There is total continuity from the early 1970s dawn of so-called “modern American conservativism” and today’s Republican crime syndicate.

With the Heritage Foundation back in the news because of this, ‘lawandcrime.com/high-profile/p… I thought it might be helpful to put the organization in context. 1/

Modern American conservatism fuses ideas from libertarianism, Chicago-School free-market economics, and white Christian evangelicalism, with the goal of reversing the New Deal and the post-World-War-II civil rights movement. 2/

Modern American conservatism approves only a very small range for government action. Government may act to maintain order, stability, and certain kinds of hierarchy, and only it if does not encroach upon the prerogatives of appropriate churches (white evangelical Christian ones and those with comparable tenets and practices), acceptable families (heterosexual, two-parent, patriarchal), and the free market (capitalist). 3/

Modern American conservatives believe in inherent authority of the church, the patriarchal Christian family, and an unfettered market. The view also rests on a belief about the incompetence of government. Government is too removed, too big, too clumsy for tasks other than minimal order-keeping. When government does properly maintain order and stability, individuals and nongovernmental organizations can attend to all the other tasks government might attempt but is likely to botch. 4/

The founding proponents of modern American conservatism started to advance their views as early as 1951, when William Buckley wrote God and Man at Yale. If you are not familiar with this book, you can get an idea of it from this highly critical contemporaneous review. https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1951/11/the-attack-on-yale/306724/ 5/

In 1960, Buckley’s brother-in-law ghost-wrote a book published under Barry Goldwater’s name, titled The Conscience of a Conservative. This was the first popular statement of the tenets of modern American conservativism and how they should be operationalized. 6/

By the early 1960s and 1970s, modern American conservatism fueled resistance to racially integrated schools, led by Jerry Falwell, and to resistance to the Equal Rights Amendment and insistence on patriarchal heterosexual marriage, led by Phyllis Schlafley. 7/

Meanwhile, business interests were coalescing around political action to rollback environmental and workplace safety regulations. The American Medical Association, fighting legislation that ultimately formed Medicare and Medicaid, created PAC in 1961 to raise money for candidates who opposed programs like these. Copying that example, board members from the National Association of Manufacturers started the first corporate PAC, the Business-Industry Political Action Committee (BIPAC) in 1963. 8/

To be continued. 9/