less class-conscious voters are immune to the rhetoric of the old socialist
position.
New Right
The description new right is usually applied to the ultra-conservativemove-
ment in the USA which came to political prominence around the time of
Ronald Reagan’s election to the presidency in 1980, and was partially
responsible for his electoral success. The intellectual origins of the new right
are rather curious, because many of its leading thinkers were former extreme
liberals, some even having beenradicalactivists in the 1960s and early 1970s.
The new right has also never had a very coherent set of beliefs. One reason for
this is that one of its major aspects has beenlibertarian, while another has
been the demand for a return to ‘traditional morality’. Many of the supporters
of new right thinking have also been prominent in the upsurge offunda-
mentalistreligious involvement in politics.
Despite this the new right was influential because it provided the politicians
of theRepublican Party, or some of them at least, with a semi-official
ideology differentiating them from theDemocratic Partyon grounds other
than simply being the party of the richer and whiter. Right-wing think-tanks
such as the Hoover Institution and the American Enterprise Institute devel-
oped policy options in considerable detail, especially in economic, foreign
affairs and defence areas. In practice the new right was a product of the forces
that swept Reagan into power, and was more symptomatic of theYuppie-
dominated self-interest politics of the 1980s than a cause of it. Even Reagan
never fully satisfied the new right, though many exponents of such attitudes
were given government positions. Eventually the inevitablepragmaticnature
of American politics defeated the movement. A number of new right candi-
dates, most notably Patrick Buchanan, have attempted to win the Republican
nomination for the US presidential elections of the 1990s and 2000s, with no
success, and although President George W. Bush embraced some policies
which found favour with new right commentators, the movement was
effectively marginalized within the US system.
New Social Movements
New social movements, often referred to simply as NSMs, have been an
increasingly important topic in political sociology over the last 20 years. The
label refers to loosely organized popular groups, usually of a protest nature, like
British CND, various European anti-nuclear movements, or the more mass-
based environmental and ecological protest organizations that now abound.
The title is very widely used however, and movements as diverse as those for
New Right