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The Strength of Weekly Ties: Relations of Material and Symbolic Exchange in the Conservative Movement

University of California, Berkeley, tmm{at}berkeley.edu

The current Republican ascendancy in American government has generated considerable scholarly interest in the conservative movement. Through an ethno-graphic study of the widely publicized but seldom-observed "Wednesday meeting" of conservative activists, this article inquires into the bases of the conservative movement’s internal cohesion and successful management of alliances with state officials. I argue that the meeting functions as both an instrument of material power and a ritual of symbolic maintenance by establishing relations of reciprocal exchange and sustaining a moral community of conservative activists and their allies. More broadly, the article examines the mutual conditioning and genetic linkage of two dimensions of social reality: relations of force and relations of meaning.

Key Words: conservative movement • right-wing activism • social movements • Grover Norquist • Pierre Bourdieu

Politics & Society, Vol. 34, No. 3, 343-368 (2006)
DOI: 10.1177/0032329206290424


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