The New Right and the World They Made

Direct mail about direct mail

I have been reading a lot by and about the New Right(s). Unfortunately, the term – like New Conservative and even neoconservative – cycles around periodically precisely because the Right or conservative reactions are reinvented in response to new political or cultural realities. The temptation is always there to call a development the New Right to signal its newness and contrast it from the Old. It’s frustrating because it is difficult to keep them straight.

Once upon a time, we distinguished between the Old Right (pre-World War II) and Buckleyite conservatism. Then people, including conservatives, began distinguishing between the Old Right (Buckleyites) and the New Right (Washington-centric political actors in the late 1970s, early 1980s). Thankfully, the rivals to the Neoconservatives called themselves Paleoconservatives, although I have also recently seen that term – paleoconservative – applied to the once New Right then Old Right Buckleyites. That’s to say nothing of the current iteration of the New Right, which broadly refers to Trumpist intellectuals and activists who reject the Reagan and especially, in my view, Bush era pieties of conservatism.

Two quick remarks on this:

First, is that in the confusion, there is some regularity with how New Right is used. The term is “Right,” rather than conservative. So it potentially eschews any implications preservationist or gradualist or traditionalism implicit in the term “conservatism.” And it is specifically new: new in the sense it offers novel ways of justifying hierarchy, but also new in the sense it distinguishes itself from – or even rejects – whatever form of right-wing or conservative political activity that preceded it. Typically, then, New Right has denoted something that is – or is at least perceived as – a more radical form of right-wing politics than that which has gone before.

The fact the New Right recurs perhaps suggests a pattern. Right-wing activists and ideologues emerge in a radical form; their movement either achieves or doesn’t achieve some proximity to power; in power, events lead to compromises and failures; its leaders age and in some cases moderate; a new generation emerges, rejecting or at least criticizing the previous as a new New Right.

The second quick point I want to make is that sometime the dust does settle a bit, and a term sticks more to one group than another. It’s reasonably clear who the neoconservatives are, even though that term was applied to a few groups. (I think the generational model of understanding them is useful.) Likewise, when historians of modern conservatism talk about the New Right, generally they mean a specific circle of activists and organizations that peaked in the 1980s. I do think “New Right” will stick in reference to Trumpist radicals. Who knows? Maybe in 40 years’ time, there will be another New Right, too.

The person responsible for the New Right coinage in this instance was Kevin Phillips, a self-taught political demographer and Nixon aide who foresaw an emergent right-wing political majority that eventually coalesced behind Reagan. I consider Phillips and other thinkers like Samuel T. Francis to be New Right intellectuals. Phillips was particularly idiosyncratic and became more critical of the right, including the New Right. What made these men New Right were their departures from older conservative assumptions and their willingness to criticize the conservative movement. In particular, they saw a political future based on lower middle- and working-class issues-motivated voters.

But the New Right was not primarily an intellectual movement. It was an activist one. Its key figures came of age in the conservative movement – including Young Americans for Freedom – and ended up in Washington as Republican staffers and aides, or working for right-leaning organizations. The New Right were not content to ponder and pontificate from little magazines in New York. They brought an aggressive, coordinated, professionalized, and well-financed approach to right-wing politics that was, I think, genuinely new. One New Right leader, who became a special assistant to Reagan, recalled being shocked that conservative senators Barry Goldwater, Strom Thurmond and John Tower didn’t meet regularly to discuss strategy. By doing so, the New Right leaders hoped to smash liberals, and purge the Republican Party of squishes.

A profile of the New Right in Harper’s Magazine said, “Like the old Right, the New Right consists of a small, tight-knit group of true believers. It is so tight-knit, in fact, that any diagram of its organization looks like an octopus trying to shake hands with itself, so completely interlocked are the directorates of its various components.”

At its narrowest, the late 1970s, early 1980s New Right could be chiefly defined by four people: Paul Weyrich (an Eastern rite Catholic and former DJ turned political strategist), Howard Phillips (a former YAF leader and Nixon Administration hatchet man), John T. (Terry) Dolan (a hard-charging pioneer of political action committees and attack ads, and a closeted gay man who died of AIDS aged 36), and Richard Viguerie (a direct mail savant, the “King Midas of the ‘New Right’”).

Between them, the New Rightists used single issue organizations (including ones focused on gun rights, right-to-life, anti-tax, and opposition to LGBTQ rights) to identify and outrage socially conservative voters. Then, using multi-issue conservative organizations, they worked to unite and coordinate these overlapping single issue voters to teach (or show) them that they are conservatives, and that liberals are their enemy. It was the united front system Frank Meyer proposed, but could never have dreamed of.

As political actors, these men were savvy and sophisticated. As subjects of intellectual history, their thought is usually unsubtle, lacking nuance. But their combination of dogmatism and dynamism became a strength.

What underwrote the professionalization, organization and ruthless aggression the New Right was money. That money came from Richard Viguerie and his direct mail empire.[1] In the direct mail business, subtlety is a liability.

Direct mail works like this: a politician or organization employs a direct mail company, such as Viguerie’s Richard A. Viguerie Co (RAVCO). That company has a list, or set of lists, of names and addresses of people who might be interested in that politician or organization. Maybe the politician has his or her own list of contributors to add to company’s (and thereby becoming a permanent part of the company’s proprietary list). The company mails the relevant list a sensationalizing letter.

We need you. Yes, you. To defeat X. The fate of the Republic depends on it. Please send a check to Y.

The direct mail company hopes for a 2% response rate. 2% means that the direct mail campaign has paid for itself. Critically, it also means the company and its employer has identified a slice – motivated patriots or simply marks, depending on your perspective – who will respond to mailers with cash. Then, you hit that 2% up for money again and again. You flatter, cajole, scare, induce, whatever.

Richard Viguerie started his business with $400 dollars and the hand-copied list of 12,000 small donors to Barry Goldwater’s 1964 presidential campaign. (The list was public domain, but photocopying was prohibited.) At least by 1978 he was a multimillionaire, and his rivals thought he cleared two million dollars pre-tax a year.

Like the other New Rightists, Viguerie was a populist. He believed in the emergent right-wing majority. RAVCO’s clients in the 1970s – Jesse Helms, Strom Thurmond, and George Wallace (for whom Viguerie raised millions to pay off debt from his presidential campaigns) – demonstrate his southern populist bona fides.

The funds raised from small donors enabled the New Right to revolutionize right-wing politics in the late 1970s. It was also a strong, early example of harnessing a non-traditional platform to get over the felt – and probably real – ways the right lacked access to traditional media.

“It’s not a cheap medium,” Viguerie admitted, “but it is a highly effective one if you know what you are doing.” It cost a lot to print materials and mail a large list. And for only a 2% response rate? But, Viguerie argued, direct mail did more than raise funds. Direct mail was advertising. It raised the public’s consciousness. It spoke directly to the people. It made an end run around the Establishment’s control of the television and newspapers.

Traditional journalism is expensive. It requires staff, shoe-leather work, investigations, editing. It is also professionalized, with norms around fact checking, balance, and public interest. Direct mail was expensive, and RAVCO had a staff in the low hundred. But it was also a serious money spinner with nothing resembling a journalistic ethos. Its goal was to raise emotions, make money, and defeats liberals. “We didn’t invent playing to fears,” Viguerie insisted. “The liberals try to scare their people as we do ours.” No doubt true, but Viguerie also conceptualized direct mail as an alternative media source, which has different implied expectations about facticity and context.

The Right has succeeded in using new media forms to reach people. Direct mail; AM radio; cable news; websites (like the Drudge Report or NRO’s Corner); social media and memes; online video and podcasting. Right-wing success on each of these platforms has been highlighted as a driver of their political success at various points in the last four decades. (This is annoying for someone like me, whose work focuses on magazines.)

These forms of media are different, and I don’t want to overstate their similarities. That said, they have historically worked as an alternative to the daily newspaper and nightly news, which have high costs, barriers to entry, and norms. Whether its writing directly to people to solicit funds, or wanting to earn clicks or downloads, or to keep viewers tuned in 24/7, each of these forms of media share some underlying elements.

To find and retain audiences, these media favor hyperbolic, inflammatory, doctrinaire, and repetitive messages. “Direct mail is basically an advertising medium,” Viguerie wrote. “Repetition is absolutely necessary.” Consistency of message or position is true in each of these forms of alternative media in ways that I think are less true of a citywide newspaper or a mainstream news network (although the Right disputes this strongly). Each has, too, extremely strong reinforcement mechanisms. A direct mailer learns very quickly if a message works or not if it doesn’t achieve the golden 2% response rate. Websites live or die by traffic, radio hosts by audience. You can’t influence without an audience. When the New Right arose, the mainstream media, such as city newspapers or the chief television networks, were to some extent insulated by their scale and unassailability. Alternative media chased the money, and that meant elevating the tension and pressure.

The combination of intensity of message and direct messaging (like a direct mailer, a video fed to you by algorithm, or a podcast in your ear) has the effect of identity building. This occurs through people receiving messages targeted at them, and building on previous engagement (like hitting the 2% repeatedly). It occurs in other ways too. Through parasocial identification with podcasters, bloggers, newsletter writers, or YouTubers, and also through specific calls to action (donate, doorknock, like and subscribe). These factors all work in tandem in ways that create an identity for someone, in ways that can be radicalizing too.

I have often thought that a “content creator’s” the need for constant fodder and the wide waterfront they must go to in order to get it creates the false impression – both to themselves and their followers/readers – that the state of the world is worse than it is. In other words, folks like Rod Dreher spent so much of their time seeking out and blogging about extreme cases of progressivism that they developed a distorted picture of the world.

Similarly, the ways alternative media connects influencers with a self-selecting audience gives creators a false sense that they have a special understanding of the public. Digital Caesars in miniature, they begin to think they understand the people, and, even more, speak for the people. The New Right style had a pronounced stridency. Some of it came from doctrinal certainty, but some no doubt came from their belief they were tribunes of true America.

The mid-century media landscape that conservatives resented so greatly has collapsed. It was largely undone by the internet, especially the shift of classified ads online. It would be too easy to say that the years the right and the New Right in particular spent developing alternative media “laid the groundwork” for present day success. But it is true that, maybe out of necessity, the Right developed a potent toolkit of liberal-demonizing, single-issue hammering, identity-building messages that has flourished in the post-monoculture moment.

Everyone is a direct mailer now.

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[1] Some of it also came from Joseph Coors of Coors Brewing Company, to whom Weyrich in particular was close.