The MAGA New Right

The Republican National Convention That Shocked the Country

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The Republican National Convention That Shocked the Country

Charles J. Holden (St. Mary’s College of Maryland; co-author of Republican Populist: Spiro Agnew and the Origins of Donald Trump’s America), TIME “Made by History,” July 17, 2024; the 60th-anniversary retrospective explicitly drawing the through-line from the 1964 Cow Palace to the post-2016 GOP.

Why It Matters Here

Holden’s piece is the wiki’s cleanest long-arc statement of the continuity thesis: 1964 → 1965 NYC pro-war march → 1970 Hard Hat Riot → 1980s/90s Newt Gingrich rhetoric → 2016 Trump rallies → Oath Keepers/Three Percenters/Proud Boys. The political temperament the GOP exhibited in San Francisco never left; it became “the party’s animating spirit.”

This is also the source for the wiki’s reading of conservative pro-war street violence in 1965 as a continuous rather than episodic phenomenon — the same coalition (longshoremen, Buckley + medal of honor winners, JBS members, KKK in expanded membership) that booed Rockefeller a year earlier was on Fifth Avenue beating antiwar demonstrators.

Core Claims

  • The convention itself was structurally unprecedented. “A stark digression from the typical convention, in which a newly crowned nominee and his allies extended olive branches to all wings of the party.” Goldwater allies booed Rockefeller, Hugh Scott, and the platform plank denouncing right-wing extremism. Eisenhower joined in by attacking the media. (“[Delegates] stood in their chairs, shouting, raving, shaking their fists and cursing the reporters in the press section.”)
  • The 1965 Fifth Avenue march. October 1965, 25,000 marchers, including William F. Buckley Jr. and Medal of Honor winners; floats reading “Bomb Hanoi” and “Fight the Reds in Vietnam and in New York City.” “Burly longshoremen and veterans left the line of march to attack those who voiced antiwar viewpoints.” A bystander, Murray Rothfield, called the “Buckley goons… Brown Shirts.” Armand Storace (sign: “Profits Equals Murder”) was beaten unconscious by ILA members shouting “kill him” and “string him up.” This is the physical precursor to January 6.
  • The same month: KKK and JBS membership surge. ADL reported a “sharp rise” in KKK membership outside the South in October 1965; NYT reported John Birch Society membership “flourishing” the next month. JBS publicity director added Selma sheriff James G. Clark to its lecture circuit weeks after the Edmund Pettus Bridge attack. The 1964–65 convention politics and the post-Civil-Rights-Act paramilitary politics were the same political phenomenon.
  • The 1970 Hard Hat Riot. Construction workers attacked antiwar protestors after Kent State. Nixon “promptly invited the leaders of their unions to the White House for a photo-op.” Same coalition arc.
  • Newt Gingrich as the 1980s–90s carrier. In 1978, lectured young activists that the party didn’t do enough to “encourage you to be nasty.” His 1990 GOPAC memo gave Republicans a list to describe Democrats: “sick, pathetic, lie, anti-flag, traitors, radical, corrupt.” Speaker of the House by 1995. This is the wiki’s nominee for the transmission node between 1964 and 2016.
  • Trump as continuation. “Knock the crap out” of hecklers; “punch [them] in the face.” Holden’s verdict: “Even though Goldwater lost in a landslide to Johnson, his RNC convention turned out to be a portent of the emerging temperament and rhetoric that now is a central part of Republican politics.”

The Holden Synthesis

Holden’s structural claim is the wiki’s load-bearing one: temperament is the through-line. Specific policies (anti-NewDeal Republicanism in 1964; “drain the swamp” in 2016) come and go. The style — rage at media, refusal to disavow extremists, embrace of physical confrontation, conspiracism about elite betrayal — is the constant. Holden makes this explicit in a way that Goldwater-only or Trump-only treatments cannot.

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