remarkable speed once the draft ended in 1973 and most U.S. forces were withdrawn from Vietnam.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.
| Table 4. The Persistence of the Democratic Majority | |||
|---|---|---|---|
| Democratic Seats In: | |||
| Congress | Years | Senate | House |
| 90th | 1967–1968 | 64 | 248 |
| 91st | 1969–1970 | 58 | 243 |
| 92nd | 1971–1972 | 54 | 255 |
| 93rd | 1973–1974 | 56 | 242 |
| 94th | 1975–1976 | 61 | 291 |
Source: www.library.unt.edu/govinfo/usfed/years.html.
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.
6 MOVEMENT CONSERVATISM
Even as Dwight Eisenhower was preaching the virtues of a toned-down, “modern” Republicanism, a new kind of conservative was beginning to emerge. Unlike the McKinley-type conservatives who fought first FDR and then Eisenhower—men who were traditional, stuffy, and above all old—these “new conservatives,” as they came to be known, were young, brash, and media savvy. They saw themselves as outsiders challenging the establishment. They were, however, well-financed from the start.
William F. Buckley blazed the trail. His 1951 book,
It’s worth looking at early issues of the
