Lee Willard Edwards (born 1932) is an American academic and author, currently a fellow at The Heritage Foundation. He is a historian of the conservative movement in the United States. [1] [2]
Lee Willard Edwards (born 1932) is an American academic and author, currently a fellow at The Heritage Foundation. He is a historian of the conservative movement in the United States. [1] [2]
Edwards was born in Chicago in 1932. Edwards says he was influenced by the politics of his parents, both anti-communist. His father Willard was a journalist for the Chicago Tribune . [3]
He holds a bachelor's degree in English from Duke University and a doctorate in political science from Catholic University. [4] His dissertation was entitled Congress and the origins of the Cold War, 1946–1948. [5]
| External videos | |
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 Booknotes interview with Edwards on The Life and Times of Walter Judd, September 2, 1990, C-SPAN | |
| Q&A interview with Edwards on Just Right, December 24, 2017, C-SPAN |
Edwards helped found Young Americans for Freedom (YAF) in 1960, and then worked for the YAF magazine New Guard as editor. [6] In 1963, he became news director of the Draft Goldwater Committee. [6]
His publications include biographies of Ronald Reagan, William F. Buckley, Edwin Meese, and Barry Goldwater, [7] [8] [9] [10] and a work of history, The Conservative Revolution: The Movement That Remade America [11] and The Power of Ideas. [12] He acted as senior editor for the World & I , owned by a subsidiary of Sun Myung Moon's Unification Church. [13] [14]
Edwards was the founding director of the Institute on Political Journalism at Georgetown University and a fellow at the Harvard Institute of Politics. [15] He is a past president of the Philadelphia Society and has been a media fellow at the Hoover Institution. [16] [17] [18]
He is a distinguished fellow in conservative thought in the B. Kenneth Simon Center for American Studies at The Heritage Foundation, [19] and as of 2011 [update] , was an adjunct professor of politics at the Catholic University of America and Institute of World Politics. [20] Edwards co-founded the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation with The Heritage Foundation's founder and chairman, Edwin Feulner, and was appointed its chairman emeritus. [21] Edwards is a signatory of the Prague Declaration on European Conscience and Communism. [22]
He and his wife, Anne, who assists him in all his writing, live in Alexandria, Virginia. They have two daughters and eleven grandchildren.
Barry Morris Goldwater was an American politician and major general in the Air Force Reserve who served as a United States senator from 1953 to 1965 and 1969 to 1987, and was the Republican Party's nominee for president in 1964.
The Hoover Institution is an American public policy think tank that promotes personal and economic liberty, free enterprise, and limited government. While the institution is formally a unit of Stanford University, it maintains an independent board of overseers and relies on its own income and donations. It is widely described as a conservative institution, although its directors have contested its partisanship.
The Heritage Foundation is an activist American conservative think tank based in Washington, D.C. Founded in 1973, it took a leading role in the conservative movement in the 1980s during the presidency of Ronald Reagan, whose policies were taken from Heritage Foundation studies, including its Mandate for Leadership.
Young Americans for Freedom (YAF) is a conservative youth activism organization that was founded in 1960 as a coalition between traditional conservatives and libertarians on American college campuses. It is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization and the chapter affiliate of Young America's Foundation. The purposes of YAF are to advocate public policies consistent with the Sharon Statement, which was adopted by young conservatives at a meeting at the home of William F. Buckley in Sharon, Connecticut, on September 11, 1960.
Human Events is an American conservative political news and analysis website. Founded in 1944 as a print newspaper, Human Events became a digital-only publication in 2013.
Peter Franz Schweizer is an American political consultant and writer. He is the president of the Government Accountability Institute (GAI), senior editor-at-large of far-right media organization Breitbart News, and a former fellow at the conservative Hoover Institution.
Edwin John Feulner Jr. is a former think tank executive who founded the conservative think tank The Heritage Foundation and served as its president from 1977 to 2013 and again from 2017 to 2018. Feulner's positions have included advisor and chairman of the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation, from which he received the Truman-Reagan Medal of Freedom in 2006.
The Sharon Statement is the founding statement of principles for Young Americans for Freedom. The views expressed in the statement, while not considered "traditional conservative principles" at the time, played a significant role in influencing Republican leaders in the 1980s. Written by M. Stanton Evans and adopted on September 11, 1960, the statement is named for the location of the inaugural meeting of Young Americans for Freedom, held at William F. Buckley, Jr.'s childhood home in Sharon, Connecticut.
Young America's Foundation (YAF) is a conservative youth organization founded in 1969. In 2018, the Los Angeles Times called YAF "one of the most preeminent, influential and controversial forces in the nation's conservative youth movement." Scott Walker, former governor of Wisconsin and 2016 Republican presidential candidate, became President of YAF on February 1, 2021.
Richard Art Viguerie is an American conservative figure, pioneer of political direct mail and writer on politics. He is the current chairman of ConservativeHQ.com.
Leo Brent Bozell Jr. was an American conservative activist and Catholic writer, and former U.S. Merchant Marine. He was a conservative Catholic, and a strong supporter of the anti-abortion movement. In 1966, he co-founded the Catholic magazine Triumph, which published for a decade until its dissolution in 1976.
Paul G. Kengor is an author and professor of political science at Grove City College and the executive director of Institute for Faith and Freedom, a Grove City College conservative think tank/policy center. He is also a visiting fellow at the Hoover Institution on War, Revolution, and Peace. Kengor has focused much of his work on Ronald Reagan, faith and the presidency, conservative politics, the Cold War, the communist movement, and Catholicism.
Traditionalist conservatism, often known as classical conservatism, is a political and social philosophy that emphasizes the importance of transcendent moral principles, manifested through certain posited natural laws to which it is claimed society should adhere. Traditionalist conservatism, as we know it today, is primarily based on Edmund Burke's political views. Traditionalists value social ties and the preservation of ancestral institutions above what they perceive as excessive individualism.
The Philadelphia Society is a membership organization the purpose of which is "to sponsor the interchange of ideas through discussion and writing, in the interest of deepening the intellectual foundation of a free and ordered society, and of broadening the understanding of its basic principles and traditions". The membership of the Society tends to be composed of persons holding conservative or libertarian political views, and many of those associated with the Society have exercised considerable influence over the development of the conservative movement in the United States.
Henry Francis Regnery (1912–1996) was a conservative American publisher who founded the newspaper Human Events (1944) and the Henry Regnery Company (1947) and published Russell Kirk's classic work The Conservative Mind (1953).
Medford Stanton Evans, better known as M. Stanton Evans, was an American journalist, author and educator. He was the author of eight books, including Blacklisted by History: The Untold Story of Senator Joe McCarthy and His Fight Against America's Enemies (2007).
Steven F. Hayward is an American conservative author, political commentator, and policy scholar. He is a senior resident scholar at the Institute of Governmental Studies at the University of California, Berkeley, and a visiting lecturer at the UC Berkeley School of Law.
This timeline of modern American conservatism lists important events, developments and occurrences which have significantly affected conservatism in the United States. With the decline of the conservative wing of the Democratic Party after 1960, the movement is most closely associated with the Republican Party (GOP). Economic conservatives favor less government regulation, lower taxes and weaker labor unions while social conservatives focus on moral issues and neoconservatives focus on democracy worldwide. Conservatives generally distrust the United Nations and Europe and apart from the libertarian wing favor a strong military and give enthusiastic support to Israel.
Alliance of Libertarian Activists (ALA) was a libertarian student organization primarily located in the San Francisco Bay area, mostly active at University of California, Berkeley, established in 1965–1966, and considered the first campus group to adopt the term “libertarian.” ALA gained members from both the purged Young Americans for Freedom (YAF) Moïse Tshombe chapter and the Cal Conservatives for Political Action (CCPA) at UC Berkeley, which was a continuation of the 1964 Cal Students for Goldwater, both founded and first chaired by Dan Rosenthal.
Traditionalist conservatism in the United States is a political, social philosophy and variant of conservatism based on the philosophy and writings of Aristotle and Edmund Burke.
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