On January 20, 1981, Ronald Reagan became president.
For conservatives who had lived through Barry Goldwater's landslide defeat sixteen years earlier, it must have felt like an entirely different country.
This time their candidate hadn't lost.
He had won 44 states.
And unlike Goldwater, Reagan arrived in Washington with something waiting behind him.
Organizations.
Policy experts.
Donor networks.
Activists.
Religious conservatives.
Political action committees.
Young lawyers.
People who had spent years thinking about what a conservative government should actually do.
Now they were going to find out whether all that preparation mattered.
It did.
But not quite as simply as they hoped.
Heritage came to Washington with a book
Before Reagan was even inaugurated, the Heritage Foundation had been working on a massive project.
It was called Mandate for Leadership.
More than 1,000 pages.
More than 2,000 recommendations covering the federal government department by department.
Taxes.
Regulation.
Defense.
Social programs.
Personnel.
Agency organization.
The point wasn't to describe conservatism in broad terms.
It was to tell an incoming conservative administration:
Here is what you can actually do.
Heritage president Ed Feulner was himself part of Reagan's transition operation.
Advance copies of Mandate reached the transition after the election, and Reagan distributed copies to his Cabinet.
That is an important moment in this story.
For years, conservative organizations had been developing ideas outside government.
Now one of those organizations had prepared an instruction manual for governing before the new president even took office.
Forty years later, conservatives would do the same thing on a much larger scale.
But this was the model.
The idea was simple: don't waste the beginning
A new president has an unusual advantage.
For a short period, there is momentum.
Appointments are being made.
Agencies are changing leadership.
Congress is paying attention.
The public expects action.
But a new administration also has a huge problem.
The federal government is enormous.
Thousands of jobs have to be filled.
Hundreds of programs have to be understood.
Cabinet secretaries arrive at departments where career employees may know the agency far better than they do.
Every interest group in Washington immediately starts asking for something.
Every day spent figuring out what you want to do is a day when that political window gets smaller.
Heritage's answer was:
Do the homework before Election Day.
That may sound obvious.
It wasn't always how presidential politics worked.
And it became one of the most important lessons conservative institutions would carry forward.
Policy was only half the problem
A book couldn't run the government.
People had to do that.
Reagan's campaign had begun planning personnel before the election.
E. Pendleton James, who would become Reagan's White House personnel director, headed a campaign task force that identified which appointed jobs needed to be filled first and developed possible candidates.
Heritage had its own talent bank.
So now we have two pieces operating together:
What should the government do?
and
Who should be put in government to do it?
That combination will become one of the most important themes in this entire story.
But winning didn't mean conservatives controlled everything
The Evidence → Reagan’s early appointments and movement-conservative frustration
This part matters.
If we told the story as though Reagan walked into Washington and simply handed the government to the conservative movement, we would be rewriting history.
Many movement conservatives were frustrated almost immediately.
They thought Reagan's election meant that people who had spent years building the movement would fill the administration.
Some did.
Many did not.
Reagan also appointed longtime personal loyalists, establishment Republicans, business executives and people whose ideological credentials movement conservatives considered weak.
Conservative activists complained that they had won the election but had not fully gained control of the administration.
That's useful for understanding what happened next.
Because the movement's response to disappointment was not:
Well, we tried.
It was:
We need a better pipeline.
Heritage begins collecting people, not just policies
The Evidence → Heritage and Reagan-era personnel
During Reagan's first term, Heritage increasingly became involved in helping conservatives find government jobs.
The foundation accumulated thousands of résumés and regularly supplied names to the administration.
This is one of those places where the larger pattern becomes visible.
An administration eventually ends.
But the person who spent four years learning how the Environmental Protection Agency works doesn't forget everything when a Democrat becomes president.
The lawyer who served at Justice still knows other lawyers.
The budget analyst still understands OMB.
The congressional staffer still has relationships on Capitol Hill.
If those people remain connected to institutions outside government, their knowledge doesn't disappear.
The institution remembers for them.
That is what political infrastructure can do that a campaign cannot.
Reagan also gave the legal movement an opportunity
While Heritage was developing policy and personnel, something much smaller was happening at law schools.
In 1982, conservative and libertarian law students at Yale, Harvard and the University of Chicago created the Federalist Society.
At first, it was tiny.
That didn't last.
The Reagan administration was simultaneously making conservative legal ideas much more important inside government.
Attorney General Edwin Meese pushed arguments about constitutional interpretation and original meaning.
Conservative lawyers entered Justice Department positions.
Reagan appointed Antonin Scalia to the Supreme Court in 1986.
And the Federalist Society became a place where many of the people interested in those ideas could meet one another.
By its first national lawyers' convention in 1987, the guest list showed how quickly it had grown.
Vice President George H.W. Bush spoke.
Attorney General Meese gave the keynote.
Justice Scalia participated.
President Reagan sent greetings.
Senior Justice Department officials chaired sessions.
A student organization had become a professional network.
What the Federalist Society did—and didn't do
This deserves the same evidence boundary we've used throughout this project.
The Federalist Society did not become a political party for lawyers.
It says it does not lobby, take positions on legislation or formally endorse judicial nominees.
Its importance came from something less direct.
It created a network.
A conservative law student could meet conservative professors.
Young attorneys could meet government lawyers.
Judges could speak at conferences.
People with similar legal ideas could find one another.
Then those people could go work in law firms, government agencies, congressional offices, universities and courts.
The organization didn't have to order them to do anything for the network to matter.
And once again, the institution could survive a presidency.
Reagan could leave office.
The lawyers would still know one another.
The same idea was spreading into the states
The Evidence → State Policy Network history
Washington wasn't the only place conservatives were building institutions.
Remember ALEC from the previous chapter?
Another state network was beginning to form around think tanks.
In 1986, representatives from market-oriented state policy organizations began meeting informally.
They called themselves the Madison Group.
Six years later, that network became the State Policy Network, or SPN.
When it formally organized in 1992, only a small number of independent state-focused think tanks were involved.
Its purpose was straightforward:
help those institutions cooperate, meet regularly and share expertise.
This added another piece to the system.
Heritage could develop ideas in Washington.
But a state think tank could understand:
its legislature,
its governor,
its courts,
its local media,
its donors,
and its political culture.
Then organizations could learn from one another.
An idea tried in Wisconsin might be adapted in Arizona.
A legal strategy used in one state might be studied in another.
A successful organization could become a model.
Again, we are seeing the same organizational lesson:
Don't reinvent everything everywhere.
Build.
Test.
Learn.
Copy what works.
Then Reagan left
January 1989 arrived.
Reagan was gone.
George H.W. Bush became president.
And this is where we get to test whether all of this had really become infrastructure.
Because movements built around a charismatic political figure often weaken when that person leaves.
These institutions didn't.
Heritage continued.
The Leadership Institute continued.
The Federalist Society continued.
ALEC continued.
The religious-right organizations continued.
The state think tanks continued.
The donor networks continued.
Some organizations disappeared or weakened.
Others grew.
But the machinery as a whole did not reset to zero.
And that meant younger conservatives could enter a political world containing institutions they had not personally built.
They inherited them.
Then Republicans lost the White House
In 1992, Bill Clinton defeated George H.W. Bush.
A Democrat was president again.
For the institutions we've been following, that was not the same thing as returning to 1964.
They still had money.
They still had organizations.
They still had mailing lists.
They still had congressional allies.
They still had state operations.
They still had lawyers.
They still had trained activists.
They simply no longer controlled the presidency.
And that distinction matters enormously.
Because while Clinton occupied the White House, conservatives could concentrate on something else:
Congress.
Newt Gingrich had been training candidates for years
The Evidence → GOPAC strategy and instructional tapes
One of the people who understood this particularly well was Newt Gingrich.
Gingrich took control of a Republican organization called GOPAC in the 1980s and transformed it into a national candidate-training operation.
GOPAC produced audio and video tapes.
It supplied issue material.
It trained aspiring politicians in messaging and campaign strategy.
Gingrich traveled around the country recruiting candidates.
Future House Speaker John Boehner later remembered listening to Gingrich's tapes in his car and said the training helped convince him that he could run for Congress.
Think about the similarity to Morton Blackwell's Leadership Institute.
Or Heritage's personnel lists.
Different organization.
Same insight.
Find people before the opening appears.
Train them.
Give them language.
Give them confidence.
Keep them connected.
Then wait for an opportunity.
Another network starts meeting every Wednesday
The Evidence → The Wednesday Meeting
In 1993, Grover Norquist began hosting a weekly gathering at Americans for Tax Reform.
It became known simply as the Wednesday Meeting.
Elected officials.
Activists.
Leaders of conservative organizations.
People working on taxes, guns, business issues, social policy and elections.
They didn't all belong to one organization.
They didn't all agree about everything.
But they met.
Every week.
By now, this should sound familiar.
Paul Weyrich had reached essentially the same conclusion two decades earlier.
The Tuesday Morning Group in Virginia would eventually use a similar model.
CPI would later do it.
The names change.
The organizational problem doesn't:
How do you keep separate groups talking to one another?
The Religious Right had built its own turnout machinery
The Evidence → The Christian Coalition’s 1994 voter outreach
The Moral Majority faded during the late 1980s.
The constituency did not disappear.
A newer organization, Pat Robertson's Christian Coalition, became an increasingly sophisticated political operation under executive director Ralph Reed.
It built lists.
It recruited church contacts.
It registered voters.
It distributed voter guides.
It communicated with pastors.
Before the 1994 midterms, the Christian Coalition said it planned to distribute tens of millions of voter guides and make calls to millions of households, with much of the material moving through churches.
Again, the point is not that one organization single-handedly determined the election.
It didn't.
Economic conditions mattered.
Bill Clinton's presidency mattered.
Candidate quality mattered.
Congressional redistricting mattered.
Gingrich mattered.
The Republican Party mattered.
Many forces were at work.
But conservatives now had something they had lacked decades earlier:
different institutions capable of doing different parts of an election at the same time.
Then came November 1994
The Evidence → 1980 and 1992 presidential results
Republicans won control of the House of Representatives for the first time in forty years.
Newt Gingrich became Speaker.
And suddenly all the candidate recruitment and training that GOPAC had been doing looked different.
It wasn't merely an activist project anymore.
Many of the people it helped prepare were now members of Congress.
The Christian Coalition could mobilize voters.
Heritage could supply policy.
State think tanks could work on state-level changes.
Norquist's meeting could bring movement leaders together.
The Leadership Institute could keep training activists.
The Federalist Society could continue growing its legal network.
None of them had to control the others.
Their work could simply stack.
This is where the word “infrastructure” starts to make sense
Infrastructure is not necessarily exciting.
A bridge is not exciting until you need to cross a river.
An electrical grid is mostly invisible until the lights go out.
Political infrastructure works similarly.
A candidate is visible.
A rally is visible.
An election is visible.
What is less visible are the things sitting behind them:
the database,
the training program,
the donor network,
the policy shop,
the attorneys,
the legislative model,
the church contacts,
the state organizations,
the weekly meetings.
Those things accumulate.
And because they accumulate, every new generation doesn't have to begin where Goldwater began.
Then Republicans returned to the White House
The Evidence → The Federalist Society’s history and stated role, 1980 and 1992 presidential results
George W. Bush's victory in 2000 provides another test.
The Federalist Society had now existed for almost twenty years.
The lawyers who joined as students in the 1980s were no longer students.
They were professors.
Government lawyers.
Judges.
Law-firm partners.
Policy experts.
By 2001, Federalist Society members or supporters could be found throughout senior positions in the new Bush administration.
Again, we should be precise.
That doesn't mean the Federalist Society as an organization selected Bush's judges.
It means that a professional network built over the previous two decades had produced a large pool of conservative lawyers from which a Republican administration could draw.
The institution remembered.
And so did the state organizations
State Policy Network began with a handful of state think tanks.
Those organizations kept building through Democratic and Republican administrations.
They raised their own money.
Hired their own policy experts.
Developed relationships with state legislators.
Shared ideas with one another.
The network eventually expanded across most of the country.
That mattered because national power could change hands while state infrastructure remained in place.
A Democratic president could govern from Washington while conservative organizations worked in state capitals.
A Republican Congress could lose its majority while legal organizations continued litigating.
A president could serve eight years and disappear from politics.
The institutions were still there.
That may be the most important thing the movement learned
Ronald Reagan was enormously important to modern conservatism.
But Reagan was president for eight years.
Heritage has now existed for more than fifty.
The Federalist Society has existed for more than forty.
The Leadership Institute has existed since 1979.
ALEC since 1973.
State Policy Network's roots go back to 1986.
Individual leaders matter.
But eventually they leave.
Institutions remember.
They remember which policy worked.
Which lawsuit failed.
Which donor cared about which issue.
Which state passed which bill.
Which staffer knew how an agency worked.
Which young activist turned out to be talented.
Which lawyer understood a particular constitutional argument.
Which member of Congress might become a future leader.
And they preserve something even more valuable:
relationships.
This doesn't mean the movement kept winning
Far from it.
Republicans lost elections.
Organizations made mistakes.
The Christian Coalition eventually declined.
Newt Gingrich resigned from Congress.
Scandals damaged people and institutions.
George W. Bush left office deeply unpopular.
Conservatives fought among themselves over spending, foreign policy, immigration and the role of government.
And in 2008, Barack Obama won a decisive presidential victory while Democrats controlled Congress.
Once again, if you looked only at the election result, you could have concluded that American conservatism had suffered a major rejection.
In one sense, it had.
But by now the movement no longer depended on controlling Washington to exist.
That would make what happened next very different from 1964.
Because in 2009, something erupted that the established conservative institutions themselves did not fully create or control.
Angry voters began organizing.
They protested spending and government bailouts.
They confronted Republican politicians as well as Democrats.
Many had never belonged to political organizations before.
It became known as the Tea Party.
And waiting nearby were organizations with decades of experience doing exactly what political movements need:
training people,
raising money,
building lists,
developing policy,
connecting activists,
and turning anger into organization.
The institutions had survived long enough to meet a new insurgency.
This time, instead of simply supporting a Republican president from the outside, parts of that insurgency would eventually move inside Congress itself.