Reagan thought that those advocating containment were weak fools, who advocated a “utopian solution of peace without victory.” Others on the right, notably Joseph McCarthy, thought they were traitors—and many maintained that belief even after McCarthy’s downfall. For McCarthyites the frustrations of a superpower, in particular America’s inability to prevent Communist victory in China, could only be explained by treason at the highest levels:
How can we account for our present situation unless we believe that men high in this government are concerting to deliver us to disaster? This must be the product of a great conspiracy on a scale so immense as to dwarf any previous such venture in the history of man. A conspiracy of infamy so black that, when it is finally exposed, its principals shall be forever deserving of the maledictions of all honest men.[4]
Another great irony of the situation was that anticommunism was far more virulent and extreme in America, where there were hardly any Communists, than in Western Europe, where Communist parties remained a potent political force until the collapse of the Soviet Union. Not that Western European anticommunism was weak: European parties of the right were, in many cases, defined by their opposition to communism. And European anticommunism, even—or perhaps especially—if it came at the expense of democracy, had its American admirers: As we’ve seen the staff at the National Review, the original house organ of movement conservatism, were ardent admirers of Generalissimo Francisco Franco.
Outside Spain, however, European anticommunists were traditional conservatives, defenders of the existing democratic order. In the United States, anticommunism—directed against shadowy enemies who supposedly controlled the nation’s policy—became a radical, even revolutionary movement. As the historian Richard Hofstadter put it in his famous 1964 essay “The Paranoid Style in American Politics,” the modern American right wing
feels dispossessed: America has been largely taken away from them and their kind, though they are determined to try to repossess it and to prevent the final destructive act of subversion. The old American virtues have already been eaten away by cosmopolitans and intellectuals; the old competitive capitalism has been gradually undermined by socialistic and communistic schemers; the old national security and independence have been destroyed by treasonous plots, having as their most powerful agents not merely outsiders and foreigners as of old but major statesmen who are at the very centers of American power.[5]
Oddly, this feeling of dispossession and victimization found special resonance in America’s rapidly growing suburbs—above all in Orange County, California, the home of Disneyland and at the time the embodiment of the new American dream. There was, it seemed, something about being a new homeowner, someone who moved both west and out to get away from it all—from the Midwest to the coast, from the city to the suburbs—that made people especially anxious about threats that it would all be taken away, especially willing to believe in dark conspiracies against their way of life. (It also didn’t hurt that Orange Country was at the heart of the military-industrial complex: As the home of many defense contractors, it was a place where many people had a personal financial stake in high tension between the West and the Soviet Union.) In recent years the Bush administration has carefully stoked the anxieties of “security moms,” but in the fifties and sixties the rebellion of the “suburban warriors” was a true grassroots movement, ready to rally behind politicians who seemed to share its concerns.[6]
The founders of movement conservatism, however high-minded their rhetoric may have been, showed little hesitation about riding the wave of paranoia. The political philosopher Peter Viereck was one of the few “new conservatives” to break with the movement as it evolved into movement conservatism proper. In a 1962 article in the New Republic, “The New Conservatism: One of Its Founders Asks What Went Wrong,” he pointed out that many of the most prominent new conservatives “failed the acid test of the McCarthy temptation of the 1950s in the same way that the fellow-traveler failed the acid test of the Communist temptation of the 1930s.” Indeed, as Viereck pointed out, Goldwater—who, like Reagan, has been reinvented by popular history as a much less extreme and threatening figure than he really was—“ardently defended the McCarthy tyranny to the very end.”[7] And while movement conservatives eventually dissociated themselves from Robert Welch, the founder of the John Birch Society, they were careful not to condemn the society itself, or its conspiracy-theory beliefs.
Movement conservatism, then, found a mass popular base by finding ways to appeal to two grassroots sentiments: white backlash and paranoia about communism. The emergence of this popular base went a long way toward turning the politically marginal “new conservatives” of the 1950s into a force to be reckoned with. And the rise of the popular base was supplemented by the creation of a different kind of base, which couldn’t deliver votes but could deliver cash: fervent support on the part of the business community.
Today we take it for granted that most of the business community is solidly behind the hard right. The drug industry wants its monopoly power left undisturbed; the insurance industry wants to fend off national health care; the power companies want freedom from environmental regulations; and everyone wants tax breaks. In the fifties and sixties, however, with memories of the New Deal’s triumphs still fresh, large corporations were politically cautious. The initial business base of movement conservatism was mainly among smaller, often privately owned businesses. And the focus of their ire was, above all, unions.
It’s hard now to grasp how important that issue was. Time’s readers were probably a bit puzzled in 1998, when the magazine named Walter Reuther, who was president of the United Automobile Workers from 1946 until his death in 1970, one of the one hundred most influential people of the twentieth century. By the century’s end, American unionism was a shadow of its former self, and Reuther had been all but forgotten. But once upon a time Reuther was a towering—and, to some people, terrifying—figure. In 1958 Barry Goldwater declared Reuther a “more dangerous menace than the Sputnik or anything Soviet Russia might do to America.”
In the 1950s America was a nation in which organized labor played a powerful, visible role. More than 30 percent of nonagricultural workers were union members, compared with less than 12 percent today. America’s unionization rate was higher than that of Canada, Italy, or France, and not far short of that in West Germany. Aside from their economic effects, unions played a central political role, providing the backbone of the Democratic Party’s strength outside the South. Unions were not, however, accepted by everyone as a fact of life.
It might have seemed that the issue of the political and economic legitimacy of unions had been settled by the extraordinary labor victories of the 1930s and 1940s. Those victories were, however, incomplete, in two important ways. First, the New Deal created a welfare state, but one that fell short of those achieved in other wealthy countries, especially when it came to health care. Unions had to push for private-sector benefits to fill the gaps. As they did, they ran into renewed opposition. Second, despite the relatively high rate of unionization, there were big regional disparities: Large parts of the country remained hostile territory for unions, and fertile ground for antiunion politicians.
4.
Speech delivered by Senator Joseph McCarthy before the Senate on June 14, 1951, from
5.
Richard Hofstadter, “The Paranoid Style in American Politics,”
6.
The term comes from Lisa McGirr,
7.
Peter Viereck, “The New Conservatism: One of Its Founders Asks What Went Wrong,”