Politics: The Conservative Resurgence

In the 1970s, the American Republican Party seemed destined for the garbage dump of history. Both houses of Congress were controlled by large Democratic majorities, virtually all state legislative houses were dominated by Democrats, moderate Republicanism—“Rockefeller Republicanism”—bored everyone stiff, and the one-note anticommunism of the Goldwaterites had been soundly rejected by the broad voting public. Yet, within a few decades Republicans would control the House and Senate, most state legislatures, and most governorships. On top of that, virtually the entire American South, which had been Democratic (or Dixiecratic) for generations, would turn solidly Republican. What happened?

Many things happened, of course, but what mainly happened was that creative capital entered the political sphere on the side of the Republicans. Two individuals in particular—Joseph Coors and Richard M. Scaife—decided that the Republican party needed a whole bevy of new ideas, and they began quietly supporting young conservative thinkers wherever they could find them. At first, to be sure, they were decidedly hard to find—young Americans had been radicalized in the 1960s and most of them had nothing but scorn for Republicans in general and conservatives in particular. But Coors and Scaife, working largely independently, relied on a core group of “talent scouts” (mainly older conservative thinkers) operating at colleges from Dartmouth to Stanford. When a young man or woman showed promise, financial support was made available. Conservative (and neoconservative) journals were launched with support from Coors, Scaife, and others. New conservative think tanks were formed (the Heritage Foundation and the Manhattan Institute, for example) and older think tanks (like the American Enterprise Institute and the Hoover Institution) were reinvigorated.

No single thing that Coors and Scaife did shook the world, but the mere existence of the creative capital they supplied encouraged more and more conservative thinkers to rise to the surface and to continue to think and publish and teach other thinkers. Ultimately, their disciplined deployment of creative capital over a long period of time would revolutionize American politics and American political ideas, for better or worse.¹⁹