Conservatives exist to conserve the ideals of the American founding, its first principles, and the framework and institutions that made it possible. In the eyes of many in the world, this every 4 year ceremony we accept as normal is nothing less than a miracle. In America, we understand that a nation is only living as long as it is striving. Only a few generations have been granted the role of defending freedom in its hour of maximum danger. This great nation will endure as it has endured, will revive, and will prosper.
Whether we go forward together with courage or turn back to policies that weakened our economy, diminished our leadership in the world, America’s future will be in your hands. Hi. My name is Christopher Malagiesi, and I’m very pleased and honored to be presenting the history of the conservative movement on behalf of the Heritage Foundation’s 2025 presidential transition project in my own personal capacity. My day job is serving as executive director of outreach for Hillsdale College’s Washington DC campus, and I was previously CPAC director and director of external relations for the American Conservative Union, and was also editor in chief of the conservative book club, which is a division of Salem Media. But for many years, I taught history of the conservative movement as an adjunct instructor at American University in Washington DC, and was the education director of Conservatism 101, a project at the Leadership Institute, where I put together an online course based on my course at American University about the political and philosophical history and influence of the conservative movement, one of the first of its kind.
Putting a course like that together would have been impossible without the pioneering work of 2 leading historians, doctor Lee Edwards and doctor George h Nash. Doctor Edwards currently serves as distinguished fellow in conservative thought at the Heritage Foundation, and much of the presentation I’m about to give today is based on his many published works. Most importantly, from his seminal work, The Conservative Revolution, The Movement That Remade America, which is one of the primary texts that I used in my classroom, which is an overview of the cons of conservatism from the years 1945 to 2000. The other historian is doctor George h Nash, whose groundbreaking book, The Conservative Intellectual Movement in America Since 1945, another of the textbooks that I used, was also incredibly influential in mine and much of the conservative movement’s understanding of itself and its philosophical history. Doctor Edwards and doctor Nash are the giants whose shoulders we stand on, as well as doctor Edwin Fulner and so many others whom I don’t have enough time to list, but who also had a great influence on my own understanding of this great and important movement I’ve worked in for nearly 2 decades.
So what is the conservative movement? How did it begin? Why was it even needed? And what are conservatives inherently trying to conserve? And how did the conservative movement rooted in Barry Goldwater’s catastrophic defeat to Lyndon Johnson in the 19 64 presidential election, returned to elect its champion Ronald Reagan just 16 years later.
This presentation will be a narrative analyzing the dramatic rise of the conservative movement, primarily from the early progressive area era to the Reagan revolution, exploring how what largely started as a marginalized movement of ideas became a powerful political force that has changed not only America, but the world. Quite literally, the word conservative means to conserve. The word conserve comes from the Latin word conservere, meaning to keep together. Con meaning together and surveyor meaning to keep. So essentially, conservative means to keep together.
And according to the dictionary, conservative means to keep, preserve, keep intact, guard, and protect from harm or destruction. So if one was curious, one might ask, what are American conservatives inherently trying to conserve? To keep together and protect from harm or destruction? The answer would be American exceptionalism. The idea that America is unique in the annals of human history and that our founding in 1776 was based on certain first principles and ideas that were, in one sense, revolutionary and in another, based on 1,000 of years of human history, experience, achievement, acquired knowledge, customs, and traditions.
Russell Kirk, the great American philosopher and traditionalist scholar, said that America was the culmination or benefactor of Western civilization, that it had inherited the best of the great Western traditions, including that of ancient Jerusalem, Athens, Rome, London, and Philadelphia, where our declaration of independence was declared and our constitutional convention was held. America, at its founding, personified these ideas. Certainly, in our governing documents, there was a reverence to individual liberty, consent of the governed, freedoms of religion and conscience, speech, private property, and a respect for civil society and its institutions, and that all men are created equal, and that they are endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. The articulation of such ideas were the byproduct of the enlightenment, and certain philosophers in particular, John Locke in natural rights, Charles Montesquieu in the separation of powers, Adam Smith in capitalism, and William Blackstone in the common law. Much of these ideas could be traced back to ideas from antiquity and the Middle Ages, including those espoused by Aristotle, Cicero, Thomas Aquinas, and many others.
Conservatives exist to conserve the ideals of the American founding, its first principles, and the framework and institutions that made it possible, and the constitutional republic that enabled the greatest experiment in human history and liberty. So for about the first 125 years or so of the American Republic, or roughly around from the founding to the late 1800, early 1900, much of America was governed by this constitutional framework of traditional checks and balances, separation of powers, federalism, and the federal government playing a limited role in society. So as to allow for individual liberty to thrive, so man can pursue their own happiness, or what was understood to be virtue. And while striving to be a more perfect union, it was not always perfect. And at times, this was challenged, and rightfully so.
America had to fight a civil war for the fulfillment of promises made in our declaration of independence to enslaved people, and it took another 100 years to achieve their full civil rights. But overall, even throughout these and many other challenges, American citizens and our country’s leaders generally respected and revered the constitution, its processes, and accumulated wisdom, and when needed, would prudently amend it, and they’ve done so 27 times. It was not until the early 20th century that that wisdom would be challenged by forces who believe in a fundamental transformation of America. Enter the progressives. The progressives believed that America was not meeting the challenges of the time, that our legislative process was too slow and not reactionary enough to deal with the great challenges and innovation spawned by the industrial revolution and the gilded age.
These challenges included widespread poverty, poor working conditions, rampant urbanization and immigration, and innovations in technology, transportation, media, and education. But what made the progressives different from previous quote unquote reform movements was their direct assault on the foundations of American constitutionalism and their desire to uproot it. They also believed that our rights were not natural and based on some fixed or immutable truths. But that rights could only be attained through boundless governmental action, centralized planning, and large whole scale policy experimentation, which would largely be overseen by a denizen of scientific and technocratic administrators in the form of an over encompassing bureaucratic administrative state. Only then could quote unquote progress be realized.
So, if one was curious, one might ask, but progress to what end? In other words, they believe that American constitutionalism and the principles that embodied were no longer sufficient, relevant, or self evident. Progress needed to be made for the sake of progress without being tethered to some type of metaphysical past. History and tradition were of this past and should not be used to prudently guide us into the future. Instead, their slogan could have been, we are the people we’ve been waiting for, as Barack Obama famously said.
The inclinations of this would mean a break from the limited government constitutionalism America had known and was no doubt a huge part of its success. This new progress would undoubtedly encroach on the individual liberty of its citizens, whereby decisions would be made in a far and distant capital, ignoring our traditions of federalism and local autonomy. And not surprisingly, this would have severe ramifications for America in the short term, but also in our present day. While presidents Theodore Roosevelt and Taft called themselves progressives during their presidencies, they still revered the constitution. And progressivism was more of a vehicle for their policy platforms.
It was really Woodrow Wilson, America’s 28th president, who openly challenged the foundations of the US constitution and enacted wide scale reforms through his new freedom agenda, which is a precursor to FDR’s New Deal, that would drastically change the relationship of the citizen and the government with a thumb on the scale side of government. For instance, it was Wilson who oversaw the implementation of the first federal income tax. Thank you for that. And drastically began to increase federal spending. And it was his administration that promoted the Federal Reserve Act, which created the Fed and central control of the monetary system.
He also supported the ill conceived federal amendment of prohibition and amendment 17, which led to the direct election of US senators instead of through the state legislatures. What Antonin Scalia, the revered originalist Supreme Court Justice, once referred to as the death of federalism. While much of this is accepted in today’s world, this was revolutionary for its time. Additionally, Wilson’s internationalism and foreign intervention also involved America in World War 1. And while noble in its intentions, it came at a great sacrifice to a 116,000 American soldiers and their families, especially as America had been historically more isolationist.
He was also the leading architect of the ill fated League of Nations, which the US Senate and the American people would subsequently reject. By the time of the presidential election of 1920, America seemed to have had enough of progressive experimentation. The Republican nominee, Warren Harding, and his vice presidential nominee, Calvin Coolidge, ran for president with the campaign promise of a return to normalcy. Harding and Coolidge overwhelmingly won the popular vote. The largest popular vote landslide since James Monroe ran for reelection unopposed in 18/20, a 100 years ago.
Under Harding and Coolidge, America witnessed the roaring twenties and oversaw one of the greatest periods of economic prosperity and cultural novelty in American history. Harding and Coolidge would begin to swing the pendulum back to limited government, fiscal restraint, non intervention, and would promote the idea of Americanism, a sense of national pride and esteem for the Constitution. So why do I mention all this? Because this period of time in the early 20th century is really the beginning of a trajectory that solidified the left versus right political dichotomy that still exists today. The early beginnings of a quote unquote conservative movement, even though it wasn’t called that back then, was initially formed in response to the progressive challenge to American constitutionalism in the early 20th century.
For the first time in modern American history, there was a real need to organize a movement to conserve the founding, its first principles, and American constitutionalism. Today, we refer to this period of the early conservative movement as the old right. Though Harding would die unexpectedly in office in 1923, Coolidge maintained and expanded on Harding’s policies. Coolidge was incredibly popular and was elected overwhelmingly in his own right in 1924. And while dismissed as silent Cal for his perceived unremarkable speeches of brevity, a Coolidge biographer wrote that at the time, Coolidge embodied the spirit and hopes of the middle class, could interpret their longings, and express their opinions.
As a quick aside, a story that was widely circulated during Coolidge’s time was that someone once told him, I made a bet today that I could get more than 2 words out of you, and Coolidge replied, you lose. Fun little aside. In 1928, Coolidge chose not to run for reelection as he believed that if he won, he would serve 10 years as president, which was something no one has ever or should ever aspire to, he believed. Instead, Republican Herbert Hoover, Coolidge’s secretary of commerce, easily won the presidency against Democrat Al Smith, the current governor of New York. As everyone knows, the country would enter the Great Depression after the stock market crash of 1929.
The American public would blame Hoover for not being able to correct the economy and would usher in then New York governor Franklin Delano Roosevelt to the presidency in 1932 in a landslide election. While FDR did not call himself a progressive, as that term at the time was now out of style. FDR, however, called himself a liberal, but was a great admirer of Woodrow Wilson and very much believed in using the government on mass to solve society’s ills, which at the time was a devastated economy, rampant poverty, and high unemployment. FDR’s New Deal policy experimentation would unleash the government in an unprecedented spending spree and bureaucratic largesse, funded by the largest tax creases in American history, with the top tax level paying as high as 94%, and created the notorious alphabet soup of agencies that attempted to a deal with all the economic crises. Doctor Charles Kessler, the senior fellow at the Claremont Institute, and editor of the Claremont Review of Books, believes there were 4 major waves of progressivism led by 4 US presidents.
And if there was a Mount Rushmore for influential progressive presidents, the 4 heads on it would be Woodrow Wilson, Franklin Roosevelt, Lyndon Johnson, and Barack Obama. During each of these presidencies, America saw a government expansion of powers the likes of which America had never seen before. The sheer size and scope of the New Deal agenda, the high tax rate increases, the constitutional crisis surrounding FDR’s court packing attempts, and eventually, FDR’s promise of a second bill of rights, whereby government promised a never ending involvement in our daily lives, would lead to the formation of a congressional conservative coalition that sought to halt further New Deal legislation. They believe that much of the New Deal policies were not working and gave government way too much power, and that it was actually the economic ingenuity and production during World War 2 that got us out of the great depression, not the alphabet soup of agencies. And while historians justifiably credit FDR’s steadfast wartime leadership in helping to win World War 2 and calm a fearful nation that had been attacked, it was his domestic agenda legacy that would solidify a quote, unquote new right.
Similar to the old right in many ways, but with new and serious challenges. The new right would rise to repudiate the large scale new deal expansions of government, identify and diagnose a societal post war moral and cultural decline, and raise the alarm to the rising international communist threat during the beginnings of the nuclear age, which would threaten all of humanity. Senator Robert Taft from Ohio, son of president Taft, would serve as the first of these early congressional conservative leaders and would help lead the charge in challenging FDR’s new deal and then Truman’s fair deal. In 1950, the liberal critic Lionel Trilling once famously said that liberalism is not only the dominant, but even the sole intellectual tradition in America. He went on to state that while a conservative or reactionary impulse did exist, it expressed itself only in irritable mental gestures, which seems to resemble ideas.
Flattering. By 1950, a fully functioning and powerful conservative movement had not yet formed and didn’t even have a name yet. It was only in its infancy, but would soon transform to become a dynamic political movement that would usher in its early hero, Barry Goldwater, to win the Republican presidential nomination only 14 years later. How did it do this? According to conservative movement historian, doctor Lee Edwards, a political movement had to have the 4 p’s in order to be successful.
The 4 p’s were philosophers, popularizers, philanthropists, and politicians. A political movement needed philosophers to come up with a viable, consistent philosophy and cogent set of principles it would embody. It would need popularizers, writers and members of the media, to promote their ideas to a wide audience and create a national constituency. When the philosophers’ ideas had been popularized, a solid financial base of donors and philanthropists were needed to fund the organizational and infrastructural apparatus of that movement, which could include think tanks, media publications, and grassroots organizations. And finally, any successful political movement needed to elect charismatic principled leadership who were proficient in media to champion their policy preferences, activate their national constituency, and win popular mandates to achieve political and legislative success.
So we begin our story of the philosophers by analyzing 3 disparate groups of thought leaders whose ideas would become the basis of this new right and burgeoning conservative movement in the post FDR, post World War 2 era. According to conservative historian, doctor George h Nash, these three groups would make up what would be called the conservative 3 legged stool. They were the classical liberals and libertarians, the traditionalists, and the anti communist. The first group we’ll explore are the classical liberals and libertarians. According to doctor Nash, they resisted the threat of the ever expanding state to liberty, private enterprise, and individualism.
They were convinced that America was rapidly drifting towards statism or socialism, and offered a spirited defense for the free market, free enterprise, a return to laissez faire economics, lower taxation, and limited government. Their most prominent early leader was economist Friedrich von Hayek or who was also known as F. A. Hayek. Hayek’s seminal work, The Road to Serfdom, written in 1944, would be the ember that sparked this revival of classical liberalism, and would revolt against the zeitgeist of the time, Keynesian Economics.
The main thesis of the book was that tyranny inevitably results from government control of economic decision making through central planning. Central planning or socialism would inevitably lead the people down a road to serfdom or totalitarianism as was seen in the Soviet Union. Hayek said the title of the book was inspired by French philosopher Alexis de Tocqueville and his writings on the road to servitude. While published in 1944, it would not actually be till April 1945 when Reader’s Digest, one of the most popular magazines in America at the time, published an abridged version of the book that would bring it to a far wider audience beyond the academic world. Hayek is also responsible for founding the Mount Pellerin Society in 1947, an influential international organization of economists, philosophers, historians, intellectuals, and business leaders that help revive and coalesce a worldwide coalition of free market advocates.
Another popular and influential figure was economist Milton Friedman and his books, in particular, Capitalism and Freedom, written in 1962, with the premise that economic freedom is a necessary precondition for political freedom. And his other book, Free to Choose, which was written in 1980, and based on his popular subsequent television series. Both Hayek and Friedman are properly credited for popularizing a classical liberal revival. Other popular early economic influencers in their published works that helped define this thought group were Albert j Knock in his book, Memoirs of a Superfluous Man, written in 1943. Henry Hazlett, and his book Economics in One Lesson, written in 1946, and Ludwig von Mises, and his three books, Liberalism, and Britain in 1927, Bureaucracy in 1944, and Human Action in 1949.
Concurrently and independently, the second group of thought leaders were the traditionalists. According to doctor Nash, a second school of thought emerged who were shocked by totalitarianism, total war, and the development of secular, rootless, mass society during the 19 thirties 19 forties. After World War 2 and the horror of the holocaust, the traditionalists urged a return to traditional religions and ethical absolutes, and a rejection of the relativism that had corroded Western values and produced an intolerable vacuum that was filled with amoral ideologies. Traditionalism has been defined as believing that tradition and custom guide man and his worldview. Each generation inherits the experience and culture of its ancestors, and through convention and precedence, man is able to inherit the culture of his ancestors and pass it down to his descendants.
Traditionalism slogan could be summed up in the popular refrain, usually credited to Edmund Burke, those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it. Their most prominent early leader was the philosopher and political theorist, Russell Kirk. Kirk’s most noteworthy work, which was actually a published version of his doctoral dissertation, was titled The Conservative Mind from Burke to Elliott, published in 1953, a providential year in conservatism’s history. It was a scholarly masterpiece linking an intellectual heritage of conservative thought from the time of the founders to the present day, with a special appreciation for Edmund Burke, Alexis de Tocqueville, and the Anglo American philosophical tradition. Kirk believed that tradition, order, and freedom were inseparable.
The book was well received and helped legitimize the burgeoning conservative movement, and many historians credit the popularity of the book for popularizing the term conservative, and giving the conservative movement its name, still used today. Another critical contributor to the traditionalist cause was Richard Weaver, whose seminal text, Ideas Have Consequences, was written in 1948. Its thesis was that the beginning of Western decline occurred when man flirted with nominalism, or the rejection of absolute truths. One other important figure was American sociologist, Robert Nisbett. His influential book, The Quest for Community, a study in the ethics of order and freedom, was written in 1953, the same year as The Conservative Mind was published.
His thesis was, the history of the West since the end of the Middle Ages was the story of decline of intermediate associations between the individual and the state. The weakening and dissolution of such ties as family, church, guild, and neighborhood had not as many had hoped liberated men. Instead, it had produced alienation, isolation, spiritual desolation, and the growth of mass man. But man cannot live in Hobbesian isolation, and so to satisfy his longings, he seeks out community, eventually finding it in the totalitarian state. Now also concurrently and independently, a third and final group of thought leaders were emerging called the anti communist.
Its early leaders were Whitaker Chambers, James Burnham, and Frank Meyer. According to doctor Nash, the anti communist had a profound conviction, being ex radicals and former communists themselves, that the west was engaged in a titanic struggle with communism, not only abroad, but at home domestically. Communism, the economic and political theories espoused by Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels, and Vladimir Lenin were a complete repudiation of the West, including the cherished ideas of representative democracy, free market economics, private property, free speech, tradition and customs, and religious freedom. Soviet communism called for a worldwide workers revolution that would end up killing at least a 100,000,000 people around the world under leaders such as Joseph Stalin, Pol Pot, Fidel Castro, and especially Mao Zedong. Whitaker Chambers, the former Soviet spy, would testify in Congress in 1948 that there was a deep seated communist infiltration in the United States government that needed to be rooted out.
His congressional testimony would famously lead to the criminal indictment of Alger Hiss, a popular state department official famously outed by Chambers as a Soviet spy. Chambers would publish his autobiographical account in his book witness, which was written in 1952. Special attention should be paid to his emotional opening called letter to my children. Another preeminent anti communist figure was James Burnham. A former Trotskyite, he rejected so called containment of communism and urged for a rollback of communism worldwide.
It is said that Ronald Reagan was actually greatly influenced by Burnham’s work, helping to form Reagan’s Cold War policies that led to the demise of the Soviet Union. Burnham outlined much of his thinking in a 3 part book series, including the struggle for the world written in 1947, the coming defeat of communism in 1949, and containment or liberation, an inquiry into the aims of United States foreign policy in 1953. But his opus would be the seminal suicide of the West, an essay on the meaning and destiny of liberalism written in 1964, which would become a very influential text supporting the fusion of all three leading conservative thought groups at the time. Other important anti communist writers in the books were William Henry Chamberlain in his book Collectivism, A False Utopia, written in 1937, Freda Utley in her book The Dream We Lost, the Soviet Union Then and Now in 1940. Eugene Lyons in his book The Red Decade, The Stalinist Penetration of America in 1941.
Max Eastman, his book, Stalin’s Russia and the Crisis in Socialism in 1940, and Reflections on the Failure of Socialism in 1955. And other books included The God That Failed, written in 1949, and even George Orwell’s seminal classics 1984, and Animal Farm. As each of these thought groups began to grow in influence in the late forties 19 fifties, astute observers realized that a consolidation of sorts would be needed and helpful in order to have real political influence. 2 men in particular would play an indelible role infusing these 3 groups together, making up what would become the conservative three legged stool and the modern conservative movement. Enter William f Buckley junior and Frank Meyer.
At only age 29, William f Buckley junior found a National Review Magazine in 1955, undoubtedly the first influential conservative publication. Buckley was a wunderkind of the highest order and was known as a debate assassin, according to doctor Lee Edwards, and certainly would become the most prominent and influential conservative voice next to Ronald Reagan for much of the latter part of the 20th century. After graduating from prestigious Yale University, he famously wrote God and Man at Yale, the Superstitions of Academic Freedom in 1951, which was a devastating critique of his alma mater and Ivy League Schools for abandoning their teaching of free market economics and the Judeo Christian ethic for socialism and secularism instead. The book would become a bestseller, and Buckley would become an overnight sensation, and the most sought after conservative speaker on college campuses. You could say he was the Ben Shapiro of his time.
Buckley would soon become the first president of the Intercollegiate Society of Individualists, or now known as the Intercollegiate Studies Institute, or ISI, founded by Frank Chodorov in 1953. ISI was the 1st national young conservative organization that helped spread conservative ideas on college campuses. Later on, after the 1964 presidential election and his New York City mayoral run-in 1965, Buckley would be the lone conservative voice on television hosting the popular debate show, Firing Line, for 33 years on PBS from 1966 to 1999. Frank Meyer, a former Communist Party USA apparatchik, knew all too well the perils of communism. After reading The Road to Serfdom while serving in the army during World War 2, he became disenchanted with communism, and soon would begin a decade long journey that would bring him to National Review, and become one of Buckley’s top confidants.
The influence of National Review cannot be overstated during this time, and it’s synthesizing of libertarian, traditionalist, and anti communist thought. Buckley and Meyer would invite thought leaders from these three groups to write for the magazine, and defend their positions, and challenge one another. Meyer believed it was imperative to create a strategic integration of the 3 to form a more cohesive philosophical union, as well as a political coalition that could combat liberal ideology and ultimately defeat the left at the ballot box. Meyer’s vision was called fusion. I know I don’t mean Asian cooking or nuclear fusion, but in some ways the effect would have a nuclear reaction that would propel the conservative movement to be forged.
Meyer understood and appreciated both the traditionalist and the classical liberal libertarians ideas. While their emphases were different, one on economics and the other cultural, and that both at times viewed each other with suspicion, one being 2 individualist, and the other being perceived as authoritarian, but both could support western values and opposition to the welfare state, according to the Fund For American Studies senior scholar and fusionist expert, Dom Devine. And both branches believed that the rise of international communism was the greatest threat of all, and thus could find common cause with the anti communist. An understanding was achieved that, according to Becky Norton Dunlop, the Heritage Foundation Ronald Reagan distinguished fellow, that conservatives would use libertarian means to pursue and achieve traditional social ends. Meyer would claim that a tension between liberty and virtue, actually had always existed in America’s consciousness, all the way back to our founding.
So fusion had an intellectual heritage all sides could relate to. Thus, conservative fusion and the modern conservative movement were forged. Meyer defends his case in a seminal book, In Defense of Freedom, a conservative credo written in 1962, and would follow it up with his next book, What is Conservatism? Written in 1964. The latter was an attempt to forge conservative consensus among the different factions, and features 12 brilliant essays by the likes of Hayek, Buckley, Kirk, journalist M.
Stanton Evans, economist Wilhelm Ropka, Wilmore Kendall, John Chamberlain, and others. Meyer would edit it all and write the intro and conclusion chapters, tying it all together. Both books are masterpieces. As the philosophers were harmonizing the philosophy, the popularizers were spreading the good word, educating the masses, and creating a national constituency of conservative voters, activists, organizations, philanthropists, and elected leaders. While National Review was certainly the most prominent early conservative publication, there were other pre 1964 popularizers that deserve notice that helped build consensus and a national constituency in the early years before the likes of conservative talk radio and cable news.
The first of which, Human Events, was an early conservative weekly newspaper founded in 1944 and was financed by Henry Regnery and focused much on foreign policy and anti communism. By 1964, it had a circulation of over 100,000. A Reagan biographer said it was hugely influential on him, and that it was his favorite reading for years. There’s a great story about Reagan and human events that doctor Edwards tells. When Reagan discovered White House aids were blocking its delivery, Reagan arranged for multiple copies to be sent to the White House residence every weekend.
He made clear human events is important to him by marking and clipping articles and passing them along to his assistants. A second publication was analysis and was an early influential 4 page newsletter started by Frank Chodorov in 1944 as well, as an old right individualist publication with 4,000 readers at its height of circulation, but soon would be merged into human events in 1951. 3rd publication was The Freeman. It was an early libertarian publication founded in 1950 and would eventually be regularly published by the Foundation For Economic Education, or FE, which was founded in 1948, which is considered to be the oldest libertarian think tank in the country. And finally, Modern Age was one of the earliest and influential traditionalist magazines started in 1957 by Russell Kirk, in close collaboration with Henry Regnery as well, which still exists and is published by ISI today.
Each represented a leading thought group that would help promote their ideas. The libertarians had the freemen, traditionalists had modern age, anti communist had human events, and analysis was for the old right. National Review though would act as an ecumenical publication bringing all these ideas together. Another popularizer worthy of mention was the Henry Regnery company, now known as Regnery Publishing, which was created in 1947 by Henry Regnery. Other than National Review and the aforementioned periodicals, conservatism had no presence on radio and television, the other popular medians at the time, and certainly none for many of the leading publishing houses.
Rectory Publishing would serve as an early vehicle to help publish conservative themed books and authors, such as Buckley’s God and Man at Yale in 1951, and Russell Kirk’s A Conservative Mind in 1953, as well as books by Albert j Knock and James Burnham. An eventual sister company of Regnery Publishing would also form in 1964 called the Conservative Book Club, started by publisher Neil McCaffrey, which would help conservative books reach a nationwide audience. Their first employee was Anne Edwards, wife of conservative historian, doctor Lee Edwards, who assisted him in research for many books, and coauthored one with him as well. The book club would soon become an important pipeline in educating a national conservative audience. Remember at the time, there was no Amazon, Barnes and Noble, or Costcos back then.
Margie Ross, the recent president of Ragnory Publishing, who during her 20 year tenure produced more than 85 books on national bestseller list, including 14 titles at number 1, has often spoke about the 5 major title waves of conservative media that helped popularize its movement. In the beginning, as we’ve discussed in this presentation, influential conservative thought was first manifested through the publications of influential books, with authors ranging from Hayek, Buckley, Kirk, and Chambers. Today, due to regnery success, there are now more than a dozen or so small, midsize to large conservative publishers, including Encounter Books. And a conservative imprint exists at most of the big publishing houses today, including HarperCollins’s Broadside Books, Hachette Book Group Center Street, Simon and Schuster’s Thresholds Edition, and Penguin Random House’s Sentinel. The second vehicle would be the magazines and periodicals we have discussed as well, including National Review and Human Events.
Magazines and periodicals would be published more regularly than books, and would be able to better respond to the timely and newsworthy issues of the day. Future influential publications would arrive in the ensuing years, including commentary, The American Spectator, The Weekly Standard, The American Conservative, Newsmax, First Things, The Claremont Review of Books, The New Criterion, and many, many others. In 1988, a third and very important vehicle was launched with the dissolution of the radio so called fairness doctrine, and would allow for the rise of the great Rush Limbaugh and the voluminous talk radio industry. Rush Limbaugh would become one of the most influential conservative voices for over 30 years and would inspire legions of talk radio hosts and enthusiasts across the country. Talk radio today is dominated by conservative voices and is still a leading vehicle for discussing conservative ideas with local and national audiences.
Top national shows include hosts Sean Hannity, Mark Levin, Glenn Beck, Mike Gallagher, Dennis Prager, Hugh Hewitt, Charlie Kirk, and many, many others. On October 7, 1996, right before the 1996 presidential election, a small little cable news network launched, and within 6 years became the most watched cable news network in the country. Of course, talking about Rupert Murdoch’s Fox News. I cannot understate the importance of Fox News. Fox would become an alternative to the mainstream media stronghold on traditional legacy TV media outlets.
For the first time, conservatives had a channel on television that would allow for more fair and balanced coverage than what they would normally get from NBC, ABC, CBS, and CNN. And the 5th and final tidal wave would be the Internet and social media. In its beginnings, conservatives believed that media would finally be accessible and democratized and could help get their message out beyond all filters. Certainly, there were reasons to be hopeful. Matt Drudge, a libertarian of sorts, published the Monica Lewinsky story in 1998 in the Drudge Report.
In 2004, CBS news anchor Dan Rather was fired from his job after he aired a knowingly false report about George w Bush’s military service, which is first noticed by bloggers online. And with the success of Andrew Breitbart and his news operations, he would inspire legions of online investigative journalists and social media activists. Obviously, we’re now aware of Big Tech and many abuses on search engines and other social media sites, but conservatives certainly have increased their influence and online following to agree that no one could have ever imagined in 1955, the year National Review was founded. Every conceivable conservative publication has a website and is accessible to anyone with a computer, smartphone, or a tablet. As a speaker’s prerogative, I’m sure Margie Ross wouldn’t mind.
I’m going to add one more title way to this list, which would be podcasting. Certainly, there is no shortage of podcasts these days, but conservatives learning from the influence of talk radio have taken advantage of the podosphere as it has certainly democratized the talk radio show and has allowed for basically anyone to start their own program. Some of the top conservative leading podcasters include Ben Shapiro, Matt Walsh, Jordan Peterson, Megyn Kelly, Adam Carolla, and many many more. In 1964, senator Barry Goldwater, the conservative hero from Arizona, would famously win the Republican nomination against New York governor Nelson Rockefeller, who represented the liberal eastern establishment of the Republican party. And while Goldwater’s victory was a recognition that the conservative movement had grown from a nascent movement of ideas into a powerful political force, Lyndon Johnson would handedly defeat Goldwater in a huge landslide.
But in defeat, Goldwater would become the most consequential loser in modern American history. From the ashes of the Goldwater candidacy, a conservative Phoenix rose with a new, smarter, and better organized political conservative movement. The campaign connected conservatives with other conservatives for the first time, neighbor to neighbor, organizer to organizer, from state to state. People started identifying themselves as conservatives, distinguishing themselves from Republicans. They were aware of and were reading National Review or had read Goldwater’s timeless fusionist book, The Conscience of a Conservative written in 1960, or Phyllis Schlafly’s defense of conservatism in A Choice, Not an Echo written in 1964.
Organizations would begin to pop up across the country to better organize conservatives, recruit conservative candidates, fundraise, advocate on public policy initiatives or referendums, and activate conservative constituencies on election day to get out and vote. A few of these new influential organizations would be the American Conservative Union, founded in 1964, which would eventually host the annual CPAC convention, which is the largest annual conservative gathering. Another group, the Philadelphia Society, founded in 1964, is an organization of movement and civic leaders, academics, journalists, clergy, and business professionals dedicated to the goal of deepening and educating others on the intellectual foundations of conservatism. Another group, the National Right to Work Legal Defense Foundation, founded in 1968, would counter the radical labor movements at the time on a state and national level. And Young Americans For Freedom, while founded in 1960, was the only other major young conservative organization in college campuses, aside from ISI, that had reached fever pitch participation with their help in organizing young conservatives for Goldwater.
It should be noted that the organization was founded at the childhood Buckley Estate in Sharon, Connecticut, and its founding statement of principles, the Sharon statement, written eloquently by M. Stanton Evans, was a statement clearly outlining conservative principles in a way that was easily understandable to the average person. The Sharon statement would inspire a countless number of conservative leaders and would help educate many new conservative voters and activists. Later on, the Young America’s Foundation would oversee Young Americans for Freedom as a part of their successful youth programming conferences and initiatives. While we’re listing influential organizations, now is probably the time to introduce another important figure in the post Goldwater era.
Next to Bill Buckley, Barry Goldwater, and Ronald Reagan, Paul Weyrich would become one of the most influential and important conservative figures in this era, and would become a successful conservative movement entrepreneur. Inspired by the Goldwater campaign, Wyrick left his career in journalism and began to work in conservative politics. He’s credited with founding or co founding a number of influential organizations, including the Heritage Foundation, along with doctor Edwin Fuldner and Joseph Coors. The Heritage Foundation, founded in 1973, is the largest and most influential conservative think tank in America, if not the world. Wyrick, Pfelner, and Coors believed that a more proactive, fusionist conservative think tank was necessary in promoting conservative public policy ideas, and making sure that those policy proposals were easy to understand and readily accessible to members of congress and their staffs before votes took place.
The next group was the American Legislative Exchange Council or ALEC, and was also cofounded by WEIRAC in 1973, and has been described as a forum for conservative leaning state legislators and private sector members to collaborate and draft model legislation that members could customize and introduce for debate in their own state legislatures. ALEC would provide a great service by helping conservative legislators from all over the country connect and collaborate. The other major group was the Republican Study Committee, which is considered the original US House of Representatives conservative caucus, was cofounded by WIRAC as well in 1973. The purpose of the RSC would be to keep watch on the Republican leadership, as they were sometimes viewed as too moderate. Eventually, they would propose their own alternative conservative legislation to rally conservative members of Congress around it.
My old boss, Morton Blackwell, the president and founder of the Leadership Institute, a national conservative political training organization, once reminded me of law 18 from his famous laws of public policy. You can’t save the world if you can’t pay the rent. As the philosophers had fused an intellectual conservative platform, and as the popularizers helped promote conservatism and create a national constituency, and as the movement began to establish itself more in the post Goldwater campaign era, there was a need for angel donors to help physically build the new infrastructure of the conservative movement. Enter the philanthropists, doctor Lee Edwards’ 3rd p of the 4 p’s of building a successful political movement. In 2008, Ron Robinson, the decades long president of Young America’s Foundation, and Nicole Hoplin, director of YAFS Foundation Relations at the time, coauthored Funding Fathers, The Unsung Heroes of the Conservative Movement.
The book chronicles the philanthropists, foundations, and unsung heroes who invested in building the conservative movement that we know today. I strongly encourage you to read their book as there are just too many donors and foundations that invested so much into building this movement. I I could not possibly name everybody in this presentation. But here are some that I know through reputation, many whom have literally donated 100 of 1,000,000 of dollars to conservative scholars, think tanks, publications, and organizations over the years. And again, this is just a personal list that I made myself.
Joseph Kors, the Kors beer magnate who helped cofound the Heritage Foundation as mentioned earlier. Richard Ulan, founder of Uline, and heir to the Schlitz Brewing Fortune. Richard Mellon Scaife and the Scaife Foundations, whose relatives were related to Andrew Mellon. Lynn and Harry Bradley Foundation, the John m Olin Foundation, Daniel Searle, and the Searle Freedom Trust, the DeVos Family Foundation, whose family cofounded Amway, the Van Andel family, who also cofounded Amway, FM Kirby Foundation, the Mercer Family Foundation, and Donors Trust. Some other individuals, Bar Saeed, who is the former owner of Triplite, Sheldon Adelson, former hotel and casino resort owner, Peter Thiel, the cofounder of PayPal, Charles Schwab, and Bernard Marcus who is the cofounder of Home Depot.
One individual needs special mention here, Richard Viguerie, who has been called the funding father of the conservative movement. Richard Viguerie was a direct mail pioneer who essentially invented direct mail marketing and fundraising for conservative causes, and helped fund and educate much of the early conservative movement through his national donor list and direct marketing campaigns, bypassing the mainstream media, and still does so today with his company American Target Advertising. Many other start in politics to him. Also during this post Goldwater campaign period, there were to merge 2 new legs of the proverbial conservative movement stool. As the conservative movement grew and new challenges arrived, so did other strands.
Doctor George Nash would categorize the new groups as the neoconservatives and social conservatives. The neoconservatives were former liberals who felt mugged by reality. After many became disillusioned with the new left and their pacifism during the Vietnam War and the 19 sixties counterculture, many of them found common cause with the burgeoning conservative movement. They’re known for their proactive foreign policy stances and hawkish positions, and fit firmly within the anti communism camp. Domestically, they were much more accepting of the welfare state than their libertarian and traditional conservative colleagues, but not as progressive as the new left.
Like the other strands, their thought leaders were often in academia, think tanks, and the media. 2 in particular would come to define the early neoconservatives, Irving Kristol and Norman Podhoritz, and early public supporters would be Democrat senators Henry Scoop Jackson from Washington State, Daniel Patrick Moynihan from New York State, and Jean Kirkpatrick, who would serve as UN ambassador for president Reagan. Irving Kristol was known as the godfather of neoconservatism. He was a prolific writer and helped cofound many publications that would promote neoconservative ideas, including co founding the Public Interest and the National Interest Publications, and would later spend much of his career as a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, helping to lead and shape its foreign policy outlook. AEI is one of the oldest and most influential right leaning think tanks in DC, primarily focusing on free markets and enterprise and hawkish foreign policy.
AEI would soon become associated as the primary think tank home for neoconservatives. The other early influential neocon figure would be the prolific author and editor, Norman Podhoritz. Podhoritz would serve as editor in chief of Commentary Magazine for 35 years. Commentary was initially a publication dedicated to Jewish affairs and would serve as a home to the anti Stalinist left, but Horace is credited for moving the magazine more towards the Republican Party. The neoconservatives would serve in high level positions and drive much of the foreign policy of the George w Bush administration.
In 1995, Irving Kristol’s son, Bill Kristol, and colleague Fred Barnes would launch The Weekly Standard, a neoconservative weekly magazine, and it would quickly become the largest circulated magazine on the right next to National Review. Their founding publisher was News Corporation, which was owned by Rupert Murdoch, who also owned Fox News, and many of the writers would serve as commentators on the channel for many years. The other burgeoning group on the right were what doctor George Nash called the religious right or who are also known as the social conservatives. In response to the infamous Roe v Wade Supreme Court decision, the so called equal rights amendment, and Jimmy Carter’s attempted rescission of tax exemptions for non public schools, a rising faith based religious right, primarily concerned with culture war issues, would become an indelible force and grassroots block of the growing conservative movement. The early influential social conservative organizations started in the 19 seventies were Eagle Forum, Concerned Women For America, and the Moral Majority to just name a few.
Eagle Forum was founded by conservative heroin, Phyllis Schlafly, who was a prolific author and activist. Her best selling book, A Choice, Not an Echo, written in 1964 in support of Barry Goldwater’s presidential campaign, was hugely influential in gathering support for Goldwater and educating countless millions about conservatism. Schlafly and Eagle Forum, which had state chapters across the country, are credited for stopping the Equal Rights Amendment in the 19 seventies, which was believed to be hostile to traditional family values. Concerned Women for America was another organization that launched in 1978 by Beverly Lahaye, whose husband was Tim Lahaye, an evangelical minister and popular author of the Left Behind book series. Like Eagle Ford, they stood against radical feminism, but were much more involved in legislative battles on Capitol Hill.
The other influential group was the Moral Majority, founded by Baptist minister, Jerry Falwell and Paul Wyrick. And Wyrick was the one who came up with the name moral majority. At its peak, it had 4,000,000 members with 20 state chapters, and became one of the most influential lobbying groups in the country, and certainly throughout the Reagan presidency. With the addition of both the neoconservatives and social conservatives, the conservative movement seemed healthy as it was attracting more members and influence. The culmination of these 5 groups, plus the national infrastructure that had been built since the 64 campaign, was incredibly influential in helping to propel Ronald Reagan to win the Republican nomination and the presidency in 1980.
In just 16 years after Goldwater’s consequential defeat, conservatives would soon elect its hero, Ronald Reagan. Reagan’s presidency was not just a win, but was called a revolution. The Reagan revolution would be the 1st fusionist presidency, with Reagan asking representatives from the various conservative groups to serve in his administration. Reagan is credited for fixing our economy from the disastrous Carter run years, lowering taxes significantly for all Americans, and for devising and implementing a successful strategy to win the Cold War and defeat Soviet communism peacefully. In his inaugural address, Reagan talked about getting government out of the way and restoring the proper balance between the citizen and government, a recognition that since the FDR days, government had grown beyond its constitutional mandates.
Conservatives finally had someone in power champion American constitutionalism again. But more than anything else, Reagan brought a sense of mourning in America again, a 1984 election campaign slogan that signified a new posture for the American people, a new hope, a new confidence, a reminder that America was still that shining city on a hill and did not have to be a nation with a crisis and confidence. The Reagan presidency would fully legitimize a conservative movement that had its early beginnings just a few decades ago and would fundamentally change the American political landscape. Today, conservatives enjoy widespread acceptance and legitimacy, and is the driving grassroots force behind a major political party. Now there are still boundless challenges for the conservative movement as seen throughout the last few years and with much pessimism for the times we now live in.
But as doctor Edwards once reminded me, conservatives have had even greater challenges when a conservative movement didn’t exist at all. I hope this presentation has given you a better understanding and appreciation of the conservative movement. In just one hour, it’s hard to summarize essentially a a 100 year movement. In my class at American University, I’d normally have 2 and a half hours weekly for 15 weeks to do this, but I hope you leave with a sense of appreciation of what came before us and the giants whose shoulders we stand on. With more time, it would be interesting to investigate and further dissect the conservative movement in the post Reagan era, and I strongly encourage you to independently explore on your own.
Other important highlights worth delving into would be the post Reagan legacy, the courts, and the further expansion of the conservative movement, George h w Bush, Pat Buchanan, and the rise of paleo conservatives in the 1992 Republican presidential primary, Newt Gingrich, the 1994 Republican Revolution, and the Clinton presidency, the compassionate conservatism of George w Bush, the war on terror, and the beginnings of the conservative crack up, Barack Obama, the modern progressive challenge, and the rise of the Tea Party and constitutional conservatism, the presidency of Donald Trump and its implications, and post 2020, the rise of the post fusionists, post liberals, paleo cons, Strausians, and the future of the conservative movement. Make sure to check out the recommended reading section for more resources and links. I wish you all the best in your completion of your coursework. Thank you.