The New Right Movement: Reactionary Response To The Counter Culture

The New Right was a political movement that originally began as a reactionary response to the counter culture movement spreading across the United States in the mid 1960s. The New Right ascended to national political prominence in the 1970s as a conglomeration of many different political groups, including many single issue action groups. The ideologies of this movement were expressed in three issues: a desire to see the country to return to its fundamental traditional values both politically and religiously, and the devotion to idea of national conspiracy theories, real or imagined.
The New Right saw the democratic upswing and counterculture of the 1960s as the “decay” of traditional American values. As a response the movement as a whole sought to defend those values and to expand and restore fundamental

New Right organizations like The Christian Voice and The Moral Majority aimed to end the “moral decay” of American culture and supported the doctrine of biblical inerrancy, a strict and literal following of Biblical teachings which manifested itself in the debate over issues such as abortion, gay marriage and the removal of prayer in schools. The christian fundamentalist movement also promoted the concept of premillennialism, also known as the Second Coming of Jesus Christ, Christ’s physical return to Earth as described in the Book of Revelations. In addition to religious literalism the New Right also sought a return to traditional ideas politically. Their principal goal was a return to a strict and literal adherence to the United States Constitution and the ideas expressed in the Declaration of Independence. They committed themselves to the defense of individual rights as expressed in the Bill of Rights and collectively marketed