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At the Aspen Ideas Climate Summit in spring 2022—one of those gatherings of the well-informed and the well-to-do so beloved by American politicians—Nancy Pelosi, then Speaker of the House of Representatives, urged Republicans to “take back” their party from Donald Trump. “This country,” the veteran Democratic leader opined, “needs a strong Republican Party.” Pelosi, who had made similar statements before, tapped into a powerful current of anxiety that has coursed through liberal political sentiment ever since Arizona senator Barry Goldwater claimed the Republican presidential nomination in 1964.
What in heaven’s name has happened to the party of Abraham Lincoln?
The postwar conservative movement championed both social and cultural conservatism and free-market economics, a pairing forged through the interplay between journals of opinion, such as National Review, the lobbying of increasingly politicized business associations, and grassroots activism over issues of taxation and school choice in Sunbelt suburbs. But it is easy to forget that, even during Barry Goldwater’s 1964 campaign, the conservative movement did not wholly control the GOP. Historical accounts of conservatism remain incomplete without a deeper analysis of the moderate Republicanism that movement conservatives eventually vanquished.
Marsha E. Barrett’s Nelson Rockefeller’s Dilemma: The Fight to Save Moderate Republicanism (Cornell University Press, 2024) provides a timely, invigoratingly original intervention into our historical understanding of the modern Republican Party. By analyzing the tumultuous political career of New York governor Nelson A. Rockefeller (1908–1979), Barrett anatomizes a now-extinct current of moderate Republicanism, whose postwar adherents were labeled “Rockefeller Republicans,” “Eastern Establishment Republicans,” and, later, “Republicans in Name Only” (“RINOs”).
Throughout the sixties and seventies, there were many prominent moderate Republicans, often concentrated in the Northeast and on the West Coast, from New York’s Jacob Javits to Massachusetts’s Henry Cabot Lodge Jr. (subject of an engrossing recent biography) to California’s Thomas Kuchel. But Rockefeller, though in many ways a singular figure, was emblematic of moderate Republicanism’s postwar apogee and irrevocable collapse.
What Barrett persuasively contends is that these Republicans were not merely marginalized by the growing power of conservative movement activists within the party but by their own decisions to accommodate conservatism. This reflected, in Barrett’s view, a deeper crisis of legitimacy within moderate Republicanism—and, she suggests, the postwar “liberal consensus” writ large.
Grandson of the great oil tycoon, Nelson Rockefeller was a man of omnivorous and voracious enthusiasms. Pursuing the Rockefeller dynasty’s third-generation enterprises of finance, philanthropy, and public service, “Rocky” helped build Rockefeller Center, roamed Latin America to promote inter-American accord, and lobbied his way into a bewilderingly diverse range of advisory roles in the Roosevelt, Truman, and Eisenhower administrations. Restlessly, Rockefeller collected modern art, mistresses, and policy entrepreneurs (he was Henry Kissinger’s first patron). Richard Norton Smith’s 2014 biography of Rockefeller is called On His Own Terms; it might more appositely have been titled “With His Many Appetites.”
In the fall of 1957, frustrated by the limitations of being a presidential advisor and with nascent designs on the White House himself, Rockefeller began to prepare a campaign for the New York governorship. Running against the chilly patrician Democrat W. Averell Harriman, Rockefeller proved a surprisingly gifted retail politician; famously, he devoured vast quantities of blintzes at a Lower East Side deli as local reporters looked on.
Rockefeller presided over the Empire State until 1973. During his governorship, Rockefeller also campaigned for the GOP presidential nomination in 1960, 1964, and 1968. His 1964 loss to Goldwater was an inflection point in the intertwined rise of movement conservatism and fall of moderate Republicanism.
Rockefeller’s national political career was briefly resuscitated in 1974 when, post-Watergate, president Gerald Ford appointed him to the vice presidency. But Rocky’s resurrection proved short-lived: Barrett documents, in excruciating detail, an ignominious tour of Southern GOP audiences the vice president undertook to convince increasingly conservative Republicans of his partisan loyalty. Unmoved, conservative insiders convinced Ford to drop Rockefeller from the 1976 presidential ticket (as one of the president’s advisors had predicted, this did little to win over the Right, who supported Ronald Reagan’s presidential primary challenge anyway).
The arc of Nelson Rockefeller’s career and heart of his political legacy is defined by the seemingly contradictory policy positions he took at the start, and then again near the end, of his governorship.
At the outset, Rockefeller appeared to embody moderate Republicanism. Nelson Rockefeller’s Dilemma defines this as centered on “pro-growth government intervention in the economy, a powerful federal presence … abroad [i.e., hawkish Cold War internationalism], a comprehensive social safety net,” and “racial liberalism,” which meant governmental action to erase segregation and promote “access and equality” in employment. Rockefeller’s chief legacies to many New Yorkers, Barrett acknowledges, were dramatic expansions of the state university system (more than quintupling enrollment), pioneering environmental protections, the nation’s first state arts council, and pharaonic public infrastructure investments, from the Metropolitan Transit Authority to Albany’s Empire State Plaza to the short-lived Urban Development Corporation.
Yet the New York governor, near the end of his time in office, also crafted the unprecedentedly draconian 1973 Rockefeller drug laws. These established mandatory sentencing for possession of a wide range of narcotics (the governor had originally pushed for life sentences for dealers and users), became “the nation’s toughest drug laws,” and helped forge a punitive criminal justice system that has disproportionately affected Black communities (an outcome, Barrett charges, Rockefeller himself knew was likely).
The 1973 drug laws emerged in the aftermath of Rockefeller’s catastrophic mismanagement of the 1971 Attica prison riot. In the wake of a decade of field-defining legal and historical scholarship about America’s War on Drugs and its carceral state, Rockefeller’s role in shaping punitive narcotics policies is probably better-known today than his support for public investment in social programs and economic development. But his narcotics policy shift from rehabilitation to incarceration, Nelson Rockefeller’s Dilemma reveals, mirrored a broader tendency in the later years of Rockefeller’s gubernatorial tenure towards social policy retrenchment. This shift encompassed paring back medical assistance for the poor, introducing work requirements into state welfare programs, and decontrolling New York City rents. (Barrett relays a disturbing, emblematic 1969 episode in which Rockefeller publicly mocked the weight of an African American woman in Nassau County who questioned proposed cuts to the state welfare budget).
Barrett sets out to solve the seeming paradox of Rockefeller’s defining policies. While another contemporaneous attempt to ideologically define moderate GOP politics, President Eisenhower’s “Modern Republicanism,” was centered around a distinctly Republican vision of the postwar social market economy (something Rockefeller also embraced), Rockefeller, at the outset of his career, identified his brand of moderate Republicanism with support for civil rights.
How, then, did he become an architect of a carceral state that has wrought many destructive effects on modern American race relations?
As befitted a descendant of abolitionist aristocrats, Rockefeller’s racial liberalism was rooted in noblesse oblige, not in a deep base of support within the growing social movement for civil rights. Even as he remained close to many leaders of the Civil Rights Movement’s “classical” phase (in particular, the economic empowerment-focused National Urban League), Rockefeller was wary of the more radical potential of contentious social movements —including those such as Martin Luther King’s Southern Christian Leadership Council (SCLC), to which he continued to pay lip service throughout the sixties.
Crucially, however, Barret also reminds readers that civil rights–oriented moderate Republicanism was always a minority political orientation within the GOP. Between 1959 and 1961, Rockefeller fought hard to enact a fair housing bill in New York State. Facing repeated opposition from Republicans in the state legislature to a more robust NAACP–backed fair housing bill, Rockefeller eventually enacted a compromise that exempted 70–80 percent of private housing in upstate New York from its provisions and removed the penalties originally proposed for violation. This “limited victory and harmful compromise” (as Barrett dubs it) played out in parallel with Rockefeller’s high-profile, successful efforts to insert a civil rights plank into the 1960 Republican platform and block the influence of conservatives, including Goldwater.
Those national efforts seemed to suggest that “Rockefeller Republicans” might someday form an intraparty majority. However, by masterfully interweaving the 1960 civil rights plank struggle with the state-level compromise over fair housing, Barrett demonstrates that even in a notionally liberal state like New York, moderate Republicans found themselves, from the outset, facing staunch opposition with the GOP. Barrett argues that civil rights–oriented moderate Republicanism’s collapse was rooted in its fundamental lack of deep intraparty legitimacy: much of the party would embrace rhetorical racial liberalism at the national level, but at the state and local level of granular policymaking, the majority of moderates, like Rockefeller’s Republican constituents and allies, would not support moving beyond the incremental civil rights gains of the 1950s.
Rockefeller’s involvement in narcotics policy—which, in fact, predated the seventies—displayed a similar tension. When Rockefeller began to turn his attention to what he deemed a social crisis of drug addiction in the mid-1960s, he recruited prominent Black aides such as the SCLC’s Wyatt Tee Walker to help devise mandatory addiction treatment programs. But Rockefeller presented such initiatives, in Barrett’s words, as tackling an “urban problem that threatened drug-free white suburbs.” During his 1966 gubernatorial reelection campaign, Rockefeller surprised many of his Black political allies by refusing to endorse New York City’s police monitoring agency, the Civilian Complaint Review Board, and downplaying the severity of police misconduct. Rockefeller, in other words, was interested in a more “enlightened” form of law-and-order politics that racialized drug use and crime several years before the seemingly unexpected conservative pivot of the seventies.
That said, there was—and still is—a constituency for Rockefeller’s style of moderate Republicanism, with its meritocratic vision of racial liberalism, emphasis on economic growth, and support issues such as environmental protection and access to the arts. It’s just that this constituency has, in growing numbers, joined the Democratic Party. Descendants of the “professional class,” socially liberal, high-education voters who supported Rockefeller Republicans today form a vital part of the Democratic coalition. This shift is especially apparent when widening the geographic scope of moderate Republicanism beyond Rockefeller’s New York to, for example, the affluent suburbs of Boston. Moreover, while contemporary political media ludicrously misapplies the label “moderate Republican” to any non-Trumpian politician, twenty-first-century moderate Republicans truly in the Rockefeller mold have only been found among GOP governors in deep-blue Northeastern states, such as Charlie Baker in Massachusetts or Phil Scott in Vermont.
Postwar moderate Republicans left behind a complex legacy. And in 2024, as the Republican Party grows ever more radical and authoritarian, it is difficult not to feel some sense of nostalgia for the Brahmin liberalism of long-vanished moderate Republicans such as Henry Cabot Lodge Jr. or Nelson Rockefeller. What Marsha Barrett reveals is why this nostalgia should not become too powerful. Its flaws, tensions, and contradictions meant that moderate Republicanism was incapable of confronting the rise of a radicalizing American conservatism.
