Movement Conservatism is different from historic the moderate/traditional Republican Party in the vain of Abraham Lincoln, Teddy Roosevelt, Nelson Rockefeller, and Dwight Eisenhower.
In his 2009 book "Reappraising the Right: The Past and Future of Conservatism," George H Nash identifies a tension between middle-of-the-road republicans and movement conservatives.
Political scientists Doss and Roberts say that "The term movement conservatives refers to those people who argue that big government constitutes the most serious problem .... Movement conservatives blame the growth of the administrative state for destroying individual initiative."
Historian Heather Cox Richardson has articulated how the pre-Movement Conservative Republican Party believed that society worked best when people at the bottom had education and equality of opportunity - and that it was the role of government to actively distribute resources to those at the bottom to provide education and equality of opportunity. This belief in a social web led to policies which have historically led to a rising middle class,
New York Times columnist Paul Krugman devoted a chapter of his book The Conscience of a Liberal (2007) to the movement, writing that movement conservatives gained control of the Republican Party starting in the 1970s and that Ronald Reagan was the first movement conservative elected President.
However, movement conservatives had to compete for President Reagan's attention with fiscal conservatives, businessmen, and traditionalists.
Author and magazine editor William F. Buckley Jr. was one of the founding members of the movement. His 1951 book God and Man at Yale argued against Keynesian economics, progressive taxation and the welfare state.
In 1955, he founded National Review, which provided a platform for arguing the movement conservative viewpoint. His emphasis was on pro-business, anti-union domestic policy. (However, in its early days the magazine also included sentiments of white supremacy).
The movement also gathered support from such disparate sources as libertarian Monetarists like economist Milton Friedman and neoconservatives like Irving Kristol. Friedman attacked government intervention and regulation in the 1950s and thereafter.
