structural:summarization
Reagan Era

Though conservatives opposed welfare spending during the New Deal era, this opposition did not become a core tenet of American conservatism until the 1970s. Southern conservatives were united under the Republican Party at this time through the Southern strategy. Conservatism had been seen as a dying ideology following the defeat of Barry Goldwater in the 1964 presidential election, but the Reagan administration in the 1980s returned American conservatism to the political mainstream. The Reagan coalition brought together segregationists, businessmen, conservatives, neoconservatives, libertarians, and the religious new right, including Christian fundamentalists, Evangelicals, Catholics and Jews. They rejected the leftward shift of the country in the previous decades, instead advocating laissez-faire economics and traditional values while opposing communism and the civil rights movement. Social conservatism became a prominent ideology in politics during the Reagan Era, fueled by opposition to abortion and the Equal Rights Amendment. The Tuesday Group was founded in 1995 to represent the moderate wing of the Republican Party in Congress.