Movement Conservative Movement [Archive.org URL]

After World War II, so many Americans believed in the new, activist New Deal state, the “liberal consensus,” that politicians could not motivate voters with sweeping stories of what it meant to be an American: almost all Americans agreed on those basic principles. So political scientists concluded that there was no longer any real defining ideological difference between Republicans and Democrats. In a famous book published in 1960, The American Voter, political scientist Philip Converse said that Americans were not particularly ideological, but rather voted based on their understanding of what benefits a party could offer to their particular group.

On the heels of this study, both Republicans and Democrats turned away from the idea of attracting voters with arguments about principle. Instead, they focused on nailing together coalitions, in a kind of transactional politics that erased the larger meaning of what it meant to participate in constructing a government.

In 1969, after Republican President Richard M. Nixon had successfully pulled together a coalition to win the White House despite the fact more Americans had voted for other candidates than had voted for him, political operative Kevin Philips applied Converse’s idea to the fortunes of the Republican Party. In The Emerging Republican Majority, Philips argued that Republicans could win for the foreseeable future if only they kept following Converse’s advice. The Democrats followed suit, and both traditional parties began to concentrate on messaging and the mechanics of getting people out to vote.

But the men who hated the liberal consensus and wanted to destroy it, men known as Movement Conservatives, did not follow Converse’s plan. They did not try to hammer together coalitions, because their plan to destroy the New Deal state was not popular with virtually anyone but their core supporters. So instead of following the new political science, they were the only group that offered to voters a clear narrative. And their narrative tied into western and American mythology. They talked of an individual American man, usually uneducated, but close to the land and to God, who fought back against an empire trying to destroy his way of life. It was a powerful image that tied into everything from the Biblical story of David and Goliath to the modern story of Luke Skywalker and the Empire. Star Wars: A New Hope came out in 1977, and three years later, the Movement Conservative spokesman Ronald Reagan won the White House.

Voters want to know that their votes matter. And since Reagan, Movement Conservatives have assured voters that they are playing a part in a war of good and evil, in which their votes are preserving America from what Movement Conservatives call socialism, or communism. That narrative has decimated traditional Republicans at the national level, and kept the Democrats on the ropes.