Historians, like most people," Michael Kazin observed in 1992, "are reluctant to sympathize with people whose political opinions they detest." Did Kazin have any particular people in mind? Yes:

Overwhelmingly cosmopolitan in their cultural tastes and liberal or radical in their politics, scholars of modern America have largely eschewed research projects about past movements that seem to them either bastions of a crumbling status quo or the domain of puritanical, pathological yahoos. Thus, over a decade after Ronald Reagan captured the presidency with the active support of the New Right, historians are just beginning to examine the origins of the type of popular conservatism whose standard the disarmingly sanguine president waved so successfully.1

Much has stayed the same in the decade since Kazin wrote those words: the élites of what David Brooks calls "Blue America" continue to regard conservatism with a baffled repugnance. But much has changed—indeed, conservatism and conservatives have become downright fashionable subjects for historians.

Four recent books on postwar conservatism reveal just how different the political landscape looks in 2002. All four are by young scholars and journalists whose political commitments are decidedly left of center: Suburban Warriors, by Harvard professor Lisa McGirr; The Right Moment, by Washington speechwriter Matthew Dallek; A Time for Choosing, by Stanford's Jonathan Schoenwald; and Before the Storm, by journalist Rick Perlstein. All four books center on Ronald Reagan: his gubernatorial election in 1966 and his presidential victory in 1980. How, these books want to know, did Reagan and all he stood for manage to achieve victory?

As recently as December 1964, conservative Republican victories on that scale seemed almost unimaginable to most pundits and political scientists. After LBJ's 1964 landslide, James Reston wrote in The New York Times that Goldwater "has wrecked his party for a long time to come." Presidential historian James McGregor Burns asserted that "by every test we have, this is as surely a liberal epoch as the late nineteenth century was." As Rick Perlstein summarizes, it looked like "the American right had been rendered a political footnote—perhaps for good." But only two years later, conservatives swept into Congress, and ten new conservative Republican governors were elected, including Ronald Reagan. Fourteen years after that, Reagan would win the White House, and his policies continue to cast a long shadow over the Oval Office. Even President Clinton's two terms bear the unmistakable mark of conservative victory; Clinton achieved the presidency by shifting the Democratic Party's center a few notches to the right, as he declared the end of big government and slashed welfare with a vigor and insouciance that would have been unimaginable to LBJ's administration.

What happened? How were the liberal values these four authors hold dear, values that seemed not only ascendant but triumphant merely a generation ago, so decisively cast aside by American voters and American politicians?

The origins of the conservatism that would carry Reagan to office, McGirr and Schoenwald show, are found in 1950s anticommunist activism. Conservative intellectuals like James Burnham challenged the doctrine of "containment," which shaped U.S. policy in the immediate postwar era. Formulated by Truman State Department luminary George F. Kennan in 1947, containment was based on the premise that, since communism was ultimately unsustainable, America needed simply to prevent its spread and then watch it collapse under its own weight. Not so, Burnham and others argued: the United States needed to more boldly and aggressively combat the red threat.

But for other conservatives, such arguments didn't go far enough. On the far right, the John Birch Society was founded by Robert Welch in 1958. Within a few years, the group numbered thousands of devoted followers: men and women who gave their time to raise funds, arrange speakers, show educational films, and write and distribute tracts, all intended to ensure America's continued opposition to communism. Both Schoenwald and McGirr suggest that the impact of the Birch Society on the postwar conservative revival cannot be overstated; in McGirr's words, "No one initiative gained such notoriety or was more important in channeling grassroots fears of liberalism than the John Birch Society, whose resources and inspiration were crucial for right-wing mobilization."

At first glance, this reading of the rise of conservatism is strongly counterintuitive. After all, while the Birch society did experience rapid growth in its early years, the organization and its excesses—its fanaticism, its racism, its profound lack of "cool"—gave conservatism a bad name with many Americans, providing liberals with a heaven-sent opportunity to taint conservative opponents with guilt by association.

Nevertheless, our authors argue, the pressure exerted from the Right by the Birch Society and their kindred spirits prepared the way for Barry Goldwater's nomination as the Republican presidential candidate in 1964. And in turn—here again the logic is counterintuitive—despite his staggering defeat in the election, Goldwater galvanized a generation of activists who would ultimately carry a conservative to the White House.

"Scratch a conservative today," Perlstein writes,

—a think-tank bookworm at Washington's Heritage Foundation or Milwaukee's Bradley Foundation. … a door-knocking church lady pressing pamphlets into her neighbors' palms about partial-birth abortion; the owner of a small or large business sitting across the table from a lobbyist plotting strategy on how to decimate corporate tax rates; an organizer of a training center for aspiring conservative activists or journalists; Republican precinct workers, fund-raisers, county chairs, state chairs, presidential candidates, congressmen, senators, even a Supreme Court justice—and the story comes out. How it all began for them: in the Goldwater campaign.

The organizations that conservatives built to elect Goldwater would not collapse; they would be the same organizations that conservative candidates relied on in subsequent elections, for the rest of the decade and, indeed, the rest of the century.

It was the Goldwater campaign, of course, that gave a big boost to a little-known actor-turned-activist named Ronald Reagan. Reagan began his political life as a Democrat. During the 1950s, in part because he chose as his second wife the daughter of an outspoken Chicago conservative, he moved rightward, eventually taking work as General Electric's spokesman against "government encroachment." In 1962, he formally switched his party affiliation, and in 1964, he served as state cochair of the Committee for Goldwater-Miller.

Near the end of the campaign, in a last-ditch effort to revive Goldwater's chances on the national stage, Reagan gave a televised 39-minute speech called "A Time for Choosing." He railed against LBJ and the liberal policies he promoted, criticizing everything from agricultural policy to welfare, and suggested that the only answer to America's ills was electing Barry Goldwater.

The speech was a stunning success—commentators said it was the most electrifying political oration since William Jennings Bryan's "Cross of Gold"—though it did far more for Reagan's political prospects than for Goldwater's. Reagan was flooded with letters from thousands of Californians, begging him to run for office, and before long, he did. He would not only inherit Goldwater's organizational network but also his mantle as the conservative standard-bearer. He won the California election as handily as LBJ had won the presidency two years before: Reagan defeated Edmund "Pat" Brown by almost a million votes, with the incumbent Democratic governor winning only three counties.

With Reagan's election to the governor's mansion, postwar conservatism came into its own. As Dallek puts it, Reagan

helped change [conservatives'] prevailing image as kooks. He soft-pedaled the position on communism so that the movement was no longer synonymous with anticommunist crackpots and right-wing zealots. He helped turn riots, welfare, crime. … into effective cudgels that could be used against liberals. He expressed the anger that voters felt toward a counterculture that seemed to flout traditional American values of hard work and economic success. And he blended these attacks with a message of soaring optimism.

In short, Reagan showed that conservatism was not only respectable but politically saleable, too.

That is the story these four remarkably similar books tell. And yet, when all is said and done, it is surprisingly difficult to ferret out their answers to the fundamental question they set out with: Why did the Right triumph, both in the Republican Party and at the ballot booth, when liberalism seemed so clearly ascendant?

All the authors seem to suggest that the answer lies in grassroots organizing, the development of which they are obsessed with charting: organizations developed in the heat, as it were, of the Cold War, matured during the Goldwater campaign, and then, mutatis mutandis, swept Reagan to victory in 1966, and again in 1980. Schoenwald educates readers about Americans for Constitutional Government, the American Conservative Union, the Free Start Association, and Young Americans for Freedom; McGirr tells us about school boards and the California Republican Assembly; and so forth. The four books point to the same conclusion: "The seeds of Reagan's [presidential] victory were planted with the organizational networks, ideas, and strategies of the conservative movement of the 1960s," in McGirr's words.

This fixation on the question of institutional development stems, no doubt, from the authors' immersion in a broad historical literature on the 1960s that has given us study after study of sncc, sds, now, and any number of other acronymic political organizations. McGirr et al. may also be taking their cues from Jerome Himmelstein, whose influential work of political sociology, To the Right (1990), suggested that looking at organizational structures is the way to understand American conservatism. The lesson that politics isn't simply organic, that it doesn't just emerge but requires the hard work of in-the-trenches organizing, is one we would all do well to remember, whether the subject is the conservative revival of the 1960s or any other political movement that has swept America. But there is something circular in the logic of positing successful organizing as the explanation of the successes of conservative organizing. The best phone bank wins? Surely there's something more to it than that.

Dallek takes us one step closer, though it's hardly a daring one at this late date: his fine-grained portrait of the 1966 California gubernatorial election suggests that the successes of conservatism owe something to the failures of liberalism. Pat Brown's inept responses to the upheavals of the '60s illustrate the point. Brown wildly misjudged his constituents when he pushed a fair housing bill through the state legislature; more concerned with property values than equality, Californians undid Brown's legislative heavy lifting the following year when they overwhelmingly approved a referendum repealing the fair housing provisions. Flummoxed by radicalism at Berkeley, Brown thought he would score points with the law-and-order crowd when he sent in police to arrest student demonstrators, but all he accomplished was alienating students, minorities, and others who had long been stalwart supporters of the liberal governor.

Brown had prided himself on a commission he established in 1959 to investigate California's urban problems; in the next six years his administration built highways, schools, parks, recreational centers, drug rehab centers, and mental hospitals. The goal was to shore up California's cities and ameliorate the plight of immigrants, black citizens, and other disadvantaged Californians. But he consistently refused to deal with reports that pointed to police brutality against African Americans in inner cities. He failed to foresee the Watts riots. And when Los Angeles finally exploded, he responded with a report calling for "massive social spending" that alienated conservatives and leftist activists alike. Reagan's conservatism succeeded in California, Dallek contends, in no small measure because Brown's liberal consensus crumbled.

McGirr adds another piece to the puzzle, turning our attention to religion, which the other three authors curiously overlook. Dallek's only nod at the church is his observation that Reagan was raised in a devout Disciples of Christ home, and once dated a pastor's daughter; Schoenwald doesn't even deliver that much detail, telling us that, under the tutelage of his shoe-salesman father and housewife mother, Reagan "learned about community spirit and what it meant to work together to achieve a common goal," never letting on that he may have also learned something about salvation or Scripture. For Perlstein, religion is merely metaphorical (as when he notes that 1940s factory owners "believed with religious certainty" that if Walter Reuther had his way, the nation's economy would fall apart), not a subject of inquiry. Where, exactly, does Perlstein think those anti-Rockefeller Republicans' commitment to the sanctity of marriage and the family came from?

But McGirr, whose book focuses on Orange County, California, recognizes the importance of conservative Christianity in the conservative revival more generally. Evangelicals allied with the anticommunist cause of the 1950s; Robert Schuller, for example, belonged to both the Orange County School of Anti-Communism and the Californians' Committee to Combat Communism. Many of the Christians who cut their political teeth on anticommunism went on to work for Goldwater and Reagan, but it was not until the late 1960s that politicized Christianity, says McGirr, began to resemble the awesome force that came to be known as the Religious Right.

Again, the conservative surge came in response to liberalism's ever-widening reach. Federal and state courts had been setting precedents that did not sit well with Orange County Christians—notably the 1962 and 1964 Supreme Court decisions making the prosecution of obscenity more difficult, and the 1969 California Supreme Court decision People v. Belous, which struck down a state anti-abortion law. The 1970s saw Christians work to prevent sex education in public schools. In 1978, John Briggs, a born-again Christian who represented Orange County in the state legislature, fought for a referendum that would give school boards the right to ban gay teachers. And in that same decade, Beverly LaHaye began the San Diego "miniconventions" that would culminate in the founding of Concerned Women for America.

Refusing to treat religion as an epiphenomenon, McGirr offers a much-needed corrective to the other accounts under review. Indeed, the triumph of conservative politics in Orange County may have had as much to do with the evangelistic success of Chuck Smith and Calvary Chapel as with the organizing success of Californians for Goldwater.

These four books won't have the last word on the New Right in America. Future studies will need to pay greater attention to the place the free market occupied in postwar conservative ideology (in the 1,688 pages that these authors have collectively devoted to explaining the rise of postwar conservatism, Milton Friedman shows up a mere four times). And, taking a hint from Samuel Freedman's The Inheritance: How Three Families and the American Political Majority Moved from Left to Right, they will need to devote more pages to the "conversion" of middle-of-the-road groups, like working-class ethnics, to conservatism. (To explain the resurgence of the Democratic Party in the 1990s, one looks not at aging New Lefties but at Reagan Democrats who'd left the party and returned.) One hopes, too, that some enterprising scholar will consider the role Richard Nixon, surprisingly peripheral in these books, played in the conservative revival. Still, the near-simultaneous publication of four well-researched and even-handed studies of conservatism is perhaps the most important recent development in the study of twentieth-century American history. McGirr, Schoenwald, Perlstein, and Dallek have started a conversation that promises to help us understand not just what happened at the polling places in November 1980, but what is happening in Washington, D.C., today.

Books Considered in this Essay:

• Matthew Dallek, The Right Moment: Ronald Reagan's First Victory and the Decisive Turning Point in American Politics (Free Press, 2000).
  
  
• Lisa McGirr, Suburban Warriors: The Origins of the New American Right (Princeton Univ. Press, 2001).
  
  
• Rick Perlstein, Before the Storm: Barry Goldwater and the Unmaking of the American Consensus (Hill and Wang, 2001).
  
  
• Jonathan M. Schoenwald, A Time For Choosing: The Rise of Modern American Conservatism (Oxford Univ. Press, 2001).
  
  

1. Michael Kazin, "The Grass-Roots Right: New Histories of U.S. Conservatism in the Twentieth Century." American Historical Review, Vol. 97, No. 1 (1992), pp. 136-55.

Lauren F. Winner is a doctoral candidate in the history of American religion at Columbia University.

Copyright © 2002 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture magazine.
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