They feared changing values around sex, civil rights, women’s rights and gay rights.
They believed the establishment was too moderate, too accommodating.
They dismissed the machinery of government and the media as controlled by a liberal elite.
They were known as “the New Right,” and 50 years ago they won a victory in the Republican Party.
It is the heirs of that political movement who have gathered at this year’s Republican National Convention in Milwaukee. As the party pushes to dramatically reshape government and roll back changing cultural mores, nominating a candidate who has disregarded fundamental elements of American democracy, it may feel like a sudden and extreme pivot in American politics. But this surge to the far-right stems from seeds planted a half-century ago.
1974: Kanawha County, West Virginia
Outrage crept into the minister’s voice as he rallied his fellow protesters.
“There’s things I don’t want my child indoctrinated in!” roared Rev. Marvin Horan.
For months, Horan, a truck driver and Baptist minister, had led marches, boycotts, and strikes by thousands of rural white parents — all against a plan to introduce new books into local schools. They were appalled by mentions of sex, inclusions of profanity, exploration of non-Christian creation myths, and readings from Malcolm X.
The protests grew violent. Bombs exploded at elementary schools (Horan later went to prison for his involvement). Snipers fired at school buses. The Ku Klux Klan joined a rally at the state capitol in Charleston.
Meanwhile, outside activists arrived to aid the protesters, as well. They came from a variety of mostly new organizations: the Conservative Caucus, Citizens for Decency Through Law, the Populist Forum, and one called the Heritage Foundation.
They offered help, including legal counsel, fundraising, and publicity. But they also had another mission: to link these local West Virginia protests into a national movement.
1974: Boston, Massachusetts
A bottle shattered. Eggs splattered and rocks hammered against the window of a school bus filled with children. Parents had violently risen up against a plan to desegregate schools, which involved sending children sometimes across town by bus.
As riots engulfed the city, once again outside activists from a variety of new groups arrived to help the protesters.
The next year, 1975, featured a remarkable convergence. Hundreds of anti-busing protesters from Boston and anti-textbook protesters from West Virginia joined together in a march on Washington, D.C.
Two separate, regional uprisings against social change became one.
Organizing discontent
The outside groups who aided the protests, along with a host of others like them, would earn the moniker “the New Right.”
While the individual groups had an alphabet soup of names, many shared the same personnel. Harper’s Magazine described their leadership as “an octopus shaking hands with itself.” Most could be tied in one way or another to a single fundraiser — the direct-mail entrepreneur Richard Viguerie.
Before email microtargeting, cable news, or talk radio, Viguerie ran a state-of-the-art operation: In a secure room, reams of magnetic tape stored millions of names and addresses of Americans who had donated to a variety of socially conservative causes.
“If you have been the recipient recently of unsolicited mail asking for money to help fight … abortion, gun control, school busing, labor law reform, or the Equal Rights Amendment, chances are your name is recorded in Viguerie’s computers,” The Atlantic wrote in a 1978 profile. “[Viguerie] describes his job as ‘organizing discontent.’”
He sent out vitriolic, conspiracy-minded appeals from the printers in his office on an array of New Right groups’ letterheads.
One, about school books, read: “Your taxes are being used to pay for grade school courses that teach our children that cannibalism, wife swapping and the murder of infants and the elderly are acceptable behavior.”
Another: “When the homosexuals burn the Holy Bible in public … how can I stand by silently?”
These letters — with their alarmed, outraged tone — not only served to raise money. They were a new form of media.
Viguerie and the New Right saw a political opportunity: to build a national coalition that did not yet exist in American elections, but which the anti-busing and anti-textbook march foreshadowed. Through direct mail, they could bypass traditional media — which they saw as biased and liberal — and link together people around the country who were angry about the nation changing around them.
A writer who had worked for Viguerie and grown alarmed, Alan Crawford, wrote more specifically of the New Right’s mission: “It has its eye on the presidency in coming years, vowing … 'to take control of the culture.’”
Soon, the New Right had its chance.
1976: North Carolina
It was embarrassing how badly Ronald Reagan was losing.
The former actor and California governor had challenged the sitting president, Gerald Ford, in the 1976 Republican primaries with a unique pitch.
Breaking from party orthodoxy, Reagan had come out for a federal abortion ban, advocated for prayer in school, derided gun laws, and opposed a constitutional amendment declaring equal rights for women.
At the time, the major political parties leaned toward the center. Both parties contained voters with ideological views across the political spectrum. They shied from divisive social and cultural battles.
“I don’t want to see one party of the right and one of the left!” Ford’s liberal Vice President, Nelson Rockefeller, exclaimed to Republican Party leaders in 1975.
But, Reagan pledged to transform the GOP, shift it rightward, into a “party of bold colors, no pale pastels.”
In other words, Reagan was the candidate of the New Right.
New Right activists initially flocked to join his campaign as high-level staff and lowly volunteers. But their excitement dimmed along with Reagan’s prospects. He lost the first five primaries to Ford, in increasingly emphatic fashion. His top aides prepared to withdraw.
The New Right mobilized to prevent it.
One of its most powerful groups, the North Carolina Congressional Club, controlled by Sen. Jesse Helms and his political strategist Tom Ellis, took charge of Reagan’s campaign in their state. They reshaped his message, emphasizing a nationalist appeal featuring the Panama Canal.
Reagan adopted a new slogan: “Make America Number One Again.”
Meanwhile, New Right groups poured money into the race to support Reagan, using new campaign finance rules. Viguerie’s magazine, Conservative Digest, and direct-mail campaigns fawned over Reagan while bashing Ford’s “secret efforts to appoint mostly liberals to high offices.”
Reagan began to win. First, he swung an upset in North Carolina. Then, he scored victories in primaries across the South. At one point he passed Ford in the delegate count to become the frontrunner — a breathtaking political comeback.
The victories had a secondary, less heralded effect. They elected the Reagan campaigns’ delegates to the Republican National Convention. Conservatives who had been outsiders and who, in many cases, were aligned with the New Right gained a say in the party’s rules and platform.
1976: Kansas City, Missouri — Republican National Convention
Reagan lost the nominating battle narrowly in the closest presidential primary race in U.S. history.
But he left an imprint, most obviously in the platform — the official document laying out what the party stands for. For the first time, the Republican platform depicted a party with strong, right-wing stances on cultural and social issues. The platform opposed gun control, advocated for states adopting the death penalty, and supported constitutional amendments for school prayer and against abortion. It departed radically from the party’s previous statements.
It reflected the wishes of Reagan, his conservative delegates, and their New Right allies. More importantly, it signaled that the coalition the New Right sought to assemble of culturally aggrieved voters had a new home in a major American political party.
2024: Milwaukee, Wisconsin — Republican National Convention
Over the years, the New Right coalition has grown in importance. The voters it sought to sway from the Democrats — largely white, often rural, overwhelmingly non-college-educated voters — today form the base of the Republican Party and former President Donald Trump’s core support.
Groups founded as part of the New Right in the 1970s, such as the Heritage Foundation, have woven further into the fabric of the party and its agenda. So, too, have the other aspects of the New Right’s approach: the rejection of mainstream news and the embrace of conspiracy-minded appeals.
This week, amid bipartisan calls to ratchet down political rhetoric after the assassination attempt against Trump, Republican delegates in Milwaukee approved the party’s latest platform. While it removes explicit opposition to abortion, the social backlash and apocalyptic rhetoric that decades ago typified the New Right infuses the document, from its call to “deport millions of illegal Migrants who Joe Biden has deliberately encouraged to invade our Country” to its focus on banning textbooks “pushing critical race theory.”
The New Right did not fully succeed 50 years ago when it sought to “organize discontent,” with “its eye on the presidency,” and the goal of taking “control of the culture.” But its values and heirs to its movement drive today’s Republican Party.
Ben Bradford is the creator and host of the narrative podcast series Landslide, telling the story of the 1976 presidential race and how it shaped our modern political divide. Landslide is a production of NuanceTales, in partnership with WFAE, and part of the NPR Network.
