Introduction

This book provides an account of the rise of the Republican Party Right in the years between Barry Goldwater’s 1964 presidential defeat and the election of Ronald Reagan as president in 1980. Specifically, it offers a detailed, historical-institutional analysis of the organizational factors internal to the Republican Party itself that helped the conservative Republican Right become the dominant political and ideological faction within the GOP in the years between Goldwater and Reagan. It looks, in particular, at how the growth of the Right in these years was aided by a desire on the part of many Republicans leaders to rebound from electoral defeat by rebuilding the party organizationally, rather than reforming it politically, through the introduction of a more “service”-oriented party structure at the national level.