Crawford, Alan. Thunder on the Right: The "New Right" and the Politics of
Resentment. New York: Pantheon Books, 1980. 381 pages.
Almost everyone concedes that future historians will not deal kindly
with the Reagan revolution, but Alan Crawford is the only conservative who
can say "I told you so." He saw something unpleasant coming even before
Reagan was elected, and took the trouble to spell it out for us. Crawford
is a former editor of a Young Americans for Freedom journal, a former
editor of Conservative Digest, and a former aide to Senator James Buckley.
After exposing almost everything he knows about the people and groups on the
Right (his knowledge is impressive), Crawford concludes that "unfortunately,
the more I saw the less I liked, and the more convinced I became that the
political activities of the New Right were not only unconservative but
anticonservative."
Crawford objects to the paranoid style of the New Right, and the "us
against them" single-issue campaigns that use morality and religion as a
front for dishonest fund-raising and back-room power and greed. His major
contribution is his detailed description of the groups and networks,
interlocking directorates, direct-mail wizards, and media spin doctors who
ran the New Right in 1979 -- and took over in Washington after the 1980
election.
ISBN 0-394-74862-X
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