The Conscience of a Liberal

5 THE SIXTIES: A TROUBLED PROSPERITY

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.

In economic terms the sixties were as good as it gets. In The Pump House Gang, published in 1968, Tom Wolfe wrote of a “magic economy” in which everything seemed easy. And by just about any standard, that’s the kind of economy America had in the sixties. The chaos and upheaval of that decade took place against the backdrop of the best economy America has ever had.

It was an economy that seemingly provided jobs for everyone. What’s more those abundant jobs came with wages that were higher than ever, and rising every year. At the bottom end, workers were much better off than they would ever be again: The minimum wage in 1966, at $1.25 an hour, was the equivalent of more than $8.00 in today’s dollars, far higher than today’s minimum wage of $5.15. By 1966 the typical man in his thirties was earning as much as his modern equivalent; by the time the great boom ended, in the early seventies, men would be earning about 14 percent more than they do now.[1] It’s true that family incomes were a bit less than they are today, because fewer women worked and the gap between women’s and men’s wages was larger. And because incomes were a bit lower than they are now, middle-class families lived in smaller houses, were less likely to have two cars, and in general had a somewhat lower material standard of living than their counterparts today. Yet the standard of living felt high to most Americans, both because it was far higher than it had been for the previous generation, and because a more equal society offered fewer occasions to feel left out. As MIT economists Frank Levy and Peter Temin have pointed out, the broad-based rise in income meant that a blue-collar machine operator earned more, in real terms, than most managers had earned a generation earlier. As a result more Americans than ever before considered themselves middle class.[2]

Economic security was also unprecedented. By 1966, 80 percent of the population had health insurance, up from only 30 percent at the end of World War II, and by 1970 the fraction of the population with health insurance surpassed today’s 85 percent level. Workers who lost their jobs despite the low unemployment rate were much more likely to receive unemployment insurance than laid-off workers are today, and that insurance covered a larger fraction of their lost wages than does today’s. And as Levy and Temin point out, rising wages across the board meant that even laid-off workers whose next job paid less than the one they lost found that within a few years they had recovered their previous standard of living.

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.

Most of the outright segregationists were Southerners. But even in the North, where there was less sympathy for strict segregation, there was palpable fear of the changes the civil rights movement was bringing. Throughout the sixties, more than 60 percent of voters agreed that “the civil rights people have been trying to push too fast.” This reaction partly reflected the way the goals of the civil rights movement widened over time. At first it was simply a matter of undoing Jim Crow—the explicit, blatant disenfranchisement and sometimes violently enforced second-class status of blacks in the South. The crudity and brutality of Jim Crow made it, in the end, a relatively easy target for reform: The nation’s sympathies were engaged by the civil rights marchers; its sense of itself was outraged by the viciousness of the resistance by Southern racists. And undoing Jim Crow required no more than declaring the formal, government-enforced institutions of Southern segregation illegal.

Once the formal institutions of Southern apartheid were gone, however, there still remained the reality of less formal but de facto discrimination and segregation—which, unlike formal segregation, existed all over the country. And as civil rights activists tried to take on this reality, the nature of the confrontation changed. In the eyes of many nonSouthern whites, it was one thing to tell school districts that they couldn’t explicitly maintain separate schools for white and black children, but it was something quite different to redraw school district boundaries and put children on buses in an attempt to end de facto segregation. Similarly, many non-Southern whites viewed laws telling state governments that they couldn’t refuse services to black people as legitimate, but viewed as illegitimate laws outlawing racial discrimination by private landlords or by homeowners selling their homes. Civil rights advocates were right to believe that de facto segregation and discrimination—which despite claims that they represented voluntary choice were often in practice supported by threats of violence—represented barriers to progress every bit as important as Jim Crow. In attempting to remedy these wrongs, however, the civil rights movement inevitably brought itself a much wider range of enemies.

Enterprising politicians took notice. Ronald Reagan, who had opposed the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Act—calling the latter “humiliating to the South”—ran for governor of California in part on a promise to repeal the state’s fair housing act. “If an individual wants to discriminate against Negroes or others in selling or renting his house,” Reagan said, “he has a right to do so.”

Above all, public perception of the civil rights movement became entangled with the rising tide of urban disorder—a linkage that served to legitimate and harden resistance to further civil rights progress.

In October 1967 Richard Nixon published a now-famous article in Reader’s Digest titled “What Has Happened to America?” The article, which was actually written by Pat Buchanan, wrapped up all the nation’s turmoil in one package: Liberal permissiveness, Nixon/Buchanan claimed, was the root of all evil.[3]

“Just three years ago,” the article began, “this nation seemed to be completing its greatest decade of racial progress.” But now the nation was “among the most lawless and violent in the history of free peoples.” Urban riots were “the most virulent symptoms to date of another, and in some ways graver, national disorder—the decline in respect for public authority and the rule of law in America.”

And it was all the fault of the liberals.

Nixon and Buchanan knew what they were doing. A conservative, went a line that became popular in the 1960s, is a liberal who has been mugged. These days crime has faded as a political issue: Crime rates plunged in the nineties, and they plunged most in New York City, once seen as the epitome of all that was wrong with American society. But in the sixties, “law and order” was arguably the single most effective rallying cry of conservatives.

There was a reason Americans felt that law and order were breaking down: They were. The crime rate more than tripled between 1957 and 1970. The rate of robbery, which Historical Statistics of the United States defines as “stealing or taking anything of value from the care, custody, or control of a person by force or violence or by putting in fear”—in other words, mugging—more than quadrupled.

Why did crime surge? The short answer is that we don’t really know much about what causes crime to rise or fall, as demonstrated by the inability of experts to predict major changes in crime rates. The crime surge of the sixties, which confounded the expectations of liberals who expected growing social justice to be rewarded with better behavior, came as a complete surprise. So did the plunging crime rates of the nineties, which confounded conservatives who believed that no improvement in crime would be possible without a return to traditional social values. As Steven Levitt of the University of Chicago has pointed out, in the nineties “the crime decline was so unanticipated that it was widely dismissed as temporary or illusory long after it had begun.”[4]

Perhaps the most plausible explanation for the great crime wave rests on demography. After World War II millions of blacks left the rural South for Northern cities—and along with their white fellow citizens, they also had a lot of children. As the baby boom reached adolescence, there was a large increase in the number of young males, and young urban black males in particular. It’s true that the actual increase in crime was much larger than the increase in the number of people in crime-prone demographic groups, but there may have been a “multiplier effect” because the demographic changes overwhelmed the forces of social control. The proliferation of crime-prone young males created new, dangerous norms for behavior. And the increase in the number of people likely to commit crimes wasn’t matched by any corresponding increase in the number of police officers to arrest them or jail cells to hold them. During the sixties the number of people in prison remained essentially flat even as crime soared—a sharp contrast with what happened in the nineties, when the number of people in prison continued to rise even as crime plunged.

Other factors were at work, too. One was a lack of inner-city jobs. Millions of Southern blacks had moved to Northern cities in search of manufacturing jobs—jobs that were abundant in the forties and fifties, thanks to the wartime boom and the peacetime consumer boom that followed. In the 1960s, however, those same cities began turning into an economic trap. Thanks to changing technologies of production and transportation, manufacturing began moving out of crowded urban industrial districts to sprawling plants in the suburbs; as a result jobs became scarce in the inner-city areas where blacks lived. Yet the black population remained penned in those inner cities due both to segregation and the inability to afford cars. The result was high unemployment among urban blacks even in the face of a booming economy.[5]

And the lack of jobs in the inner city, as famously argued by the sociologist William Julius Wilson, probably helped foster a destructive culture. Wilson also argued that the beginnings of desegregation perversely worsened the problem, because middle-class blacks took advantage of reduced housing discrimination to flee the ghetto, leaving behind a population segregated by class as well as race.

Whatever the reasons for rising crime in the sixties, what people saw was that law and order were breaking down. Many of them were more than willing to follow Nixon’s lead and place the blame on purported liberal permissiveness. There’s no evidence that permissiveness—as opposed to, say, lack of prison capacity or sufficient employment opportunities for blacks—was a significant factor in the crime wave. But the public, confronted by rising crime at the same time the nation was attempting to correct past injustices, was all too willing to make the connection.

And in the public mind concerns about crime were inextricably mixed with fear of large-scale urban violence.

The era of urban riots that began with the Harlem riot of 1964 lasted only four years—that is, although there would be riots after 1968, like the 1992 Los Angeles riot that followed the police beating of Rodney King, they would never feel like a national wave. In the riot years, however, it seemed as if all of urban America was going up in flames.

The causes of the rise and fall of urban riots remain as obscure as the causes of the rise and fall of crime. Many, probably most, riots began with acts of police brutality. The 1964 Harlem riot, for example, began when a police officer shot a fifteen-year-old black youth. And during the riots the police often ran amok. Still, police brutality against blacks was nothing new. So why, for four years in the 1960s, did such acts provoke large-scale riots?

Social scientists have found that riots were most likely to happen in cities outside the South that had large black populations. The absence of Southern riots presumably reflected the tight level of social control. Or to put it less euphemistically, in the South blacks were too terrorized to riot. Repression was less total in Northern cities, and the great postwar migration ensured that by the sixties many of these cities had huge black populations, including an increasing number of younger blacks who had never lived in the South. These demographic trends, which were essentially the same demographic trends that helped cause rising crime, combined with the terrible living conditions in urban ghettos, probably set the stage for violent reactions against acts of brutality that would once simply have been endured.

Did the civil rights movement have anything to do with urban riots? The 1968 report of the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders, generally referred to as the Kerner Commission, suggested that it did. “White racism,” it declared, “is essentially responsible for the explosive mixture which has been accumulating in our cities since the end of World War II.” While placing the ultimate blame on white racism, however, the report suggested that the proximate causes of the riots lay in the expectations created by the civil rights movement:

Frustrated hopes are the residue of the unfulfilled expectations aroused by the great judicial and legislative victories of the Civil Rights Movement and the dramatic struggle for equal rights in the South.

A climate that tends toward approval and encouragement of violence as a form of protest has been created by white terrorism directed against nonviolent protest; by the open defiance of law and federal authority by state and local officials resisting desegregation; and by some protest groups engaging in civil disobedience who turn their backs on nonviolence, go beyond the constitutionally protected rights of petition and free assembly, and resort to violence to attempt to compel alteration of laws and policies with which they disagree.

The frustrations of powerlessness have led some Negroes to the conviction that there is no effective alternative to violence as a means of achieving redress of grievances, and of “moving the system.” These frustrations are reflected in alienation and hostility toward the institutions of law and government and the white society which controls them, and in the reach toward racial consciousness and solidarity reflected in the slogan “Black Power.”

A new mood has sprung up among Negroes, particularly among the young, in which self-esteem and enhanced racial pride are replacing apathy and submission to “the system.”

Lyndon Johnson was deeply dismayed by the Kerner Commission report, which he felt played right into the hands of conservatives. Blaming white racism for urban disorder, no matter how true the accusation might have been, was no way to win white votes. Suggesting that attempts to diminish the heavy hand of racism might have catalyzed violence wasn’t likely to encourage further reform so much as to empower those who didn’t want a civil rights movement in the first place. And it certainly helped Nixon.

And in the minds of white voters, crime and riots merged with another widely publicized indicator of America’s breakdown: rising welfare dependency.

After his death in 2004 Ronald Reagan was eulogized as a lovable, avuncular fellow, devoted to the cause of freedom, defined by his victory over the Soviet evil empire and, maybe, by his devotion to tax cuts. But the Ronald Reagan who became California’s governor in 1966 was something quite different: the representative of and vehicle for white voters angry at the bums on welfare. In his autobiography Reagan described the groups who urged him to run for governor of California in 1966:

The image is clear: Welfare chiselers were driving up decent peoples’ taxes. Never mind that it wasn’t true, at least not to any significant extent—that Aid to Families with Dependent Children, the program most people meant when they said “welfare,” never was a major cost of government,[7] and that cheating was never a significant problem. (In later years Reagan would refer again and again to the grossly exaggerated story of a Chicago welfare queen driving her welfare Cadillac.) The fact was that welfare rolls were indeed rising. By 1966 twice as many Americans were on welfare as there had been a decade earlier. That was just the beginning: The welfare rolls more than doubled again in the “welfare explosion” of the late 1960s and early 1970s.[8] And Reagan didn’t need to point out that a substantial fraction of those who entered the welfare rolls were black.

What caused the welfare explosion? A change in attitude, according to the mainstream media: “In Washington,” wrote Time in 1970,

The author and pundit Mickey Kaus, writing thirty years later, was blunter about what really changed: “Before the ‘welfare explosion’ of the late 1960s many poor blacks were blocked or discouraged from receiving welfare.”[10]

The welfare explosion, then, was probably in part a byproduct of the civil rights movement. Like the rise in crime it was probably also in part a result of the shift of manufacturing out of central cities, leaving black urban populations with few ways to earn a living. It’s clear that whatever the reasons for growing welfare rolls, they played all too easily into the growing sense of many Americans that, as Reagan would have it, “arrogant bureaucrats” were taking their hard-earned dollars and giving them away to people who didn’t deserve them. And while Reagan may have defined those undeserving people by the presumed content of their character—they were “welfare chiselers”—many of his supporters surely defined the undeserving by the color of their skin.

Although race was a primary motivator, was the backlash only about race?

Ah, the Summer of Love! For Americans of a certain age—baby boomers looking back at their youth, or maybe at the youth they wish they’d had—the sixties have taken on a nostalgic glow. But at the time the reaction of most Americans to the emergence of the counterculture was horror and anger, not admiration.

Why did the counterculture arise? Again nobody really knows, but there were some obvious factors. That magic economy was surely part of the story: Because making a living seemed easy, the cost of experimenting with an alternative lifestyle seemed low—you could always go back and get a regular job. In fact, you have to wonder whether the Nixon recession of 1969–71—which saw the unemployment rate rise from 3.5 to 6 percent—didn’t do more to end the hippie movement than the killings at Altamont.

Also, familiarity with prosperity may have bred contempt. While the older generation was gratified and amazed at its ability to live a middle-class lifestyle, the young saw only the limits of what money can buy. In the 1967 film The Graduate, Dustin Hoffman’s character, Benjamin, is dismayed when his father’s friend, demanding that he pay attention, tells him, “Just one word—plastics.” Benjamin, trying to explain his unease to his father, explains that he wants his future to be “different.”

As with so much of what happened in the sixties, demography surely played a role. The counterculture emerged circa 1964—the year in which the leading edge of the baby boom reached college age. Sheer numbers made it easier for young people to break with the cultural conventions of their elders. There were also technological changes—the Pill made sexual experimentation easier than in any previous historical era. And the youth of the sixties may have had different values in part because they were the first generation to have grown up watching TV, exposed to a barrage of images (and advertisements) that, though designed to sell products, also had the effect of undermining traditional values.

The youth rebellion frightened and infuriated many Americans—Ronald Reagan in particular. During his campaign for governor of California he promised to “investigate the charges of communism and blatant sexual misbehavior on the Berkeley campus.” He spoke of “sexual orgies so vile I cannot describe them to you,” and at one point claimed to have proof that the Alameda county district attorney had investigated a student dance which had turned into “an orgy,” where they had displayed on a giant screen “pictures of men and women, nude, in sensuous poses, provocative, fondling.” In fact there was no such investigation—like the welfare queen with her Cadillac, the dance-turned-orgy was a figment of Reagan’s imagination.

It all sounds comical now. Communism and sexual misbehavior—the sum of all fears! It’s almost impossible to avoid engaging in armchair psychoanalysis: Why was the future president so obsessed with what those Berkeley students were doing? For middle-class Americans, however, the changing social norms of the 1960s created real anxiety. On one side Americans feared being mugged—which really did happen to a lot of people in the newly dangerous cities. On the other side they were afraid that their children would tune in, turn on, and drop out. And that really happened, too.

Since my concern in this book is with political economy, however, the question is whether the cultural rebellion of youth had a major, lasting political impact. And there’s not much evidence that it swayed many voters. Most people disapproved of what the kids were up to, but only a minority viewed their actions as a serious threat. Thus a 1971 Harris Poll asked, “Do you feel that hippies are a real danger to society, more harmful to themselves than to society, or do you feel they are not particularly harmful to anyone?” Only 22 percent said that hippies were a real danger; the same percentage said they weren’t particularly harmful; 53 percent said they were mainly harmful to themselves.[11] Perhaps even more telling than the polls was the behavior of politicians keen to exploit public dismay over what was happening in America. To read the speeches of Richard Nixon and Spiro Agnew, his attack-dog vice president, is to be struck at how little, when all is said and done, they talked about cultural anxieties. Even Nixon’s 1969 “silent majority” speech, often described as pitting regular Americans against hippies and the counterculture, actually focused not on broader cultural conflicts but specifically on demonstrations against the Vietnam war.[12]

Yet as the example of Reagan suggests, some people were intensely dismayed by the youth rebellion, for reasons they may not have admitted even to themselves. And an obsession with other peoples’ sexual lives has been an enduring factor in movement conservatism—a key source of the movement’s, um, passion.

Lyndon Johnson didn’t want a war. His 1967 State of the Union address is remarkable for its mournful tone, its lack of bombast. “No better words could describe our present course,” he declared, “than those once spoken by the great Thomas Jefferson: ‘It is the melancholy law of human societies to be compelled sometimes to choose a great evil in order to ward off a greater.’…I wish I could report to you that the conflict is almost over. This I cannot do. We face more cost, more loss, and more agony. For the end is not yet.”

Nonetheless Johnson and the nation got sucked into war. That war divided the nation bitterly, in ways that have become familiar once again in recent years. There were huge demonstrations, sometimes met with violent responses. A few young Americans became so radicalized that they turned to fantasies of violent revolution. Meanwhile Richard Nixon exploited the war to win the White House, a victory made possible because Johnson, trapped by the war, chose not to run for reelection. Four years later Nixon was able to pull off a political feat, turning an unpopular war to his advantage, that was echoed by George W. Bush’s victory in 2004. Even though the public had turned overwhelmingly against the war, Nixon succeeded in making George McGovern’s call for withdrawal from Vietnam sound irresponsible and weak.

Surely, then, Vietnam must have transformed American politics—or so you might think. When one looks closely at the evidence, however, the case for Vietnam as a turning point is surprisingly hard to make. For Vietnam to have been decisive, either the antiwar movement or the backlash against that movement—or both—would have had to grow into a sustained force in American politics, continuing to shape policies and elections even after the war was over. In fact none of this happened.

The antiwar movement, which loomed so large in the sixties and early seventies, faded away with remarkable speed once the draft ended in 1973 and most U.S. forces were withdrawn from Vietnam. The antiwar activists went on to other things; radical leftism never took hold as a significant political force.

On the other side Nixon was never able to convert the backlash against the antiwar movement into major congressional victories.

There’s a persistent myth that Vietnam “destroyed the Democrats.” But that myth is contradicted by the history of congressional control during the war years, shown in table 4. Even in 1972, the year of Nixon’s landslide victory over McGovern, the Democrats easily held on to their majority in the House and actually widened their lead in the Senate. And the dirty tricks Nixon used to assure himself of victory in 1972 produced, in the Watergate scandal, the mother of all blowbacks—and a sharp jump in Democratic electoral fortunes.

What’s more the available evidence just doesn’t show a broad public perception in the early post-Vietnam years of Democrats as weak on national security. Polls taken after the fall of Saigon but before the Iranian hostage crisis suggest a rough parity between the parties on national security, not the overwhelming GOP advantage of legend. For example, a search of the Roper Center’s iPOLL for “Republican and Military” between 1975 and 1979 turns up two Harris Polls from 1978 and one Republican National Committee Poll from 1979. None of the three shows a large Republican advantage on the question of which party can be trusted on military security.

Eventually, the Democrats did find themselves in trouble, and there would come a time when Republicans would effectively use the claim that American troops in Vietnam were stabbed in the back to portray Democrats as weak on national security. But the realities of Vietnam had very little to do with all that.

The sixties were the time of hippies and student radicals, of hardhats beating up longhairs, of war and protest. It would be foolish to say that none of this mattered. Yet all these things played at best a minor direct role in laying the foundations for the changes that would take place in American political economy over the next thirty years. In an indirect sense they may have mattered more: The lessons learned by Republicans about how to exploit cultural backlash would serve movement conservatives well in future decades, even as the sources of backlash shifted from hippies and crime to abortion and gay marriage.

What really mattered most for the long run, however, was the fracturing of the New Deal coalition over race. After the passage of the Civil Rights Act, Johnson told Bill Moyers, then a presidential aide, “I think we’ve just delivered the South to the Republican Party for the rest of my life, and yours.” He was right: In their decisive victory in the 2006 congressional elections, Democrats won the Northeast by 28 percentage points, the West by 11 percentage points, the Midwest by 5 percentage points—but trailed Republicans by 6 points in the South.[13]

That fracture opened the door to a new kind of politics. The changing politics of race made it possible for a revived conservative movement, whose ultimate goal was to reverse the achievements of the New Deal, to win national elections—even though it supported policies that favored the interests of a narrow elite over those of middle-and lower-income Americans.

Before this movement—movement conservatism—could win elections, however, it first had to establish an institutional base, and take over the Republican Party. How it did that is the subject of the next chapter.