voters and supporters into the party, Speaker of the House John Boehner refers to conservatives as “knuckle-draggers” and Republican National Committee chairman Reince Preibus cravenly caved in to demands from the Mitt Romney campaign to strip Ron Paul supporters and Tea Party–leaning delegates of their credentials and exclude them from participating in the 2012 Republican National Convention. The damage done to the Republican brand by the disgraceful and disrespectful treatment conservative and libertarian-leaning delegates received at the 2012 convention will continue to dog the national GOP for a long time.
Of course Romney is now a nonfactor after he gave away the presidency by running a content-free campaign, but the rules changes that his supporters engineered have been maintained to provide an advantage to the next Republican presidential candidate the Republican establishment chooses to anoint.
And there’s the lesson for today’s Tea Partiers and libertarian-leaning conservatives. During the late 1970s and early 1980s we of the New Right weren’t operating as an appendage of the GOP; we were working through it in the spirit of the biblical injunction in the book of Romans to be in the world, but not of the world.
We weren’t even operating as supporters of any individual candidate, even though eventually all of us who were active in the New Right came to support Ronald Reagan for president.
We saw ourselves as separate from the established Republican Party. Our goal was to promote a set of conservative principles and values and to back candidates who would stand for those values andprinciples—if that meant opposing the established leaders of the Republican Party, and supporting conservative Democrats such as the late congressman Larry McDonald, former congressman and senator Phil Gramm when he was a Democrat, or Democratic state representative Woody Jenkins in Louisiana, so be it.
As I said earlier, conservative “third force” groups were a key part of Reagan’s victory and the building of the 1980 Reagan coalition.
The individuals associated with the rise of the New Right—Bill Armstrong, Morton Blackwell, Joe Coors, Phil Crane, Terry Dolan, Bob Dornan, Tom Ellis, Jerry Falwell, Ed Feulner, Newt Gingrich, Ron Godwin, Jesse Helms, Gordon Humphrey, Woody Jenkins, Roger Jepson, Tim and Beverley LaHaye, Ed McAteer, Connie Marshner, Larry McDonald, Larry Pratt, Howard Phillips, H. L. “Bill” Richardson, Pat Robertson, James Robison, Phyllis Schlafly, Mike Valerio, Bob Walker (both the congressman and the former Reagan aide), Jim Watt, Vin Weber, Paul Weyrich, Carter Wren, and the groups they developed to educate, activate, and energize voters—weren’t mere appendages of the national Republican Party or the Washington political establishment.
Every time Jimmy Carter proposed a new policy with which we disagreed, such as giving away the Panama Canal, cancelling the B-1 bomber, or expanding the welfare state, even when we lost the fight, it added new supporters to the conservative movement and helped create the Reagan coalition.
However, it is vital to recognize that the conservative voters who opposed giving away the Panama Canal were just as mad at establishment Republican senator Howard Baker for backing the Panama Canal Treaty as they were at Jimmy Carter for signing it.
The strategy of acting as a third force (not a third party!) in politics is still valid today; the problem is that too many conservative coalitions and organizations—including some we created back in the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s—have become captive to the Republican establishment.
During the administration of President George W. Bush, theleaders of some of these organizations would get all aflutter if they got a call from Karl Rove; however if they got a call that President Bush was on the line, they would wet their pants even as Rove and his boss, President Bush, were betraying them and supporting policies that went
Of course Romney is now a nonfactor after he gave away the presidency by running a content-free campaign, but the rules changes that his supporters engineered have been maintained to provide an advantage to the next Republican presidential candidate the Republican establishment chooses to anoint.
And there’s the lesson for today’s Tea Partiers and libertarian-leaning conservatives. During the late 1970s and early 1980s we of the New Right weren’t operating as an appendage of the GOP; we were working through it in the spirit of the biblical injunction in the book of Romans to be in the world, but not of the world.
We weren’t even operating as supporters of any individual candidate, even though eventually all of us who were active in the New Right came to support Ronald Reagan for president.
We saw ourselves as separate from the established Republican Party. Our goal was to promote a set of conservative principles and values and to back candidates who would stand for those values andprinciples—if that meant opposing the established leaders of the Republican Party, and supporting conservative Democrats such as the late congressman Larry McDonald, former congressman and senator Phil Gramm when he was a Democrat, or Democratic state representative Woody Jenkins in Louisiana, so be it.
As I said earlier, conservative “third force” groups were a key part of Reagan’s victory and the building of the 1980 Reagan coalition.
The individuals associated with the rise of the New Right—Bill Armstrong, Morton Blackwell, Joe Coors, Phil Crane, Terry Dolan, Bob Dornan, Tom Ellis, Jerry Falwell, Ed Feulner, Newt Gingrich, Ron Godwin, Jesse Helms, Gordon Humphrey, Woody Jenkins, Roger Jepson, Tim and Beverley LaHaye, Ed McAteer, Connie Marshner, Larry McDonald, Larry Pratt, Howard Phillips, H. L. “Bill” Richardson, Pat Robertson, James Robison, Phyllis Schlafly, Mike Valerio, Bob Walker (both the congressman and the former Reagan aide), Jim Watt, Vin Weber, Paul Weyrich, Carter Wren, and the groups they developed to educate, activate, and energize voters—weren’t mere appendages of the national Republican Party or the Washington political establishment.
Every time Jimmy Carter proposed a new policy with which we disagreed, such as giving away the Panama Canal, cancelling the B-1 bomber, or expanding the welfare state, even when we lost the fight, it added new supporters to the conservative movement and helped create the Reagan coalition.
However, it is vital to recognize that the conservative voters who opposed giving away the Panama Canal were just as mad at establishment Republican senator Howard Baker for backing the Panama Canal Treaty as they were at Jimmy Carter for signing it.
The strategy of acting as a third force (not a third party!) in politics is still valid today; the problem is that too many conservative coalitions and organizations—including some we created back in the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s—have become captive to the Republican establishment.
During the administration of President George W. Bush, theleaders of some of these organizations would get all aflutter if they got a call from Karl Rove; however if they got a call that President Bush was on the line, they would wet their pants even as Rove and his boss, President Bush, were betraying them and supporting policies that went
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