The American right [...] is on the march again. In some sense, this resurgence is hard to understand. If you buy the thesis that the Right is driven by a defense of hierarchy and privilege and draws its energy from opposition to a strong left, its strength is almost incomprehensible. It’s hard to think of a time when American capital and capitalists were so politically secure. [...]

[...] for most of the twentieth century, while the GOP was usually more conservative, especially on economic issues, than the Democrats, there was a great deal of ideological diversity within the two major parties. The Republican Party also had a liberal wing, just as the Democrats had a conservative wing.

[...]

[...] the GOP of the 1950s and 1960s often had a stronger civil rights record than the Democrats, because the Dems still had a large Southern component.

Into the 1960s, the Republicans often were stronger on civil liberties than Democrats as well. [...]

Movement conservatives were undeterred by Goldwater’s massive loss and continued with their plot to take over the Republican Party. A year later, Buckley ran for mayor of New York on the Conservative Party ticket, with the conscious aim of drawing enough votes away from the liberal Republican John Lindsay to elect the Democratic candidate, Abe Beame, and thereby weaken the GOP’s left flank. (The contrast with liberals, who shy away from any third-party challenge that might lead their party to a loss, is a vivid symptom of their lack of conviction.) [...]

the United States might have seemed to many a conservative country, making the founding of the magazine an act of “supererogation,” as the Catholic reactionary put it, in fact it was anything but: it was a bold counterstroke against liberal hegemony.

Continuing the provincial petit bourgeois theme, Goldwater was the grandson of the founder of a five-outlet department store chain

[...] many of the businesspeople who pushed the neoliberal agenda in the 1970s were neither movement conservatives nor self-made entrepreneurs but career managers. They were often socially liberal. But they objected to the host of new claims along what we’d later call identitarian lines (gender, race, etc.) as well as an explosive growth in social regulations (environment, workplace safety, and the like, as opposed to more narrowly drawn economic regulation of prices and product lines), which they felt were annoying restrictions on the free play of capital. [...]

[...] At the 1980 Republican convention, the one that nominated Ronald Reagan, the party dropped support for the era from its platform for the first time since it was adopted in 1940. The nomination of Reagan marked the victory of the Right in the Republican Party.