Graduate School of Arts and Sciences

July 1, 2025

Abigail Arnold | Graduate School of Arts and Sciences

Geeking Out With…is a feature in which we talk to GSAS students about their passions. You can check out past installments here.

Daniel Ruggles is a sixth-year PhD student in Politics. He is set to defend his dissertation, “Capturing the Flag: How Young Conservatives Took Over the Republican Party, 1960-1980,” and graduate this summer. He joined Geeking Out With… to talk about his research, which looks at the ways young conservatives built bureaucratic institutions, focusing specifically on the organization Young Americans for Freedom.

This interview has been edited for clarity.

Tell us about your dissertation project.

I’m interested in how conservatives have built the capacity to govern for ideological causes. Political scientists looking at our current polarization often focus on two narratives: the top-down story of conservative groups raising funds and politicizing topics that had not previously been politicized in the 1970s or the bottom-up story of anti-liberal backlash after the 1960s. Both these stories are true, but they rely unconsciously on a missing middle. I look at what I call “activist-entrepreneurs” – people who were very dedicated in helping to build new political institutions but not the people shaping ideas – and how they became a pseudo-bureaucracy.

The specific case I look at is Young Americans for Freedom, an organization founded in 1960 by conservatives and active until a little after 1980. This was a social movement that created a very strong “beat the libs” identity among college students with about 25,000 members at its peak. Many of them went on to help build the institutions of the New Right and groups we know of today such as the Heritage Foundation and the American Legislative Exchange Council. While my research focuses on activism and institution-building in the past, contemporary groups use a very similar model to build the strategic capacity to govern. Methodologically, I draw from tools from political science, sociology, and history, including archival work and interviews.

How did you become interested in this topic?

I think a lot of scholars are motivated to understand our personal experiences by investigating their causes and purposes. I was raised in the conservative movement where many of my friends went into the kinds of roles and jobs I study in my research. When I first came to Brandeis, I was interested in topics like policing equity and didn’t think I was going to study conservative institution-building. Once I saw how under-studied the conservative movement still is in American political development, I saw a natural bridge between this research question and my own background.

Now that you’re almost at the defense, how do you feel your perspective on this topic has shifted or evolved over the years of work involved in a PhD?

As a social scientist, I want to be informed by my experiences without focusing only on affirming them. I believe that, regardless of who you research, you have to respect your subjects’ agency and their ability to pull things off. This work has given me a greater appreciation for the scale and success of the conservative movement, a movement that has become even more relevant today. As a political scientist, I’ve learned to adapt my research methods to the entire breadth of a research question. This is a very interdisciplinary project – at the start, I focus a lot on sociological theory and how Young Americans for Freedom went from disconnected people to a political force countering the New Left. Toward the end of the dissertation, I bring in more work from political science to show how social movements transition into institutional activism.

You’ve mentioned this project’s relevance to current politics. During your time in the PhD program (2019-2025), there has been a lot of change in the United States. How has this tied into or affected the work you are doing?

I started my PhD during a Donald Trump administration and am ending it during another one. During the first Trump administration, the administration struggled to govern – officials were constantly leaving, and there were agencies that didn’t want to comply with the president. Then, over four years, conservatives thought about how to build a movement that could help a future conservative president govern. I see this in my research too in conservatives’ relationships to Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan. The conservative question is how to shape bureaucracy, which is typically seen as more liberal. With Project 2025, conservatives thought about how to push more movement members into government jobs. My future work will look at more contemporary ways conservatives are building the capacity to govern in ways that aren’t the typical ones we think of. People are very focused on changes we can see, but I’m more interested in researching these subterranean processes.

What people or resources at Brandeis have helped you in your research?

The faculty in the Politics department has been really helpful, and Chloe Gerson in the library has been great in her help with archival work. Doing my research also required a lot of looking off-campus. I wouldn’t have been able to do this research without expanding my network off-campus, especially since there is no one else at Brandeis researching these topics. I’m in the interdisciplinary writing group for PhD students as well, which is really great. It was a big part of the writing process during my fifth year, and I’ve also done some informal peer work sharing writing with other students, which has been helpful.

When you’re not working on your research, what else do you like to do?

I live in Brighton and like to stay involved with my community there and up-to-date on what’s going on in Boston. I keep up with folks from the interdisciplinary writing group and we will Zoom or meet up for coffee. I also love traveling and cooking. Any given day, you will find me writing and then cooking or exploring. I love doing day trips around New England – Providence, Ipswich, and Duxbury are some of my favorite spots.

What advice do you have for other students exploring their passions?

First, make sure your projects are doable. Even the best-planned prospectus will be too ambitious. The best advice I got was to design my research in such a way that I could cut things. That type of editing is something we all need to do. You can have the best idea going in, but you’ll still need to cut things. It doesn’t matter if you’re passionate about something if it’s not accomplishable, because you’ll lose all your joy and desire to finish it.

Second, make sure to ruthlessly network – even with senior scholars or people whom you don’t think will respond. I think students have a tendency to silo themselves in their cohorts, departments, or campuses, but that’s not the way people produce research or build an academic community. I now interact with people all across the country, and that’s because I have reached out and built relationships with others, not because my research is more special than others’.

Third, share your work. I think many people are afraid of sharing – it takes a lot of courage, but your work will only be good if you share it with others. Students tend to isolate themselves, but there is such a benefit to finding your academic community.