"He Spoke to the American People": Young Conservative Intellectuals, Ronald Reagan, and the Republican Presidential Primaries in 1976

The historiography of American conservatism has grown exponentially over the past quarter-century. While intellectual and political histories of the right were prominent in the 1980s and 1990s, the historiography has shifted in different directions over the past decade. Lisa McGirr’s excellent social history of middle class conservatives in the late-1950s and early-1960s in Orange County, California, Suburban Warriors, sparked a dramatic expansion in social histories of conservatism, each with an eye to explaining the rise of the right from various state, local or institutional perspectives and each focused on racial issues in the 1950s and 1960s.

My paper argues for the importance of understanding the intellectual history of conservatism in the 1970s to the rise of American conservatism. Specifically, I examine the perspectives of young intellectuals—conservative writers of the baby boomer generation—on the Republican presidential primaries in 1976. Young conservative intellectuals looked to Ronald Reagan as the standard-bearing for conservatism and the future of the Republican Party throughout the 1970s. Remarkably, they even defended Reagan’s choice of moderate Republican Senator Richard Schweiker as his Vice Presidential nominee. I will show that for these young writers the battle between Ronald Reagan and Gerald Ford for the GOP nomination in 1976 demonstrated the importance of a wide array of issues important to conservatism, including anticommunism, the Panama Canal, domestic spending, and abortion. Although racial issues played a part in young conservatives’ views of the 1976 election, other issues were of more importance in energizing young writers in their vigorous defense of Reagan.