The conservative movement is a long-running American political movement whose defining feature, on the historical account, is institutional rather than electoral: it built its own media, think tanks and advocacy organizations rather than working primarily through a party.
Hemmer’s history traces that construction from the 1940s — magazines, radio programmes, book clubs and publishing houses assembled over decades — and argues that this institutional network is what made the movement’s later political influence possible. The shift to digital distribution described on the previous version of this page is a change of medium within a much longer pattern, not a break in it.
Self-identification, measured
Gallup’s 2024 aggregate, based on surveys of 14,162 U.S. adults, found 37% of Americans identifying as conservative, 34% as moderate and 25% as liberal. Within the Republican Party, 77% identified as conservative — a record high in Gallup’s series, which runs from 1992.
The second figure is the more interesting one. The movement’s alignment with one party has become close to complete, which is a different thing from the movement growing.
Terminology
The project’s editorial guidance forbids using “conservative” as a label applied to others in its own voice. This page uses the word because it is the movement’s own name for itself and Gallup’s own survey category — that is, as self-identification and as a measured variable, not as a characterization imposed here.
What was removed
The previous version carried a chronology from the 1950s and a list of unsourced claims about digital adaptation and influence. Four of the five recorded connections assert relationships — that the movement “spawned” the Tea Party, and that it founded two named organizations — that nothing cited here establishes; their descriptions now say so. Founding of specific organizations belongs on those organizations’ pages, with their own filings cited.
The founded field, which read “1950s”, was not a date and has been removed.
Sources
- 01.
Hemmer, N. (2016). Messengers of the Right: Conservative Media and the Transformation of American Politics. University of Pennsylvania Press. History of the movement's media institutions from the 1940s onward, and the standard account of how media-building rather than electoral organizing gave the movement its shape. Metadata confirmed against the Crossref record for the DOI.
- 02.
Brenan, M. (2025). U.S. Political Parties Historically Polarized Ideologically. Gallup. Published January 16, 2025, aggregating 2024 surveys of 14,162 U.S. adults. Source for 2024 ideological self-identification: 37% conservative, 34% moderate and 25% liberal overall; 77% of Republicans identifying as conservative, a record high in Gallup's series.