The Conscience of a Liberal

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.

Civil Rights and the Defection of the South

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.

Urban Disorder

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.

The shocking crime and disorder in American life today, flow in large measure from two fundamental changes that have occurred in the attitudes of many Americans. First, there is the permissiveness toward violation of the law and public order by those who agree with the cause in question. Second, there is the indulgence of crime because of sympathy for the past grievances of those who have become criminals. Our judges have gone too far in weakening the peace forces as against the criminal forces. Our opinion-makers have gone too far in promoting the doctrine that when a law is broken, society, not the criminal is to blame.

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