For the Common Man- Patrick J. Buchanan and Kevin P. Phillips: Populist Conservatives during the Ascendancy of the American Right

Abstract

This biographical history explores the careers of New Right conservative populists Patrick Buchanan and Kevin Phillips, tracing their shared political evolution with, and eventual divergence from, mainstream Republicanism. Placing their conservative populism in the wider political context of America’s transitions from liberalism to neoliberalism from the late 1960s to the early 1990s, both men expressed a politics that articulated the rise of the American right, and its divisions by the election of Bill Clinton. Using a myriad of published works from their literary careers, this project complicates the often-monolithic picture of conservatism’s rise in American politics. Starting with Phillips’ influential The Emerging Republican Majority (1969), both men envisioned a coming conservative electoral majority to usurp the dominance of Democratic liberalism. During the 1970s, both men thought such a majority was jeopardized in the aftermath of the Watergate scandal, the resulting ideological confusion of the decade, and what they perceived as the liberal bias of the nation’s media. Unsatisfied with the expressions of American conservatism in the 1980s, Phillips became a harsh critic of Ronald Reagan’s economic policies while Buchanan felt that Republicans had not moved right enough. By contextualizing America’s shifts in the post-World War II era with the country’s longer populist history, Phillips pivoted his image of the elite from a broad collection of liberal interests to Reagan’s business Republicans. Buchanan only emboldened his attacks on liberal elites and moderate Republicans he thought threatened the white working-class. In highlighting their trajectories, this project places populism as a political force that both bound together, and revealed contradictions in, the conservative movement that gained power in the 1980s. Broadly, their divergence from mainstream Republicanism represented the breaking of Reagan’s coalition of economic and social conservatives.