Review of a Political Right Turn
From
the aftermath of the 1964 Presidential election the conservative movement in America – if not the GOP itself –
appeared all but dead. The champion of the right, Republican Barry Goldwater,
had suffered a withering defeat in his bid to unseat President Lyndon Johnson.
Meanwhile, bickering and backstabbing within the party (like GOP Governor of
Michigan George Romney’s appeal for voters in his state to “split the ticket”
with a vote for him and LBJ) threatened to further weaken the apparatus which
the right would need for any kind of future success. The outlook was grim for
conservatives, yet, against all odds, over the next forty years the American
right would prove itself the most dominant
political force in the country, capable of producing electoral
landslides as well as strategically-won victories. Ronald Reagan’s wave of
right-sided popularity broke over the 1980s, an era when many Democrats found
political realities forcing them to move right, to varying degrees. As recently
as 2004, conservatives declared their own targeted electoral strategy the
impetus behind George W. Bush’s narrow reelection.
So, how does one explain the
dramatic, even Phoenix-like, re-birth of the right? How could such a defeated
and seemingly irrelevant ideology in 1964 emerge to grow into such a viable
political power?
The answer, according to Mary
Brennan, was the movement’s “baptism by fire.” Ironically, from that scathing
defeat in 1964 conservatives emerged more resolute than ever, and with a
grassroots constituency more determined to win. Brennan’s tightly-written book,
Turning Right in the Sixties, charts the evolution of the right in the
1960s, and specifically during the critical period between Goldwater’s defeat
and the election of Richard Nixon four years later. Nixon is portrayed as no
true conservative, although he moved right to woo them, but merely as an
evolutionary phase preceding the right’s ultimate triumph in 1980.
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