TThe Republican Party of 2024 belongs to Donald Trump and MAGA. But the populist right once saw the GOP in a very different light.
At the Second Conservative Political Action Conference in 1975, attendees debated whether the Republican Party should be abolished and replaced with a new political party. One speaker in support of the move said that political parties are “nothing more than a temporary, disposable tool for like-minded citizens to express their views.” The conference concluded that “the question of our party loyalty is [the two major] The survival of political parties is an issue that is increasingly in doubt for conservatives.
Though the proposal to create a third party quickly stalled, it reflected the right’s distinctively cold approach to party form. Conservatives saw parties as serving only as disposable means to an end, not as valuable institutions and instruments of democracy in their own right. And when right-wing forces seized the Republican Party in the early 1970s and remade it in their own image, the result was a retreat from the very promise that made parties a central pillar of lowercase-D Democratic and lowercase-R Republican politics. In that sense, the crisis that will shake American democracy in 2024 is one that has been half a century in the making.
As conservatives transformed the Republican Party, they erased the older model of republicanism. In the mid-20th century, Republican organizations functioned best as community-based civic associations. Conservative in form as well as substance, they focused on problem-solving in government and sought to contain and redirect political conflict rather than exacerbate it. These Republican organizations reflected the interests and control of local social and economic elites. Political scientist Clinton Rossiter has evoked the mid-20th century “self-image of the Republican Party” as “a solid, serious people…. a wholesome people without ruthlessness.”
Party politics in this approach is about organizing social actors into a calm, pragmatic leadership, not waging a major clash of worldviews or all-out war across social divisions. limit both in the conduct of politics and in the workings of government.
read more: Trump plans a more MAGA-like Senate
Ray Bliss, Ohio’s longtime Republican leader and chairman of the Republican National Committee in the 1960s, epitomized this approach. To build the Republican Party, he cross-referenced voter registration rolls with membership lists of service clubs like the Kiwanis Club, the Rotary Club, the Chamber of Commerce, and country clubs. Bliss, who disliked ideological infighting or outright comment on policy issues, summarized his vision for the Republican Party that took power in 1960 as “a government that is efficient yet economical; a government sensitive to changing times yet guided by common sense; a government considerate of the needs of the people yet wise in carrying out programs to meet those needs.”
Emerging conservative activists despised this approach as weak and politically ineffective: they believed politics was fundamentally rooted in conflict and sought to polarize politics by exploiting grievances and status resentment (“to know who hates who,” as future Nixon aide Kevin Phillips put it in 1968).
Changes in political organization in the 1970s set the stage for that approach to overtake the old party model. Interest groups, think tanks, and lobbying organizations encroached on the activities of both major parties, and a new campaign finance system funneled money outside the party structures. As the Republican Party’s formal influence weakened, outside groups, from the National Conservative Political Action Committee (NCPAC) to the National Right to Work Committee to the Moral Majority, filled the void. And conservative activists used this network of groups to reshape the Republican Party from the district level down, even as they outflanked the traditional parties from the outside. “Conservatism is wine,” said William Luscher, publisher of Conservatism is Wine. National Reviewhas often said, “The Republican Party is a bottle.”
Conservative leaders like Rusher and Paul Weyrich realized that this burgeoning political base offered an opportunity to form a new conservative electoral coalition. They aimed to capitalize on growing resentment among white Americans over a range of social and cultural issues, from legalized abortion to busing children to racially integrated schools. By working together, various outside groups could mobilize growing resentment and supplant the Republican establishment. In 1972, Weyrich began holding weekly strategy meetings that included staff from political groups like the NCPAC, religious right groups, and business groups like the National Association of Manufacturers. Conservatives who had once viewed each other with suspicion now had a template for cooperation.
The activists’ most important move was to win over disaffected white evangelicals, especially in the South, most of whom were former Democrats. Impassioned language about sexual morality has long colored conservative politics, and now it is being combined with new issues and networks. Weyrich, a deacon in the Melkite Greek Catholic Church, had always been vocal on abortion and homosexuality, and he saw early on how to unite Catholics and (white) evangelicals.
Ultimately, Christian Right pastors ended up using the same tactics as Weyrich and his fellow activists to stoke public outrage. “You need an issue that’s emotive to galvanize people and make them angry enough to stop watching TV and do something,” explained Bob Billings of the newly formed Moral Majority. “I believe the issue of homosexuality is the one we should be tapping into.” Women like Catholic Phyllis Schlafly and evangelical Beverly LaHaye also contributed to the explosion of outside conservative groups, especially on these cultural issues.
The effort took advantage of new limits imposed after Watergate on individual contributions to formal political parties and candidates. The limits created space for political action committees (PACs), which could rake in big sums from small donors motivated by sensationalist direct mail focused on social issues. NCPAC president Terry Dolan cheerfully predicted a politics free from the lines of accountability that had long shackled parties and candidates. “A group like ours can get away with lying,” he said in 1980, “and the candidates it supports will stay clean.”
One moment epitomized the clash of competing visions of political activism. At an awkward breakfast meeting on May 19, 1981, Republican National Committee Chairman Richards confronted a host of right-wing luminaries, from Dolan, Weyrich, and Schlafly to billionaire oilman and John Birch Society member Bunker Hunt. A conservative but traditional political activist, Richards complained that independents were making trouble where the Republican Party didn’t want them to. Their flamboyant advertising tactics and frequent interference in primaries had usurped the party’s traditional role. Richards chided them, calling them “like a cannonball on the deck of a ship.”
Nonsense, replied John Lofton. Conservative Digest. If he attacked Ronald Reagan and those fighting hardest for his tax cuts, it was Richards himself who ran wild.
read more: CPAC used to be for the more radical side of the Republican Party. The party has since shifted in that direction.
Richards was a more dogmatic conservative than earlier party chairs like Bliss. But he remained committed to the classic organizational model with lines of accountability and authority that had characterized political parties for a century and a half. “If I’m the party chair and I’m in charge of campaigning in a particular area, I don’t want someone else to come in and interfere with my strategy,” he argued. Richards later tried to enter into a “non-interference pact” in which conservative organizations would pledge not to intervene in any election in which a Republican candidate or state chair had asked them to withdraw.
NCPAC rejected the demands, calling Richards’ complaint the height of establishment bullshit. Dolan declared that party activists “don’t care what registered Republicans think.” All they care about are “donors.” The truth is that now that the right has its own organizations, financial clout, and connections to Republican voters, formal political parties are in no position to make demands.
In the decades that followed, right-wing issues became party issues, and their activists, activists, and political approaches changed too, until a conservative runaway gang eventually came to dominate the Republican Party and define our turbulent political era.
Political parties, at their best, safeguard democracy, unite governments with the governed, and instill norms of tolerance. When political parties fail to live up to these virtues, democracy itself is threatened. In recent years, as the right has moved from the Tea Party to MAGA, its longstanding, moneyed, win-at-all-costs approach has shifted in disturbing new directions that deny not only the authority of political parties but the very project of building electoral majorities. Gapped by apocalyptic fears about a changing American electorate, Republicans have resorted to features of the American political system that irritate the majority of the population: the courts, an unbalanced Senate with a 60-vote filibuster rule, unfair district drawing, and a politicized voting process.
Perhaps the key moment in the impulse that began to break down the traditional controls of American politics in the 1970s was the insurrection of January 6, 2021. Mob violence prompted the right to almost openly declare that their opponents’ electoral victories were meaningless and to accept any means necessary to prevent them. The basic democratic norm that losers must accept defeat and fight again no longer applied, becoming merely a shackle that should be discarded, “temporary and disposable”, just like the shackles of political parties.
Daniel Schlozman is an associate professor of political science at Johns Hopkins University. Sam Rosenfeld is an associate professor of political science at Colgate University. They co-authored the book, The Hollow Party: The Many Pasts and Troublesome Present of American Party Politics (Princeton, 2024) from which this essay is excerpted.
Made by History takes readers beyond the headlines through articles written and edited by expert historians. For more information about TIME’s “Made by History,” please click here.Opinions expressed do not necessarily reflect those of TIME editors..
