The Conscience of a Liberal

47	44
Richest Third	42	37

Source: Larry Bartels, “What’s the Matter with What’s the Matter with Kansas?” p. 13 (photocopy, Princeton University, 2005).

If the Republican Party of the fifties and sixties didn’t stand for economic conservatism, what did it stand for? Or maybe the question is better phrased as follows: What did voters who voted Republican think they were voting for?

To some extent they were voting for the traditional ethnic order. The Republican Party of the 1950s was, above all, the WASP party—the party of non-Southern white Anglo-Saxon Protestants, with the Anglo-Saxon bit somewhat optional. (Eisenhower came from German stock, but that didn’t matter.) During the 1950s, 51 percent of those who considered themselves Republicans were WASPs, even though the group made up only 30 percent of the electorate.[6] White Protestants had been the dominant ethnic group in the United States for most of its history, but the rise of the New Deal, with many Catholic union members in its base and with a large role for Jewish intellectuals, undermined that dominance. And much of the rest of the country was suspicious of the change. It’s hard now to recapture that state of mind, but as late as the 1960 election a significant number of Americans voted against Kennedy simply because he was Catholic.

More creditably, many Americans voted Republican as a check on the power of the dominant Democratic coalition. From the thirties through the seventies, Democrats commanded a much larger share of registered voters than the Republicans. Although this didn’t translate into a Democratic advantage in capturing the White House— between the 1948 election and the election of Ronald Reagan the Republicans held the presidency for four terms, the Democrats for three—it did translate into consistent Democratic control of Congress from 1952 on. This consistent control led to abuses—not gross corruption, for the most part, but petty corruption and, perhaps more important, complacency and lack of attention to popular concerns. Republicans became the alternative for those who valued some accountability. In particular, Republicans in the Northeast often presented themselves as reformers who would clean up the system rather than change it in any fundamental way.

In sum, between 1948 and sometime in the 1970s both parties accepted the changes that had taken place during the Great Compression. To a large extent the New Deal had created the political conditions that sustained this consensus. A highly progressive tax system limited wealth at the top, and the rich were too weak politically to protest. Social Security and unemployment insurance were untouchable programs, and Medicare eventually achieved the same status. Strong unions were an accepted part of the national scene.

This equilibrium would collapse in the 1970s. But the forces that would destroy the politics of equality began building in the 1960s, a decade in which everything went right for the economy, but everything seemed to go wrong for American democracy.

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