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
they call it the “welfare syndrome.” Largely because of the work of groups like the National Welfare Rights Organization, which now has chapters in all 50 states, the poor no longer feel that any stigma is attached to applying for welfare. Tens of thousands of persons who were once too timid or too ashamed to go on the dole are now rapping on the doors of their local welfare offices and demanding the payments they consider to be their right.[9]
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
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
