In the 1950’s and early 1960’s we had a Republican president, but conservatives had no power to speak of. I think we forget that too often. The following is from Matthew Dallek’s review of Mary Brennan’s book: TURNING RIGHT IN THE SIXTIES: The Conservative Capture of the GOP.
In the late 1950s and early 1960s conservatives were widely dismissed as “kooks” and “crackpots” with no hope of winning political power. In 1950 the literary critic Lionel Trilling spoke for a generation of scholars and journalists when he wrote that “in the United States at this time liberalism is not only the dominant but even the sole intellectual tradition…. It is the plain fact [that] there are no conservative or reactionary ideas in general circulation” but only “irritable mental gestures which seem to resemble ideas.” The historian Richard Hofstadter echoed Trilling’s assessment, arguing that the right was not a serious, long-term political movement but rather a transitory phenomenon led by irrational, paranoid people who were angry at the changes taking place in America.
Sounds kind of familiar, doesn’t it?
When I read Jeffrey Anderson at The Weekly Standard or I listen to Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas or I sample the stylings of Reps. Michele Bachmann, Paul Broun, Steve King or Louie Gohmert, I hear “irrational, paranoid people who [are] angry at the changes taking place in America.” And their influence seems to be waxing, not waning. Watch Sen. Dean Heller of Nevada defend armed militants who train their sniper rifles on federal officers and you get an idea of what I’m talking about. These folks are trying to organize to purge the Republican Party of its last remnants of sanity.
Their lack of any kind of positive agenda should also be familiar.
Journalists were equally contemptuous. In 1962 a writer in the The Nation suggested that conservatives were more interested in thinking up “frivolous and simple-minded” slogans than in developing intelligent proposals to meet the complexities of post-Second World War America. The Washington Post described members of one conservative group as people who liked to “complain about the twentieth century.” And even a sympathetic commentator in Commonweal wondered whether a right-wing student group was a new political voice or “merely a new political organization out to repeal the twentieth century?”
Also familiar, their lack of focus:
AT the beginning of the 1960s conservatives were in a better position than at any time since the 1930s to challenge moderate Republicans for control of the party. But large obstacles remained. Not only were conservatives widely viewed as wild-eyed fanatics but they squabbled among themselves, had trouble articulating a positive program of reform, had few grassroots organizations, and lacked the funding to make the movement a serious political force.
The current iteration of conservative revolt is better funded and has more grassroots organization, but the similarities are nonetheless glaring.
What appears to be different this time around is that there does not seem to be some great untapped reservoir of unserved political opinion for conservatives to exploit. Or, if there is, they don’t seem to be on track to identify it and exploit it.
