ABSTRACT
Catholics in the United States tended quite early to affiliate with the Democratic Party, first because the Republicans seemed to be a bastion of intolerant Protestantism, then because the urban Democratic machines functioned as agencies of patronage and welfare, finally because the party emerged in the 1930s as the champion of the working class and of the welfare state of which most American Catholics were beneficiaries to some degree. The gradual emergence of the Civil Rights Movement after World War II opened another dimension of Catholic social thought. Abortion was not at first one of the principal issues, but inevitably it became so. In 1966 Buckley's brother-in-law L. Brent Bozell broke with the National Review and founded Triumph as the platform of what he claimed to be authentic Catholic politics. The rapid swell of opposition to the Vietnam War was, as much as it was anything, a repudiation of the anti-Communism that was integral to Catholic politics.
