The New Right and the Transformation of Modern Conservatism
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The New Right and the Transformation of Modern Conservatism
The New Right emerged during the second half of the twentieth century as a major force that reshaped conservative politics in the United States and the United Kingdom. Drawing upon free-market economics, anti-communism, traditional social values, religious activism, and new forms of political organization, the movement transformed conservative parties from relatively moderate coalitions into highly organized ideological movements. The literature collected on this page examines both sympathetic and critical interpretations of the New Right, its historical development, its intellectual foundations, and its continuing influence on modern politics.
Historical Origins
The collected scholarship traces the New Right to postwar conservative reactions against the New Deal, expanding federal government, Keynesian economics, organized labor, and the cultural changes of the 1960s. Barry Goldwater's presidential campaign, William F. Buckley's intellectual leadership, and conservative grassroots activism laid much of the organizational groundwork that later produced the Reagan Revolution.
The material also examines the growth of suburban conservatism, Sunbelt politics, anti-tax movements, southern realignment, and grassroots mobilization that gradually shifted the Republican Party toward a more ideologically conservative identity.
Intellectual Foundations
A major theme throughout the literature is the development of conservative intellectual institutions.
Topics include:
- Traditional conservatism
- Fusionism
- Libertarian economics
- Anti-communism
- Neoliberal economic theory
- Think tanks
- Conservative publishing
- University-based intellectual networks
- Policy organizations
Numerous sources discuss the influence of organizations such as the Heritage Foundation, the Intercollegiate Studies Institute, Young Americans for Freedom, and the Mont Pelerin Society in shaping conservative political ideas and translating them into public policy.
Reagan, Thatcher, and the Conservative Revolution
The New Right reached political power during the administrations of Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher.
The collected material explores:
- Tax reduction
- Deregulation
- Privatization
- Monetarism
- Supply-side economics
- Anti-union policies
- Welfare reform
- National defense expansion
- Limited government
- Free-market reforms
Several works evaluate both the successes and criticisms of Reaganomics and Thatcherism, while others examine how these governments permanently altered political debate concerning the role of the state, markets, taxation, and public spending.
Race, Religion, and Electoral Realignment
A significant portion of the literature focuses on demographic and electoral change.
Major topics include:
- Southern realignment
- Suburban politics
- White flight
- Property tax revolts
- Proposition 13
- Race and conservatism
- Law and order politics
- Welfare debates
- The Southern Strategy
Many historians also examine the emergence of the Religious Right, evangelical political mobilization, the Moral Majority, family values campaigns, opposition to the Equal Rights Amendment, abortion politics, and the increasing importance of religion within Republican electoral coalitions.
Institutions and Political Organization
Unlike earlier conservative movements, the New Right invested heavily in long-term institutions.
The sources describe the growth of:
- Think tanks
- Conservative foundations
- Direct-mail fundraising
- Conservative media
- Legal organizations
- Judicial networks
- Grassroots campaign organizations
- Advocacy groups
- Policy development organizations
These institutions helped sustain conservative influence beyond individual elections and played a major role in candidate recruitment, judicial appointments, legislative strategy, fundraising, and media communication.
Neoconservatism and Foreign Policy
The literature also examines the development of neoconservatism and its relationship to Cold War politics.
Recurring subjects include:
- Anti-communism
- The Reagan Doctrine
- Military expansion
- National security
- Democracy promotion
- International intervention
- Conservative foreign policy
Several works distinguish traditional conservatism from neoconservatism while exploring areas where the two movements cooperated politically.
Historiography and Scholarly Debate
Many of the collected works focus not only on historical events but also on changing scholarly interpretations.
Historians debate:
- Whether the New Right represented continuity or a break from earlier conservatism.
- The relative importance of grassroots activists versus elite institutions.
- The influence of race, religion, economics, and culture.
- The relationship between conservatism, populism, and the contemporary radical right.
- The connections between Reagan-era conservatism and modern political movements.
Recent scholarship increasingly places the New Right within broader international developments involving neoliberalism, globalization, populism, and democratic change.
Continuing Legacy
The sources emphasize that the New Right continues to influence political institutions, public policy, conservative parties, judicial philosophy, electoral strategy, and political discourse.
Its impact extends beyond the Reagan and Thatcher years through:
- Conservative policy institutes
- Republican Party development
- Judicial appointments
- Tax policy
- Religious activism
- Conservative media
- Populist movements
- Ongoing debates over the size and role of government
Conclusion
Taken together, the collected scholarship presents the New Right as one of the most influential political movements of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. While historians disagree about many aspects of its origins, ideology, and consequences, there is broad agreement that the movement fundamentally transformed conservative politics through its combination of intellectual organization, electoral strategy, policy development, grassroots activism, and institutional permanence. The bibliography also demonstrates the diversity of interpretations, ranging from supportive accounts written within conservative institutions to critical analyses produced by historians, political scientists, economists, and social theorists.
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Historiography and the Continuing Legacy of the New Right
Was the Trump Phenomenon a Historical Accident? Reinterpreting the History of the American Right
| Marc-Olivier Bherer | Le Monde | 2025
Reviews historical arguments that Trumpism developed from longstanding alliances between mainstream conservatives and radical right-wing movements rather than appearing as an isolated political accident.
The Crisis of American Conservatism
| Meg Jacobs | Modern American History | 2025
Examines recent scholarship on American conservatism and the tensions between traditional conservatism, movement politics, populism, and the radical right.
The New Right and Its Legacy for British Conservatism
| Ben Williams | Journal of Political Ideologies | 2024
Analyzes how neoliberal economics, social conservatism, Thatcherism, and opposition to the postwar consensus transformed British Conservative politics.
Understanding the Leading Thinkers of the New American Right
| Jacob Heilbrunn | History News Network | 2023
Explores intellectual efforts to replace Reagan-era fusionism with nationalism, religious integralism, economic populism, and a stronger conception of state power.
The New Conservatism at Home
| Michael J. Thompson | New York University Press | 2023
Discusses how the New Right moved American conservatism toward aggressive opposition to liberal government, social reform, and the twentieth-century welfare state.
The New Right's Legacy in Broader Context
| Ben Williams | Ideology, Theory, Practice | 2022
Places Thatcherism and Reaganism within the international breakdown of the postwar economic consensus and the rise of market-centered public policy.
The Radical Right, Realism, and the Politics of Conservatism in Postwar International Thought
| Jean-François Drolet | Review of International Studies | 2021
Recovers radical conservative ideas that were frequently excluded from conventional histories of postwar international relations and conservative political thought.
Movement Conservatism, Neoconservatism, and the New Right
| Bryan M. Santin | Cambridge University Press | 2021
Explains how movement conservatives and neoconservatives challenged universities, cultural liberalism, and the political influence of the New Left.
The Long New Right
| Sidney Tarrow | Cambridge University Press | 2020
Situates the New Right within the longer history of social movements, partisan realignment, political organizing, and changes in the American party system.
Reaganland Is the Riveting Conclusion to a Story That Still Isn't Over
| Walter G. Moss | History News Network | 2020
Reviews the coalition of evangelical Christians, tax revolters, neoconservatives, business interests, and political organizers that carried Ronald Reagan to power.
How the Right Went Far-Right
| Geoffrey Kabaservice | The New York Review of Books | 2020
Considers how Republican conservatism evolved from an ideologically diverse movement into one increasingly shaped by polarization, populism, and hostility toward institutional restraints.
The New Right: A Journey to the Fringe of American Politics
| John Ganz | The Guardian | 2019
Reviews attempts to define the online and populist New Right while comparing it with older conservative movements and ideological traditions.
The Transformation of the Republican Party
| Sam Rosenfeld | Annual Review of Political Science | 2018
Surveys the ideological nationalization and organizational transformation of the Republican Party during the rise of modern movement conservatism.
The Conservative Label Is a Misnomer
| Lawrence S. Wittner | History News Network | 2018
Argues that many modern conservative programs seek radical changes to established institutions rather than the preservation normally associated with conservatism.
The Ever-Expanding Historiography of the U.S. New Right
| Whitney Strub | Journal of Social History | 2008
Reviews scholarship on conservative activists, suburban politics, gender, sexuality, race, religion, and grassroots organization in the rise of the American New Right.
Intellectual Foundations and Conservative Institutions
How the Heritage Foundation Turned Conservative Ideas into Government Policy
| Kim Phillips-Fein | The Washington Post | 2018
Explains how conservative think tanks developed detailed policy plans that could be rapidly implemented when Republican administrations entered office.
Mandate for Leadership and the Reagan Revolution
| Edwin J. Feulner | The Heritage Foundation | 2017
Describes the influence of Heritage's policy recommendations on staffing, deregulation, taxation, defense, and administrative priorities during the Reagan administration.
How Think Tanks Became Engines of Conservative Power
| James McEnteer | Smithsonian Magazine | 2017
Describes the growth of policy institutes that supplied conservative politicians with research, legislative proposals, media arguments, and trained personnel.
The Conservative Intellectual Movement in America: Then and Now
| George H. Nash | Intercollegiate Studies Institute | 2016
Reflects on the coalition of traditionalists, libertarians, anti-communists, and neoconservatives that established the intellectual foundation of postwar conservatism.
The Intellectual Origins of the Reagan Revolution
| Lee Edwards | The Heritage Foundation | 2013
Presents a conservative account of the thinkers, publishers, organizations, and activists who prepared the ideological foundation for Reagan's presidency.
Hayek, Friedman, and the Illusions of Conservative Economics
| Robert Kuttner | Dissent | 2011
Critiques the free-market theories that became central to New Right opposition to regulation, organized labor, progressive taxation, and public ownership.
Frank Meyer and Conservative Fusionism
| Kevin J. Smant | First Principles | 2011
Examines Frank Meyer's effort to unite individual freedom with traditional virtue and its importance to the emerging conservative movement.
The Sharon Statement and the Birth of Young Americans for Freedom
| Young America's Foundation | Young America's Foundation | 2010
Presents the founding principles of a major conservative youth organization combining limited government, free enterprise, constitutionalism, and opposition to communism.
The Road from Mont Pèlerin
| Philip Mirowski and Dieter Plehwe | Harvard University Press | 2009
Presents research on the economists, foundations, journalists, and policy organizations that transformed neoliberalism from a marginal theory into a governing project.
The Mont Pelerin Society and the Rise of Neoliberalism
| Philip Mirowski and Dieter Plehwe | Modern Intellectual History | 2009
Examines the international intellectual network that promoted market liberalism and influenced the economic component of the New Right.
The Invention of the Conservative Think Tank
| Jason Stahl | American Historical Review | 2007
Explores the political development of conservative policy organizations and their challenge to universities, government experts, and liberal policy institutions.
Fusionism and the Conservative Coalition
| George W. Carey | Intercollegiate Studies Institute | 2005
Discusses attempts to reconcile libertarian economics, traditional moral authority, constitutionalism, and anti-communism within a unified conservative philosophy.
The Heritage Foundation and the Conservative Movement
| Lee Edwards | The Heritage Foundation | 1997
Recounts the establishment of the Heritage Foundation and its role in connecting conservative research directly to legislators and executive-branch officials.
The Right and the Good: Distributive Justice and the New Right
| Desmond S. King | Political Studies | 1987
Examines the moral assumptions behind New Right arguments about markets, welfare, individual responsibility, inequality, and distributive justice.
Goldwater, Buckley, and the First New Right
William F. Buckley and the Politics of Ideas
| Alvin S. Felzenberg | Hoover Institution | 2017
Discusses Buckley's influence through National Review, television debates, political organizing, and support for conservative candidates.
Rick Perlstein Says Trump Proved He and Other Historians Were Right About Goldwater
| Rick Perlstein | History News Network | 2017
Argues that Goldwater's defeat energized rather than destroyed the conservative movement by encouraging activists to build durable institutions and organizing networks.
How William F. Buckley Put Conservatism on the Map
| Lee Edwards | National Review | 2015
Provides a sympathetic history of Buckley's contributions to conservative publishing, movement organization, and Republican politics.
The Man Who Made Conservatism Respectable
| Geoffrey Kabaservice | Politico Magazine | 2014
Describes Goldwater's role in turning conservative opposition to the New Deal and liberal Republicanism into a national political movement.
Barry Goldwater and the Remaking of the American Political Landscape
| Rick Perlstein | Smithsonian Magazine | 2014
Explains why Goldwater's failed presidential campaign became a formative event in the ideological transformation of the Republican Party.
The Conservative Sixties
| David Farber | American Historical Review | 2011
Reviews scholarship showing that the 1960s produced a powerful conservative mobilization alongside the more familiar New Left and counterculture.
Young Americans for Freedom and the Conservative Movement
| John A. Andrew III | Pacific Historical Review | 2009
Explores the student activists who translated conservative intellectual ideas into campus organizing, campaign work, and national political influence.
The Rise of the Conservative Legal Movement
| Steven M. Teles | American Historical Review | 2009
Reviews the development of legal organizations that challenged liberal jurisprudence and built an alternative conservative network of lawyers, judges, and scholars.
William F. Buckley Jr. and the Making of Modern Conservatism
| Hendrik Hertzberg | The New Yorker | 2008
Assesses Buckley's role in creating a respectable public identity for conservatism while defining the boundaries of the movement.
Thomas Sugrue: Reflections on Barry Goldwater's Conservative Legacy
| Thomas J. Sugrue | History News Network | 2008
Examines Goldwater's ideological influence, racial politics, constitutional arguments, and importance to the development of modern Republican conservatism.
Barry Goldwater and the Southern Strategy
| Elizabeth Tandy Shermer | Journal of Arizona History | 2008
Examines the interaction between Goldwater conservatism, western politics, civil-rights opposition, and Republican gains among white southern voters.
The Goldwater Myth
| Andrew E. Busch | History News Network | 2006
Challenges the image of Goldwater as a purely libertarian conservative and highlights his contribution to the Republican Party's social conservatism.
Conservatism and the Republican Party in the 1960s
| Gregory L. Schneider | Presidential Studies Quarterly | 2003
Traces the growing organizational and ideological strength of conservatives within the Republican Party after Goldwater's campaign.
The Other Side of the Sixties
| John A. Andrew III | The Journal of American History | 1998
Examines conservative activism during the 1960s and its importance to the later success of the New Right.
National Review and the Conservative Intellectual Movement
| Jeffrey Hart | The Sewanee Review | 1995
Examines the magazine's role in combining traditionalism, anti-communism, economic liberalism, and electoral activism.
Race, the South, Suburbs, and Electoral Realignment
The Long Southern Strategy
| Angie Maxwell and Todd Shields | Oxford University Press | 2019
Examines how racial resentment, religious conservatism, and antifeminism contributed to the Republican Party's long-term growth among white southern voters.
The Grassroots Origins of the New Right
| Lisa McGirr | Organization of American Historians | 2018
Summarizes research demonstrating that modern conservatism was constructed by local activists rather than created solely by national politicians and wealthy donors.
Proposition 13 and the Conservative Tax Revolt
| Jack Hitt | Smithsonian Magazine | 2018
Explains how California's Proposition 13 energized anti-tax politics and provided a model for conservative campaigns across the United States.
How Orange County Became the Center of the Conservative Movement
| Lisa McGirr | Smithsonian Magazine | 2017
Describes the suburban communities, defense industries, churches, and activist networks that made southern California a laboratory for New Right politics.
The Southern Strategy, Then and Now
| Joseph Crespino | The New York Times | 2012
Explains how Republican politicians used racial, cultural, and constitutional themes to attract white voters displaced from the Democratic coalition.
Race and the Transformation of the Republican Party
| Joseph Crespino | American Historical Review | 2009
Reviews historical research on civil rights, racial backlash, partisan realignment, and the growth of modern conservatism.
From the New Deal to the New Right: Race and the Southern Origins of Modern Conservatism
| Shane Hamilton | Perspectives on Politics | 2009
Reviews Joseph Lowndes's argument that modern conservatism developed through changing racial appeals, southern politics, and opposition to federal civil-rights intervention.
The Tax Revolt and the Transformation of American Politics
| Isaac William Martin | American Historical Review | 2008
Examines grassroots opposition to property taxation and its contribution to limited-government politics and the national New Right.
White Flight and the New Right
| Kevin M. Kruse | American Historical Review | 2007
Connects resistance to integration and urban liberalism with suburbanization, privatization, and a conservative language of individual rights.
Massive Resistance and the Conservative Movement
| Joseph Crespino | Journal of Southern History | 2007
Examines how organized resistance to school desegregation shaped conservative arguments concerning states' rights, local control, and federal power.
The Silent Majority and the Rise of Conservative Populism
| Matthew D. Lassiter | American Historical Review | 2006
Explores appeals to supposedly ordinary, law-abiding, middle-class citizens against protesters, welfare recipients, urban unrest, and liberal elites.
The Color of Taxation and the Conservative Ascendancy
| Daniel Martinez HoSang | Pacific Historical Review | 2005
Analyzes how racialized perceptions of public spending and taxation helped build support for conservative fiscal policies.
The Rise of the Republican South
| Earl Black and Merle Black | Harvard University Press | 2002
Traces the long electoral movement of white southern voters from the Democratic Party into the Republican conservative coalition.
The Politics of Homeownership and the Rise of the New Right
| Robert O. Self | American Historical Review | 2002
Connects suburban property interests and resistance to taxation, integration, and metropolitan government with the growth of conservative politics.
Suburban Warriors and the Origins of the New American Right
| Lisa McGirr | Princeton University Press | 2001
Shows how middle-class suburban activists in California built conservative organizations around anti-communism, free enterprise, Christianity, and opposition to liberal government.
Reagan, Economic Transformation, and the Conservative State
Reaganland Sheds New Light on a Familiar History
| Walter G. Moss | History News Network | 2021
Reviews the political crisis of the late 1970s and the organized conservative coalition that enabled Reagan's 1980 victory.
PATCO and the Transformation of Labor Relations
| Joseph A. McCartin | Georgetown University | 2021
Explains how Reagan's dismissal of striking air-traffic controllers symbolized and accelerated the declining bargaining power of organized labor.
Reagan's Tax Revolution
| Tax Policy Center | Urban Institute and Brookings Institution | 2020
Explains the major tax reductions and later adjustments enacted during Reagan's presidency and their effects on federal revenue.
The Reagan Revolution
| Lou Cannon | Miller Center, University of Virginia | 2016
Evaluates Reagan's impact on taxation, regulation, defense, the judiciary, public attitudes toward government, and the direction of the Republican Party.
What Reagan Learned from FDR
| H. W. Brands | History News Network | 2015
Explains how Reagan adopted Franklin Roosevelt's ability to communicate an ideological realignment while working to reverse the political legacy of the New Deal.
Why the Tea Party Forgives Reagan's Sins
| David Davenport and Gordon Lloyd | Time | 2014
Examines why later conservatives continued to idealize Reagan despite his tax increases, budget deficits, compromises, and expansion of some government programs.
Reaganomics and the Transformation of Economic Policy
| Federal Reserve History | Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis | 2013
Reviews the economic conditions and policy changes associated with deregulation, monetarism, tax reductions, and the battle against inflation.
Deregulation and the Rise of Market Conservatism
| Martha Derthick and Paul J. Quirk | American Historical Review | 2010
Explores how deregulation challenged the administrative state and altered relations among government agencies, corporations, consumers, and organized labor.
Ronald Reagan: A Uniter, Not a Decider
| Jacob Heilbrunn | History News Network | 2007
Discusses Reagan's ability to hold together libertarians, religious conservatives, anti-communists, neoconservatives, and business interests.
The Conservative War on Labor
| Lawrence Mishel and Matthew Walters | Economic Policy Institute | 2003
Describes policies and institutional changes that weakened union power during and after the New Right's rise to national influence.
The Political Origins of Supply-Side Economics
| Brian Domitrovic | American Historical Review | 2000
Examines the intellectual and political campaign that made tax cuts and supply-side theory central elements of Republican economic policy.
The Turn of the Cycle
| John Kenneth Galbraith | The New Yorker | 1992
Reflects critically on the Reagan-Thatcher political era, its laissez-faire economic promises, and its long-term effects on Western politics.
The New Right and the Welfare State
| Desmond S. King | Comparative Studies in Society and History | 1988
Analyzes New Right ideology concerning welfare, citizenship, markets, social obligation, and the proper boundaries of state responsibility.
The Economic Consequences of the Reagan Administration
| Benjamin M. Friedman | American Economic Review | 1988
Assesses the effects of Reagan-era fiscal and monetary policies on deficits, investment, inequality, growth, and the distribution of economic resources.
Response to King on New Right Ideology
| Kenneth R. Hoover | Comparative Studies in Society and History | 1988
Questions whether the term New Right describes a coherent ideology or an unstable coalition of market liberals, traditionalists, and political conservatives.
Thatcherism and the British New Right
Modern Conservatism and the New Right
| Jason Xidias | Kwantlen Polytechnic University Pressbooks | 2022
Introduces the combination of neoliberal economics and traditional social authority associated with Thatcher, Reagan, Hayek, and the modern New Right.
Margaret Thatcher and the Transformation of Britain
| Encyclopaedia Britannica Editors | Encyclopaedia Britannica | 2022
Surveys Thatcher's privatization program, confrontation with labor unions, market reforms, foreign policy, and reshaping of the Conservative Party.
How the Cold War Led the CIA to Promote Human-Capital Theory
| Daniel Immerwahr | Aeon | 2017
Connects Cold War social science and human-capital theory with the later individualizing and market-oriented policies of Reaganism and Thatcherism.
How Economic Boom Times in the West Came to an End
Places Reagan and Thatcher's market reforms in the context of the productivity slowdown and economic turmoil that ended the postwar boom.
Privatization Under Margaret Thatcher
| Centre for Public Impact | Centre for Public Impact | 2016
Reviews the sale of state-owned industries and its consequences for government revenue, ownership, competition, investment, and consumer services.
The Miners' Strike and the Transformation of Britain
Examines the decisive confrontation between the Thatcher government and organized mineworkers during the restructuring of the British economy.
The Legacy of Margaret Thatcher
| Brian Wheeler | BBC News | 2013
Reviews competing assessments of Thatcher's influence on British industry, inequality, homeownership, labor relations, and political culture.
The Poll Tax and the Fall of Margaret Thatcher
| Brian Wheeler | BBC News | 2010
Explains how an unpopular local-tax reform triggered mass opposition, Conservative division, and the end of Thatcher's premiership.
Thatcherism: An Historical Perspective
| Ewen H. H. Green | Transactions of the Royal Historical Society | 1999
Places Thatcherism within the longer development of British Conservatism and debates whether it represented continuity, adaptation, or ideological revolution.
The Rise and Fall of the Postwar Consensus
| Dennis Kavanagh and Peter Morris | Contemporary British History | 1989
Explains how economic crisis, inflation, industrial conflict, and ideological criticism undermined Britain's postwar political settlement.
The New Right and Education
| John Quicke | British Journal of Educational Studies | 1988
Examines how market competition, parental choice, traditional standards, testing, and centralized control were combined in New Right education policy.
Thatcherism and the Politics of Hegemony
| Stuart Hall | Marxism Today | 1988
Presents an influential left-wing interpretation of Thatcherism as a political project that reshaped popular attitudes as well as government policy.
The New Right, Social Policy, and Citizenship
| Ruth Levitas | Critical Social Policy | 1986
Critiques the New Right's emphasis on market discipline, dependency, family responsibility, and reduced social entitlements.
The Meaning of Thatcherism
| Ralph Miliband | London Review of Books | 1983
Critiques the political and economic assumptions behind Thatcherism and its attack on trade unions, public ownership, and social-democratic institutions.
The Great Moving Right Show
| Stuart Hall | Marxism Today | 1979
Offers an early analysis of Thatcherism as authoritarian populism combining free-market economics, nationalism, law-and-order politics, and moral traditionalism.
Religion, Family, Gender, and the Culture Wars
How the Fight Against the ERA Reshaped American Politics
| Marjorie J. Spruill | The Washington Post | 2019
Shows how the ERA controversy intensified partisan divisions over feminism, family roles, sexuality, and the authority of the federal government.
The Religious Right and the Republican Party
| Daniel K. Williams | Oxford Research Group | 2018
Explains how evangelical activists became central participants in Republican elections, conservative policy organizations, and national culture-war campaigns.
The Equal Rights Amendment and the Rise of the New Right
| Marjorie J. Spruill | Smithsonian Magazine | 2017
Explains how opposition to the ERA united religious groups, homemakers, conservative organizations, and Republican politicians.
The End of White Christian America
| Robert P. Jones and E. J. Dionne Jr. | Brookings Institution | 2016
Discusses the relationship between white Protestant decline, southern partisan realignment, racial reaction, and the political mobilization of the Religious Right.
Jerry Falwell and the Moral Majority
| American Experience | PBS | 2016
Describes how Falwell helped organize evangelical voters around abortion, education, sexuality, anticommunism, and support for Ronald Reagan.
How Evangelicals Became Republicans
| Molly Worthen | The Atlantic | 2015
Examines the theological, cultural, racial, and organizational changes that brought many white evangelicals into the conservative Republican coalition.
The Real Origins of the Religious Right
| Randall Balmer | Politico Magazine | 2014
Argues that resistance to federal action against racially discriminatory private schools helped initiate evangelical political mobilization before abortion became its defining issue.
Family Values and the Rise of Modern Conservatism
| Robert O. Self | American Historical Review | 2012
Connects conservative arguments about gender roles and family authority to broader opposition to feminism, gay rights, and welfare-state liberalism.
Abortion and the Transformation of the Republican Party
| Daniel K. Williams | American Historical Review | 2011
Reviews the history of abortion politics and explains how anti-abortion activism became integrated into the Republican conservative coalition.
The Rise of the Religious Right
| Daniel K. Williams | Origins: Current Events in Historical Perspective | 2010
Traces the development of conservative evangelical politics from anti-communism and education controversies to abortion, family policy, and Republican activism.
The Moral Majority and the Transformation of American Politics
| Daniel K. Williams | American Historical Review | 2006
Reviews scholarship on the institutions and political strategies that brought conservative Protestants into national partisan politics.
Phyllis Schlafly and Grassroots Conservatism
| Donald T. Critchlow | American Historical Review | 2006
Examines Schlafly's organization of conservative women against the Equal Rights Amendment and her contribution to modern Republican activism.
The Christian Right and Republican State-Building
| Kimberly H. Conger and John C. Green | Studies in American Political Development | 2002
Examines how religious conservatives developed organizations, voter lists, lobbying operations, and political expertise within the Republican Party.
The Culture Wars and the New Right
| James Davison Hunter | American Historical Review | 1993
Analyzes conflicts over abortion, sexuality, education, family life, religion, and national identity that became central to conservative mobilization.
The New Right and the Politics of Sexuality
| Jeffrey Escoffier | Socialist Review | 1985
Examines how opposition to gay rights, feminism, abortion, and sexual liberalization helped unify religious and secular conservative constituencies.
Neoconservatism, Foreign Policy, and Anti-Communism
The Reagan Doctrine
| Ronald Reagan Presidential Library | National Archives | 2018
Describes the policy of supporting anti-communist movements and governments as part of the New Right's intensified global confrontation with the Soviet Union.
Neoconservatism and American Foreign Policy
| Justin Vaïsse | Brookings Institution | 2010
Traces neoconservatism from disillusioned liberal intellectuals to its alliance with Reagan and its growing emphasis on anti-communist foreign policy.
The Rise and Fall of the Neoconservatives
| Joshua Muravchik | The Atlantic | 2009
Offers a sympathetic account of neoconservatism's emergence from liberal anti-communism and its influence on Republican foreign policy.
The Neoconservative Moment
| Francis Fukuyama | The National Interest | 2004
Critiques the assumptions about American power, democratization, military intervention, and global leadership associated with neoconservative foreign policy.
The Neoconservative Counterrevolution
| John Judis | Foreign Affairs | 2004
Examines the origins, evolution, and foreign-policy ambitions of neoconservative intellectuals and policymakers.
The Neoconservative Persuasion
| Irving Kristol | The Weekly Standard | 2003
Provides an influential insider's description of neoconservatism as a political tendency rather than a rigid ideological doctrine.
Anti-Communism and the Conservative Movement
| Richard Gid Powers | American Historical Review | 1999
Reviews the central role that opposition to communism played in uniting libertarians, traditionalists, religious conservatives, and former liberals.
The New Right and the Cold War
| Andrew Gamble | International Affairs | 1987
Examines how nationalism, military strength, anti-communism, and market economics shaped the New Right's international outlook.
The Committee on the Present Danger and the New Right
| Jerry W. Sanders | Political Science Quarterly | 1983
Examines the coalition of defense intellectuals and politicians that challenged détente and pressed for increased military spending.
Jeane Kirkpatrick and Dictatorships and Double Standards
| Jeane J. Kirkpatrick | Commentary | 1979
Presents the influential argument that American foreign policy should distinguish between authoritarian allies and revolutionary totalitarian regimes.
Media, Organization, and the Institutionalization of Conservatism
How Rush Limbaugh Changed American Politics
| Brian Rosenwald | Politico Magazine | 2021
Describes Limbaugh's role in transforming conservative media, mobilizing Republican voters, and enforcing ideological loyalty among politicians.
The Republican Revolution of 1994
| Office of the Historian | U.S. House of Representatives | 2019
Summarizes the election that gave Republicans control of the House and demonstrated the continuing institutional strength of post-Reagan conservatism.
The Contract with America and the New Right's Legacy
| Marc J. Hetherington and Thomas J. Rudolph | Brookings Institution Press | 2018
Connects the 1994 Republican victory to conservative distrust of government and the longer political legacy of the Reagan Revolution.
How Conservatives Remade the Courts
| David Montgomery | Politico Magazine | 2018
Describes the long-term organizational campaign to develop conservative lawyers, judges, legal theories, and appointment strategies.
Conservative Political Action Conference and Movement Politics
| Laurence Jurdem | Smithsonian Magazine | 2018
Traces CPAC's development as a meeting place for activists, candidates, donors, intellectuals, and organizations from across the conservative coalition.
The Conservative Legal Movement and the Federalist Society
| Jeffrey Toobin | The New Yorker | 2017
Examines the organizations and professional networks that made conservative legal ideas increasingly influential in judicial appointments.
How Conservative Media Built a Movement
| Nicole Hemmer | Columbia Journalism Review | 2017
Explains how conservative radio, magazines, television, and advocacy organizations developed a self-reinforcing alternative to mainstream journalism.
The Rise of Conservative Media
| Nicole Hemmer | Origins: Current Events in Historical Perspective | 2016
Traces conservative broadcasting from early radio activists through talk radio and cable television.
Richard Viguerie and the Technology of the New Right
| National Museum of American History | Smithsonian Institution | 2016
Explains how computerized direct mail enabled conservative organizations to raise money, circulate messages, and identify supporters nationwide.
How Big Money Built the Conservative Movement
| Heather Cox Richardson | The Atlantic | 2016
Reviews the role of wealthy donors, private foundations, policy institutes, and advocacy networks in the growth of modern conservatism.
The Rise of Direct-Mail Conservatism
| Richard Viguerie | American Historical Review | 2014
Examines how mailing lists and targeted fundraising allowed New Right organizers to bypass traditional Republican institutions and build an independent activist base.
Talk Radio and the Transformation of American Conservatism
| Brian Rosenwald | American Historical Review | 2012
Reviews the political impact of conservative talk radio on Republican candidates, voters, policy debates, and party discipline.
The Institutionalization of the Conservative Movement
| Steven M. Teles | American Historical Review | 2011
Explains how conservatives built durable institutions in law, economics, media, academia, religion, and public policy rather than relying solely on elections.
The New Right and Conservative Philanthropy
| Alice O'Connor | American Historical Review | 2007
Explores how private foundations financed research institutes, university programs, advocacy organizations, and intellectual networks supporting market conservatism.
The Ringleader
| Elizabeth Kolbert | The New Yorker | 2005
Profiles Grover Norquist and the organizational network linking tax activists, business groups, gun-rights advocates, religious conservatives, and Republican officials.
Historical Interpretations and Political Development
APG Roundtable: Scholarly Perspectives on the American Right
| Kyle McGettigan et al. | Journal of American Studies | 2024
Surveys recent scholarship on the American right, including the deterioration of the Reagan coalition, Republican polarization, populism, and conservative institutional development.
The Crisis of Conservatism
| Joel D. Aberbach and Gillian Peele | Cambridge University Press | 2011
Examines the ideological, electoral, and organizational challenges confronting conservatism after the presidencies of Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush.
The Conservative Movement: Then and Now
| George H. Nash | Hoover Institution | 2009
Reviews the intellectual coalitions, political organizations, and internal disputes that shaped American conservatism after the Second World War.
The Conservative Century: From Reaction to Revolution
| Gregory L. Schneider | Rowman & Littlefield | 2009
Argues that twentieth-century American conservatism developed from opposition to progressive reform into an ambitious movement seeking extensive political transformation.
The Age of Reagan: The Conservative Counterrevolution, 1980–1989
| Steven F. Hayward | Crown Forum | 2009
Assesses Reagan’s attempts to reverse the New Deal order through taxation, deregulation, military expansion, judicial appointments, and conservative rhetoric.
Republicans: Reasserting Conservative Principles and Seeking a Majority
| Mark D. Brewer and Jeffrey M. Stonecash | Cambridge University Press | 2009
Traces the Republican effort to assemble business conservatives, suburban voters, white southerners, religious activists, and anticommunists into a national majority.
The Transformation of the Republican and Democratic Party Coalitions in the United States
| Gary Miller and Norman Schofield | Perspectives on Politics | 2008
Analyzes how social conservatism, business interests, racial realignment, and changing economic divisions transformed the two major American parties.
The Rise of Conservatism in America, 1945–2000
| Ronald Story and Bruce Laurie | Bedford/St. Martin’s | 2008
Presents primary sources and historical interpretations concerning the conservative movement’s rise from the postwar margins to national power.
The Conservative Ascendancy: How the Republican Right Rose to Power in Modern America
| Donald T. Critchlow | University Press of Kansas | 2007
Describes the politicians, donors, intellectuals, activists, and organizations that converted conservative ideas into electoral and governmental power.
American Conservatism: An Encyclopedia
| Bruce Frohnen, Jeremy Beer and Jeffrey O. Nelson | Intercollegiate Studies Institute | 2006
Provides historical and intellectual entries on the people, institutions, movements, and controversies that composed modern American conservatism.
The Right Nation: Conservative Power in America
| John Micklethwait and Adrian Wooldridge | Penguin Press | 2004
Explores the religious, economic, regional, and organizational foundations that made American conservatism unusually powerful compared with conservative movements elsewhere.
The Right Moment: Ronald Reagan’s First Victory and the Decisive Turning Point in American Politics
| Matthew Dallek | Oxford University Press | 2004
Examines Reagan’s 1966 California campaign and the combination of racial, cultural, economic, and law-and-order themes that anticipated the New Right.
Conservatism in America Since 1930
| Gregory L. Schneider | New York University Press | 2003
Collects documents illustrating the development of traditionalism, libertarianism, anticommunism, social conservatism, and New Right activism.
The Age of Reagan: The Fall of the Old Liberal Order, 1964–1980
| Steven F. Hayward | Crown Forum | 2001
Presents a conservative interpretation of the economic, cultural, and political crises that weakened the liberal order and prepared the way for Reagan.
The Republican Right Since 1945
| David W. Reinhard | University Press of Kentucky | 1983
Provides a history of conservative activists and politicians who challenged the moderate Republican establishment before the rise of Reagan.
Grassroots Mobilization and Movement Organization
Mothers of Conservatism: Women and the Postwar Right
| Michelle M. Nickerson | Princeton University Press | 2012
Shows how women organized reading groups, school campaigns, anticommunist networks, and Republican clubs that built the grassroots conservative movement.
Standing Athwart History: The Political Thought of William F. Buckley Jr.
| Lee Edwards | Intercollegiate Studies Institute | 2010
Examines Buckley’s contribution to conservative coalition-building, political journalism, anticommunism, and ideological boundary-setting.
Conservative Women and Grassroots Activism
| Michelle M. Nickerson | American Historical Review | 2005
Reviews research on conservative women whose community organizing, anticommunism, and defense of traditional family roles contributed to movement growth.
Suburbanization and the Making of the New American Right
| Lisa McGirr | Pacific Historical Review | 2001
Connects suburban growth, defense industries, evangelical churches, property ownership, and anticommunism to conservative activism in California.
Before the Storm: Barry Goldwater and the Unmaking of the American Consensus
| Rick Perlstein | Hill and Wang | 2001
Reconstructs the activists, direct-mail operations, ideological conflicts, and regional movements behind Goldwater’s 1964 campaign.
A Generation Divided: The New Left, the New Right, and the 1960s
| Rebecca E. Klatch | University of California Press | 1999
Compares activists of the New Left and New Right and explains how both movements rejected established institutions while pursuing opposing political visions.
Conservative Political Movements in the United States
| Jerome L. Himmelstein | Annual Review of Sociology | 1990
Surveys the social composition, ideas, institutions, and political strategies of postwar conservative movements.
Women of the New Right
| Rebecca E. Klatch | Signs | 1987
Studies the motivations and political identities of women active in libertarian, anticommunist, religious, and traditionalist conservative organizations.
The New Right at Grass Roots
| Gillian Peele | Palgrave Macmillan | 1984
Examines the local organizations, campaign networks, pressure groups, and fundraising methods that distinguished the New Right from traditional party conservatism.
The New Right and the 1980 Election
| Jerome L. Himmelstein and James A. McRae Jr. | Public Opinion Quarterly | 1984
Uses electoral data to investigate which voters moved toward Reagan and whether they represented a durable new conservative constituency.
The Reagan Coalition
| A. James Reichley | The Wilson Quarterly | 1982
Identifies the economic conservatives, national-security voters, southern whites, ethnic Catholics, and religious activists supporting Reagan.
The New Right Papers
| Robert W. Whitaker | The Heritage Foundation | 1982
Presents New Right arguments concerning taxation, government bureaucracy, anticommunism, education, family policy, and conservative political strategy.
The New Right and Its Leaders
| Alan Crawford | Political Science Quarterly | 1981
Profiles the organizers and advocacy groups that sought to replace establishment Republicanism with a more confrontational conservative politics.
The New Right and the Politics of Resentment
| Alan Crawford | Political Science Quarterly | 1980
Examines the grievances, cultural anxieties, and anti-establishment rhetoric that helped New Right organizers mobilize conservative voters.
The Emerging Republican Majority
| Kevin P. Phillips | Arlington House | 1969
Predicts a Republican realignment based on southern, suburban, western, ethnic, and working-class reactions against liberal Democratic politics.
Neoliberal Economics and the Conservative Policy Revolution
Market Privilege: The Place of Neoliberalism in American Political Development
| Timothy P. R. Weaver | Studies in American Political Development | 2021
Argues that market-oriented government reshaped urban policy, public services, citizenship, and political institutions beyond conventional accounts of deregulation.
The Triumph of Deficits: Supply-Side Economics, Institutional Constraints and the Political Articulation of Fiscal Crisis
| Daniel R. Alvord | The Sociological Quarterly | 2020
Examines how supply-side advocates reconciled tax reductions and large deficits with conservative demands for fiscal restraint.
The Quiet Failures of Early Neoliberalism: From Rational Expectations to Keynesianism in Reverse
| Jacqueline Best | Review of International Studies | 2020
Shows how the Reagan and Thatcher governments modified monetarist and supply-side theories when early attempts to apply them encountered political and economic difficulties.
Reaganomics: A Watershed Moment on the Road to Trumpism
| John Komlos | The Economists’ Voice | 2019
Critiques Reagan-era tax, labor, and deregulatory policies and connects their distributional consequences with later populist discontent.
Neo-Liberalism and Fiscal Conservatism
| Mark Blyth | Cambridge University Press | 2014
Explores tensions between tax cutting, market liberalization, monetary discipline, balanced budgets, and the practical politics of conservative government.
The Popular Origins of Neoliberalism in the Reagan Tax Cut of 1981
| Monica Prasad | Journal of Policy History | 2012
Explains how public hostility toward taxation and distinctive American fiscal institutions helped produce Reagan’s major income-tax reduction.
Neoliberalism and Morality in the Making of Thatcherite Social Policy
| Florence Sutcliffe-Braithwaite | The Historical Journal | 2012
Shows how Thatcherite policy combined market economics with moral arguments about independence, responsibility, family life, and welfare dependency.
Ideas and Economic Crises in Britain from Attlee to Blair
| Matthias Matthijs | Cambridge University Press | 2011
Explains how economic crises created opportunities for Thatcherites to challenge the postwar consensus and institutionalize market-oriented policies.
The Free Economy and the Strong State
| Andrew Gamble | Soundings | 2009
Explores the apparent contradiction between New Right support for limited economic government and its reliance on centralized political authority.
Capital Rules: The Construction of Global Finance
| Rawi Abdelal | Harvard University Press | 2007
Explains how policymakers and economists constructed international rules favoring capital mobility, financial liberalization, and market-centered governance.
A Brief History of Neoliberalism
| David Harvey | Oxford University Press | 2005
Presents a critical history of the international shift toward privatization, financialization, market discipline, and reduced labor power.
The Commanding Heights: The Battle for the World Economy
| Daniel Yergin and Joseph Stanislaw | PBS | 2002
Documents the global turn from state planning and Keynesian management toward privatization, deregulation, and market-oriented economic policies.
The Rise of the Market: Critical Essays on the Political Economy of Neo-Liberalism
| Philip G. Cerny | Verso | 1993
Analyzes the political institutions and economic ideas behind privatization, deregulation, fiscal restraint, and the weakening of social democracy.
Policy Paradigms, Social Learning, and the State
| Peter A. Hall | Comparative Politics | 1993
Uses Britain’s shift from Keynesianism to monetarism to demonstrate how fundamental changes in policy ideas produce political transformation.
The Political Power of Economic Ideas: Keynesianism Across Nations
| Peter A. Hall | Princeton University Press | 1989
Explains how economic paradigms shape public policy and provides context for the New Right’s rejection of Keynesianism.
Race, Crime, Welfare, and the Politics of Backlash
From the War on Poverty to the War on Crime
| Elizabeth Hinton | Harvard University Press | 2016
Shows how federal crime policies developed through both liberal and conservative administrations and contributed to mass incarceration.
The First Civil Right: How Liberals Built Prison America
| Naomi Murakawa | Oxford University Press | 2014
Argues that punitive criminal-justice institutions grew through bipartisan policies before becoming central to conservative law-and-order politics.
The Undeserving Poor: America’s Enduring Confrontation with Poverty
| Michael B. Katz | Oxford University Press | 2013
Traces the recurring distinction between deserving and undeserving recipients that informed conservative welfare reform.
Governing Through Crime
| Jonathan Simon | Oxford University Press | 2007
Explains how fear of crime transformed government, schools, workplaces, family policy, and political understandings of citizenship.
The Silent Majority: Suburban Politics in the Sunbelt South
| Matthew D. Lassiter | Princeton University Press | 2006
Shows how suburban white voters used race-neutral languages of property rights, schools, merit, and neighborhood autonomy to resist liberal reform.
White Flight: Atlanta and the Making of Modern Conservatism
| Kevin M. Kruse | Princeton University Press | 2005
Connects opposition to desegregation with privatization, suburban withdrawal, religious conservatism, tax resistance, and Republican politics.
Law and Order: Street Crime, Civil Unrest, and the Crisis of Liberalism in the 1960s
| Michael W. Flamm | Columbia University Press | 2005
Traces the development of law-and-order politics from local controversies into a central element of Nixonian and New Right electoral strategy.
The Politics of Law and Order: Street Crime and Public Policy
| Michael W. Flamm | American Historical Review | 2000
Reviews how crime, urban unrest, and public disorder became issues through which conservatives challenged liberal government.
Why Americans Hate Welfare
| Martin Gilens | University of Chicago Press | 1999
Demonstrates how racialized media images and beliefs about deservingness shaped public opposition to welfare programs.
The New Politics of the Welfare State
| Paul Pierson | World Politics | 1996
Explains why conservative governments often retrench social programs indirectly because established welfare states create powerful constituencies.
The Politics of Rage: George Wallace, the Origins of the New Conservatism, and the Transformation of American Politics
| Dan T. Carter | Louisiana State University Press | 1995
Demonstrates how Wallace’s racial populism, attacks on elites, and defense of local control influenced later conservative campaigning.
Dismantling the Welfare State? Reagan, Thatcher and the Politics of Retrenchment
| Paul Pierson | Cambridge University Press | 1994
Compares Reagan and Thatcher’s attempts to reduce social programs and identifies the political constraints limiting conservative retrenchment.
The Tragedy of American Compassion
| Marvin Olasky | Regnery Publishing | 1992
Argues that private and faith-based charity is more effective than government welfare and helped shape compassionate-conservative policy.
The New Politics of Poverty: The Nonworking Poor in America
| Lawrence M. Mead | Russell Sage Foundation | 1992
Advocates work requirements and behavioral obligations that became influential in conservative and centrist welfare reform.
Losing Ground: American Social Policy, 1950–1980
| Charles Murray | Basic Books | 1984
Presents an influential New Right argument that welfare programs weakened work incentives, family stability, and personal responsibility.
Religion and the Moral Politics of the New Right
The Battle for the Bible and the Transformation of American Evangelicalism
| David R. Swartz | Oxford University Press | 2016
Connects disputes over biblical authority with the institutional consolidation and political conservatism of American evangelicalism.
God’s Own Party: The Making of the Christian Right
| Daniel K. Williams | Oxford University Press | 2010
Traces evangelical conservative politics from opposition to the New Deal through anticommunism, family activism, and alliance with Reagan.
Christian Conservatives and State Republican Parties
| Kimberly H. Conger | Political Research Quarterly | 2009
Studies the influence of religious conservative activists within state Republican organizations and candidate-selection processes.
The Culture of Conservative Christian Litigation
| Daniel Bennett | American Historical Review | 2007
Examines how religious conservative organizations increasingly used litigation and constitutional claims to pursue cultural and political objectives.
Ronald Reagan and the Splintering of the Christian Right
| David John Marley | Journal of Church and State | 2006
Explains how disputes over strategy, leadership, and Reagan administration policies divided religious conservative organizations.
Into the Wilderness: Ronald Reagan, Bob Jones University, and the Political Education of the Christian Right
| Aaron Haberman | The Historian | 2005
Examines Reagan’s relationship with conservative evangelicals and the tensions produced by racial, educational, and religious controversies.
The Christian Right in American Politics: Marching to the Millennium
| John C. Green, Mark J. Rozell and Clyde Wilcox | Georgetown University Press | 2003
Assesses the Christian Right’s electoral influence, organizational strength, policy agenda, and relationship with Republican leaders.
With God on Our Side: The Rise of the Religious Right in America
| William Martin | PBS Frontline | 1996
Documents the preachers, strategists, institutions, and controversies that turned conservative Christianity into a major political force.
Roads to Dominion: Right-Wing Movements and Political Power in the United States
| Sara Diamond | Guilford Press | 1995
Examines the networks connecting evangelical activists, conservative foundations, political organizations, anticommunists, and economic libertarians.
The Political World of the Clergy
| Ted G. Jelen | Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion | 1993
Explores how clergy leadership, denominational identity, and theological beliefs contributed to conservative political mobilization.
The Christian Right in the Republican Party
| John C. Green, James L. Guth and Kevin Hill | Review of Politics | 1993
Examines whether Christian conservatives operated as an outside pressure group or became integrated into Republican Party institutions.
Spiritual Warfare: The Politics of the Christian Right
| Sara Diamond | South End Press | 1989
Investigates the ideology, fundraising, media systems, and political campaigns of conservative Christian organizations.
The Christian Right and the 1984 Presidential Election
| Stephen D. Johnson and Joseph B. Tamney | Review of Religious Research | 1985
Uses survey evidence to assess the religious, economic, and cultural characteristics of Christian Right voters supporting Reagan.
Right-Wing Religion: Christian Conservatism as a Political Movement
| Michael Lienesch | Political Science Quarterly | 1982
Analyzes the ideas, constituencies, leadership, and organizational structure of the emerging Christian conservative movement.
Gender, Family, Education, and Cultural Conflict
Divided We Stand: The Battle Over Women’s Rights and Family Values That Polarized American Politics
| Marjorie J. Spruill | Bloomsbury | 2017
Shows how the conflict between feminists and conservative women helped transform gender and family questions into partisan dividing lines.
No Permanent Waves: Recasting Histories of U.S. Feminism
| Nancy A. Hewitt | Rutgers University Press | 2010
Places conservative women’s activism and antifeminist mobilization within broader interpretations of American gender politics.
Righting Feminism: Conservative Women and American Politics
| Ronnee Schreiber | Oxford University Press | 2008
Examines how conservative women constructed their own claims to female representation while opposing major feminist policies.
Culture War? The Myth of a Polarized America
| Morris P. Fiorina | Pearson Longman | 2004
Challenges claims that ordinary Americans are as ideologically divided over cultural issues as political activists and party elites.
America’s Public Schools and the Politics of Culture
| Jonathan Zimmerman | American Historical Review | 2004
Reviews conflicts over prayer, sex education, multiculturalism, textbooks, and parental authority in public education.
The Language Police: How Pressure Groups Restrict What Students Learn
| Diane Ravitch | Alfred A. Knopf | 2003
Critiques ideological pressure on textbooks and standardized tests from both conservative and progressive advocacy groups.
The Politics of Character Education
| Chester E. Finn Jr. | Hoover Institution | 1994
Presents a conservative case for schools to emphasize discipline, moral standards, civic responsibility, and traditional virtues.
The Politics of School Textbooks
| Joan DelFattore | Educational Researcher | 1992
Examines conservative campaigns concerning religion, patriotism, sexuality, evolution, and representations of American history in public-school materials.
Illiberal Education: The Politics of Race and Sex on Campus
| Dinesh D’Souza | Free Press | 1991
Criticizes affirmative action, multicultural curricula, and campus speech regulation from a New Right perspective.
Culture Wars: The Struggle to Define America
| James Davison Hunter | Basic Books | 1991
Defines the conflict between culturally orthodox and progressive moral visions that transformed American political alignments.
The Content of Our Character
| Shelby Steele | HarperCollins | 1990
Presents a conservative critique of affirmative action, racial guilt, identity politics, and liberal approaches to racial inequality.
Tenured Radicals: How Politics Has Corrupted Our Higher Education
| Roger Kimball | Encounter Books | 1990
Argues that New Left ideas became institutionalized in universities and helped inspire conservative campaigns against academic liberalism.
The Closing of the American Mind
| Allan Bloom | Simon & Schuster | 1987
Offers an influential conservative critique of relativism, universities, popular culture, and the intellectual consequences of the 1960s.
The Rise of the New Right and the Decline of the Equal Rights Amendment
| Jane J. Mansbridge | University of Chicago Press | 1986
Explains how conservative organization, federalism concerns, religious opposition, and disputes about family roles defeated ERA ratification.
Thatcherism, British Conservatism, and the European New Right
The Neoliberalism–Nationalism Nexus
| Christian Joppke | Cambridge University Press | 2021
Explains how neoliberal economic reform frequently coexisted with nationalism, border controls, and culturally conservative politics.
From “One Right Way” to “One Ruinous Way”? Discursive Shifts in “There Is No Alternative”
| Astrid Séville | European Political Science Review | 2017
Examines Thatcher’s assertion that no alternative existed to market reform and the later political use of necessity-based arguments.
The Conservative Party from Thatcher to Cameron
| Tim Bale | Manchester University Press | 2016
Traces how later Conservative leaders managed Thatcher’s legacy while adjusting to electoral change, social liberalism, and European integration.
Thatcher and Thatcherism
| Eric J. Evans | Routledge | 2013
Surveys Thatcher’s ideology, policies, leadership, electoral coalition, economic reforms, and long-term political legacy.
Thatcherism, the New Racism and the British New Right
| Anna Marie Smith | Cambridge University Press | 1994
Analyzes how Thatcherite rhetoric connected market reform, nationalism, race, sexuality, family authority, and popular anxieties.
Thatcherism and Conservative Politics
| Philip Norton | Parliamentary Affairs | 1990
Examines how Thatcher changed Conservative Party ideology, leadership, organization, and relationships with established institutions.
Mrs Thatcher’s Revolution: The Ending of the Socialist Era
| Peter Riddell | Political Quarterly | 1989
Assesses whether Thatcher’s reforms permanently displaced social democracy and transformed the assumptions of British government.
The Free Economy and the Strong State: The Politics of Thatcherism
| Andrew Gamble | Palgrave Macmillan | 1988
Explains why Thatcherite economic liberalism required a powerful central state to confront unions and restructure public institutions.
The New Right: The Counter-Revolution in Political, Economic and Social Thought
| Norman P. Barry | Palgrave Macmillan | 1987
Surveys libertarian, neoliberal, public-choice, monetarist, and traditional conservative ideas associated with the New Right.
The New Right: Politics, Markets and Citizenship
| Ruth Levitas | Routledge | 1986
Critically evaluates New Right theories of markets, welfare, citizenship, inequality, social obligation, and individual responsibility.
The Anatomy of Thatcherism
| Andrew Gamble | Economy and Society | 1985
Interprets Thatcherism as a combination of free-market economics, centralized state authority, nationalism, and conservative social discipline.
The Anatomy of Thatcherism: The Economy, Society and the State
| Colin Leys | New Left Review | 1985
Offers a critical interpretation of Thatcherism as a project to reorganize social power and weaken collectivist institutions.
Hayek, the New Right, and the Crisis of Social Democracy
| John Gray | Political Quarterly | 1984
Discusses Hayek’s influence on conservative attacks against planning, welfare provision, trade-union power, and collectivist political philosophy.
Thatcherism and the Crisis of the Left
| Stuart Hall | New Left Review | 1981
Analyzes the New Right’s ability to build popular consent around markets, authority, national identity, and opposition to the postwar settlement.
The Meaning of Conservatism
| Roger Scruton | Penguin Books | 1980
Articulates a traditionalist defense of authority, nation, property, family, and inherited institutions during the emergence of the British New Right.
Foreign Policy, Neoconservatism, and National Power
Conservatives in a “Liberal Age”
| Jennifer Delton | Cambridge University Press | 2026
Reconsiders how Cold War liberals and emerging neoconservatives adapted their ideas and institutions to the conservative political environment of the 1970s.
The Reagan Reversal: Foreign Policy and the End of the Cold War
| Beth A. Fischer | American Historical Review | 2009
Reviews arguments that Reagan moved from militant confrontation toward negotiation and nuclear-arms reduction during his second term.
The Neoconservative Revolution: Jewish Intellectuals and the Shaping of Public Policy
| Murray Friedman | Cambridge University Press | 2005
Studies the intellectual networks and political controversies through which former liberals helped reshape conservative public policy.
Present Dangers: Crisis and Opportunity in American Foreign and Defense Policy
| Robert Kagan and William Kristol | Encounter Books | 2000
Presents neoconservative arguments for military strength, international leadership, democracy promotion, and resistance to authoritarian regimes.
The Reagan Administration and the Cold War
| John Lewis Gaddis | Diplomatic History | 1987
Assesses the strategic assumptions, military buildup, diplomacy, and ideological ambitions of Reagan’s approach to the Soviet Union.
The Rise of the Counter-Establishment
| Sidney Blumenthal | Times Books | 1986
Describes how conservative think tanks, foundations, publications, and policy experts constructed an alternative governing establishment.
The Reagan Doctrine and the Third World
| Chester A. Crocker | Foreign Affairs | 1985
Explains the conservative argument for assisting anticommunist forces and confronting Soviet influence in developing countries.
The Evil Empire Speech
| Ronald Reagan | Voices of Democracy | 1983
Presents Reagan’s moralized anticommunist rhetoric linking national security, religious conviction, and conservative opposition to Soviet power.
Reflections of a Neoconservative
| Irving Kristol | Basic Books | 1983
Collects essays explaining neoconservative criticism of liberal social policy, cultural radicalism, economic planning, and Democratic foreign policy.
The Neoconservatives: The Origins of a Movement
| Peter Steinfels | Simon & Schuster | 1979
Traces the movement of intellectuals from liberal and socialist backgrounds toward conservative positions on welfare, culture, and foreign policy.
Recent Scholarship and Reinterpretations
A Conservative Individualist: Revisiting Shirley Letwin’s Political Thought
| Oscar Leonardo Rodríguez Burgos | History of European Ideas | 2026
Reassesses Shirley Letwin as an important theorist of the British New Right whose defense of individual responsibility differed from both libertarianism and traditional paternalistic conservatism.
From Hegemony to Herrschaft? Reaction and the Contemporary British Right
| Tom Hoctor | Journal of Political Ideologies | 2025
Argues that parts of the British right have moved beyond Thatcherite hegemony toward a more reactionary politics centered on sovereignty, authority, nationalism, and institutional confrontation.
Thatcher’s Policy Unit and the Neoliberal Vision
| Aled Davies | Journal of British Studies | 2023
Examines the advisers and competing ideological tendencies within Thatcher’s Policy Unit, showing that the government’s New Right program was less unified than often assumed.
The Rise and Fall of the Neoliberal Order
| Gary Gerstle | Oxford University Press | 2022
Places the New Right within the emergence of a broader neoliberal political order based on markets, deregulation, globalization, and diminished labor power.
The Republican Party and American Political Development
| Robert Mason | Cambridge University Press | 2022
Traces the Republican Party’s evolution from Hoover through Reagan and explains how conservative activists gradually displaced moderate and liberal Republicans.
Partisans: The Conservative Revolutionaries Who Remade American Politics in the 1990s
| Nicole Hemmer | Basic Books | 2022
Shows how conservative media figures and political operatives moved beyond Reaganism toward a more combative, populist, and anti-establishment style of politics.
Laboratories of Autocracy
| David Pepper | Princeton University Press | 2021
Examines how conservative state governments have used legislative power, redistricting, voting restrictions, and institutional restructuring to entrench partisan authority.
The Enablers: How Team Trump Flunked the Pandemic and Failed America
| Barbara Kellerman | Cambridge University Press | 2020
Places contemporary Republican leadership within the longer transformation of conservatism from institutional restraint toward personal loyalty and populist executive power.
Reactionary Republicanism
| Bryan T. Gervais and Irwin L. Morris | Oxford University Press | 2020
Uses congressional evidence to explain the Republican Party’s increasing ideological extremity, partisan hostility, and resistance to political compromise.
Let Them Eat Tweets
| Jacob S. Hacker and Paul Pierson | Liveright | 2020
Argues that Republican leaders combined policies favoring wealthy constituencies with racial, religious, and cultural appeals designed to mobilize working-class voters.
American Conservatism: Reclaiming an Intellectual Tradition
| Andrew J. Bacevich | Library of Congress | 2020
Collects conservative writings while distinguishing older traditions of restraint, constitutionalism, and community from the interventionist and populist tendencies of the modern right.
The Long Southern Strategy: How Chasing White Voters in the South Changed American Politics
| Angie Maxwell and Todd Shields | Oxford University Press | 2019
Explains how racial resentment, antifeminism, and evangelical identity worked together in the Republican transformation of the South.
American Carnage: On the Front Lines of the Republican Civil War
| Tim Alberta | HarperCollins | 2019
Chronicles the conflict between establishment conservatives, Tea Party activists, religious leaders, and populists during the Republican Party’s movement toward Trump.
The Embattled Vote in America
| Allan J. Lichtman | Harvard University Press | 2018
Traces controversies over voting rights and explains how conservative campaigns against alleged fraud contributed to new restrictions on electoral participation.
Rule and Ruin: The Downfall of Moderation and the Destruction of the Republican Party
| Geoffrey Kabaservice | Oxford University Press | 2018
Explains how moderate Republicans lost influence as ideological activists, conservative organizations, and movement-backed candidates gained control of the party.
Intellectuals, Publications, and Conservative Theory
The Reactionary Mind: Conservatism from Edmund Burke to Donald Trump
| Corey Robin | Oxford University Press | 2018
Argues that conservatism repeatedly develops as a defense of threatened hierarchies and applies this interpretation to the modern American right.
The Ideas Industry
| Daniel W. Drezner | Princeton University Press | 2017
Examines the growing influence of wealthy donors, celebrity intellectuals, advocacy organizations, and media platforms on conservative policy debate.
The New Deal and the Triumph of Liberalism
| Sidney M. Milkis and Jerome M. Mileur | University of Massachusetts Press | 2016
Provides context for the governmental order that New Right thinkers and politicians later sought to dismantle.
The Limousine Liberal: How an Incendiary Image United the Right and Fractured America
| Steve Fraser | Basic Books | 2016
Traces the conservative use of elite hypocrisy as a populist argument against liberal reformers and Democratic cultural authority.
Messengers of the Right: Conservative Media and the Transformation of American Politics
| Nicole Hemmer | University of Pennsylvania Press | 2016
Shows how conservative broadcasters and publishers constructed an alternative media system decades before the emergence of Fox News.
Dark Money: The Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Right
| Jane Mayer | Doubleday | 2016
Investigates the wealthy donors, private foundations, university programs, think tanks, and political organizations that financed conservative transformation.
The Conservative Human Rights Revolution
| Marco Duranti | Humanity | 2015
Examines conservative contributions to postwar human-rights thought and challenges the assumption that the language of rights belonged exclusively to the political left.
Buckley and Mailer: The Difficult Friendship That Shaped the Sixties
| Kevin M. Schultz | The Washington Post | 2015
Uses the public rivalry between William F. Buckley Jr. and Norman Mailer to illuminate the competing conservative and radical visions of the 1960s.
The Political Thought of the Conservative Party Since 1945
| Kevin Hickson | Palgrave Macmillan | 2012
Surveys One Nation conservatism, Thatcherism, neoliberalism, social conservatism, Euroscepticism, and the ideological disputes shaping Britain’s Conservative Party.
The Right Talk: How Conservatives Transformed the Great Society into the Economic Society
| Mark A. Smith | Princeton University Press | 2007
Explains how conservative rhetoric reframed public issues in economic language centered on markets, taxation, efficiency, and individual responsibility.
America at the Crossroads
| Francis Fukuyama | Yale University Press | 2007
Critiques neoconservatism’s transformation from cautious antitotalitarianism into an ambitious program of military intervention and democratic regime change.
The Conservative Soul
| Andrew Sullivan | HarperCollins | 2006
Contrasts a skeptical conservatism grounded in limited government with the religious certainty and executive activism of the contemporary Republican right.
The Political Theory of Conservative Economists
| Conrad P. Waligorski | University Press of Kansas | 1990
Analyzes the political assumptions of Hayek, Friedman, and other economists whose ideas provided intellectual foundations for the New Right.
The Conservative Intellectual Movement in America Since 1945
| George H. Nash | Intercollegiate Studies Institute | 1976
Provides a foundational history of the traditionalists, libertarians, and anticommunists who constructed postwar movement conservatism.
The Conscience of a Conservative
| Barry Goldwater | Princeton University Press | 1960
Articulates the limited-government, anticommunist, states’ rights, and constitutional principles that inspired the emerging conservative movement.
Up from Liberalism
| William F. Buckley Jr. | Regnery Publishing | 1959
Presents Buckley’s early critique of liberal intellectual culture, centralized government, secularism, and accommodation with communism.
Conservative Law, Courts, and Constitutional Politics
The Scheme: How the Right Wing Used Dark Money to Capture the Supreme Court
| Sheldon Whitehouse and Jennifer Mueller | The New Press | 2022
Argues that conservative donors and legal organizations built a coordinated system for influencing judicial selection, constitutional doctrine, and federal regulation.
The Federalist Society: How Conservatives Took the Law Back from Liberals
| Michael Avery and Danielle McLaughlin | Vanderbilt University Press | 2021
Traces the organization’s role in promoting originalism, networking conservative lawyers, and reshaping the federal judiciary.
Ideas with Consequences: The Federalist Society and the Conservative Counterrevolution
| Amanda Hollis-Brusky | Oxford University Press | 2019
Shows how an elite legal network developed doctrines and personnel that transformed constitutional law and judicial appointments.
The Rights Revolution Revisited
| Lynda G. Dodd | Cambridge University Press | 2018
Examines competing liberal and conservative efforts to use courts and constitutional rights to restructure American government.
Originalism as Faith
| Eric J. Segall | Cambridge University Press | 2018
Critiques originalism as both a constitutional theory and a central identity-forming doctrine of the conservative legal movement.
Restoring the Lost Constitution
| Randy E. Barnett | Princeton University Press | 2014
Develops a libertarian constitutional argument for stronger protection of individual liberty and narrower federal regulatory authority.
Radicals in Robes
| Cass R. Sunstein | Basic Books | 2005
Argues that some conservative judges pursue extensive constitutional change while presenting their decisions as exercises in judicial restraint.
The Most Activist Supreme Court in History
| Thomas M. Keck | University of Chicago Press | 2004
Examines how conservative justices used judicial review to advance federalism, property rights, and limits on congressional power.
A Matter of Interpretation
| Antonin Scalia | Princeton University Press | 1997
Defends textualism and originalism as alternatives to judicial interpretation based on contemporary moral or political preferences.
The Constitution in Exile
| Douglas H. Ginsburg | Regulation | 1995
Calls for reconsidering constitutional doctrines that permitted the expansion of federal administrative and economic power after the New Deal.
The Tempting of America
| Robert H. Bork | Free Press | 1990
Offers a conservative critique of judicial activism and describes the political struggle surrounding Bork’s unsuccessful Supreme Court nomination.
Constitutional Faith
| Sanford Levinson | Princeton University Press | 1988
Explores competing understandings of constitutional authority that influenced conservative debates over original intent and judicial legitimacy.
Toward a Jurisprudence of Original Intent
| Robert H. Bork | Harvard Journal of Law & Public Policy | 1984
Presents an influential conservative argument that judges should interpret the Constitution according to historically grounded principles rather than evolving values.
The New Federalism: Can the States Be Trusted?
| Susan Rose-Ackerman | University of Chicago Law Review | 1981
Evaluates New Right arguments for returning regulatory and social-policy authority from the federal government to the states.
Business, Taxation, and Anti-Government Mobilization
The Kochland: The Secret History of Koch Industries and Corporate Power in America
| Christopher Leonard | Simon & Schuster | 2019
Investigates the growth of Koch Industries and the company’s influence on libertarian policy organizations, energy regulation, labor relations, and conservative politics.
The Great Risk Shift
| Jacob S. Hacker | Oxford University Press | 2019
Describes how conservative economic policies shifted responsibility for healthcare, retirement, employment, and family security from institutions to individuals.
Democracy in Chains
| Nancy MacLean | Viking | 2017
Argues that public-choice economics and donor networks supported a long-term strategy to constrain democratic control of markets and property.
The Republican War Against Workers
| Gordon Lafer | Economic Policy Institute | 2013
Reviews conservative state policies concerning unions, wages, workplace regulation, unemployment insurance, and public-sector bargaining.
Invisible Hands: The Businessmen’s Crusade Against the New Deal
| Kim Phillips-Fein | W. W. Norton | 2009
Traces the business executives and advocacy groups that opposed organized labor, social regulation, and the New Deal before the New Right’s electoral breakthrough.
The Wrecking Crew
| Thomas Frank | Metropolitan Books | 2008
Argues that conservative officials weakened public agencies and then used declining government performance as evidence that government itself was ineffective.
The Permanent Tax Revolt
| Isaac William Martin | Stanford University Press | 2008
Traces the organizations and political ideas that transformed resistance to taxation into a permanent feature of conservative American politics.
The Political Power of Business
| Patrick Bernhagen | Routledge | 2007
Explores how corporations influence public policy through lobbying, investment decisions, political funding, expertise, and institutional access.
What’s the Matter with Kansas?
| Thomas Frank | Metropolitan Books | 2004
Examines how cultural issues helped conservative politicians gain support from voters whose economic interests might conflict with free-market Republican policies.
The Great Tax Wars
| Steven R. Weisman | Simon & Schuster | 2002
Places modern conservative tax reduction within the longer American struggle over progressive taxation, wealth, and federal authority.
Wealth and Poverty
| George Gilder | Regnery Publishing | 1981
Defends entrepreneurship, investment, family structure, and supply-side economics while criticizing redistribution and welfare dependency.
Free to Choose
| Milton Friedman and Rose Friedman | Hoover Institution | 1980
Popularizes the case for deregulation, school choice, reduced welfare provision, monetary restraint, and individual economic responsibility.
The Way the World Works
| Jude Wanniski | Regnery Publishing | 1978
Develops supply-side arguments for lower marginal tax rates and helped make tax reduction a central objective of the New Right.
A Time for Truth
| William E. Simon | Regnery Publishing | 1978
Calls on business leaders and conservative institutions to organize against regulation, taxation, organized labor, and liberal political dominance.
Capitalism and Freedom
| Milton Friedman | University of Chicago Press | 1962
Presents the influential argument that competitive markets and limited government are essential foundations of political freedom.
Race, Rights, Immigration, and National Identity
The Turnaway Playbook
| James Morone | Basic Books | 2020
Examines political strategies that redirect economic insecurity into racial, religious, and cultural resentment.
White Identity Politics
| Ashley Jardina | Cambridge University Press | 2019
Examines how perceptions of white group identity and demographic decline influence conservative political attitudes.
The End of the Republican Party?
| Stanley B. Greenberg | Thomas Dunne Books | 2019
Analyzes the demographic and ideological challenges produced by the Republican Party’s reliance on older, white, evangelical, and rural constituencies.
Identity Crisis
| John Sides, Michael Tesler and Lynn Vavreck | Princeton University Press | 2018
Uses election evidence to show how race, immigration, religion, and national identity structured the 2016 presidential campaign.
Bring the War Home
| Kathleen Belew | Harvard University Press | 2018
Explains how Vietnam veterans, white-power activists, and paramilitary groups developed a revolutionary movement alongside mainstream conservative politics.
White Backlash
| Marisa Abrajano and Zoltan L. Hajnal | Princeton University Press | 2015
Examines how immigration and racial attitudes influenced white voters’ movement toward the Republican Party.
Dog Whistle Politics
| Ian Haney López | Oxford University Press | 2015
Argues that coded racial appeals helped build support for conservative policies involving taxation, welfare, crime, and limited government.
The Origins of the Urban Crisis
| Thomas J. Sugrue | Princeton University Press | 2014
Connects deindustrialization, housing discrimination, suburbanization, and racial inequality to the urban crises that fueled conservative backlash.
Why Americans Don’t Join the Party
| Zoltan L. Hajnal and Taeku Lee | Princeton University Press | 2011
Explores racial differences in party identification and the consequences of conservative realignment for American electoral politics.
The New Jim Crow
| Michelle Alexander | The New Press | 2010
Argues that law-and-order policies and mass incarceration created a racial caste system after the formal end of segregation.
The End of Southern Exceptionalism
| Byron E. Shafer and Richard Johnston | Harvard University Press | 2006
Uses electoral evidence to debate whether economic development or racial conflict best explains the Republican transformation of the South.
The Emerging Democratic Majority
| John B. Judis and Ruy Teixeira | Scribner | 2004
Assesses demographic and regional changes that challenged the Republican majority initially constructed by the New Right.
The Politics of Immigration Control in America
| Daniel J. Tichenor | Princeton University Press | 2002
Traces the political coalitions and ideological arguments that shaped immigration restriction and reform throughout American history.
Nixon’s Civil Rights
| Dean J. Kotlowski | Harvard University Press | 2001
Examines the Nixon administration’s complicated combination of affirmative-action policies, civil-rights enforcement, and appeals to racial backlash.
Chain Reaction
| Thomas Byrne Edsall and Mary D. Edsall | W. W. Norton | 1991
Argues that race, taxation, crime, and welfare transformed electoral politics and undermined the New Deal Democratic coalition.
Religion, Abortion, and Conservative Social Movements
Bad Faith: Race and the Rise of the Religious Right
| Randall Balmer | Eerdmans | 2021
Argues that conflicts over racially discriminatory Christian schools played a crucial role in the early organization of the Religious Right.
Unholy: Why White Evangelicals Worship at the Altar of Donald Trump
| Sarah Posner | Random House | 2020
Connects evangelical support for Trump with the longer Religious Right traditions of racial grievance, patriarchy, media activism, and partisan loyalty.
Taking America Back for God
| Andrew L. Whitehead and Samuel L. Perry | Oxford University Press | 2020
Examines Christian nationalism as a political ideology linking religious identity with social hierarchy, national belonging, and conservative public policy.
The Power Worshippers
| Katherine Stewart | Bloomsbury | 2019
Investigates the churches, legal groups, donors, and political organizations associated with the contemporary Christian nationalist movement.
The Evangelicals: The Struggle to Shape America
| Frances FitzGerald | Simon & Schuster | 2017
Provides a comprehensive history of evangelical religion and its emergence as a central force in conservative Republican politics.
Defenders of the Unborn
| Daniel K. Williams | Oxford University Press | 2016
Traces the anti-abortion movement from its Catholic origins through its integration into evangelicalism and the Republican Party.
After Roe: The Lost History of the Abortion Debate
| Mary Ziegler | Harvard University Press | 2015
Shows how abortion politics evolved through strategic disputes over constitutional law, women’s rights, morality, and party alignment.
The Family
| Jeff Sharlet | HarperCollins | 2008
Investigates an influential Christian political network that connected conservative religious ideas with American governmental and foreign-policy elites.
Abortion and the Politics of Motherhood
| Kristin Luker | University of California Press | 1984
Studies the competing moral worldviews and social experiences that shaped pro-choice and anti-abortion activism.
The New Christian Right
| Robert C. Liebman and Robert Wuthnow | Aldine Publishing | 1983
Collects early sociological research on the beliefs, institutions, leadership, and political objectives of conservative Christian activists.
Not by Politics Alone
| Tamara K. Hareven | University of Chicago Press | 1982
Examines how family ideology and social change contributed to conservative responses against feminism and new sexual norms.
The Fundamentalist Phenomenon
| Jerry Falwell | Doubleday | 1981
Presents the Religious Right’s own explanation of its theology, moral concerns, social agenda, and entrance into electoral politics.
The Battle for the Mind
| Tim LaHaye | Fleming H. Revell | 1980
Presents a Religious Right critique of secular humanism and argues that conservative Christians must regain influence over education and government.
Listen, America!
| Jerry Falwell | Doubleday | 1980
Calls conservative Christians into political action against abortion, secular education, feminism, communism, and expanding federal government.
Whatever Happened to the Human Race?
| Francis Schaeffer and C. Everett Koop | Crossway | 1979
Links abortion, euthanasia, and secular humanism in an influential argument that mobilized evangelical social conservatives.
Media, Populism, and the Republican Party
Talk Radio’s America
| Brian Rosenwald | Harvard University Press | 2019
Explains how talk radio transformed Republican politics by rewarding confrontation, policing ideological loyalty, and weakening party leaders’ ability to compromise.
The Great Alignment
| Alan I. Abramowitz | Yale University Press | 2018
Explains how race, religion, ideology, education, and geography produced highly polarized and internally unified political parties.
Network Propaganda
| Yochai Benkler, Robert Faris and Hal Roberts | Oxford University Press | 2018
Analyzes how a distinct conservative media ecosystem contributed to misinformation, partisan polarization, and distrust of mainstream institutions.
Republican Like Me
| Ken Stern | HarperCollins | 2017
Investigates the communities and experiences underlying conservative identity beyond stereotypes used in national political debate.
One Nation After Trump
| E. J. Dionne Jr., Norman J. Ornstein and Thomas E. Mann | St. Martin’s Press | 2017
Places Trump’s rise within the Republican Party’s longer ideological transformation and the decline of traditional conservative institutional restraints.
Why the Right Went Wrong
| E. J. Dionne Jr. | Simon & Schuster | 2016
Argues that modern conservatism repeatedly promised to reverse the New Deal and Great Society, producing escalating expectations and growing ideological radicalism.
The Tea Party and the Remaking of Republican Conservatism
| Theda Skocpol and Vanessa Williamson | Oxford University Press | 2016
Studies the grassroots activists, media networks, and elite organizations that pushed Republican politics toward stronger antigovernment positions.
The Populist Explosion
| John B. Judis | Columbia Global Reports | 2016
Places right-wing populism within economic dislocation, distrust of elites, nationalism, immigration conflict, and dissatisfaction with established parties.
It’s Even Worse Than It Looks
| Thomas E. Mann and Norman J. Ornstein | Basic Books | 2016
Attributes congressional dysfunction partly to the Republican Party’s transformation into an ideologically extreme and procedurally confrontational organization.
Asymmetric Politics
| Matt Grossmann and David A. Hopkins | Oxford University Press | 2016
Argues that Republicans operate primarily as an ideological movement while Democrats function more as a coalition of social groups seeking government action.
The Outrage Industry
| Jeffrey M. Berry and Sarah Sobieraj | Oxford University Press | 2014
Examines the economic and political incentives behind inflammatory talk radio, cable news, blogs, and partisan commentary.
Theda Skocpol on the Tea Party and the Remaking of Republican Conservatism
| Theda Skocpol | Scholars Strategy Network | 2012
Summarizes research showing how older grassroots activists interacted with conservative media and professionally funded advocacy groups.
The Tea Party: Three Principles
| Elizabeth Price Foley | Cambridge University Press | 2012
Presents a sympathetic interpretation of the Tea Party’s commitments to limited government, constitutionalism, and American sovereignty.
The Broken Branch
| Thomas E. Mann and Norman J. Ornstein | Oxford University Press | 2008
Examines how partisan polarization and changes in Republican congressional leadership weakened deliberation, oversight, and institutional norms.
Off Center: The Republican Revolution and the Erosion of American Democracy
| Jacob S. Hacker and Paul Pierson | Yale University Press | 2006
Explains how conservative leaders pursued policies outside the political center through institutional control, messaging discipline, and organized interest groups.
International and Comparative New Right Movements
The Far Right Today
| Cas Mudde | Polity Press | 2019
Explains how radical-right parties normalized nativist, authoritarian, and populist ideas within mainstream political competition.
Against Democracy and Equality
| Tamir Bar-On | Routledge | 2013
Analyzes the European New Right’s rejection of egalitarianism, multiculturalism, universalism, and liberal democratic culture.
Where Have All the Fascists Gone?
| Tamir Bar-On | Ashgate | 2007
Investigates how postwar radical-right intellectuals rebranded ethnonationalist ideas through cultural difference and metapolitical strategy.
Populist Radical Right Parties in Europe
| Cas Mudde | Cambridge University Press | 2007
Defines the populist radical right through nativism, authoritarianism, and populism and examines its relationship with mainstream conservatism.
The Extreme Right in Western Europe
| Elisabeth Carter | Oxford University Press | 2005
Studies the ideology, organization, electoral performance, and political opportunities of radical right parties across Western Europe.
The Politics of the Extreme Right
| Paul Hainsworth | Pinter | 2000
Compares extreme-right parties and movements across Europe, examining their ideology, voters, leadership, and influence on mainstream conservatives.
The Nouvelle Droite’s Bid for Political Respectability
| Roger Griffin | Patterns of Prejudice | 2000
Explores how French New Right thinkers sought to distance themselves from historical fascism while retaining anti-egalitarian and ethnocultural ideas.
The Rise and Fall of Germany’s New Right
| Jan-Werner Müller | German Politics | 1999
Examines attempts by German New Right intellectuals to establish a nationalist conservative movement distinct from both mainstream Christian democracy and neo-Nazism.
The New Right in the New Europe?
| Seán Hanley | Journal of Political Ideologies | 1999
Traces the adoption of Anglo-American neoliberal and conservative ideas by Czech intellectuals and political activists after communism.
The New Politics of the Right
| Hans-Georg Betz and Stefan Immerfall | Palgrave Macmillan | 1998
Studies neo-populist parties that mobilized opposition to immigration, European integration, taxation, welfare, and established political elites.
Fascism’s Return
| Richard J. Golsan | University of Nebraska Press | 1998
Examines historical revisionism, nationalism, and the revival of radical-right ideas in postwar European political culture.
Explaining the Electoral Success of the New Right
| Wesley D. Chapin | West European Politics | 1997
Analyzes whether immigration, taxation, crime, nationalism, and dissatisfaction with established parties explain support for New Right parties.
The Radical Right in Western Europe
| Herbert Kitschelt and Anthony J. McGann | University of Michigan Press | 1995
Argues that successful radical-right parties combined market economics with authoritarian and anti-immigration appeals.
Radical Right-Wing Populism in Western Europe
| Hans-Georg Betz | Palgrave Macmillan | 1994
Compares European parties that combined anti-establishment populism, nationalism, immigration restriction, and market-oriented economics.
The New Right in France
| Michael Minkenberg | European Journal of Political Research | 1992
Examines the intellectual, cultural, and organizational development of France’s Nouvelle Droite and its influence on nationalist politics.
