At the recent party to celebrate feminist publisher Virago's 30th birthday, the high point was a poem written and read by Margaret Atwood, reminding the audience that three decades earlier, the term "women's writing" was thought to be an oxymoron.

Virago's survival is a testament to an idea whose time had come. In the 1970s, many small presses - The Women's Press and the Writers' and Readers' Co-operative - started publishing feminist material. Their efforts were bolstered by alternative bookshops, partisan magazines such as Spare Rib and a network of committed supporters.

Now those sister imprints are dead, dying or subsumed into larger corporations. Virago is an imprint of AOL Time Warner. But campaigning women writers can be found on any conglomerate's roster of authors - Susan Faludi at Random House, Pat Barker at Penguin. Cometh the hour, cometh the imprint, and then cometh the corporation with the bigger cheque book.

New York is currently witnessing a mirror version of the birth of feminist publishing with a surge in neo-conservative (neo-con) imprints. Both Penguin Putnam and Crown have recently announced plans to launch lists specifically devoted to Rightwing material. Bookspan, which runs Book of the Month Club, has declared the formation of an as yet unnamed new club devoted to conservatism.

The Right wing, which controls the presidency and both houses of Congress, is experiencing a delicious rush of popularity, and publishing - an opportunist business if ever there were one - is responding to this powerful trend.

Neo-con publishing was, until recently, the preserve of such homespun imprints as Washington-based Regnery Publishing, a house born out of conviction in 1947 in a oneroom office in Chicago. Agglomerated into Eagle Publishing, it now sits alongside Human Events (the National Conservative Weekly), Lifeline Press - devoted to "timely and scientifically accurate books for consumers concerned about their health" - and the Conservative Book Club, with a membership thought to be more than 75,000.

Regnery's book club, insiders speculate, will be at greatest risk from the corporate imprints. But Eagle's president Jeffrey Carneal is bullish. "The book club welcomes the existence of new imprints," he says. "Competition will be a challenge, and we are not resting on our laurels, but we have a 30-year head start."

New York, the centre of US publishing, is a bastion of liberal values led by an elite that has linked intellectualism to socialism since the early 20th century. But some commentators believe that New York may be out of step with the mood of the nation. Conservative authors already appear on lists that are happy to play both sides against the middle.

Sean Hannity, author of Let Freedom Ring, is a bedfellow of Leftist Oscar-winning film-maker Michael Moore at HarperCollins. Crown is publisher of Ann Coulter - who wrote both Slander, a diatribe against liberals, and High Crimes and Misdemeanors, about the various Clinton scandals; it also published a bestselling attack on conservatives by David Brock, Blinded by the Right. "For us, the business is instinctual rather than a business assignment," declares Carneal, convinced that New York will be undone by its ambivalence.

Eagle, united in its mission to promote the Right-wing cause, has an integrity that the New York houses, despite their power to buy shelf space in the stores, cannot challenge.

A recent profile of Fox News chairman Roger Ailes in The New Yorker underlined just how aggressively the Right-wing media is working to seize the high ground. Murdoch-owned Fox is snatching market share from the relatively more balanced CNN.

The neo-cons are on a roll. Eagle's books are cheer-led by a support network of radio shows, TV pundits and columnists who can be relied upon to publicise its titles. Rush Limbaugh's radio talk show alone is heard by as many as 20 million listeners.

So what is a neo-con? Sam Tanenhaus in Vanity Fair this month defined the type as someone who believes that "the optimal world is one in which the United States asserts its might and promulgates its ideas, embracing its 'unipolar' status whether or not other nations agree."

Tanenhaus identified Washington's leading neo-cons as Deputy Secretary of Defense, Paul Wolfowitz; former chairman of the Pentagon's Defense Policy Board, Richard Perle; and publisher of the influential The Weekly Standard, William Kristol. Behind them is a group of academic mentors, including Allan Bloom, Albert Wohlstetter and Leo Strauss. Strauss died in 1973, but remains iconic.

Their ideas were barely audible in smoke-filled rooms before 9/11. Now they have become common currency in the US. Right-wing intellectuals and activists such as Ailes are making the running. At the heart of government stands Karl Rove, President

Bush's campaign manager, whose indefatigable strategising and agenda-setting have kept the Right wing one step ahead.

The ubiquity of conservative activity has enabled neo-con writers to reach a wider, more attentive audience than ever. Ann Coulter's Slander, published in late June 2002, sold 400,000 copies in three months and spent eight weeks at the top of the non-fiction best-seller list. Her latest book, Treason, is thought to be the third fastest seller this week, just behind the new Harry Potter and Hillary Clinton's memoirs. For New York publishers, neo-cons have become big bucks.

Conglomerate publishing knows how to ride a wave, to move in and move on. Despite the shift in income from backlist to frontlist, the true strength of an imprint lies in those titles which, once published, stay in print and deliver a steady stream of low investment return.

Regnery laid down its list in the McCarthy era, with a young William F Buckley Jr, and the insights of Whittaker Chambers, "the Time magazine editor who had come to see the darkness in the light of Communism".

Virago was established with its first - perhaps best - idea: to " rediscover" lost women writers and keep them in print. Neo-con publishing may already have peaked. None of its key works has appeared in Britain or in translation.

Major houses like Penguin and Crown may well find that the road from here bends less to the right, more downhill.