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Richard Nixon once said, “In a crisis, be aware of the danger but recognize the opportunity.” He could have been speaking for a new breed of conservatives that arose during his administration. Amid national anxiety over long lines at gas stations and rising energy prices in the early 1970s, they recognized an opportunity to reduce the scope of government and expand the free market in a quest to turn the New Deal upside down.

Meg Jacobs RI ’09, the Jeanne Rosselet Fellow at the Radcliffe Institute and an associate professor of history at MIT, pinpoints that time as the blossoming of a movement that continues to reshape the notion of government’s role in the United States. For the book she is writing during her fellowship, Panic at the Pump: The Energy Crisis and the Challenges of Conservative Governance since the 1970s, she is examining both the successes and the struggles of a conservative movement that is trying to effect change from within the corridors of power. Jacobs writes that the book, which will include the end of the George W. Bush administration, “tells the story of how conservatives sapped Americans of their confidence in the ability of their elected leaders to resolve the 1970s energy crisis and every other large-scale public crisis that has arisen since.”

The 2008 election, which propelled Barack Obama into the White House with a strong Democratic majority in the House and the Senate, may have signaled “a move back to an assumption that the government should provide for the common good,” says Jacobs. She expects the new administration to usher in more regulation and invest government resources in “green” energy policies. In doing so, she says, Obama may draw lessons from Franklin D. Roosevelt in framing an ambitious program as essential to economic recovery and long-term national security.

The key is to build a political coalition behind the effort, she says. The modern conservative movement faced that challenge as it rose from crushing defeat in the 1960s. Jacobs chronicles a sometimes bumpy rightward path, with conservatives having to overcome ingrained expectations of the American public. She notes that from the time of the Great Depression and the New Deal, people expected the government to provide stability, prosperity, and opportunity. The 1970s represented a turning point in US politics.

“This tremendous era of economic boom and growth of the postwar period starts to come undone in the 1970s,” she says in an interview in her Byerly Hall office. “And Americans’ expectations about the future begin to change, from a sense of hope and optimism to what pundits began to refer to as an age of limits.”

Many point to Barry Goldwater’s presidential campaign of 1964 (when Ronald Reagan delivered an antigovernment speech that was revered by conservatives) as the movement’s precursor. Young conservatives who would become government fixtures, including Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Caspar Weinberger, and Alan Greenspan, came of age during that period, influenced by free-market champions like Milton Friedman.

After Nixon’s landslide victory in 1972, the energy crisis proved a test for the newly empowered conservative movement and its ability to enact its ideology, according to Jacobs. The administration proposed “Project Independence,” a deregulation program calling for increased domestic production of energy sources and fewer environmental protection measures. At the same time, a counterforce urged the government to “do something,” with both Democrats and a large segment of the public pushing for government price controls on an oil industry blamed for the crisis. In a forerunner to current Democratic proposals, Senator Henry Martin “Scoop” Jackson, a Democrat from Washington, advocated a multibillion-dollar government investment to develop alternative sources of energy. That measure didn’t pass, but conservatives didn’t get what they wanted either.

In her book, Jacobs portrays a president who was both sympathetic to those in his administration who wanted to undo the regulatory structure put in place by the New Deal and conscious of the public objection to higher prices that a market response could bring. Eventually crippled by the Watergate scandal, Nixon signed legislation to extend price controls and established the Federal Energy Administration to oversee regulations—measures that were anathema to the conservative movement.

“This happened at a time of political transition,” Jacobs says. “The New Deal mentality was not quite dead and the conservative mentality had not fully ascended, if it ever in fact did.”

One sign of the transition occurred when young conservatives working in the Ford administration persuaded the president to dump as vice-presidential nominee Nelson Rockefeller—one of the last moderate Republicans with a national profile—in favor of the more conservative Bob Dole. The movement reached new heights several years later with the election of Ronald Reagan, who in 1977 said, “Our problem isn’t a shortage of oil. It’s a surplus of government.” Soon after he entered office, he eliminated price controls on oil, which had been maintained through the Ford and Carter administrations. He also built up military power in the Persian Gulf, which protected American oil interests. With these measures and others, Jacobs says, Reagan not only hewed to conservative philosophy but used his political skills to make the movement palatable to the American public.

“He was a wonderfully effective leader for the conservative movement, for popularizing their ideas,” she says. “On the other hand, one of the things that made him successful—and this the conservatives like less—was his willingness to compromise. He understood that you can’t get everything you want.”

Since Reagan, Jacobs says, the right has sought another president in his image who would be even more committed to conservative values. She believes that George H.W. Bush was a failure in that regard, but that his son was much more ideologically driven than even Reagan. George W. Bush learned valuable lessons from Reagan, she says, including the strategy of using executive power to accomplish conservative goals.

His administration immediately focused on energy policy, establishing the National Energy Policy Development Group, chaired by Vice President Cheney. “The goal,” Jacobs writes, “was to reverse thirty years of environmental and energy policy, specifically through deregulation, tax reform, and opening up new exploration and drilling, all with the aim of increasing energy production.”

The work of that task force led to the 2005 Energy Policy Act, which offered tax incentives to increase production of fossil fuels. Jacobs notes that equally important behind-the-scenes measures—such as cutting the staff of the Environmental Protection Agency and rewriting regulations affecting coal plants—supported the administration’s agenda while bypassing the legislative process. Indeed, in the waning days of the administration, the Washington Post reported that the White House sought to take a host of deregulatory steps that would undo restraints on private industries such as power plants.

“They’ve been able to alter and shape and shift policy even within the limits of what the electorate will accept,” Jacobs says. “Sometimes they run right over those limitations and do what they want anyway.”

Yet just as in previous Republican administrations, the conservative movement failed to achieve all its aims—notably, drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. Another setback was the passage in 2007 of government mandates to increase fuel efficiency standards, a measure the administration opposed.

Perhaps the biggest blow to the conservative movement was the administration’s handling of Hurricane Katrina. After decades of often successful efforts to enact conservative ideology, Jacobs says, the American public’s view of government’s role may have been changed by the tragic aftermath of the hurricane. Though some critics charged the administration with incompetence, she says, Katrina represented a manifestation of an ideology that undercut government from within.

“It was part of a larger shift in which you don’t believe in the legitimacy of government to act,” Jacobs says. “There are consequences, and Americans are seeing that.”

Since then, government has acted to address a different kind of crisis: the financial meltdown that dominated the fall election campaign. This time, intervention was pushed by the Bush administration—evidence that it’s difficult to govern as a complete ideologue, says Jacobs. The crisis brought Alan Greenspan, one of the modern conservative movement’s early champions, to testify before Congress. The former chairman of the Federal Reserve was asked if his free-market ideology had caused him to make decisions he wished he had not made.

“Yes, I’ve found a flaw,” Greenspan responded. “I don’t know how significant or permanent it is, but I’ve been very distressed by that fact. I was shocked because I had been going for forty years or more with very considerable evidence that it was working rather well.”

Despite the election results, Jacobs isn’t ready to conclude that the American public has found a fatal flaw in the conservative ideology that reshaped government. But certainly, she says, Americans chose more government over less on November 4, a view supported by post-election surveys. As the financial crisis worsened, so did the prospects for the Republican party, Jacobs says, indicating that “when Americans are in serious economic trouble, they still look to government. We’ll see how long that remains true.”

Lewis I. Rice is a freelance writer based in Boston.

Illustration by John Ritter; photo by Tony Rinaldo