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This timeline of modern American conservatism lists important events, developments and occurrences that have affected conservatism in the United States. With the decline of the conservative wing of the Democratic Party following 1960, the movement is most closely associated with the Republican Party (GOP). Economic conservatives favor less government regulation, lower taxes and weaker labor unions while social conservatives focus on moral issues and neoconservatives focus on democracy worldwide. Conservatives generally distrust the United Nations and Europe and apart from the libertarian wing favor a strong military and give enthusiastic support to Israel.[1]
Although conservatism has much older roots in American history, the modern movement began to gel in the mid-1930s when intellectuals and politicians collaborated with businessmen to oppose the liberalism of the New Deal led by President Franklin D. Roosevelt, newly energized labor unions and big-city Democratic machines. After World War II, that coalition gained strength from new philosophers and writers who developed an intellectual rationale for conservatism.[2]
Richard Nixon's victory in the 1968 election is often considered a realigning election in American politics. From 1932 to 1968, the Democratic Party was the majority party as during that time the Democrats had won seven out of nine presidential elections and their agenda gravely affected that undertaken by Republican Dwight D. Eisenhower administration, which was altered completely with Nixon's 1968 electoral victory. Democrats were largely split over whether to support or oppose the Vietnam War, and many whites felt the national Democratic Party had deserted them, leading many of them to vote Republican at the presidential level since the 1950s and at the state and local level since the 1990s.
In the 1980 presidential election and in his subsequent presidential administration, Ronald Reagan rejuvenated conservatism in the United States, supporting tax cuts, significantly increasing defense spending, deregulation, and breaking with the post-World War II foreign policy consensus of containing the Soviet Union and instead introducing and advancing the Reagan Doctrine, which sought to rollback global communism and bring an end to the Cold War.
Reagan also supported and advanced the ideals associated with family values and conservative Judeo-Christian morality, leading many historians to call the 1980s the Reagan era.[3] The Reagan model remains the conservative standard for social, economic, and foreign policies. In the 21st century, social issues such as abortion, gun control, and gay marriage have grown in importance to many American conservatives. Since 2009, the Tea Party movement has energized conservatives at the local level against the policies made by the presidency of Barack Obama, leading to Republican success in the 2010 and 2014 mid-term elections, and the 2016 election, in which Donald Trump was elected president.
- ^ Thomas, Michael (June 11, 2007). American Policy Toward Israel: The Power and Limits of Beliefs. Routledge. ISBN 978-1-135-98345-1.
- ^ Patrick Allitt (2009). The Conservatives: Ideas and Personalities Throughout American History. Yale University Press. ch 1–6 covers the story down to 1945.
- ^ Sean Wilentz The Age of Reagan: A History, 1974–2008. (2009); John Ehrman The Eighties: America in the Age of Reagan. (2008) pp. 3–8.
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