Movement conservatism

[4] Recent examples of writers using the term "movement conservatism" include Sam Tanenhaus,[5] leading paleoconservative Paul Gottfried,[6] and Jonathan Riehl.

[8] Journalist John Judis writes that before William F. Buckley established the journal National Review in 1955, anti-leftist forces varied "from free market anti-New Dealers to traditionalists like Russell Kirk to anti-Semitic crackpots like Gerald L. K. Smith".

[9] Paul Krugman described the rise of movement conservatism in his 2007 book The Conscience of a Liberal as occurring in several phases between 1950 and Reagan's election as president in 1980.

It argued that "the central question that emerges... is whether the White community in the South is entitled to take such measures as are necessary to prevail, politically and culturally, in areas where it does not predominate numerically?

"[10][11] When Buckley ran for mayor of New York in 1965, he may have been the first conservative to endorse affirmative action, or, as he called it, “the kind of special treatment [of African Americans] that might make up for centuries of oppression.” He also promised to crack down on labor unions that discriminated against minorities, a cause even his liberal opponents were unwilling to embrace.

In 1969, in his capacity as founding editor of National Review, launched a decade and a half earlier as a “conservative weekly journal of opinion” that stood in opposition to the dominant liberal ethos of the time, Buckley toured African-American neighborhoods in Cleveland, Detroit, Chicago, San Francisco, Oakland, Los Angeles and Atlanta organized by the Urban League and afterward singled out for special praise “community organizers” who were working “in straightforward social work in the ghettos.” In an article in Look magazine months later, Buckley anticipated that the United States could well elect an African-American president within a decade, and that this milestone would confer the same reassurance and social distinction upon African Americans that Roman Catholics had felt upon the election of John F. Kennedy.

During the 1960s, Kristol and his associates argued against the Great Society policies of President Lyndon B. Johnson, which had expanded the welfare state through Medicare and the War on Poverty.

[13] Its main activity in the 1960s, says Rick Perlstein, "comprised monthly meetings to watch a film by Welch, followed by writing postcards or letters to government officials linking specific policies to the Communist menace".

This ended the exceptionalism of the "one-party South" in presidential elections and brought significant additional political power to the Republican Party, although these voters were not necessarily movement conservatives.

[20] Movement conservatives embraced an anti-regulation and anti-union message as part of their appeal to business interests, with whom they had common ground in terms of tax policy.

[21] For example, in 1958 Barry Goldwater referred to influential union leader Walter Reuther as a "more dangerous menace than the Sputnik or anything Soviet Russia might do to America."

[8] Fareed Zakaria stated in November 2016 in describing a book about conservative Alan Greenspan: "It's also a vivid portrait of the American establishment as it moved right from the 1970's to the 1980s and 1990s.

[25] Historian William Link, in his biography of Jesse Helms, reports that "By the mid-1970s, these movement conservatives wanted to control the Republican Party and, ultimately, the national government.