How the South Won the Civil War: Oligarchy, Democracy, and the Continuing Fight for the Soul of America

by Heather Cox Richardson

argued that McCarthy’s ends had justified his crude means, because America was under siege not necessarily by actual communists, but by those who were not sufficiently opposed to communism: “the Liberals,” a name they capitalized to make this general leaning sound like a political cabal. The term swept in almost everyone in America, for Buckley and Bozell made no distinction between Soviet-style communism and the widely popular liberal consensus. They praised McCarthy for challenging the orthodoxy of the New Deal and called for a movement that would purge the country of Liberals and create a new orthodoxy of strict Christianity and individualism. They called themselves Conservatives, though their determination to overthrow a popular, stable system of government was, in fact, quite radical. To distinguish their political movement from traditional conservative principles, adherents began to refer to their project as “Movement Conservatism.”19