The Origins of the Republican Civil War

The Origins of the Republican Civil War

The splits inside the conservative movement that Nicole Hemmer identifies between populists and elitists have only intensified in recent years.

With the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980, the conservative media seemed to have arrived. But as Hemmer notes, a New Right generation of activists that included figures such Terry Dolan of the National Conservative Political Action Committee and Jerry Falwell of the Moral Majority had arrived that did not have much in common with the older conservative generation. She points out that leaders of the New Right backed Republican congressman Phil Crane, then former Texas governor John Connally, only supporting Reagan during the general election. Buckley and his cohort, Hemmer writes, saw the New Right paladins as “Johnnies-come-lately to the movement, demanding rigorous fealty to social issues that had only recently become the drivers of politics.” Hemmer might have noted that, although Reagan has since become a conservative icon, George F. Will and Norman Podhoretz, among others, lamented what they viewed as Reagan’s concessive posture towards Mikhail Gorbachev.

The splits inside the conservative movement that Hemmer identifies between populists and elitists have only intensified in recent years. Hemmer points to the rise of Rush Limbaugh, whom National Review anointed in 1993 on its cover as “The Leader of the Opposition.” Today, as they grapple with the rise of Donald Trump and devote more energy to battling each other than their ideological opponents on the left, conservatives face an identity crisis. But does anyone have the right stuff to solve it?

Jacob Heilbrunn is editor of the National Interest.

Image: Paul Ryan at CPAC 2016. Flickr/Gage Skidmore