Howard Phillips

By Richard A. Viguerie, CHQ Chairman
Conservatives should always be willing to learn, not only from our own experiences but also from the experiences on the Left.  We interviewed Roger Craver and found lessons that can benefit today’s conservatives.  (Excerpt 25 of 45 from America’s Right Turn.)

By Richard A. Viguerie, CHQ Chairman
Conservatives would no longer have the use of their “secret weapon” (direct mail) to themselves.  It was no longer a secret.  (Excerpt 24 of 45 from America’s Right Turn.)

By Richard A. Viguerie, CHQ Chairman
By stopping the Equal Rights Amendment at the last moment, Phyllis Schlafly taught conservatives that nothing is inevitable.  We can do it!  (Excerpt 23 of 45 from America’s Right Turn.)

By Richard A. Viguerie, CHQ Chairman
Conservatives created the Religious Right in the 1970s.  Then in 1980 Ronald Reagan was elected president, thanks in large part to conservative direct mail. America had entered a new era. (Excerpt 22 of 45 from America's Right Turn.)

By Richard A. Viguerie, CHQ Chairman
Leadership of the conservative movement shifted from Barry Goldwater to Ronald Reagan, and from the Old Right to the New Right, in the 1970s.  (Excerpt 21 of 45 from America’s Right Turn.)

In 1977 and 1978 conservative giant Howard Phillips visited every congressional district in America to recruit candidates. During a trip to New Hampshire in 1977, only five people showed up for a meeting. One of them was Gordon Humphrey, who volunteered to run against Democrat Thomas J. McIntyre and became one of three New Right senators elected in 1978.

There are a lot of parallels between 1964 and 2016, but the most important one is this: By defeating Goldwater, establishment Republicans created the opportunity for Democrats and their progressive Republican allies to bankrupt the country in a war that lacked a strategy for victory and to enact the regulatory and welfare regime that continues to plague our economy and limit our liberty fifty years on.

By Richard A. Viguerie, CHQ Chairman
George H.W. Bush, ran as a pro-choice moderate in the 1980 Republican primaries – he wanted nothing to do with the social and economic conservative positions Reagan espoused. Almost by default Bush became Reagan’s runningmate, but he never adopted Reagan’s limited government goals and throughout the Reagan presidency he was never trusted by conservatives.

By Richard A. Viguerie, CHQ Chairman

In my new book TAKEOVER I knock down the myth of Ronald Reagan's so-called 11th Commandment and show how Reagan took all the discontents within the Republican Party to build a new majority coalition and defeat the “dime store Democrat” leadership of the Republican establishment.

If conservatives won’t start taking results more seriously, you can bet the rest of the GOP soon will. In order to achieve victory, the late conservative activist Howard Phillips used to say, “first we must seek it.” Even before that, we must define it—and perhaps more ambitiously than we have done in the past.