Eisenhower’s moderate Republicanism drove business conservatives to abandon populist mass campaigns for elite influence

Evidence

What accounted for Crane’s changed attitude toward the Society and his new interest in raising money for an American meeting? It may have reflected a shift in the nature of business activism following Eisenhower’s reelection. Prior to the Eisenhower years, the business opponents of New Deal liberalism hoped that the Republican Party, once back in power, would undo the New Deal. But instead Eisenhower’s “moderate Republicanism,” which accepted a Keynesian framework sympathetic to limited government involvement in the economy, and which treated liberal social programs and labor unions as necessary bulwarks against economic strife and social disorder, solidified the political transformations of the New Deal era. In the 1940s and early 1950s, business activism had largely consisted of broad public education campaigns regarding the virtues of free enterprise, featuring newspaper advertisements, mass-printed brochures, and other similar efforts informed by the desire to impact political culture as quickly as possible by reaching as many people as possible. They sought to carry out an essentially populist strategy, believing that getting their point of view across was all that was needed to regain the confidence of the masses. In the mid-1950s, however, following the disappointments of the Eisenhower era, conservative activists began to feel that they would be more successful if they tried to shape the opinions of smaller numbers of more influential people. They began to target their projects at academics, clergy, journalists and politicians—people whom they felt would have a disproportionate impact on the larger culture. — Philip Mirowski & Dieter Plehwe (eds.), The Road from Mont Pèlerin, 1458

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the broader historiography of ‘neoliberalism as ideas network’ — echoes how the network’s own founders described defeating Keynesianism through intellectual capture rather than mass politics. — connects to: Goldwater’s defeat shifted GOP dominance from moderates to free-market conservatism — Angus Burgin, The Great Persuasion: Reinventing Free…, 506; Postwar business conservatives built think tanks that functioned like political parties without mass support. — Philip Mirowski & Dieter Plehwe (eds.), The Road from Mont Pèlerin: The Making…, 1440
• SEED: An essay angle: the origin story of ‘shaping the influencer’ as a conservative tactic — how a failed mass strategy gave way to elite-focused counter-revolution, anticipating modern think-tank strategy.
• DEFINE: Defines the key distinction between the earlier populist ‘broad public education’ strategy and the later elite-targeting strategy — a foundational definition for understanding how the neoliberal network operated.