explain what made the New Right new. He answered that they weren’t really conservatives. They were “radicals working to overturn the present power structure in this country.” The New Right’s discontinuities from the old one would be exaggerated in the years to come—not least by its self-mythologizing leaders. But there were some important differences. For one thing, they believed Barry Goldwater, in whose presidential campaign many had cut their political teeth, was by then too much a member of the establishment to retain their respect. That made the outsider Orrin Hatch a natural recruit.
...more
