Flaming Moderates of the ’60s Move Right

We made up political buttons that said, “I am an Extreme Moderate.” Our antagonism to big government was genuine, but more, well, moderate than those of our friends and adversaries on the GOP right.

Tender of years in the early 1960s, we at Advance magazine and, later, the Ripon Society seldom got much media attention, unless we were criticizing the GOP leadership. The shuffling GOP regulars were harried on all sides—including by Advance, which termed them The Stupid Party. We wanted innovations like a volunteer military, bomb shelters, an end to the old country-based immigration quotas, and federalism that would return power to the states.

Advance began with George Gilder and me at Harvard College in 1960, then moved to Washington, D.C. In 1964 it drowned in Goldwater. The failure of Advance showed just how weak moderate Republicanism really was, even near its high-water mark.

The Ripon Society, formed about 1963 (also at Harvard), was named after the Wisconsin town where the GOP was first organized. It was set up to study issues and write papers. Campus chapters were established around the East and in New York City.

There was no attempt to build a grass roots movement, and I don’t imagine there were more than about 150 Ripon members scattered around at any one time. But Advance and the early Ripon Society, before they lost many of us to more conservative causes, furthered a number of useful arguments— including the central one that a party needs ideas as well as principles and workers. Our position in favor of civil rights was quickly embraced by the Right. Everyone in the GOP found they could back federalism. The volunteer military was enacted as law by Nixon.

But Ripon also changed, and to some extent there was something wrong with it from the beginning. What was wrong was the tendency on the part of many moderates to define themselves not by objective standards but by the sheer feeling of moderation. That isn’t hard—just find out where the Left and Right are at any given moment and take a position between them. Conviction politics of the Reagan and Thatcher variety is a proper antidote to such wishy-washy wetness in the center, as well as to the politics of feeling promoted by the Left.

Specific issues also changed, of course. It was one thing in the comparatively simple ’60s, to contend that government could be made to work fine if only Republicans were in charge. It was another to hold such optimism after Richard Nixon had not only institutionalized the Great Society but expanded it.

Then there were the social issues. When several of us joined Martin Luther King’s March on Washington in 1963, it was for equal opportunity, not for affirmative action quotas and mandatory school busing. Similarly with the new issues of gender. George Gilder was editing the Ripon Forum in the mid-1970s when his book Sexual Suicide made him “the most dangerous man in America” to Betty Friedan. Eventually, terminal ire in the budding feminist faction at Ripon terminated him at the Forum.

Then there was the matter of the federal income tax. By the 1970s, inflation was pushing more and more of the middle class into higher brackets. Richard Rahn, then Ripon’s president, met economist Art Laffer at a Ripon function and helped set up the first supply-side econometric model. Gilder, among others, made the supply-side case famous in his 1981 book Wealth and Poverty.

By the late 1970s it was clear to many of us that Ripon was an idea whose time had come and gone. Ripon continues on, a few alumni have turned left, but most of the founding braintrust have long since shifted to mainstream conservatism. Many have been influential. In addition to the individuals named above and a few elected congressmen, John McClaughry has become a liber- tarian theorist in Vermont, Chris DeMuth is president of AEl; Patricia Lines is one of the nation’s experts on home schooling.
vouchers, and charter schools.

More ’60s kids grown up and changing the world. But not the way George McGovern had in mind.