Dark Horses

“Even the liberals,” writes Richard Viguerie, “have realized deep in their hearts that America was never made up of 200 million liberals. Even at the peak of their power the liberals sometimes gave signs of worrying that they might face a massive uprising on the right.” And now, the contributors to The New Right Papers (St. Martin’s, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010; $12.95) will tell you, they are.

It did not of course happen overnight: “Ronald Reagan,” as William A. Rusher observes in “The New Right: Past and Prospects,” “did not spring full-blown from the brow of Jove in 1980 or any other recent year . . .” (The contemporary conservative movement really began to knit, Rusher believes, in 1964, “when the Goldwater campaign introduced the conservatives of America to one another.”) But it has happened: the product of 16 years (and more) of intensive and patient work, leavened by the conservatives’ discovery of what, according to Viguerie, “liberals had long known: that single-issue politics is only an aspect of coalition politics. We learned to organize, lobby, and bargain just as our opponents had been doing for so many years.” The conservative victory of 1980 has been discounted by many observers who believe that, as soon as it becomes apparent that Ronald Reagan is unable to repair in four years what the liberal Democrats have spent five decades wrecking, “the people” will turn their back on him and return in 1984 to business-as-usual, by reuniting Ted Kennedy or Walter Mondale with his patrimony. Robert W. Whitaker, the editor of the present volume, pours cold water on the conventional wisdom by pointing out that massive counter-revolution at the polls was precisely what many Republicans expected of 1936, an election year Whitaker believes will be the inverse model for 1984.

CW

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Chilton Williamson Jr.

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“Even the liberals,” writes Richard Viguerie, “have realized deep in their hearts that America was never made up of 200 million liberals. Even at the peak of their power the liberals sometimes gave signs of worrying that they might face a massive uprising on the right.” And now, the contributors to The New Right Papers (St. Martin’s, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010; $12.95) will tell you, they are.

It did not of course happen overnight: “Ronald Reagan,” as William A. Rusher observes in “The New Right: Past and Prospects,” “did not spring full-blown from the brow of Jove in 1980 or any other recent year . . .” (The contemporary conservative movement really began to knit, Rusher believes, in 1964, “when the Goldwater campaign introduced the conservatives of America to one another.”) But it has happened: the product of 16 years (and more) of intensive and patient work, leavened by the conservatives’ discovery of what, according to Viguerie, “liberals had long known: that single-issue politics is only an aspect of coalition politics. We learned to organize, lobby, and bargain just as our opponents had been doing for so many years.” The conservative victory of 1980 has been discounted by many observers who believe that, as soon as it becomes apparent that Ronald Reagan is unable to repair in four years what the liberal Democrats have spent five decades wrecking, “the people” will turn their back on him and return in 1984 to business-as-usual, by reuniting Ted Kennedy or Walter Mondale with his patrimony. Robert W. Whitaker, the editor of the present volume, pours cold water on the conventional wisdom by pointing out that massive counter-revolution at the polls was precisely what many Republicans expected of 1936, an election year Whitaker believes will be the inverse model for 1984.