If Not Now, When?

Abstract

In the decades between the ending of the second World War, and the landslide triumph of Ronald Reagan in 1980, the increased number of conservative officeholders, and their subsequently successful efforts to pull American politics to ‘the right’, have been acknowledged by a large amount of scholars and commentators. Some of these however, have added that the preceding shift in the partisanship balance nationally, has been the result of determined political exploitation by ‘conservative elite’s’ (both on and off the Beltway) utilization of America’s social divisions, particularly along the lines of culture and race, in order to further their own private political agendas. Other than the role of prominent conservative politicians and activists in this perceived process of political mobilization, the part of self-identified conservative media outlets of the postwar era have received relatively little attention. In this thesis, the role of the important conservative media outlet National Review magazine, and the influence of the conservative upsurge on the contents on its writings, is the main subject of inquiry. Ultimately, it is argued that the general scholarly assessments of the magazine’s attitude towards the conservative movement as one of ‘ideological purity’, rather than ‘political pragmatism’ is an overgeneralization that does not apply to the moments when it arguably mattered most; when ‘their’ favored candidate, Ronald Reagan, stood for the presidency in the elections of 1976 and 1980.