Tuesdays Gone

‘ I feel as sure as everyone except conceivably Gerald Ford that there will be a slaughter of Republicans, the innocent along with the guilty,” senior editor James Burnham wrote in National Review in the fall of 1974. He gleaned this in part from a two-week road trip he embarked upon with wife Marcia. The trip’s purpose centered around pleasure (“to enjoy the wild west wind”) and business (“check on our country and countrymen”). He explained, “We drove about 2,500 miles, mostly in the mid-Atlantic states.”

Three days after he filed that article, Republicans lost a total of four Senate seats, 45 House seats, and five governorships, including from such population-rich states as California and New York. Given that Democrats already owned majorities in both houses of Congress and among the governors, the shellacking — to borrow the peculiar word used 36 years later by the president on the receiving end of a similar midterm defeat — in a sense rivaled what Republicans experienced this week.

Every whupping feels at once new and as though déjà vu. In 1974, Burnham could feel the political winds as much as that “wild west wind” in his drives through such locales as Charlestown, West Virginia, Eden, South Carolina, and Danville, Virginia. In 2026, many conservatives dismissed those same winds. They looked at daunting poll numbers as proof not of the unpopularity of the Republican brand but of the corruption of activist pollsters. Our engagement with fellow citizens, coming as it does through the intermediaries of curated websites and cable-news shows, distorts reality. The open road that the Burnhams traveled 52 years ago seems a healthier, more enlightening place than an ideological cocoon.

Like Burnham in 1974, Whittaker Chambers, an Eisenhower Republican who confessed to “always” voting as a straight-ticket stalwart, grasped that his fellow citizens would more than counterbalance his 1958 ballot. The man who famously believed he defected from the winning to the losing side in the battle between communism and the free world characteristically chose no comforting delusions to escape the discomforting reality that the majority of his fellow Americans had soured on his party.

“The Republicans had lost touch with reality in all directions, and in all groupings, until domestic policy resembled irresolution tempered by expediency, and foreign policy more and more resembled something like eccentricity,” he wrote in the November 22, 1958, issue of National Review.

L. Brent Bozell saw no silver lining. Democrats netted 13 Senate and 48 House seats that year, which left Bozell to write in that same issue of National Review that “the off-year tendency could at most explain a setback, never a collapse.” He ridiculed the president, “the man who presided over the spendingest Administration in the nation’s history,” for lambasting Democrats as “spenders” and lamented that the party traded its soul to make “Eisenhower its high priest.” The criticisms Bozell issued in the wake of 34’s midterm defeat look familiar to anyone monitoring internecine criticisms issued in the wake of 47’s midterm defeat.

Bozell concluded that the rout ought to jar conservatives into soul-searching and organizing. His friend and fellow senior editor Frank Meyer reached the same conclusion to the electoral drubbing six years later.

“In December of 1964 — the Goldwater year — Goldwater was clobbered, and what do we do now?” the late Lee Edwards reflected in 2020. “Some conservatives thought, ‘That’s it. We were smashed, demolished. It’s all done. Let’s give up. Let’s retire.’ Others were much more aggressive. It was Frank Meyer who said something like, ‘You can build a pretty good political movement with a base of 27 million people,’ which is the number of people who had voted for us in 1964. He said, ‘What are we going to do about it? We’re going to start an organization.’”

So, Meyer, Edwards, Bob Bauman, and a few others launched the American Conservative Union that December. Political catastrophe, the likes of which were faced by the conservatives in 1964, often catalyzes consequential political activism. This remains true for diverse variants of those who fall under the broad “right” label. Edward Harwood founded the American Institute of Economic Research during the first year of the Roosevelt administration. Jerry Falwell and Paul Weyrich launched the Moral Majority halfway through the Carter presidency. Charlie Kirk and Bill Montgomery launched Turning Point USA in the midst of the Obama presidency. The most potent vehicles for the conservative message rolled off the assembly line as a result of defeat, not victory.

Work came before revival. Excuses and demoralization did not. The conservative who built the movement did not, on the whole, blame the majority of their countrymen for disagreeing or deny errors. They worked on both their errors and their countrymen.

“Go outside and engage with strangers” seems like a lesson of the Burnhams’ road trip from which 2026 conservatives might benefit. The aftermath example from 1974 and ballot-box beatdowns before and since implore the vanquished to dust themselves off, make corrections, and fight. The silver lining that Bozell failed to see in 1958 pertained to humiliation obliterating complacency and sclerosis and generating reflection and action. Something better usually emerges from the worst defeats.

The rural towns the Burnhams drove through 52 falls ago included shopping plazas, commercial districts, and much else that did not exist not too many falls before their trip. Burnham observed that the occupants of the many houses that suddenly encroached on farm lands and forests could not possibly work in agriculture. Where did they work? Surely far away. He elsewhere noticed factories far away from any home. He concluded, “I was struck with the visible display of the automobile’s integral relation to our social structure.”

From the no-vacancy signs at Holiday Inns and the overflowing restaurants, Burnham judged that Americans enjoyed incredible affluence. “A nation whose pet dogs and cats have a more nourishing diet than half of mankind,” he noted, “is still some distance from economic ruin.” But Burnham saw 49.9-cents-per-gallon gasoline — a drop from the peak but considerably higher than just a year earlier.

Surely Watergate presented a unique challenge to the 1974 Republican Party. But a war in the Middle East, then as now, increased by more than a third in a very short period the price at the pump, which sits below numbers that advertise the economy’s health to Americans on an almost constant basis in a way that a 15-minute wait for a table cannot. Such close parallels do not always characterize the reasons for ballot-box ruin, which generally owe to issues unique to the times. The way that causes and candidates, and principles and parties, recover always and everywhere requires the humility to admit errors, the discipline to correct them, and the tenacity to organize for victory.