Robert Britt Horwitz - Americas Right: Anti-Establishment Conservatism from Goldwater to the Tea Party

PREFACE

Conservatism has been the most important political doctrine in the United States for nearly four decades. It has dominated the intellectual debate and largely set the national policy agenda, even during years of Democratic electoral control. But twenty-first-century conservatism has moved far beyond even the Reagan Revolution of small government, lower taxes, and a respect for tradition. Contemporary American conservatism practices a politics that is disciplined, uncompromising, utopian, and enraged, seeking to take back our country. An unlikely alliance of libertarians, neoconservatives, and the Christian right has launched anxious and angry attacks on the purported homosexual agenda, the hoax of climate change, the rule by experts and elites, and the banishment of religion from the public realm. In the foreign policy arena it has tried to remake the world through the cleansing fire of violence.

This is anti-establishment conservatism , whose origin can be traced back to the right wing that battled both the reigning post-World War II liberal consensus and the moderate, establishment Republican Party (also known as the Grand Old Party or GOP). This book examines the nature of anti-establishment conservatism, traces its development from the 1950s to the Tea Party, and explains its political ascendance.

Books on conservatism litter the journalistic and academic landscapes. Indeed, the treatment of conservatism has become somewhat of a scholarly cottage industry. What is different about this effort is its attention to both domestic and foreign policy, and the weaving of these two facets of anti-establishment conservative thought and action into one coherent narrative of change over time. Americas Right also revisits and reassesses some of the older, dismissed theoretical assessments of the conservative movement, most notably that of the mid-twentieth-century historian Richard Hofstadter. This revisit allows students of conservatism to circle back to the 1950s to see how public intellectuals and scholars like Hofstadter interpreted a moment of political ferment not unlike our own. Americas Right then applies and adjusts some of those interpretations to help make sense of the current conservative moment.

The book begins in the 1950s, when conservatism shifted from its pre-World War II isolationism to embrace a double rollback: of the New Deal and of international communism. Anti-establishment conservatisms fusion of libertarian and traditionalist principles found its political expression in the candidacy of Barry Goldwater, GOP standard-bearer in the 1964 presidential election. Goldwaters crushing defeat did not subdue anti-establishment conservatism; its political entrepreneurs built the institutions that served to channel the ongoing discontent with liberalism. Americas Right analyzes these institutions and how they helped facilitate the reemergence of anti-establishment conservatism in the late 1970s. It examines the two movements most responsible for this rejuvenation: the new Christian right and neoconservatism. The millenarian underpinnings of anti-establishment conservatism came to the fore after the 9/11 attacks, and informed the rationale for the George W. Bush administrations invasion of Iraq in 2003. Finally, the book explores the most recent manifestation of anti-establishment conservatism: the Tea Party.

While Americas Right is broadly sourced, it is written for the general serious reader. I have tried hard not to use academic jargon or assume great familiarity with social and political theory. Where I employ big concepts such as secularism, pre- or post-millennialism, American exceptionalism, and the like I endeavor to define them simply and clearly. Where I explore a theory such as Hofstadters paranoid style I try to explain it straightforwardly and with rich context. The vast majority of the notes are bibliographic citations, although I do employ the occasional textual note where it aids in explaining an issue in the main body of the text. Readers who wish to see a comprehensive bibliography can go to my webpage on the University of California, San Diego Department of Communication website: http://communication.ucsd.edu/people/faculty/robert-horwitz.html.

Because of the topic and the writing pitch and style, I hope the book will have some general audience readership. As a synthetic overview of history and political sociology that spans the politics of the post-war period and ends with the Tea Party movement, this volume is, I think, of contemporary topical interest and will have a decent shelf life for students interested in a longer perspective on American politics.