Rage against the Leviathan: Direct Mail and the Rise of the New Right

Since at least the mid-1960s, conservatives of various sorts, including the likes publisher William Rusher and consultant Richard Viguerie, have debated how best to adapt American conservatism to changing cultural times, to shifts in socio-economic sentiment, and to oftentimes volatile encounters between “the people” and the “powers that be.” For these particular social actors, the East Coast had become a symbol of an establishment presence within the Republican Party- a sign of the worst kind of ideational stagnancy. For Rusher in particular, the party needed a spark- one that could energize new voters while strengthening the commitment of those already within the proverbial fold.

This talk explores “the New Right” of the 1970s in order to illustrate how their use of direct mail, position marketing, and mass media created a unique communicative genre that challenged assumed liberal democratic boundaries between informing and entertaining, art and news, fact and fiction. The paper argues that direct mail in particular helped revolutionize conserative constituency making in and through its post-industrial age. What would become “the New Right” in American public life largely emerged from this collective reconsideration of how best to make conservative ideas palatable to the American people in the midst of severe economic uncertainty. In essence, the New Right embodied what Viguerie and other similarly thinking conservatives attempted to practice daily in their respective meetings, publications, and policy defenses: principle over party.

In the midst of a crumbling New Deal Order, how would conservatives advertise their message to the broadest yet most productive audience possible? The content of this message mattered to be sure, racist, misogynist, or otherwise, but the ways in which such content was disseminated and marketed would be even more so.