Question

Discussion Prompt: Describe the political, economic and cultural agenda of the New Right that emerged in the 1980s. How successful was the New Right in implementing their social and cultural agenda in the 1980s? Using your Module 14 course materials, identify some of the ways social groups from diverse backgrounds and experiences continued to offer a radical challenge to the far right's social and political agenda. 300 words

Answer 1

New Right, grassroots coalition of American conservatives that collectively led what scholars often refer to as the “conservative ascendancy” or “Republican ascendancy” of the late 20th century. Dubbed the New Right partly in contrast to the New Left counterculture of the 1960s, the New Right consisted of conservative activists who voiced opposition on a variety of issues, including abortion, homosexuality, the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA), the Panama Canal Treaty, affirmative action, and most forms of taxation.

The “newness” of the New Right refers both to the reinvigorated and redefined forms of conservative political activity and to the youthfulness and mobilization of a previously disorganized suburban middle class. The New Right grew rapidly during the 1960s and 1970s, thanks in part to organizations such as Young Americans for Freedom and College Republicans. These organizations shared demographic characteristics (white, middle-class, Protestant, suburban) and were frustrated with a perceived decline in morality during the 1960s and 1970s, including rampant drug use and more-open and public displays of sexuality as well as rising crime rates, race riots, civil rights unrest, and protest movements against the Vietnam War. Additionally, New Right conservatives often blamed the nation’s ills on liberalism, which they saw as contributing to the mismanagement and corruption of the federal government.

Though some debate as to the regional birthplace of the New Right still exists among scholars, the most popular view sees the Sun Belt—the area of land stretching from southern California across the Southwest, through Texas, and into Florida—as the geographic home of the New Right. Arizona Sen. Barry Goldwater’s 1964 presidential campaign is often viewed as a key event in the rise of the New Right, and Pres. Ronald Reagan is often seen as its iconic hero. Other key players in the rise of the New Right included anti-ERA activist Phyllis Schlafly and Richard Viguerie, whose use of direct mail revolutionized political strategies for mobilizing grassroots support

Definition of New Right

Every time we turn around, something new is being marketed to the public. It could be a new computer, a new phone, a new car, anything. So what makes something new? Well, hopefully a new product is going to be relevant to current everyday life. Perhaps it's an improvement over the older versions of the same thing or adds features that the old versions didn't have.

But this isn't limited to just the newest iPhone or luxury sedan. It works the same way with political movements. Sometimes events cause a new political movement to rise up, claiming to have the right answers to pressing policy questions that current political movements do not possess. The New Right is one such movement.

The New Right refers to the movement of American conservatives in the 1970s and 1980s that rose up in opposition to liberal policies on taxes, abortion, affirmative action, as well as foreign policy stances on the Soviet Union. This movement lent substantial support to the Republican Party, leading to Republicans winning control of the U.S. Senate in 1980 and the election of Ronald Reagan as 40th president of the United States the same year.

New Right Issues

The New Right movement began forming in the 1960s and 1970s as its members were dismayed by increased sexuality in the public arena, rising crime, liberalization of abortion, and social unrest caused by the Vietnam War, which was the conflict between the United States and communist North Vietnam that lasted from roughly 1965 to 1975. Organizations were formed, such as Young Americans for Freedom and the College Republicans, often populated by white, middle-class Protestant suburbanites.

Among the issues that animated the New Right was the upcoming Panama Canal treaty that gave control over the Panama Canal to its mother country. Many conservatives opposed the treaty, feeling the U.S. should retain control over the canal. New Right members also balked at what they viewed as appeasement towards the Soviet Union. While running against President Gerald Ford for the Republican presidential nomination in 1976, Reagan criticized both the treaty and the Ford policy of détente, which was an effort to relax tensions with the Soviets through negotiations. Instead, Reagan believed that the U.S. should build up its military might to deter Soviet aggression.

The organization of social conservatives also fueled the New Right. In 1973, the Supreme Court established a constitutional right to an abortion in the Roe v. Wade ruling. Opposition to the ruling sparked a parallel movement called the Religious Right, which was made up largely of Protestant Christians who opposed liberal policies on abortion and homosexuality. This movement was led by individuals such as Jerry Falwell and Reverend Pat Robertson. Many Religious Right activists found common cause with the New Right and joined its ranks, giving strong support to New Right candidates and Reagan during his runs for president. This is what has led many critics to conflate the Religious Right with the Republican Party and, even though that relationship still exists, the ideological similarities between the two groups began dwindling in the 2010s.

New Right Major Players

Aside from individuals such as Reagan and Falwell, one of the most important players of the New Right was Richard Viguerie, who pioneered the field of direct mailing while working for the Barry Goldwater campaign. Many wealthy donors were put off by the strident Goldwater and did not donate to him, so Viguerie instead sent out letters to thousands of supporters asking for donations. This came to be called direct mailing, and Viguerie and other conservatives would use it later to raise money for other campaigns and for political organizations.

Another important member was Paul Weyrich, who founded the Heritage Foundation, an organization dedicated to creating policy papers to be used by activists and politicians to create and explain public policies. Other players included Howard Phillips, the founder of the Conservative Caucus, and Phyllis Schlafly,

A dictionary defines sociology as the systematic study of society and social interaction. The word “sociology” is derived from the Latin word socius (companion) and the Greek word logos (speech or reason), which together mean “reasoned speech about companionship”. How can the experience of companionship or togetherness be put into words or explained? While this is a starting point for the discipline, sociology is actually much more complex. It uses many different methods to study a wide range of subject matter and to apply these studies to the real world.

The sociologist Dorothy Smith (1926 – ) defines the social as the “ongoing concerting and coordinating of individuals’ activities” (Smith 1999). Sociology is the systematic study of all those aspects of life designated by the adjective “social.” These aspects of social life never simply occur; they are organized processes. They can be the briefest of everyday interactions—moving to the right to let someone pass on a busy sidewalk, for example—or the largest and most enduring interactions—such as the billions of daily exchanges that constitute the circuits of global capitalism. If there are at least two people involved, even in the seclusion of one’s mind, then there is a social interaction that entails the “ongoing concerting and coordinating of activities.” Why does the person move to the right on the sidewalk? What collective process lead to the decision that moving to the right rather than the left is normal? Think about the T-shirts in your drawer at home. What are the sequences of linkages and social relationships that link the T-shirts in your chest of drawers to the dangerous and hyper-exploitive garment factories in rural China or Bangladesh? These are the type of questions that point to the unique domain and puzzles of the social that sociology seeks to explore and understand.

Sociologists study all aspects and levels of society. A society is a group of people whose members interact, reside in a definable area, and share a culture. A culture includes the group’s shared practices, values, beliefs, norms and artifacts. One sociologist might analyze video of people from different societies as they carry on everyday conversations to study the rules of polite conversation from different world cultures. Another sociologist might interview a representative sample of people to see how email and instant messaging have changed the way organizations are run. Yet another sociologist might study how migration determined the way in which language spread and changed over time. A fourth sociologist might study the history of international agencies like the United Nations or the International Monetary Fund to examine how the globe became divided into a First World and a Third World after the end of the colonial era.

These examples illustrate the ways society and culture can be studied at different levels of analysis, from the detailed study of face-to-face interactions to the examination of large-scale historical processes affecting entire civilizations. It is common to divide these levels of analysis into different gradations based on the scale of interaction involved. As discussed in later chapters, sociologists break the study of society down into four separate levels of analysis: micro, meso, macro, and global. The basic distinction, however, is between micro-sociology and macro-sociology.

The study of cultural rules of politeness in conversation is an example of micro-sociology. At the micro-level of analysis, the focus is on the social dynamics of intimate, face-to-face interactions. Research is conducted with a specific set of individuals such as conversational partners, family members, work associates, or friendship groups. In the conversation study example, sociologists might try to determine how people from different cultures interpret each other’s behaviour to see how different rules of politeness lead to misunderstandings. If the same misunderstandings occur consistently in a number of different interactions, the sociologists may be able to propose some generalizations about rules of politeness that would be helpful in reducing tensions in mixed-group dynamics (e.g., during staff meetings or international negotiations). Other examples of micro-level research include seeing how informal networks become a key source of support and advancement in formal bureaucracies or how loyalty to criminal gangs is established.

Macro-sociology focuses on the properties of large-scale, society-wide social interactions: the dynamics of institutions, classes, or whole societies. The example above of the influence of migration on changing patterns of language usage is a macro-level phenomenon because it refers to structures or processes of social interaction that occur outside or beyond the intimate circle of individual social acquaintances. These include the economic and other circumstances that lead to migration; the educational, media, and other communication structures that help or hinder the spread of speech patterns; the class, racial, or ethnic divisions that create different slangs or cultures of language use; the relative isolation or integration of different communities within a population; and so on. Other examples of macro-level research include examining why women are far less likely than men to reach positions of power in society or why fundamentalist Christian religious movements play a more prominent role in American politics than they do in Canadian politics. In each case, the site of the analysis shifts away from the nuances and detail of micro-level interpersonal life to the broader, macro-level systematic patterns that structure social change and social cohesion in society.

The relationship between the micro and the macro remains one of the key problems confronting sociology. The German sociologist Georg Simmel pointed out that macro-level processes are in fact nothing more than the sum of all the unique interactions between specific individuals at any one time (1908), yet they have properties of their own which would be missed if sociologists only focused on the interactions of specific individuals. Émile Durkheim’s classic study of suicide (1897) is a case in point. While suicide is one of the most personal, individual, and intimate acts imaginable, Durkheim demonstrated that rates of suicide differed between religious communities—Protestants, Catholics, and Jews—in a way that could not be explained by the individual factors involved in each specific case. The different rates of suicide had to be explained by macro-level variables associated with the different religious beliefs and practices of the faith communities. We will return to this example in more detail later. On the other hand, macro-level phenomena like class structures, institutional organizations, legal systems, gender stereotypes, and urban ways of life provide the shared context for everyday life but do not explain its nuances and micro-variations very well. Macro-level structures constrain the daily interactions of the intimate circles in which we move, but they are also filtered through localized perceptions and “lived” in a myriad of inventive and unpredictable ways.