The Ideological-Operational Divide in the G.O.P.

In the late nineteen-sixties, when Richard Nixon was practicing law on Wall Street but had his eye on bigger things, the columnists Rowland Evans and Robert Novak reported that Nixon’s advisers were studying a new book titled “The Political Beliefs of Americans,” with particular interest in its use of opinion polls to explain the nature and depth of conservatism in America. The book’s publication, in 1967, came three years after President Lyndon B. Johnson inflicted a bruising defeat on the Republican Presidential nominee, Arizona Senator Barry Goldwater, who had run an unflinchingly right-leaning campaign. (Nixon, who had failed to win the White House in 1960, and then the California governorship two years later, found himself sitting that round out.) Excavations of the Goldwater-Johnson contest might still produce surprising new nuggets; even at the time, though, it was no surprise that most of Goldwater’s twenty-seven million votes were cast by white Protestants. The authors of “Political Beliefs,” Lloyd A. Free and Hadley Cantril, noted that nearly half of those voters were college educated, and asserted that “the impression that Goldwater supporters were ‘a bunch of ignorant kooks’ is ridiculous.”

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