I have spent a great deal of time in recent years thinking about where all the craziness came from. I had a front row seat when the seeds were planted in the 1970s, as the right began its 50-year march through all levels of government, the courts, the media, and every other important political institution.
I moved to Washington, DC in the fall of 1974 to go to graduate school, a conservative in a liberal town. I had been a member of Young Americans for Freedom during college and remember clearly having to dodge anti-Vietnam War protesters on my way to Air Force ROTC drills in uniform. When I see today’s campus protests I have a strong sense of déjà vu and remember that conservative opposition to Vietnam War protests was a key factor fueling a change in strategy toward the left.
I was interested in history, especially what was called “revisionist history.” I thought there had been a conspiracy to cover-up the Roosevelt Administration’s responsibility for the Pearl Harbor attack. I planned to write a master’s thesis on the subject at Georgetown. I mention this because my interest in revisionism brought me in touch with people and organizations on the conservative fringes that were important in creating a conservative worldview that was much different from the one that existed in the 1930s through the 1960s. It was a more aggressive conservatism, radical and militant. It was not the conservatism of the country club or the Chamber of Commerce, where the main concern was labor unions. The conservatism of the early 1970s was more ideological, less partisan—many conservatives despised the Republican Party for its timidity and willingness to cut deals with Democrats—and broader in its interests and the sorts of strategies it was willing to use to achieve victory.
Watergate. Obviously, the central event of 1974. To understand its political importance on the right, one must understand that many conservatives viewed Nixon as a liberal in terms of policy, a view now shared by most historians. Nevertheless, because he was under attack by Democrats and what was widely perceived as a liberal media, conservatives circled the wagons around him. I remember the conservative Stan Evans telling me that he never liked Nixon until Watergate. When Nixon was forced out of office conservatives saw this as a liberal coup. The importance of this absurd belief is that the right became much more alienated from society and adopted a more aggressive approach to fighting the left...
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| Source:Brince Bartlett was a longtime Conservative Republican activist in the 1970s and after that. |
From Bruce Bartlett
I don't know if I completely disagree with what Bruce Bartlett is arguing here... but from where I am, I can see a complete disagreement with what he's saying. I just have a few issues with him and one is what it actually means to be a Conservative.
Bruce Bartlett seems to go by the idea that everyone on the Right, is a Conservative. Which is ridiculous, because the far-right doesn't really believe in anything that has to do with conserving. They are always trying to blow things up and take on, if not take down the establishment. When the fact is being a Conservative, is for a large part about being part of the establishment and conserving it.
I think what this is really about is how much the Republican Party has changed the last 60 years. Before Richard Nixon, this was a country club, white-collar, very wealthy, center-right, political party. And all the blue-collar, small town, religious fundamentalist types, were Democrats, in most cases.
Today, the Republican Party still has that white-collar-country club wing in it, but most of those folks are what I would call today, Yuppiecrats. Those Democrats are JFK Democrats, as well as fake leftists, who talk and act like Socialists. But who live like white-collar, liberal capitalists, who love capitalism and liberal democracy as the real Liberals and Conservatives, while they're bashing those liberal values in public.
I think what really changed the Republican Party, was Watergate. For the Richard Nixon loyalists, (people who are very similar and in many cases the same voters as MAGA) what President Nixon and his Administration did in response to the anti-war-left, and the militant far--left in the early 1970s, with their Plummers Unit and their secret national security state, and how they tried to cover up Watergate... those actions taken by the Nixon Administration, were no worst than what Democrats did when they were in power before Richard Nixon. And they've never forgiven the Democrats, as well as mainstream Republicans and the mainstream media, for taking down Richard Nixon.
I don't think there has ever been a "50 year plan for total victory" by the far-right in the Republican Party. But when Newt Gingrich was elected to the U.S. House of Representatives in 1978, he got to works fairly quickly to put together a plan that would win back the House for Republicans. At the time Newt Gingrich was elected, House Republicans only had 145 seats in the House and they picked up 15 seats in 1978. It wasn't until 1994 that Republicans won back the House. But as former U.S. Representative Robert Walker wrote for the Ripon Society in 2014 about the Conservative Opportunity Society:
"Gingrich and COS were mostly younger Members of Congress who had a desire to see the party fight to become a majority. Gingrich recognized that the change he wanted would take legislative activists committed to using the congressional processes for political battle and development of a unique agenda. The Members he recruited for COS were conservatives, moderates and pragmatists who shared a willingness to engage the Democrats on national issues.
Early leaders of the group included Vin Weber, Hank Brown, Duncan Hunter and me. We began meeting on Wednesday mornings in 121 Cannon and agreed that we had to develop a compelling agenda. The agenda needed to be visionary with a clear view of economic, cultural and societal change. So, we reached out to futurists, including Al Toffler and John Nesbitt, and met with them for hours at a time. What came out of those sessions was grounding in the emerging information economy and the magnitude of the change that the new economy would produce. The futurists’ insight provided us with the foundation for the principles and programs we would advocate...
From the Ripon Society
Newt Gingrich has always been a hyper-partisan figure, at least rhetorically. He was always very pragmatic in how he governed when he was Speaker of the House and perhaps even when he was House Minority Whip in the early 1990s.
But with Newt Gingrich and these other populist-right figures like Trent Lott, U.S. Representatives like Vin Weber, Hank Brown, Duncan Hunter, and many others, from the 1980s and 90s... this is where the Republican Party doesn't become more or less conservative, but more populist. And they go from primarily a center-right, country club, white-collar, political party, to a party that includes a lot more blue-collar, working-class, religious fundamentalist voters. Which is the Republican Party that we see today.
But there's never been 1 plan put together where the far-right would just take over the Republican Party, but the entire U.S. Government... except for what the Heritage Foundation put together with their Project 2025 last year.
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