Reagan’s New Coalition

The appearance of the delegates at the Joe Louis Arena in Detroit betrayed no hint that the Republican Party might be transforming itself into the coalition necessary to the making of a majority party. On the contrary, Republican delegates in convention assembled seemed more exclusionary and comic than ever—exclusionary, because the delegates were even whiter, more predominantly male, and richer than in recent years; comic, because good plain Republican garments had been replaced by outlandish elephant hats, garish serapes, and anything else that might catch the wandering television cameraman’s eye.

It also was a convention that looked rigidly rightist, more even than Barry Goldwater’s convention at the Cow Palace in San Francisco in 1964. The inability by supporters of the Equal Rights Amendment to wage a floor debate on the platform plank ending forty years of Republican support for ERA was terrifying to some onlookers in the press section. Syndicated columnist Richard Reeves smelled “a whiff of moral Fascism.” Henry Fairlie, the expatriate English journalist, wrote in the Washington Post: “The Reaganites on the floor were exactly those who in Germany gave the Nazis their main strength and who in France collaborated with them and sustained Vichy.”

RD

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Robert D. Novak

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Ronald Reagan

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The appearance of the delegates at the Joe Louis Arena in Detroit betrayed no hint that the Republican Party might be transforming itself into the coalition necessary to the making of a majority party. On the contrary, Republican delegates in convention assembled seemed more exclusionary and comic than ever—exclusionary, because the delegates were even whiter, more predominantly male, and richer than in recent years; comic, because good plain Republican garments had been replaced by outlandish elephant hats, garish serapes, and anything else that might catch the wandering television cameraman’s eye.

It also was a convention that looked rigidly rightist, more even than Barry Goldwater’s convention at the Cow Palace in San Francisco in 1964. The inability by supporters of the Equal Rights Amendment to wage a floor debate on the platform plank ending forty years of Republican support for ERA was terrifying to some onlookers in the press section. Syndicated columnist Richard Reeves smelled “a whiff of moral Fascism.” Henry Fairlie, the expatriate English journalist, wrote in the Washington Post: “The Reaganites on the floor were exactly those who in Germany gave the Nazis their main strength and who in France collaborated with them and sustained Vichy.”