"Why Has the Dream That Animated Generations of Ayn Rand–Toting Buckleyites to Join the Cause Been Quietly Forgotten?"

"To give them somewhat more credit, Trump has genuinely changed Republican elites' thinking about what their voters care about. 'One of the things we discovered to our dismay in 2016 is that the electorate—the base of the Republican Party—was really not conservative in any meaningful way,' explains Mona Charen. Charen comes from the party's anti-Trump wing, but pro-Trump Republicans have been saying similar things throughout, lambasting their party's former leaders as heartless plutocrats rightly cast aside by the proletarian base."

Jonathan Chait at New York argues that the "Republicans' Long War to Roll Back the New Deal Is Finally Over."

"Three Scenarios Present Themselves"

"But another strain of conservatism can be found at the other end of the reality-to-fantasy axis: the conspiracy-obsessed, anti-establishment, almost nihilistic populism that traced back to Sen. Joseph McCarthy's anti-communist crusade in the early 1950s and has extended from the John Birch Society and the Tea Party movement all the way to Pizzagate and QAnon. Many of its believers form a major part of Trump's base, and he has traveled farther down that populist axis into fantasy than any president before. The fate of the Republican Party depends on how many of the 73 million Americans who voted for him will go on that journey with him."

Geoffrey Kabaservice at Persuasion sees a "three-way split" in the Republican Party's near future.

And Jeff Greenfield at Politico worries about how Republicans will act in a future close election.

"Pretending It Isn't True Won't Change It"

"Alexis de Tocqueville adds the observation that as a community addresses and corrects for grave systemic injustices over time, the (smaller) ones that (inevitably) remain come to loom ever-larger in the minds of those who suffer them, so that an act or event that would have been considered a relatively minor injustice in the past comes to take on enormous significance in the present."

Damon Linker at The Week argues that "moderation in pursuit of justice is essential."

"Geography Was Far More Predictive of Voting Coalitions on the Civil Rights [Act] Than Party Affiliation"

"In this case, it becomes clear that Democrats in the north and the south were more likely to vote for the bill than Republicans in the north and south respectively. This difference in both houses is statistically significant with over 95% confidence. It just so happened southerners made up a larger percentage of the Democratic than Republican caucus, which created the initial impression than Republicans were more in favor of the act.
"Nearly 100% of Union state Democrats supported the 1964 Civil Rights Act compared to 85% of Republicans. None of the southern Republicans voted for the bill, while a small percentage of southern Democrats did."

In a 2013 Guardian article, Harry J. Enten answers the question, "Were Republicans really the party of Civil Rights in the 1960s?" 

"Faced With a Choice Between Democracy and Power, the Party Chose the Latter"

"Republicans have chosen contraction and authoritarianism because, unlike the Democrats, their party isn't a coalition of interests in search of a majority. Its character is ideological. The Republican Party we know is a product of the modern conservative movement, and that movement is a series of insurgencies against the established order. Several of its intellectual founders—Whittaker Chambers and James Burnham, among others—were shaped early on by Communist ideology and practice, and their Manichean thinking, their conviction that the salvation of Western civilization depended on the devoted work of a small group of illuminati, marked the movement at its birth."

George Packer at The Atlantic traces the intellectual decline of the Republican Party.

"All Those Little Old Ladies in Tennis Shoes That You Called Right-Wing Nuts and Kooks"

"Additionally, in their exhaustive examination of the tea party movement, political scientists Christopher Parker and Matt Barreto argue that Obama's election instigated the rise of today's far right. Much like how the John Birch Society arose as a rejection of progress on civil rights, tea party supporters felt anxious about what they saw as the 'real' America slipping away when the country chose a black man to be its president."

Christopher Towler at The Conversation marks the sixtieth anniversary of the John Birch Society.

"What in God's Name Has Happened to the Republican Party?"

"Rockefeller's speech on extremism was intended to take full advantage of the television spotlight. Its official purpose was to plead for an amendment to the platform, proposed by Pennsylvania Sen. Hugh Scott, denouncing 'extremist' groups. But the Goldwater forces knew it was a veiled attack on their candidate. The third-term senator had the support of the virulent anticommunist John Birch Society, which he refused to distance himself from, even though its leader had accused Eisenhower of treason and being a communist agent.
"Melvin Laird, a congressman from Wisconsin and future secretary of defense who was running the show for Goldwater, thwarted Rockefeller by asking that the platform be read into the record before the governor spoke. The platform was 8,500 words. It took 90 minutes. Rockefeller was pushed out of primetime."

In a 2016 article, John Dickerson at Slate tells the story of the failed Republican "Stop Goldwater" efforts in 1964.

"A Freakishly Dangerous Figure Walked Through the Door Conservatism Had Opened"

"But revisiting that past, he discovers something very familiar. Conservatism trafficked all along in anti-intellectualism, bigotry, ideological radicalism, and loopy conspiracy theories. The conservative movement was a revolt against the moderation of mainstream Republicans like Dwight Eisenhower while fiercely defending the vicious lies of Joe McCarthy. Buckley renounced the president of the John Birch Society while continuing to endorse the organization itself, which was a large and powerful constituency. While most mainstream Republicans at the time supported civil rights, conservatives opposed those mainstream leaders for that very reason. Conservatives understood very clearly at the time that their project of turning the Republican Party into a vehicle for conservatism required prying millions of white segregationists from the Democratic Party."

Jonathan Chait at New York reviews Max Boot's The Corrosion of Conservatism.

"How a Textile Magnate Turned the Party of Lincoln Into the Party of Trump

"If you've ever wondered how the GOP can be both the party of Lincoln and defenders of the Confederate flag, a refuge for protectionists and the disaffected working class and protector of the most powerful multinational corporations, a party of Pauls and Bushes, Kochs and Tea Partiers, and, yes, Donald Trump—it helps to take a closer look at a man who helped start it all."

In a 2015 Politico article, Jonathan M. Katz profiles conservative capo Roger Milliken.

"During My Lifetime, the Love of Guns Has Become a Fetish"

"So that's how we got here. The NRA has won. Yet the group and its compatriots seem no less paranoid or angry, still convinced that tyranny is right around the corner and that federal agents are coming for their guns. The wholesale confiscation of guns was never seriously bruited in the United States. Through the 1980s, even most conservatives considered the fear of confiscation to be screwball paranoia, relegated to self-published tracts like  Behold a Pale Horse, which imagined a 'patriot data bank' kept by the government, 'consist[ing] of information collected about American patriots, men and women who are most likely to resist the destruction of our Constitution and the formation of the totalitarian police state under the New World Order.' Now, however, thanks to the NRA, it's the rare Republican leader who doesn't encourage the confiscation fantasy."

Slate runs an excerpt from Kurt Andersen's Fantasyland: How America Went Haywire: A 500-Year History.

Later it adds another excerpt about Oprah Winfrey.

And adds yet another on the history of right-wing conspiracism since the 1960s.

"Overwhelming Evidence Showing the Central Role Racial Politics Played in the Republican Party's Rise to Power After the Civil Rights Movement"

"Buoyed by the surprising strength of Workman's campaign, South Carolina’s junior senator, Strom Thurmond, abandoned the Democratic Party in 1964 and joined the Republicans. Sixteen years earlier, Thurmond had left the Democrats briefly to run for president as a 'Dixiecrat' on the States’ Rights ticket. His surprise announcement in 1964 signaled the start of what political scientists call the 'great white switch.'"

Sid Bedingfield at The Conversation discusses the rise of the Republican Party in 1960s South Carolina. 

"The Southern Roots of Modern Conservatism"

"To see all this as simple obstructionism, perversity for its own sake, is a mistake. A cause lies behind it: upholding the sanctity of an ideology against the sins of the majority. This is what drives House Republicans to scale back social programs, or to shift the tax burden from the 1 percent onto the parasitic mob, or to come up with a health-care plan that would leave Trump’s own voters out in the cold. To many of us, it might seem heartless. But far worse, Buchanan once explained in a famous essay, is misguided Good Samaritanism, which, by helping the unlucky, cushions them against the consequences of their bad choices. This is exactly the sentiment voiced by the House Republican who voted to strip away Obamacare and then explained that the new proposal, which punishes people with preexisting medical conditions, has the advantage of 'reducing the cost to those people who lead good lives.'"

Sam Tanenhaus at The Atlantic reviews Nancy MacLean's Democracy in Chains: The Deep History of the Radical Right's Stealth Plan for America.

As does Bethany Moreton at Boston Review.

"The First Lady of the Conservative Movement"

"The conservative theorist and organizer Paul Weyrich said that Mrs. Schlafly 'dressed up the conservative movement for success at a time when absolutely no one thought we could win.'

"Even liberals conceded her impact. 'If political influence consists in transforming this huge and cantankerous country in one's preferred direction,' the political scientist Alan Wolfe wrote in The New Republic in 2005, 'Schlafly has to be regarded as one of the two or three most important Americans of the last half of the 20th century'—although he hastened to add that 'every idea she ever had was scatterbrained, dangerous and hateful.'"

Douglas Martin in The New York Times writes an obit for Phyllis Schlafly.

"The Conservative Movement Is Fundamentally Broken"

"Goldwater opposed the Civil Rights Act of 1964. He himself was not especially racist—he believed it was wrong, on free market grounds, for the federal government to force private businesses to desegregate. But this 'principled' stance identified the GOP with the pro-segregation camp in everyone’s eyes, while the Democrats under Lyndon Johnson became the champions of anti-racism.

This had a double effect, Roy says. First, it forced black voters out of the GOP. Second, it invited in white racists who had previously been Democrats. Even though many Republicans voted for the Civil Rights Act in Congress, the post-Goldwater party became the party of aggrieved whites.

"'The fact is, today, the Republican coalition has inherited the people who opposed the Civil Rights Act of 1964—the Southern Democrats who are now Republicans,' Roy says. 'Conservatives and Republicans have not come to terms with that problem.'"

Zack Beauchamp at Vox talks with Avik Roy about the decline of the Republican Party.

As does Molly Ball at The Atlantic.

And Norman J. Ornstein and Thomas E. Mann explain how the Republican Party produced Donald Trump.

"The Snake Has Started Eating Its Own Tail"

"Conservatives didn't always hate the media. The idea of a 'liberal media' is a relative recent innovation in conservative thought compared to more time-tested tropes like nationalism and celebrations of business success. Right-wing Americans tended to see the news media as their champion during the New Deal era, when the Republican Party had a weakened national presence while ideological opposition to Franklin Roosevelt's policies was most clearly articulated by powerful press barons as William Randolph Hearst, Joseph Medill Patterson, and Robert R. McCormick. Newspaper columnists like Westbrook Pegler and George Sokolsky—known for their attacks on FDR, labor unions, and alleged communist infiltration of the government—were widely viewed by conservatives as lonely, heroic muckrakers fighting against a corrupt regime. The comic strip Little Orphan Annie, created by ardent Roosevelt-hater Harold Gray, often featured heroic newspaper editors and reporters fighting against nefarious liberal politicians and devious social reformers.
"A small trickle of conservative media criticism emerged after World War II when magazines like Human Events and National Review started arguing that elite publications like The New York Times and Time magazine were insufficiently anti-communist. But the minor current of conservative complaints about liberal media bias became a full flowing river with Barry Goldwater’s run for the presidency in 1964."

Jeet Heer in The New Republic looks at the legacy of conservative criticism of journalists.

"Conservatism Itself Has Lost Its Identity to Politics"

"The mythology promulgated by the conservative movement has it that a candidate who naturally expresses both Christian conservatism and Goldwater-Reagan conservatism must be out there somewhere. But the record of three decades since Reagan won the nomination with support from both camps suggests otherwise: in a full generation, there has never been a candidate equally appealing to both kinds of conservative. What reason is there to think there ever will be one?"

Daniel McCarthy in The American Conservative looks at Republican factionalism.

"The Leading Edge of Conservative Media's First Presidential Campaign"

"Analyses of right-wing media—discussions of 'the Fox News primary' and 'the Limbaugh effect,' for example—often focus too heavily on major institutions, overlooking the most effective form of conservative media activism: the moments when unknown grassroots activists intersect with powerful right-wing distribution networks. The role these books played in the Goldwater nomination drive show just how powerful such moments can be.
"This isn't just populism. It's populism-plus."


In a 2014 Atlantic article, Nicole Hemmer looks at "The Three Books That Shook Conservative Media in 1964."

La Fast Time Machine Gospel Runaway

The New York Times posts obits for singer Andraé Crouch, actor Rod Taylor, actor Taylor Negron, actress Anita Ekberg, author Harry V. Jaffa, government professor Walter Berns, lawyer Al Bendich, songwriter Ervin Drake, and record producer Kim Fowley.

"No Governor Who Came to Albany After Him Was Half So Consequential"

"In retrospect, it seems obvious that a candidate The Progressive thought might be 'a Republican F.D.R.' and Adlai Stevenson considered 'a thoughtful and sincere liberal' never stood the slightest chance of winning the Republican nomination for president. Rockefeller, who served in the Roosevelt, Truman and Eisenhower administrations, worshiped Roosevelt and thought Ike lacked sufficient boldness. How could a candidate to the left of Eisenhower hope to win Republican votes nationwide?

"It didn't seem so obvious then."

Timothy Noah in The New York Times reviews Richard Norton Smith's On His Own Terms: A Life of Nelson Rockefeller.

"I’ve Been Waiting for a Book Like This for a Long Time"

"But it also bears a political argument we need to absorb. Explained Connor in Chicago, 'The John Birch Society built the most effective, best-funded right-wing populist organization in the United States of America. Now, not all my friends on the left want to hear this. It’s so easy to say, "These people were crackpots."' But Robert Welch 'was a brilliant man. That doesn’t mean he was correct about anything. But he was a brilliant man. And he loved to sell.' And what comes through strikingly in the book is that, even as Welch and his organization were excoriated, the stories they told, frequently through carefully disguised front groups with pleasant-sounding names—say, the one from the 1960s about how sexual education was teaching children how to be sexually promiscuous; or the one in the early 1990s promoting the impeachment of Bill Clinton—were sold quite effectively to the broader political culture. They achieved things."

Rick Perlstein at The Nation discusses Claire Connor and her new book, Wrapped in the Flag: A Personal History of America's Radical Right.