reclaim leadership of the party, but the Republican Party had been permanently changed.
And just in time, because America was about to turn its attention away from the pragmatic politics of the early twentieth century towards a new politics of moral and social reform as America was about to enter the tumultuous politics of the 1960s and 1970s.
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Always a treat when one of your videos drops. This page deserves to blow up.
Thanks! I hope so too!
I just want to say, this is phenomenal work! I hadn't previously been Is aware of so many important individuals involved with National Review for example. Again, thank you for the phenomenal work you do!
Great channel, Frank. You should do one on the conservatism/Republicanism of Coolidge through Nixon, with a focus on Eisenhower and Nixon.
You should post more frequently, I learn a lot from your videos! Keep up with the good work
Thanks! I couldn't agree more. There were some major technical problems I had to deal with and get fixed that delayed the series for far too long. I have a lot of film already done and waiting to get assembled. So more is coming.
Great to see you back with some new episodes, Frank! Keep up the strong work!
Given the change that occurred to the Republican Party in the aftermath of Goldwater's loss (ultimately embracing the ideals that his candidacy represented), might it be apt to say that the Democratic Party took the opposite tack instead as a consequence of McGovern's loss?
Always look forward to your next video. Thanks!
Yay!!! A new video
I so glad you're back. Can't wait for your next video. Some of the stuff that you describe about the conservative movement I think about the movement started by Bernie Sanders. There are some clear similarities. I wonder where you think it will go from here.
One of the most interesting things about the conservative movement is that it's an actual social movement. So I agree. There are big similarities with how social movements operate. It just confuses people because, over time with its success at politics, "conservative movement" started to get used as merely a synonym for the Republican Party. Which it wasn't when it began, and in many ways still is not.
It's interesting that despite the US having two minor parties the Libertarians on the right and the Greens on the left those minor parties still fall in line with the party ideology of either modern conservatism or new deal liberalism. I think it's also at this point when world politics has much more of an effect on US politics. It's at this point that the US becomes a world power and the leftward push of European left wing parties all have the same ideology to new deal liberals.
Great content frank! 🤓🔥
Idea for the next party system's central question: how do we manage a post-industrial society?
This includes issues of declining birthrates and attitudes towards immigration, (demographics)
How should we deal with megacorporations that use technology to exert control over our lives (oligopolies),
How to take care of our population as the US's global standing and standard of living decreases, and how to reverse it (material concerns),
How to conduct ourselves on the world stage, and our involvement with the world system (foreign policy)
How to deal with the effects of climate change (green policy)
And how to adjust society morally through social issues in order to solve polarization and ensure the fabric that holds society together remains intact.
Two sides of this are NATIONALISTS (america first plus the centrist democrats) and the GLOBALISTS (the old business republicans and neoliberal moderate democrats). Remove the associated connotations of those terms because they will mean something different. It will be interesting where the modern PROGRESSIVES fall, because they have conflicting policy in this party system
Did you do a video about Coolidge, Hoover, and Eisenhower?
Goldwater wins those prized former Democratic strong Southern States! 😆
Glad to see a new video.
By this point isn't the new deal the conservative position?
Because it feels like it is to me with the new conservatives being closer to a new wave of reformism rather than reactionaries.
Also i'm really curious how you will handle the series going forward because in the era of the struggle of civil rights up to now the conservative position espoused by this new movement becomes progressively more bankrupt and indefensible.
Thanks! Over next few episode we're going to be talking about the shift to moral politics, first in history, then in the 1960s and 1970s. Because a lot of what happened is really tied up in applying political philosophies designed to deal with economic questioned during the New Deal to new social and moral questions, with tumultuous results.
Oddly enough, we’re now seeing thought leaders in the National Conservative movement like Sohrab Ahmari and Adrian Vermeule explicitly claiming the legacy of the New Deal for their own.
It’s been too long
Thanks, I agree! It was a crazy summer followed by major technical issues that took me way too long time to get fixed. I actually have a backlog of raw film for the next few episodes already done and just waiting to get assembled. So more is coming!
Future Video: Rise of the Progressive Movement | From Leonard to Sanders
At its core, when you strip out all the ideological dressing, conservative politics is just opposition to change
It think it very depends on what you mean by change. The interesting thing about the twentieth-century conservative movement is that it was frequently quite experimental and radical, proposing big changes to how America worked. It just wanted to change America in what we would call a "conservative" direction.
For example, it was conservatives who wanted to experiment with a novel idea like charter schools. In that case, it was liberals who wanted to leave the system the way it had always been, even when they agreed it was imperfect and could use reforms, arguing strongly for caution against untested and radical change.
Liberals and conservatives both have fought to preserve with no changes those things they liked, while fighting to experiment with radical ideas that would push America in their preferred ideological direction. Conservative and liberal were ideological directions both groups sought to push towards.
@@FrankDiStefano yes, but like you said, religious conservatives have little in common with godless libertarians though they ended up together as they both opposed the social change that took place under the New Deal.
@@FrankDiStefano I just don't know why modern American political landscape is shaped by the ideological division between liberals and conservatives?
@Frank DiStefano thank you for this comment!