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To: H-1960s@H-NET.MSU.EDU Subject: Re: Conservative Sixties, trying again Comments on Conservative 60s. Well, this has been fun and good holiday cheer. I do agree with the comments made that historians have of late been doing a lot of good work on post-World War II conservatism, including the 60s era. The book Jeff Roche and I edited was intended to take advantage of that work and introduce new studies in a kind of one-stop shopping model particularly useful for course adoption. Several of the comments, particularly those by Kazin, Schneider, and Critchlow, demonstrate the degree to which we are still having fruitful and unresolved conversations about who exactly conservatives are in the Sixties era and what they want. Michael Kazin and I seem to be arguing for a big tent in which conservatives are mostly people who self- identify as such or, as Jeff Roche points out, are people who are in a process of self-identifying as conservatives. Greg Schneider and Don Critchlow seem to be arguing that conservatives fit within a certain political parameter best established by the Goldwater coalition and policed by William Buckley. In a paper I gave at Don’s Policy History expo last spring, I argued that conservatives in the mid-60s are having heated arguments about civil rights legislation. Those who oppose the civil rights acts, like Goldwater and Reagan, do become dominant forces in the conservative movement but I try to show that all conservatives, as self-identified at the time, did not oppose racial justice through federal legislation. I think the centrality of racial justice issues in the making of a conservative political movement in the 60s is not unimportant and it needs to be looked at squarely, even if it was not that important in certain Orange County neighborhoods and even if Mr. Welch was not a racist . . . . or a conservative??? Jeff Roche shows in his dissertation and forthcoming book that racial justice issues are important in the 60s era to inchoate conservatives in the Texas Panhandle. Right, Jeff? It is also interesting to note that George Wallace specifically identifies himself in the mid- 1960s as having once been a liberal but that because of Democratic Party race policy he now identifies with conservatives. Okay, maybe William Buckley would not like his definition of conservatism but what does it mean that Wallace says what he does? I also think it is worth considering that a difference grows in the 60s era between business conservatives and "movement" conservatives and that Nixon nicely handles this divide. Don seems to want to treat Nixon as not a conservative and he clearly is not a Goldwater or Reagan conservative. But could he be a moderate conservative? Is there such a thing? Besides his electoral strategy of reaching out to culturally conservative Democrats I am also thinking about his new federalism programs, an understudied example of conservative governance. And yes, his Watergate problem did hurt the Republican Party but it will be interesting to research if it actually hurt the growing power of conservative activism and intellectual vivacity. How, I wonder would work by the Edsalls on the 70s era, with their Washington focus on institution building, affect our discussion of the conservative trajectory? Thanks to Michael L for setting up this focused and useful conversation on an important historiographical topic. David Farber
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