From Draft NOtices, October-December 2024
— Isidro Ortiz, PhD
The election of Richard Nixon in 1968 marked the twilight of liberalism and the ascendancy of conservatism, according to some historians. In the wake of Nixon’s rise to power, the American Right mobilized and caused significant changes to social, economic and political life. Two recent works explore how the Right became such an influential force and are worth our reading.
In her new book, Resistance from the Right: Conservatives and the Campus Wars in Modern American, historian Lauren Lassabe Shepherd draws extensively on interviews and archival sources to chronicle the emergence and growth of organized resistance to the campus-based New Left and Black Power movements of the late 1960s. She illuminates how conservative student activists were funded by wealthy donors and received intellectual guidance from sophisticated prominent conservatives. Under such sponsorship and direction, conservative student activists such as Karl Rove, Bill Barr, Jeff Sessions and Pat Buchanan crafted a robust response to progressivism on college campuses and became conservative icons.