The Death of the New Right

A neat summary of the rise and fall of the New Right movement from its birth after World War II to its collapse with the election of Obama from a review of Sam Tanenhaus's new book, The Death of Conservatism by Carl Bogus of The American Prospect.

First, as the New Right sees it, the Establishment is truly untrustworthy. Some liberal leaders are naive; but others might be disloyal. This was what Joseph McCarthy preached. It was the theme of None Dare Call it Treason, a 1964 book by little-known author John A. Stormer that became a cult classic of the New Right, selling 7 million copies. And it was also the raison d'être of the John Birch Society, whose leader, Robert Welch, declared that "the chances are very strong that Milton Eisenhower [the president's brother and a college president] is actually Dwight Eisenhower's superior and boss within the Communist Party." William F. Buckley Jr. deftly gave the conservative movement a patina of respectability by repudiating Welch and the Birchers, whom he labeled as kooks, and by drawing a distinction between McCarthy, whose personal flaws he acknowledged, and McCarthyism, which Buckley claimed was necessary to save the republic. The theme of untrustworthy leaders endangering the nation persists despite the end of the Cold War. It is why some fret that President Obama is a secret Muslim who pals around with terrorists.

Second, distrust of the Establishment is connected to questions of class. McCarthy said that the traitors had "the finest homes, the finest college education and finest jobs in government." New Rightists saw Alger Hiss as the quintessential example of the privileged traitor whom the Establishment refused to condemn, despite damning evidence. The modern conservative movement has always seen itself as a populist insurgency, and liberals misapprehend it when they see the movement as an unswerving ally of big business.

Third, and most important, because the Establishment was ensconced at the highest levels of government, New Rightists came to see government itself as an enemy. This is what lies at the heart of modern conservatism's hostility to government. In line with an older tradition in the GOP, the modern Republican presidents not connected to the conservative movement -- Eisenhower, Gerald Ford, and George H.W. Bush -- respected constitutional processes and governmental structure, implementing laws enacted by Congress even when they disagreed with them. But Tanenhaus argues that each of three modern Republican presidents with close relationships to the modern conservative movement -- Nixon, Reagan, and George W. Bush -- felt no such obligation and indeed carried out plans (in the Watergate affair, Iran-Contra, and secret surveillance and torture policies) that they deemed "too urgent to be trusted to the traditional channels of government."

Because the modern conservative movement has always seen the republic in peril and itself as the only reliable savior, it came to place allegiance to the movement and its ideology above all else.