American conservatism and the Republicans:
The modern American conservative movement emerged largely as a reaction to the liberalism (as defined above) that prevailed from the Roosevelt Administration on. It really got its start in Barry Goldwater’s 1964 presidential campaign – which failed to elect Goldwater, but planted the organizational seeds of the later movement. You can read the whole story in The Right Nation: Conservative Power in America, by John Micklethwait and Adrian Wooldridge (New York: The Penguin Press, 2004). As those authors point out, “conservative” in post-Goldwater American usage meant something rather different than what it had meant to earlier generations (and still means in Europe):
Now, the above description is incisive but it glosses over the presence of several different and potentially conflicting trends within the modern conservative coalition. In general, we can identify the following currents on the “right” side of the map:
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Business conservatism: The people Bush famously called his “base.” Far and away the dominant force in the Republican Party (and in American society generally). Shades over into “neoliberalism” (see above), distinguished by matters of emphasis. These are the ones who believe, or at least proclaim, that whatever is good for [name of established business corporation in which you happen to have investments] is good for the country. Union-busting, good. Corporate welfare, good. Foreign military adventurism, acceptable if it provides business opportunities.
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Neoconservatism: The second most important force in the Republican Party, right now, and arguably the most important in the Administration. Dedicated to spreading the American versions of democracy and capitalism abroad, through military intervention where necessary. Remarkably, neoconservatism is a purely intellectual or “policy-wonk” movement with no mass base of support. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neoconservatism_in_the_United_States.
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Religious-social traditionalist conversatism: IMO the third most important force in the Republican Party, now, and fighting hard to become number one. “Family values,” the Christian Coalition, and all that. Against gay marriage, for school prayer and teaching of “intelligent design”. This group does have a huge-grass roots support base that almost defines what we think of as the “red states” – but its supporters are mostly middle-class,working-class or poor, which potentially gives them very different material interests than the business conservatives. If they ever decide to split off from the Pubs and go their own way, they have a ready-made vehicle in the Constitution Party (formerly the U.S. Taxpayers Party) – http://www.constitution-party.net/.
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Paleoconservatism: Nativist, isolationist, anti-immigrant, populist. Not really a voice in the Republican Party at present, because they’re directly opposed to the Iraq War; also, because they’re economic populists and they seem to hate Wall Street as much as Washington. They want NAFTA abolished, immigration restricted, and tariffs imposed to protect the jobs of American workers. Paleocons are in the tradition of the old Populist Party and the interwar America First! movement. Ross Perot’s Reform Party was ideologically incoherent (and ultimately broke up for that among other reasons), but paleoconservatism was definitely one of its elements. Represented, at present, by Pat Buchanan and his America First Party (http://www.americafirstparty.org/).
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Libertarianism: Minimal-statists, in some cases verging on anarchism (although the anarchist tradition as such, in politics, is actually heavily influenced by Marxism). Libertarians are pro-market, which is not the same thing as pro-business. Opposed to welfare for poor people; opposed, for the same ideological reasons, to government bailouts of troubled businesses; opposed to American military intervention abroad. Want to decriminalize all “victimless crimes” such as prostitution and drug use. Like the neocons, this is mainly an intellectual movement with relatively little grass-roots presence, but it does have its own political party, the Libertarian Party (http://www.lp.org/), which is probably the single largest and best-organized third party on the American scene, at present. There’s also the Independence Party (one of the fragments that emerged from the breakup of the Reform Party), whose politics have been described as “moderate libertarian”: http://www.mnip.org/ It has no effective presence outside Minnesota at present, but there it did manage to get Jesse Ventura elected governor. Libertarians also have some independent influence in Washington, through institutions such as the Cato Foundation think-tank, which work hand-in-glove with the Republican ruling establishment.
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White supremacism/separatism: Self-explanatory. Now mostly marginal, at least in its overt form; it’s debatable how much influence racist thinking has in other conservative camps, such as the paleocons, or the immigration-restriction movement generally. (See this thread: http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?t=310401.) And the modern rise of the Republican Party to majority status can be attributed in part to Nixon’s 1968 adoption of a “Southern Strategy” which targeted conservative Southern whites (most of them Democrats, up until then) who were still nursing resentment over the end of Jim Crow. But racism’s more extreme manifestations, such as the Klan and the Nazis, are definitely beyond the pale, now. The “militia” movements seem to have been in steep decline ever since the bombing of the Oklahoma City federal courthouse in 1995. They haven’t gone away – but, for the most part, organized white supremacists are so far out there that it would be against Board rules for me even to provide links to their websites.
but I did not know that. And I love Dave Barry. (It might be that I read it and forgot it, but it lodged in my subconscious.)