Why the Right Went Wrong: ConservatismFrom Goldwater to the Tea Party and Beyond (8 page)

Before there was online fund-raising, there was direct mail. The Goldwater-era conservatives were its pioneers. Perlstein noted that whereas in 1960, 22,000 people made donations to John F. Kennedy’s campaign and 44,000 to Richard Nixon’s,
“over a million gave to Barry Goldwater.” The Goldwater mailing list became one of the hottest properties in conservatism, and throughout the 1970s and into the year of Reagan’s triumph, direct mail specialists helped build a regiment of conservative organizations. The master of them all was conservative mail impresario Richard Viguerie.

Now in his eighties, Viguerie remains active in Tea Party politics. Direct mail, Viguerie once explained to me, served a double function. Its main purpose, of course, was to raise money. But it also created lines of communication among conservatives unimpeded by mainstream media, and the opportunity to highlight issues that were not on the mainstream’s radar. The construction of ideological enclaves, so often bemoaned in the Bush and Obama years as major sources of polarization, is work that began in the 1950s and 1960s.

In our era, conservatives, particularly those associated with Fox News, are well-known for dominating
bestseller lists. One week in late July 2014 was revealing: Hillary Clinton’s memoir,
Hard Choices,
came in at No. 3 on the
New York Times
bestseller list, but it was one place behind
Blood Feud,
a book attacking her, and just one ahead of
One Nation,
written by Ben Carson, an African-American neurosurgeon who became a conservative hero for
challenging President Obama at a White House prayer breakfast. Carson emerged in 2015 as a surprisingly strong GOP presidential contender.

But the proclivity of conservatives to buy movement books is not new. Their sales were simply never measured on the established bestseller lists because the right wing’s punchy volumes tended to be paperbacks published by small presses, some of them set up to push out a single book, or self-published, as Smoot’s was. The far right had networks of its own. Besides Smoot, other bestselling Birch authors included W. Cleon Skousen, who enjoyed a major revival in the Tea Party years. Skousen’s eccentric view of the American founding,
The 5,000 Year Leap
, was a smash hit on Amazon in the early years of the Tea Party when talk show host Glenn Beck put it on the reading list of his one-day course on “The Making of America.”

The Goldwater campaign was fueled by (and helped fuel) the sales of such tracts, the most important being
A Choice Not an Echo
. Long before she led the fight against the Equal Rights Amendment, Phyllis Schlafly was a heroine on the right for her self-published 126-page paperback, touted on its cover as “the inside story of how American presidents are chosen.” The book’s argument would be entirely familiar to today’s Tea Party. She explained why the Republicans had consistently been
“maneuvered into nominating candidates who did not campaign on the major issues”—meaning the right’s issues.

“In each of their losing presidential years,” she argued, “a small group of secret kingmakers, using hidden persuaders and psychological warfare techniques, manipulated the Republican National Convention to nominate candidates who would sidestep or suppress the key issues.” Their goal was to make certain that “the New Deal–New Frontier foreign policy—in which they have a vested interest” was never “debated, investigated or submitted to voters.” Thus was the defeat of the conservative champion Robert A. Taft at convention after convention—by Wendell Willkie, by Thomas E. Dewey (twice), and by Dwight D. Eisenhower—portrayed as a form of serial betrayal. Conservatives have been waging war on one “Republican establishment” or another ever since.

Especially instructive is the conservative columnist Ralph de Toledano’s
The Winning Side: The Case for Goldwater Republicanism,
published in 1963. De Toledano shared with Schlafly—and in truth, with the entire right in the early 1960s—the conviction
that conservatives had been blocked from the victory that would inevitably have been theirs had they only been given a chance to lead the Republican Party. “The dominant consensus of this country is and always has been of a conservative bent,” de Toledano insisted. “This bent has failed to impose itself on the course of events because forces and individuals have
deprived the American people of a choice.”

Presciently (although not for 1964), de Toledano argued that “the Democratic coalition formed by Franklin Delano Roosevelt has begun to come apart” and that “a new conservative consensus has the potential strength to replace it.” De Toledano made the case not only that Goldwater conservatism
should
win, but also that it
would
win—and was a more promising path to a Republican victory than Rockefeller-style liberalism.

The Winning Side
was a mixed salad of ideological hope and political number crunching, some of it quite shrewd. At the heart of its argument was a belief that the South was destined to switch its allegiances from the Democrats to the Republicans, provided the Republicans embraced conservatism. “In its economic principles, in its devotion to Constitutional government, and in its abhorrence to any tyranny (whether of majorities or minorities), the South was akin to the Midwest, to the Mountain states, to the American countryside.” Without any intended irony, he led off his list of conservative heroes with the Democrat who had been the outstanding political and intellectual defender of slavery before the Civil War. The South, de Toledano wrote, “was as Republican as John C. Calhoun, Robert A. Taft and Barry Goldwater.” Abraham Lincoln would have been mystified and, one presumes, rather upset. With the civil rights push in full swing, de Toledano’s mention of Calhoun and his reference to a tyranny of “minorities” made clear which side of the civil rights struggle he was on.

The Goldwater campaign and the backlash against Johnson’s support for civil rights are often cited as the twin engines of the white southern defection from the Democratic Party. But to understand the deeply embedded role of race in the development of the conservative coalition, it’s important to recognize that the Democratic coalition FDR built was
already
confronting severe pressures by the late 1930s around racial questions. As Ira Katznelson recounted in
Fear Itself: The New Deal and the Origins of Our Time,
southern Democrats in Congress were defecting from Roosevelt’s program as early as the middle
1930s. Race was not an incidental factor in the new conservatism and the racial reaction so visible in the Obama years was part of a much older story.

To maintain segregation, the South always depended on the support or at least acquiescence of the rest of the country, and since the Civil War, the northern Democratic Party had been its natural ally in maintaining the racial status quo. But the New Deal’s progressive economic measures upset the party’s internal balances, aggravating the contradictions between the northern liberals who largely staffed the New Deal and southern segregationist voters, particularly southern elites.

Although New Deal programs, because of southern influence, were far less generous to nonwhites than to whites, they nonetheless empowered African-Americans and altered their political loyalties. Under Roosevelt, African-American voters outside the South began switching their allegiances from the party of Lincoln to the party of FDR. (
In the South, most of them couldn’t vote at all.) As economic change swept the South, millions of African-Americans migrated from southern farms to northern industrial jobs, bolstering the black vote and rendering it even more important to the Democrats in key states such as Michigan, New York, Ohio, Illinois, and Pennsylvania. The electoral interests of northern and southern Democrats began to diverge.

The rise of the labor movement, facilitated by the Wagner Act, further alarmed southern Democrats. As Katznelson points out,
CIO unions in particular “cultivated African-American membership” and “quickly became the most racially integrated institutions in American life.” Senator James Byrnes of South Carolina, a Democrat who later served as Harry Truman’s secretary of state, warned in 1938 that the Democrats had fallen under the influence of “the Negroes of the North” and he complained that the New Deal’s policies on unions and wages were undermining southern racial arrangements. He concluded that the South—meaning the white South—had been “deserted by the Democrats.”

A reaction to Roosevelt’s “court packing” plan to expand the size of the Supreme Court and then the onset of recession were decisive in moving southern Democrats to seek alliances with like-minded Republicans, as the historian James T. Patterson noted.
In late 1937, Senator Josiah Bailey, a North Carolina Democrat, joined with leading Republicans to produce a conservative manifesto that criticized high levels of public spending and
called for tax cuts, particularly in capital gains, “to free funds for investment and promote the normal flow of savings into profitable and productive use.” Here again were old ideas that would be pronounced new in the 1980s and again in our time. The manifesto also attacked organized labor and the CIO’s sit-down strikes.
“We insist upon constitutional guarantees of the rights of person and of property,” the conservatives wrote, “the right of the worker to work, of the owner to possession, and of every man to enjoy in peace the fruits of his labor.”

The “conservative coalition” of most congressional Republicans allied with almost all of the southern Democrats was born. From 1938 until Lyndon Johnson’s 1964 landslide, it largely controlled Congress, even though it was nominally under Democratic leadership during most of those years.

Southern segregationist intellectuals and activists were already envisioning a new politics around race in the 1940s, as the political scientist Joseph Lowndes showed in
From the New Deal to the New Right.
In 1947, Charles Wallace Collins, a southern lawyer and segregationist, published
Whither Solid South? A Study of Politics and Race Relations
. Wallace, who saw how resistance to racial equality would ally naturally with a broadly conservative view of economics and federal power, might be seen as the first theorist of a southern political realignment. As Lowndes notes, Collins was no crackpot. Born into a planter family in Alabama, he studied law, then Semitic languages and archeology at the University of Chicago, and finally politics and economics at Harvard.

Collins argued that the South was distinct from the rest of the country because “the doctrine of white supremacy is akin to a religious belief” in the region, “rooted in the very fiber of the southern soul.” If the Democratic Party had been the South’s bulwark before the 1930s, the New Deal had fundamentally altered the party’s role, turning it into a friend of concentrated power in Washington and an enemy of states’ rights. “Centralization has brought national planning and with it new words, and
new meanings to old words.”

Collins was particularly upset with the transformation of the word
democracy
. Under the New Deal, it had come to refer to “moral and spiritual values,” including racial equality that would be imposed by the state. Therefore, he saw “the whole Negro program” as “infected with the deadly virus of stateism.” This was one of the earliest marriage proposals between Confederate ideas and contemporary libertarianism.

Collins, as Lowndes notes, had taken heart in the 1940s from the opposition of many Republicans to the creation of a permanent Fair Employment Practices Commission. If the South opposed the new body in order to maintain white supremacy, many conservative Republicans opposed it for interfering with the prerogatives of private employers. And here is where Collins proved prophetic. In the short run, he said, the South should seek to gain the balance of power between national Democrats and Republicans in the Electoral College. This was the case for what became the States’ Rights Democratic Party, the “Dixiecrats” who nominated Senator Strom Thurmond against Democrat Harry Truman and Republican Thomas E. Dewey in 1948 and carried Louisiana, South Carolina, Alabama, and Mississippi. But in the longer run, Collins saw the issues of personal freedom, local self-government, and support for private enterprise as creating the common ground on which Democrats in the South would come together with conservative Republicans everywhere else. This coalition, he predicted, could become
“the strongest party in the country, provided that the issue of Negro equality was left to the sponsorship of a new Liberal Party.”

It would take sixteen years for Collins’s dream to move from the Dixiecrat experiment to the Goldwater realignment. The rise of the civil rights movement would not only tear the Democratic Party apart, but also fracture a Republican Party that had once been the African-Americans’ best ally.

By the 1950s, sympathy for the South’s resistance to civil rights extended beyond the far edges of the conservative movement. While Buckley was often a defender of tolerance, witnessed by his opposition to anti-Semitism, he and his magazine supported southern resistance to civil rights. Their views were characteristic of a significant body of conservative opionion at the time. The August 24, 1957, issue of
National Review
published “Why the South Must Prevail,” an editorial that explicitly defended white supremacy. The editorial asked “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?” Its response: “The sobering answer is Yes—the White community is so entitled because, for the time being, it is
the advanced race.”

Buckley took up the argument in his own name in his 1961 book,
Up from Liberalism,
declaring flatly that “yes, there are circumstances in which the
minority can lay claim to preeminent political authority, without bringing down on its head the moral opprobrium of just men.” Buckley went on:

In the South, the white community is entitled to put forward a claim to prevail politically because, for the time being anyway, the leaders of American civilization are white—as one would certainly expect given their preternatural advantages of tradition, training and economic status. . . .