Phoenix Rising is an ideological and institutional study of the development of conservative politics and the Republican Party in Arizona from the late-1940s through the 1980s. Over that time, conservative Republicanism replaced the New Deal regime as the dominant political power in the state. During the same period, two distinct strands of conservatism developed in the Southwestern Sunbelt state, competing within the Republican Party for institutional and ideological dominance. One strand emerged from the mid-century municipal reform movement in the capital city of Phoenix. Championed by Barry Goldwater and his allies, this political philosophy was anti-statist and value-driven in rejection of the New Deal transactional liberalism that dominated both major parties at the time. It led the Arizona Republican Party to pursue a secular and strategic assault on the dominant Democratic Party. An alternate conservatism rooted in evangelical Christianity and an ideological approach to political activism arose within the Arizona Republican Party in the early 1960s, challenging the secular, strategic conservatives on the role of Christianity in politics and the importance of ideological purity. The conflict between these competing strands of conservative thought shaped the local success of conservative politicians, contributed to the national development of the modern conservative movement, and prefigured ongoing divides within the Republican Party of today.

This study challenges the notion of either race or virulent anti-communism as the nucleus of modern conservatism by tracing its roots instead to a progressive-style urban reform movement and particular religious worldviews. It argues that the development of modern Republican conservatism involved multidimensional intra-party contests in addition to conservative-liberal conflicts between the major parties. While the internal contradictions of the New Deal may have laid the foundation for its eventual demise, several strands of conservative thought and political practice vied with one another to emerge as the dominant alternative. In principle, these strands shared in common the proposition, expressed often by Barry Goldwater, that the foundation of liberty was man’s creation by God as a free individual, and that all government action must be measured against that standard. Conflicting interpretations of this conservative principle, however, generated divisions within the Arizona Republican Party that continue to reverberate nationally.