Conservatism, Insurgency and Republican Presidents

• In Event: Presidents and Parties in a Polarized Age

Abstract

The nomination of Donald Trump highlighted the tensions within the Republican Party between establishment party leaders and insurgent outsiders. Trump’s election to the presidency, however, illustrated the relative ease with which these divisions could be reconciled in the context of a general election. The Republican Party in 2016 exemplified the combination of weak parties and strong partisanship.

The proposed paper puts this combination into the context of modern party history. It examines the process by which the insurgency/establishment dynamic overtook the competition between moderate and conservative factions within the party, and considers the ways in which this evolution has shaped and been shaped by partisan polarization. Analysis of conservatism and insurgency builds on ideas about reactionary conservative politics (Gervais and Morris 2018, Parker and Barreto 2013), and extends them into the longer history of the modern Republican Party, tracing party development to the contestation between Dwight Eisenhower and Robert Taft for the 1952 presidential nomination. Drawing on extensive archival research, this account continues through the intra-party struggles over the response to the Watergate scandal, and into the nomination contests of 1976 and 1980.

Author

• Julia Rezazadeh Azari, Marquette University