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Does modern American conservatism start with Reagan or Nixon?

entremet

entremet

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It seems these two are the big conservative figures that have molded the GOP to its current state. Reagan especially was a master at communicating the narrative that government cannot be trusted, was your enemy, and so on. This gave him credibility to dismantle social programs. He's also become a sort of GOP Messiah, along with strange idol worship.

Nixon is a bit more complex. His form of conservatism was a bit different. He started the EPA and got us off the gold standard, something many wacky gold libertarian types still lament lol. Nixon also supported Affirmative Action. However, many consider him a bellwether for modern conservatism. Nixon's biggest sin, even more than his corruption, seems to be the start of the heavily racist War on Drug and the creation of the DEA. In terms of modern conservatism, this does seem more in line with conservatives's law and order ethic. Nixon isn't as beloved as Reagan either. His criminal status doesn't help here and it's hard to go against a telegenic movie star like Reagan was as well.

I still pick Reagan. Reagan, unlike Nixon, lead greater efforts to deregulate more industries. Cut more services, and also had, what I believe, a poisonous rhetoric about government role in society.

Does modern American conservatism start with Reagan or Nixon?
 
Manmademan

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The dismantling of unions and the beginnings of the "southern strategy" leveraging race to split the democratic coalition were things that began under Nixon, not Reagan.

Reagan is more well liked- mostly because he wasn't run out of office on a rail like Nixon was (though he WOULD have been and SHOULD have been without congressional republicans protecting him from Iran Contra fallout) but he largely only continued what Nixon started- he didn't originate it.
 
DrForester

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I'd say Regan. His economic polices are pretty much gospel to the modern GOP, and even though it keeps not working, they keep pushing the trickle down shit.
 
dots

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Nixon started the modern trend of doing crimes and not going to jail for it which is the biggest indicator of a Republican president lately, so him.
 
TacomaSCDisaster

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I'd say it predates Nixon. Kicked off in full in the 1950's when all left wing thought became taboo and capitalism was deified. Socialism and communism were popular ideologies in the US with strong followings that were gaining in popularity pre-WWII especially in response to the Depression.
 
phonicjoy

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Economics-wise it has to be Reagan. He is being ridiculed for it in schools of Economics ever since.
 
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OP
entremet

entremet

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Goldwater is a good pick. I chose Presidents as the option since Presidents tend to have outsized influence on their parties--see Trump currently lol. Clinton before that.

If want to include non-Presidents I will also include Grover Nordquist. Dude is a maniac.
 
Kernel

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phonicjoy said:
Trickle down isnt taught anywhere. Theres this "legend" of Reagan being explained the tax curve on the back of a napkin by Some right wing economist and that being the inspiration for all that bullshit.
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Isn't that the two santa theory?

https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2018-02-09/republicans-deficits-and-the-two-santa-theory

The two-Santa theory became the political complement to supply-side economics, a phrase also popularized by Wanniski, and formed the basis of the fiscal policies of the Ronald Reagan presidency, when taxes were cut and spending was increased. Contrary to Wanniski's predictions, the budget deficit surged. The economy, however, turned a corner. It went from low growth and high inflation in 1980 to high growth and low inflation by 1987.
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Bandage

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Reagan destroyed our economy so thoroughly that we will never recover. And Republicans continue his traditions of making life worse for everyone.
 
Metallix87

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There is no simple answer to this. Goldwater started the shift, sure, but he, Nixon, and Reagan would not be enough to the right for most current day Republicans.
 

PrimeBeef

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mikeys_legendary said:
Trump just did. That "tax cut" disproportionately (and negatively) affects those who own a house in states where you are able to write off part of your mortgage on your taxes.
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That's different. That was removing deductions, not a tax raise. I don't remember the Bush 2 era, but I believe his father, who hated reganomics, called it vodou, was the last Republican to willfully raise them, knowing it would end his recession.
 
Kthulhu

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It starts with Goldwater. He was the first to really push back against the civil rights movement.
 
Cruxist

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I think there are 3 distinct shifts towards modern conservatism.

1. Goldwater
Interestingly enough, Goldwater himself isn't really the shift, but the people around him. His presidential campaign was less about him and his policies and more about a cult of personality around him. It was a creation of these conservative magazines and mailing lists that generated this and kind of served as a proto-Fox News.

2. Nixon
I still think Nixon accomplished some good things as President, but his lust for power and the massive chip on his shoulder made him play into the worst pieces of America. He was disingenuous with phrases like "law and order" and "dogwhistle" and took advantage of all the racial tensions. His campaign was also a breeding ground for all of the right wing power brokers that exist now or helped found Fox News. And then of course there's Watergate. There are definitely conservatives out there that remember it unfairly and believe if Nixon had a Fox News at the time, he wouldn't have needed to resign. Nixon also leaned heavily into the anti-intelligence/anti-academia we see permeate the right today.

3. Reagan
Reagan codified what the other two were working with and brought with it the damning power of celebrity. Not only that, he was just such a liar, all the time. Dude lied about his past so much. And his framing of everything as good vs. evil has been so ridiculously detrimental to politics as a whole, it's just shocking. He was the head of a union who de-clawed the union movement in America. And I think we all know how his economic policies have fared.
 
andrew

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James Buchanan.
Meet the Economist Behind the One Percent's Stealth Takeover of America
In thinking about how people make political decisions and choices, Buchanan concluded that you could only understand them as individuals seeking personal advantage. In an interview cited by MacLean, the economist observed that in the 1950s Americans commonly assumed that elected officials wanted to act in the public interest. Buchanan vehemently disagreed — that was a belief he wanted, as he put it, to "tear down." His ideas developed into a theory that came to be known as "public choice."

Buchanan's view of human nature was distinctly dismal. Adam Smith saw human beings as self-interested and hungry for personal power and material comfort, but he also acknowledged social instincts like compassion and fairness. Buchanan, in contrast, insisted that people were primarily driven by venal self-interest. Crediting people with altruism or a desire to serve others was "romantic" fantasy: politicians and government workers were out for themselves, and so, for that matter, were teachers, doctors, and civil rights activists. They wanted to control others and wrest away their resources: "Each person seeks mastery over a world of slaves," he wrote in his 1975 book, The Limits of Liberty.
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...the Virginia school, as Buchanan's brand of economic and political thinking is known, is a kind of cousin to the better-known, market-oriented Chicago and Austrian schools — proponents of all three were members of the Mont Pelerin Society, an international neoliberal organization which included Milton Friedman and Friedrich Hayek. But the Virginia school's focus and career missions were distinct. In an interview with the Institute for New Economic Thinking (INET), MacLean described Friedman and Buchanan as yin and yang:

"Friedman was this genial, personable character who loved to be in the limelight and made a sunny case for the free market and the freedom to choose and so forth. Buchanan was the dark side of this: he thought, ok, fine, they can make a case for the free market, but everybody knows that free markets have externalities and other problems. So he wanted to keep people from believing that government could be the alternative to those problems."

The Virginia school also differs from other economic schools in a marked reliance on abstract theory rather than mathematics or empirical evidence. That a Nobel Prize was awarded in 1986 to an economist who so determinedly bucked the academic trends of his day was nothing short of stunning, MacLean observes. But, then, it was the peak of the Reagan era, an administration several Buchanan students joined.
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the economist developed a grand project to train operatives to staff institutions funded by like-minded tycoons, most significantly Charles Koch, who became interested in his work in the '70s and sought the economist's input in promoting "Austrian economics" in the U.S. and in advising the Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank.

Koch, whose mission was to save capitalists like himself from democracy, found the ultimate theoretical tool in the work of the southern economist. The historian writes that Koch preferred Buchanan to Milton Friedman and his "Chicago boys" because, she says, quoting a libertarian insider, they wanted "to make government work more efficiently when the true libertarian should be tearing it out at the root."

With Koch's money and enthusiasm, Buchanan's academic school evolved into something much bigger. By the 1990s, Koch realized that Buchanan's ideas — transmitted through stealth and deliberate deception, as MacLean amply documents — could help take government down through incremental assaults that the media would hardly notice. The tycoon knew that the project was extremely radical, even a "revolution" in governance, but he talked like a conservative to make his plans sound more palatable.

MacLean details how partnered with Koch, Buchanan's outpost at George Mason University was able to connect libertarian economists with right-wing political actors and supporters of corporations like Shell Oil, Exxon, Ford, IBM, Chase Manhattan Bank, and General Motors. Together they could push economic ideas to the public through media, promote new curricula for economics education, and court politicians in nearby Washington, D.C.

At the 1997 fiftieth anniversary of the Mont Pelerin Society, MacLean recounts that Buchanan and his associate Henry Manne, a founding theorist of libertarian economic approaches to law, focused on such affronts to capitalists as environmentalism and public health and welfare, expressing eagerness to dismantle Social Security, Medicaid, and Medicare as well as kill public education because it tended to foster community values. Feminism had to go, too: the scholars considered it a socialist project.
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The historian emphasizes that Buchanan's role in the disastrous Pinochet government of Chile has been underestimated partly because unlike Milton Friedman, who advertised his activities, Buchanan had the shrewdness to keep his involvement quiet. With his guidance, the military junta deployed public choice economics in the creation of a new constitution, which required balanced budgets and thereby prevented the government from spending to meet public needs. Supermajorities would be required for any changes of substance, leaving the public little recourse to challenge programs like the privatization of social security.

The dictator's human rights abuses and pillage of the country's resources did not seem to bother Buchanan, MacLean argues, so long as the wealthy got their way. "Despotism may be the only organizational alternative to the political structure that we observe," the economist had written in The Limits of Liberty.
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...people who "failed to foresee and save money for their future needs" are to be treated, as Buchanan put it, "as subordinate members of the species, akin to…animals who are dependent.'"

Do you have your education, health care, and retirement personally funded against all possible exigencies? Then that means you.
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siddx

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Reagan was the first to institute the Republicans new strategy to make voters worship the wealthy and believe they should let the person selling an item dictate the encomy rather than the people buying. Mix that with a massive uptick in the war on minorities with the crack and aids epidemic and the continued white flight and you have the first fully realized version of the GOP agenda.
 
Ogodei

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The current era starts with Reagan. Nixon laid the groundwork with the Southern Strategy, but Nixon's vision was largely to preserve the New Deal order: he wanted the welfare state but a welfare state rigged to benefit white people. Reagan is the one who shifted in the anti-poor components and created conservatism as we know it today. Trump's the one who's slowly shifting it away from that (as much of the basis of Trumpism is about bringing back that welfare-but-just-for-white-people concept).
 
Kill3r7

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Reagan. He ran against Nixon in '68 under the same message. Reagan represented the future of the GOP and their path to victory.
 
ahoyhoy

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PrimeBeef said:
Regan. But the shittiness of the current GOP goes back to Nixon.
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This.

Nixon taught the GOP how the game should be played but his policies (domestic policies AR least) were not nearly as destructive as Reagan's.

Each succeeding GOP shit heel (Gingrich, W., Paul, McConnell, Orangefuck) has introduced more layers of fuckery.
 
Tom Nook Says...

Tom Nook Says...

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Kthulhu said:
It starts with Goldwater. He was the first to really push back against the civil rights movement.
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I think this is right. Goldwater had supported Civil Rights legislation in the past, but when the Civil Rights Act of 1964 came along he chose to oppose it for seemingly opportunistic reasons. He saw a chance to pry white southern democrats away from the party and went for it. He didn't exactly buy what he was selling, so to speak. Today, the GOP is full of people who are not even aware why their views are racist. The party's been intellectually regressing for decades, reducing itself further and further to a vague platform of intensely anti-immigrant sentiment, abject opposition to civil rights issues, and a feeling that angering political opponents is an admirable goal in and of itself.
 
Green Yoshi

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Bill Clinton wrote in his autobiography that Nixon was a liberal compared to the Republicans he had to deal with in the 90s (f.e. Newt Gingrich).
 

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Kill3r7 said:
Republicans are all about state's rights which is the opposite of what the federalists stood for.
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Right. I'm thinking more about the promotion of business interests and consolidation of power in elites. It's always worthwhile to note that modern conservatives support state's rights and limited government until they infringe on either.

EDIT: How could I have forgotten the Alien and Sedition Acts?
 
MetroidPrimeRib

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Goldwater, then Nixon, then Reagan. All are equally important and sequential in very important way and it's a really, really long story

But it definitely started in the 60s with the southern strategy and racist dixiecrat flipping and that was all Nixon capitalizing on Goldwater
 
Kill3r7

Kill3r7

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quickly said:
Right. I'm thinking more about the promotion of business interests and consolidation of power in elites. It's always worthwhile to note that modern conservatives support state's rights and limited government until they infringe on either.

EDIT: How could I have forgotten the Alien and Sedition Acts?
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At the start it was all elites. The rest of it was mostly lip service. They were all landowners.
 
PositivePolitique

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Wasn't the Affordable Care Act based off ideas from Nixon? Or something like that, I can't remember the exact details. That alone would make me say Reagan shifted the country heavily to the right.

Since Bernie in 2016, and the likes of AOC, America has been shifting the Overton window back toward the centre. The democrats need to actually be economic left and the republicans economic right.
 
Brinbe

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Goldwater, 1964

The GOP died with Eisenhower. Once LBJ signed the Civil Rights Act that set off the political readjustment and Southern Strategy that lives to this day.
 
HadesHotgun

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quickly said:
It probably traces back to the Federalist Party, whose prominent members included Adams and Hamilton.
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Absolutely not. The Federalists were pragmatic and supported a functioning government.

The Democrats under Jefferson were the forerunners of the Democrats of the civil war and the Republicans of today.

An idealogical devotion to White supremacy was absolutely the major defining feature of Jeffersonian politics and it is the direct predecessor to today's Republicans.
 
Trufflesguy Law

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Reagan starts the modern-era. Like the GOP still has their personality cult around Reagan, and they still tout the whole idea of restoring a lost American glory, American exceptionalism, deregulation, and they still echo Reagan-era perspectives on civil rights, and so on. Like Reagan is such a fundamental part of the GOP's DNA at this point.

But that being said, you cannot discount the contributions of people like Nixon, Thurmond, and Goldwater. Cause like other people in the thread have said they laid the groundwork. The 'law and order' policies and candidates like Nixon and Thurmond were fundamental to the GOP's vilification of minorities, and marked a shift towards more subtle (but still powerful) forms of racism. As much as Reagan amped it up, The War on Drugs is a Nixon product, and it's an extension of those 'law and order' policies. They couldn't explicitly talk about locking up black and latin@ people, but they could certainly talk about 'being tough on crime' and 'locking up drug dealers/rapists/murderers'. Goldwater also paves the way for this with his 'states rights' talk, which not only became a dog-whistle in American conservatism for legislation that marginalizes minority groups, but also revealed the Southern Strategy, which was codified by Nixon and endures today (though it's starting to shift). If Reagan is the father of modern American conservatism, Nixon, Thurmond, and Goldwater are the grandfathers.
 
julian

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I'm not sure I'd say either represents the GOP as they behave these days. As bad as Nixon was, he actually believed in the federal government and its ability to do....well, anything.
 
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