Movement Conservatism

The term movement conservatism was an inside term describing conservatism in the United States and New Right. According to Nash (2009) the movement comprises a coalition of five distinct impulses. From the mid-1930s to the 1960s, libertarians, traditionalists, and anticommunists made up this coalition, with the goal of fighting the liberals' New Deal. In the 1970s, two more impulses were added with the addition of neoconservatives and the Religious Right.

R. Emmett Tyrrell, a prominent writer on the right, says, "the conservatism that, when it made its appearance in the early 1950s, was called the New Conservatism and for the past fifty or sixty years has been known as 'movement conservatism' by those of us who have espoused it." Political scientists Doss and Roberts say that "The term movement conservatives refers to those people who argue that big government constitutes the most serious problem.... Movement conservatives blame the growth of the administrative state for destroying individual initiative." Historian Allan J. Lichtman traces the term to a memorandum written in February 1961 by William A. Rusher, the publisher of National Review, to William F. Buckley, Jr., envisioning National Review as not just "the intellectual leader of the American Right," but more grandly of "the Western Right." Rusher envisioned philosopher kings would function as "movement conservatives".

Recent examples of conservative writers using the term "movement conservatism" include Sam Tanenhaus, Paul Gottfried, and Jonathan Riehl. New York Times columnist Paul Krugman devotes a chapter of his The Conscience of a Liberal (2007) to the movement.