From National Review to the Sharon Statement and How the Movement Took the GOP

Place your bets. Rewind to the mid-1950s. The Republican Party has just elected a very popular general to the White House, and the party's leadership has settled into a comfortable, moderate routine: accept most of the New Deal, trim around the edges, keep the peace. Then a young writer in his late twenties, with a famous book about his college behind him and no particular standing in Washington, decides the country needs a magazine of ideas, and the magazine will lose money for years. What are the odds that this magazine, and the people who gather around it, will remake the party within a generation?

Not good. And yet that is what happened. The conservative movement did not arrive in the Republican Party like a conquering army. It arrived the way most lasting things do, as a small group of stubborn, well-read people with a printing press, a mailing list and a willingness to keep showing up. I want to tell you how it worked, because the method matters more than the names, and because anyone who wants to move a party, a school board or a state legislature should learn it.

The party the movement inherited

To see why a movement was needed, look at what the Republican Party was. After the long Democratic run of 1933 to 1953, Eisenhower's victories in 1952 and 1956 restored Republican control of the White House but not a clear philosophy. The party's establishment, centered in the Northeast, called its approach "modern Republicanism." It accepted the main structures of the New Deal and sought to manage them more efficiently. The Taft wing, Midwestern and wary of both big government and foreign entanglements, had lost the argument for the nomination in 1952. Conservative voters existed in large numbers, but they had no organizing center, and they did not trust the political class that spoke for them.

The movement came from outside the party machinery for a reason. The people who built it were writers, professors, students and businessmen, and they were arguing about ideas first and offices second. That is the point worth stealing. A party that has only candidates and no thinkers has nothing to say when the candidates lose. A party with a living tradition of argument can lose and come back.

National Review, 1955

On November 19, 1955, William F. Buckley Jr. published the first issue of National Review. Buckley had made a name with God and Man at Yale in 1951, a book arguing that his alma mater was teaching against the principles of the families who paid for it. Now he launched a magazine whose opening statement said it "stands athwart history, yelling Stop." You can read the full story of that line in William F. Buckley Stood Athwart History and Then Built a Movement. For my purposes here, the point is the purpose.

Buckley's aim was not to elect anyone. It was to give the right a place to argue, with standards. A magazine of ideas could do three things a campaign could not.

1. It could define the movement's terms. What does a conservative believe about the economy, the Cold War, the Constitution and the family? A weekly publication forces an answer, in print, in public, week after week.
2. It could recruit. Young people who read the magazine learned that others shared their views. For many, that discovery was the first step toward doing something about it.
3. It could police the boundaries. In 1962, National Review ran an editorial criticizing the leadership of the John Birch Society, whose conspiratorial claims, Buckley and his colleagues thought, were discrediting the right. You can disagree with every particular of that decision. But it shows a movement that understood a hard truth: if you want to win a majority, you have to be willing to separate yourself from the people who make you impossible to take seriously.

The magazine also brought together voices who did not agree on everything. That is where the idea of fusionism comes in.

Fusionism: the deal that made it a coalition

Postwar conservatism was not a single philosophy. There were traditionalists, who thought a good society rests on inherited morals and institutions. There were libertarians, who thought individual freedom and free markets were the point. And there were anti-communists, who thought the Cold War outranked everything. These camps argued bitterly. Frank Meyer, a senior editor at National Review, made the case that they needed each other. Freedom without virtue decays into license, and virtue enforced by a state is not virtue at all. The synthesis came to be called fusionism, and Meyer laid out his version in a book in 1962. For a full treatment, see Fusionism Was the Deal That Made the Modern Right Possible and Five Strands of the American Right Compared in One Table.

Fusionism was not a perfect philosophy. Critics on the right still argue that it papered over real disagreements. But it was a superb political tool, because it gave people with different priorities a reason to work for the same candidates. Think of it as a treaty among allies who will never be identical twins. When the deal held, the movement grew. When it frayed, the movement argued. And that has been true ever since.

The Sharon Statement, 1960

If the magazine was the movement's brain, the student organizations were its legs. In the 1950s the Intercollegiate Society of Individualists, founded in 1953 and later renamed the Intercollegiate Studies Institute, brought conservative ideas to campuses. Then, in September 1960, a group of young conservatives met at Buckley's family estate in Sharon, Connecticut, and founded Young Americans for Freedom.

They adopted a short statement of principles, drafted by M. Stanton Evans, then a young journalist, and it became known as the Sharon Statement. It was only a few hundred words long. In plain terms, it affirmed that individual liberty is a gift from God and not a grant from the state, that the Constitution limits the powers of government, that the market economy is the best guardian of liberty, that the political and economic freedom of Americans is at stake in the struggle with Soviet communism, and that the goal was victory over that threat, not coexistence with it. Read the document. It is short, it is clear, and nobody in the room needed a consultant to write it.

What I want you to notice is how the statement works as a political tool. It did not list policy proposals. It listed principles. A principle is something a student at a state university in Oregon can sign onto without having read a tax code. A principle is also something that does not go out of date when a bill dies in committee. The Sharon Statement gave a generation of campus conservatives a flag, and in those years campus conservatives were a minority, often a lonely one. The model has been copied by later campus groups, and if you want to copy it yourself, starting a conservative club on campus, a checklist from charter to speaker takes you from charter to first speaker.

Goldwater: the draft that nobody authorized

By 1960 the movement had a magazine, a student network and a philosophy. What it needed was a candidate. Barry Goldwater, a senator from Arizona, published The Conscience of a Conservative that year, a short book that put the movement's ideas into plain language for voters. The book sold well beyond the political class, and the story is told in A Slim Paperback From 1960 Gave Conservatives a Platform to Stand On.

In 1963 a group of activists, led by a New York political operative named F. Clifton White, formed the National Draft Goldwater Committee. This was a remarkable thing. Goldwater himself had not agreed to run. The committee organized volunteers, precinct by precinct and state by state, in the unglamorous work that actually wins delegates. They studied the party's delegate rules, which most of the establishment had stopped bothering to read, and found that a determined minority could capture a state convention in a county where nobody else had shown up.

Let me make that point as plain as I can. The establishment lost the 1964 nomination, in large part, because its opponents learned the rules and its leaders did not. Delegate selection is a boring, technical process, and boring technical processes decide who wins. The same lesson is in how to become a precinct committeeman and take over your county party and how delegates are chosen and what they really do at a national convention.

Goldwater won the nomination in July 1964 at the convention at the Cow Palace near San Francisco, after a fierce fight with Nelson Rockefeller, the governor of New York and the leading figure of the party's Eastern wing. He then lost the general election in a landslide. I will leave the campaign itself to The 1964 Goldwater Campaign Lost 44 States and Won the Future. What matters here is the sequence. The movement did not capture the party by winning the White House. It captured the party first, then it lost badly, then it came back and won. The capture came before the victory.

The establishment fights back

Do not imagine that the party's leaders watched all this politely. The Eastern wing had won the argument of 1952 and 1956, and it had a strategy for staying in control. In July 1960, on the eve of that year's convention, Richard Nixon flew to New York and met Nelson Rockefeller at the governor's apartment on Fifth Avenue. The two men agreed on a set of platform positions, especially on defense and civil rights, that moved the party toward Rockefeller's views. Goldwater, who had been building support on the right, called the arrangement the "Munich of the Republican Party" and was furious. The press called it the Treaty of Fifth Avenue, and it became a symbol for conservatives of how the party's leaders settled things among themselves and informed the rest of the party afterward.

That anger is worth understanding, because it is the emotional fuel behind every later revolt against a party establishment. Activists in the early 1960s did not hate their own party. They hated being managed by it. They saw a leadership that wanted their votes and their money but not their opinions. When the Draft Goldwater organizers went county by county, they were speaking to people who felt exactly that way. And here is the lesson for the establishment, any establishment, in any decade: a faction that feels ignored will eventually organize, and an organized faction with a grievance and a plan is stronger than a leadership with a title and a habit.

There is a lesson for the insurgents too, and the movement learned it slowly. Nelson Rockefeller was not wrong to say that a party must also win elections in places where conservatism was a hard sell. The 1964 result proved his point about the general election, even as it proved the movement's point about the nomination. The long-run answer, which Ronald Reagan embodied sixteen years later, was to carry the movement's principles in a form that could appeal to people who had never read a line of National Review.

How a minority takes over a party

Let me turn this into a method, because that is the practical use of the history.

1. Build the ideas before the campaign. Magazines, think tanks, reading groups and speakers' series are slow and unglamorous. They are also the only things that work over twenty years. The Heritage Foundation, founded in 1973, and the Federalist Society, founded in 1982, followed the same pattern. See How a Handful of Law Students in 1982 Changed the Federal Courts.
2. Get the young involved early. Every movement that lasts has a pipeline. Young Americans for Freedom, in its years of greatest influence, trained people who later served in Congress, in administrations and in the press.
3. Learn the rules. Party rules, filing deadlines, delegate formulas, committee elections. Most people ignore them. That is why an organized minority beats a disorganized majority.
4. Keep a core of principle and a willingness to coalition. Fusionism worked because it gave people reasons to stay together.
5. Accept being outnumbered and keep showing up. The movement lost in 1964, and then its organizers went back to work. The historical record of Republican insurgents against party establishments, from this period to our own, is in Seventy Years of GOP Insurgents Versus the Establishment, in Order.

The case against the movement's method

Fair is fair. The strongest objection to this story is that the movement's takeover of the party created a more ideological, less flexible Republican Party, one that sometimes punishes pragmatists and that finds it hard to compromise. There is something to that. A party built on principle can become brittle, and activists who control primaries can nominate candidates who please the faithful but alarm the middle. Nelson Rockefeller's wing argued exactly that in 1964, and in that year they had a point.

But look at the alternative. A party that nominates only the safe and the acceptable has no reason for anyone to be excited, and it has nothing to offer the voters who want change. The movement succeeded because its ideas moved real people, and because it was patient. And over time, the movement learned to temper its ideas with the need to win. Reagan's governing record in California and Washington, built on conservative principles but willing to take half a loaf, is the proof, as the story in Governor Reagan, Sacramento and the Welfare Fight Nobody Remembers shows.

The bottom line

• The conservative movement was built from the outside: a magazine in 1955, a student group in 1960, a book that same year and a volunteer draft committee in 1963. It captured the Republican nomination in 1964 before it had won the presidency.
• Read the Sharon Statement. It is short, it is about principles, and it is still the clearest account of what campus conservatives set out to do.
• If you want to change a party, learn its rules. Delegate selection and committee elections are boring, and boring is where power sits.
• Build ideas and pipelines first, campaigns second. The people who started National Review never expected to see the result in their lifetimes. Plan on a long game.
• Do not confuse a movement with a mood. A movement has principles, a coalition and a method, and it keeps working after a loss.