If the slogan “It’s the economy, stupid,” had been valid, America would have been a country of mass political contentment. Yet in August 1966, when an AP/Ipsos Poll asked people, “Generally speaking, would you say things in this country are heading in the right direction, or are they off on the wrong track?” only 26 percent said “right direction,” while 71 percent said “wrong track.”
It’s no mystery why. For many, perhaps most, Americans any satisfaction over continuing material progress was outweighed by the overwhelming sense that American society was falling apart. Crime was soaring; cities were devastated by riots; privileged youth were growing their hair, taking drugs, and having premarital sex; demonstrators were out in the streets denouncing the Vietnam War. Historians today may look back at the upheavals of the sixties and see them as representing separate trends—the motivations of muggers and those of student radicals, the motivations of hippies and those of middle-aged war opponents were by no means the same. Yet the public sense of chaos unleashed had a real foundation.
In the 1966 elections voters would express their dismay at the polls, giving Republicans major gains in Congress. In California, an actor-turned-politician named Ronald Reagan became governor by campaigning against welfare cheats, urban rioters, long-haired college students—and the state’s fair housing act.
Now, the Republican Party of 1966 was a much more moderate institution than the Republican party we know today. Movement conservatism—the subject of my next chapter—existed, and had managed to nominate Barry Goldwater in 1964, but it hadn’t yet secured control of the party. Ronald Reagan wasn’t yet an enthusiastic tax cutter and Richard Nixon actually governed as a liberal in many ways: He indexed Social Security for inflation, created Supplemental Security Income (a major program for the disabled elderly), expanded government regulation of workplace safety and the environment, and even tried to introduce universal health insurance.
Yet the seeds of movement conservatism’s eventual dominance were sown in the 1960s—or, to be more accurate, between 1964, the year of Lyndon Johnson’s landslide victory over Barry Goldwater, and 1972, the year of Richard Nixon’s even bigger landslide victory over George McGovern.
Those years were, of course, the years of escalation and mass casualties in Vietnam, an era in which America was torn apart by questions of war and peace. Vietnam was certainly the issue of the time. Without Vietnam, Lyndon Johnson would almost certainly have run for a second full term, demonstrators and police wouldn’t have fought pitched battles outside the Democratic Convention in Chicago, and Nixon would never have made it to the White House.
The long-term effects of Vietnam on American politics, however, were less than you might think. According to conventional wisdom the struggle over Vietnam crippled the Democratic Party, condemning it to a permanent position of weakness on national security. As we’ll see in this and later chapters, that conventional wisdom overstates the case. The war did little to shake the Democrats’ hold on Congress. As for the image of Democrats as weak on national security: Nixon was highly successful in portraying George McGovern as weak on national security, but it’s much less clear that the Democratic Party as a whole came to be viewed the same way until much later. The image of weak Democrats didn’t really sink in until the 1980s, and was projected back in a rewriting of history.
What really happened in the sixties was that Republicans learned how to exploit emerging cultural resentments and fears to win elections. Above all, Republicans learned how to exploit white backlash against the civil rights movement and its consequences. That discovery would eventually make it possible for movement conservatives to win the White House and take control of Congress.
So let’s start with the event that mattered most in the long run: Lyndon Johnson’s decision to champion civil rights.
As a man whose roots go deeply into Southern soil, I know how agonizing racial feelings are. I know how difficult it is to reshape the attitudes and the structure of our society. But a century has passed—more than 100 years—since the Negro was freed. And he is not fully free tonight. It was more than 100 years ago that Abraham Lincoln—a great President of another party—signed the Emancipation Proclamation. But emancipation is a proclamation and not a fact.
A century has passed—more than 100 years—since equality was promised, and yet the Negro is not equal. A century has passed since the day of promise, and the promise is unkept. The time of justice has now come.
So spoke Lyndon Johnson in March 1965, declaring his determination to pass what eventually became the Voting Rights Act, a week after police violently attacked a voting rights march in Selma, Alabama.
Johnson’s decision to end the de facto disenfranchisement of African Americans culminated a nearly twenty-year evolution within the Democratic Party. It began in 1947, when Harry Truman created a committee on civil rights, with instructions to recommend legislation protecting Negroes from discrimination. Like most good deeds in politics, Truman’s move contained an element of calculation: He believed that by winning black votes in Northern cities he could pull out a victory in the 1948 election. And so it proved, even though the inclusion of civil rights in the Democratic platform led to a walkout of Southern delegates and the third-party presidential candidacy of the segregationist governor of South Carolina, Strom Thurmond.
Political calculation aside, it was inevitable that the party that created the New Deal would eventually become the party of civil rights. The New Deal was a populist movement—and like the populist movement of the nineteenth century, it found itself reaching out for support to blacks, who had the most to gain from a more equal distribution of income. Later, World War II forced the pace: not only did blacks fight for America, but the legacy of Nazism helped make overt racism unacceptable. After the 1948 Democratic Convention, Truman ordered the army integrated. World War II was followed by the Cold War, in which the Soviet Union tried to portray itself as the true champion of the proposition that all men are created equal. Truman and many others believed that America needed to end its long history of segregation and discrimination in order to reclaim the moral high ground.
Today hardly any politician, from North or South, would dare quarrel publicly with the sentiments Johnson expressed when he introduced the Voting Rights Act. (Though in their hearts some surely believe, as Trent Lott blurted out in his 2002 eulogy of Strom Thurmond, that if the ardent segregationist had been elected in 1948 we wouldn’t have had “all these problems.”) Forty years on the freedom riders are regarded as heroes and Martin Luther King has become a national icon, a symbol of the better angels of America’s nature. In the sixties, however, many white Americans found the push for civil rights deeply disturbing and threatening.
In part that’s because a fairly large fraction of Americans were still unreconstructed segregationists. Between 1964 and 1978 the American National Election Studies survey asked people whether they favored “desegregation, strict segregation, or something in between.” In 1964 a full 23 percent still answered “strict segregation,” compared with 32 percent wanting desegregation.