Building the New Right: How Conservatives Mobilized Young Americans for Freedom to Capture the Republican Party, 1960-1980

Abstract

This dissertation explains how conservatives used networks of mid-level activist-entrepreneurs to monopolize power within the Republican Party and remake it into a vessel for ideological conservatism. Existing accounts of the conservative turn in the postwar GOP tend to focus either on elite entrepreneurs or grassroots mobilization, but neither the top-down nor bottom-up explanations sufficiently account for the coordinated, sustained effort required to both displace an institutional party and remake it around an ideological vision. Using the case of Young Americans for Freedom (YAF) from 1960 to 1980, this dissertation identifies a critical but undertheorized actor transforming the Republican Party: the activist-entrepreneur – ideologically committed, tactically strategic, and organizationally embedded agents who operate between movement leadership and grassroots activists to build durable institutional power.

I argue that activist-entrepreneurs emerged from mobilizing structures like YAF, where conservative leaders trained young politicos not only in conservative doctrine but also in protest, campaigning, and institution-building. Imbued with agency and strategy, these activist-entrepreneurs went on to found or staff the infrastructure of the New Right, from the Heritage Foundation to the Conservative Political Action Conference, creating a parallel institutional ecosystem capable of displacing mainstream institutions within the Republican Party coalition. This infrastructure enabled conservatives to transform the party from within, not merely allying with partisans but redefining the Republican Party as a vestige of conservatism. This dissertation conceptualizes this monopolizing power of capture as a process in which a faction develops a veto power over a party’s agenda, nominations, and governing strategy by both replacing formal party functions with movement institutions and remaking the social milieu partisans operate within. Activist-entrepreneurs are the key agents driving this process.

This study contributes a theoretical framework for understanding capture as a monopolizing power through a developmental process: from political opportunity to mobilizing structures, from contentious activism to ideological maintenance, and, ultimately, to the replacement of party elites and institutions by a movementized rank-and-file. In highlighting the work of activist-entrepreneurs, this dissertation reorients the scholarship on parties and movements by revealing how political development depends not only on leaders and voters but on the durable and strategic work of those who translate ideological interests into political outcomes.