The New Right looked at American society and saw a disappearance of personal morality, the absence of chastity and sobriety, the shirking of responsibility, and a loss of national strength and stature in foreign policy.
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The seeds for today's New Right conservative political movement were planted in 1964 with Senator Barry Goldwater's failed presidential campaign against President Lyndon Baines Johnson. Goldwater challenged the Republican Party and the nation to return to traditional conservative principles and values. His landslide loss both angered and energized radical conservatives much the way that Bill Clinton's victory would in 1992. Following Goldwater's defeat, William F. Buckley's Young Americans for Freedom (YAF), which had been established in 1960, took off with a renewed dedication and sense of purpose. New conservative organizations like the American Conservative Union were created to promote grassroots conservative lobbying and public education.
Also out of the ashes of Goldwater's defeat, came several men who would grow the radical conservative movement and create and implement the strategy that would defeat the ratification of the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA); elect Ronal Reagan Governor of California and President of the United States, and take control of the Republican Party. These men included, Paul Weyrich, Richard Viguerie, Howard Phillips, Paul Laxalt, Taft Schreiber, Jules Stein, Henry Salvatori and Ronald Reagan.
Paul Weyrich started out as an aide to Colorado Senator Gordon Allott and is generally credited with moving the right's agenda away from communism to domestic social issues as the battleground for political control of America. He founded the Washington-based Heritage Foundation, a powerful conservative think tank, and he is the point of convergence between the secular and the religious right. He was a key organizer of the Moral Majority in 1979 and the Christian Coalition in 1989 where he continues as an active strategist.