Rise of Moderate Conservatism

The Rise of Moderate Conservatism

• Phyllis Schlafly
  • Opposed the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA).
  • Opposed abortion rights post-Roe v. Wade (1973).
  • Opposed no-fault divorce laws.
  • Believed family was central to a woman's place.
• Schlafly symbolizes threads uniting modern conservatism:
  • Culture warrior: religious beliefs on abortion and feminism.
  • Opposed big government.
  • Advocated a hawkish foreign policy.

Factors Contributing to the Political Shift After 1968

• The 1968 election is critical in modern U.S. history due to political realignment.
• Issues of race, gender equality, and sexual politics persisted and were repackaged in the 1970s and 1980s.

The New Right's Influence

• Union of:
  • Conservative religious elements.
  • Hawkish neoconservatives: defected from the Democratic Party, critical of its foreign policy (especially under Jimmy Carter).
  • Small government advocates: lower taxes, less government intervention.

Ronald Reagan's Political Vision

• Differed from Nixon, Ford, and Carter.
• Critiqued the New Deal.

The Reagan Revolution

• Debate on whether Reagan initiated a true revolution.
• Reagan profoundly changed American politics and ushered in a new political vision that is still relevant today.

The 1968 Election: Unraveling the New Deal Coalition

• New Deal coalition: African Americans, Southern Democrats, ethnic working-class whites in the North, educated liberals, and unions.
• Dwight Eisenhower expanded the New Deal.
• 1968: Change due to:
  • Cultural resentments.
  • Economic downturn.
  • Reaction against protest movements (Black Power, SDS, women's liberation, gay liberation).
• Resentment towards Great Society programs (War on Poverty, affirmative action).
  • White working class felt programs primarily helped minorities.
  • Democratic Party captured 60% of this vote in 1964, but only 35% in 1968.
• Economic downturn:
  • Lyndon Johnson's policies (Vietnam War, Great Society) overheated the economy.
  • Interest rates doubled, national debt exploded, and rapid inflation occurred.
  • Decline in the standard of living.
• Johnson's decision not to run for reelection in 1968.
• Robert Kennedy's assassination in June 1968.
• Internal disunion within the Democratic Party due to new left protesters outside the Democratic National Convention.
• Richard Nixon promised to restore law and order, fueling the political shift.

Grassroots Conservatism on the Rise

• The liberal vision appealed to fewer Americans.
• Apollo moon landing (July 1969) seemed to negate countercultural critiques of American capitalism.
  • Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin became the first humans to set foot on the moon.
  • The U.S. victory in the space race.

Johnson's Dilemma

• Johnson's administration was neglecting domestic programs, giving the war the bulk of its attention and money.
• Cartoon illustrates Johnson's dilemma in funding both the Vietnam War and the Great Society.

Economic Decline in the 1970s

• Decreasing standards of living, periodic recessions.
• Decreased confidence in the American economy, government, and military.
• Government spending in the 1960s:
  • Vietnam War, Great Society programs (Medicare, Medicaid, War on Poverty).
    • Ballooned the federal deficit, caused spiraling inflation.
• Rising unemployment:
  • Vietnam veterans returning home.
  • Cancellation of government defense contracts triggered layoffs in the industrial sector.
• Shift from a manufacturing-based economy to a post-industrial, service sector economy.

Energy Crisis

• Rising energy costs
• Americans: 6% of the world's population in 1970, consumed nearly 40% of its global energy resources.
• Heavy reliance on oil, reliance on countries around the Persian Gulf and the Middle East.
• Shift of jobs from the Midwest to the Sunbelt due to air conditioning.
• Inflation and unemployment spiked in the 1970s, a rare occurrence.
  • Inflation: devaluation of currency.
  • High inflation typically accompanied by lower unemployment (Great Depression).
• Policies to fix one problem often worsened another.
  • Cutting taxes to stimulate business recovery caused prices to rise further.
  • Raising interest rates to curtail inflation put loans out of reach for many Americans.
• The Rust Belt got its name from crumbling infrastructure due to manufacturing leaving the Midwest.

Bruce Springsteen's "Born in the U.S.A."

• Critiques American policymakers of the 1970s and 1980s and critiques American capitalism.
• Speaks to economic disillusionment and emotional trauma from the Vietnam War.

Energy Crisis and Foreign Policy

• Roots in American foreign policy and high standard of living after World War II.
• Israel created in 1947 by the United Nations to provide a homeland for the Jewish people.
  • The United States also believes that the world owed the Jewish people reparations for the horrors of the Holocaust.
  • Land already occupied by Palestinians, Arab nations viewed Jewish immigration as Western colonization.
  • Wars between Arab nations and Israel ensued.
• U.S. government supported Israel's right to exist but depended on Middle Eastern oil.
• The Soviet Union pushed to form stronger alliances in the Middle East.
• In retaliation for U.S. support of Israel, OPEC announced an oil embargo on the U.S. in 1973.
  • The US depended on the Middle East for about 12% of the oil it consumed.
  • Cartel of major oil-producing nations.
  • Embargo lasted five months, causing the worst recession since the Great Depression in 1974.
• High inflation and high unemployment.
• Reasons for unemployment: there must be something more foundationally wrong with the American economy, and there is, with deep roots in the ailing auto and steel industries.

The Ailing Auto and Steel Industries

• In 1970, the big three of American automakers, General Motors, Ford, Chrysler, sold 89% of the cars market in The United States. By 1980, that share had dropped 23.
• American consumers bought smaller, more fuel-efficient cars imported from Japan.
• In 1950 at the kind of the heart of American economic dominance, The United States produced nearly half of the world's steel. By 1980, a mere thirty years later, it is a mere 14%.
• Japanese competitors produced steel for a third of the price.
• American automobile and steel plants closed, leading to decaying industrial cities in the Midwest (Rust Belt).
• The United States shifted to a service sector and high-tech jobs.

Societal Concerns: Shifting Away from Economic Concerns

• Widespread abandonment of the Democratic party from once reliably Democratic voters:
• Northern Blue Collar Workers, White suburbanites, disgruntled Southerners.
• Nixon called these folks the silent majority.
• Nixon's budget cutting targets social welfare programs for minorities and the poor.
• Nixon gained the loyalty of the silent majority by trying to tame the Supreme Court.
• Nixon appoints Warren Burger to head the Supreme Court in 1969.
• The Court insisted that the North develop busing, a busing program to catch up with the South. A massive protest rocked the North in the early nineteen seventies.
• Boston becomes the seat bed of this.
• Joseph Rakes brought along his family's American flag.
• Ted Landsmark, a lawyer on the way to a meeting, happened to actually cross paths with the protesters.
• The students pounced on him.
• On the right, it it appears that Landsmark is struggling to free himself from the grips of another white man who is grabbing him from the rear.
• The man holding Landsmark was actually helping him to his feet after white use had thrown him to the ground and had beaten him.
• Landscape's heavily bandaged face at a press conference the following day shocked white Boston and encouraged the city's leaders to initiate a sustained campaign to deescalate racial tensions.
• The Supreme Court stance had shifted in large part because of some of Nixon's more conservative Supreme Court appointments.
• The court ruled in 1971 that school districts did not have to participate in inner city busing programs, which accelerated the so called white flight to the suburbs, which created a core of all black urban schools ringed by suburban white schools in major metropolitan areas across the country.

Issues over Sexual Politics and Feminism

• Feminists and gay rights activists carried the nineteen sixties revolution over rights into the seventies and eighties, striking at the heart of gender identity in American society.

• Feminist political demands received unprecedented attention in nineteen seventies.

• Lobbied for equal pay for equal work, an end to sexual harassment, access to paternity leave or, excuse me, paid maternity leave.

• Bread and butter issues, these kind of kitchen table issues became even more pressing when the economy starts to go down south in the nineteen seventies, which forced more and more women into the workplace.

• Workplace discrimination is hard, in many ways, harder to eradicate than political discrimination.

• Working women faced challenges such as:

  • Discrimination, sexual harassment.
  • Lack of affordable daycare.
  • Difficulty convincing men to pitch in at home.
    • Women worked fifteen hours more a week than men during nineteen seventies.

• Challenges convincing working women that feminism provided the answer to the problems they faced, balancing work and home life or advancing in the workplace.

• Press often portrayed feminists negatively.

• Divides within the movement:

  • Poor minority women saw racial and ethnic prejudice as bigger obstacles than gender discrimination.
  • Viewed leaders as disproportionately white and upper middle class.

Positive Advancements

• Title IX of the 1972 Education Act prohibited gender discrimination in education.
• Revolutionized high school and college sports.

Abortion

• No issue galvanized women more than abortion.
• Between 1,500,000 women a year sought legal abortions during the nineteen seventies.
• Botched procedures by incompetent practitioners, often illegal.
• Two to three thousand women died every single year seeking these these illegal abortions.
• Issue of bodily autonomy for a lot of pro choice activists.
• Feminists felt that women should have the right to make medical decisions about their own bodies.
• In 1970, a young, unmarried, poor, pregnant twenty five year old Norma McCorvey sued Texas under the say pseudonym Jane Roe claiming that she had the right to a legal and safe abortion based on her constitutional right to privacy.

Roe v. Wade (1973)

• Legalized abortion.
• Essentially a right to privacy is broad enough to encompass a woman's decision whether or not to terminate her pregnancy.
• Prohibited states from criminalizing abortion in the first trimester but allowed them to regulate it in the second and even prohibited during the third when a fetus became viable.
• Vocabulary revealed competing visions.
• Supporters: Pro-choice (personal liberty).
• Opponents: Pro-life (life begins at conception).

Equal Rights Amendment (ERA)

• Failed to be ratified (three states short).
• Alienates women who centered their life around children in the home
• Question of a woman's right to an abortion and by extension, women's rights as as equal citizens in this country and what counts as equal rights continues to animate a lot of our discussions today.
• The most important thing here is that we're talking about political realignment here.
• Gloria Steinem argued that feminism was not counter to the family.
• Feminism was fighting not just for women's equality, but for a more compassionate masculinity.

Environmental Concerns

• Nation's oil dependence, suburban sprawl, lack of wildlife protections, tailpipe emissions.
• Rivers like the Cuyahoga in Ohio caught fire.
• Los Angeles smothered in smog.
• Environmental movement's most successful phase.
• Historians date the start of this environmental movement to the first Earth Day in April of nineteen seventy.
• Purging the poison of mainstream American values out of their lives.
• Politicians framed pollution as a health issue, e.g., lead poisoning damages children's brains.
• Welding pragmatic concerns with environmental concerns.
• Concentrated on wilderness preservation.

Presidential Support for Environmental Reforms

• Johnson administration regulated tailpipe emissions and set aside land for preservation.
• Nixon and Carter increased federal environmental control.
• New standards on tailpipe emissions.
• Companies were mandated to reduce the amount of toxins that their factories produced and to clean up sites that they had contaminated.
• Car manufacturers were mandated to install things like catalytic converters that helped reduce automobile pollution in some places by up to 75%.
• Foundation of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA).
• Clean Air Act and Clean Water Act.
• Clean Air Act and the Clean Water Act, along with the Endangered Species Act, which is not on the slide, are all well received in the within within the majority of Americans.

Drawbacks

• Blue-collar workers feared pollution controls would encourage industrialists to move overseas.
• Protests against environmentalism in the West among conservatives who did not like the idea of the federal government controlling so much land.
• Western miners, ranchers, loggers, disagreed with new federal restrictions.
• Western voters helped Ronald Reagan win the presidency in 1980 because he listened to their complaints about federal environmental policies.

The Rise of the Moral Majority

• Grassroots political movement.
• Religious conservatives alienated by feminism and gay rights.
• Outraged at the decline of the traditional family assaults on traditional ways of living.
• Supported politicians that defended traditional values.
• Jerry Falwell founded the Moral Majority in 1979.
• Described as pro-life, pro-family, pro-morality, and pro-America.
• Registered millions of new voters.
• Helped bridge the divide between Protestants and Catholics.
• Voted overwhelmingly for Reagan in the 1980 presidential election.
• Major component of Republican Party politics today.

The Watergate Scandal

• Nixon authorized White House staffers and members of Nixon's reelection campaign to break into the office of the Democratic National Committee in June of nineteen seventy two during the midst of the presidential season election season.
• Nixon claimed he didn't know anything about the plot.
• Burglars confessed to accepting a bribe to keep quiet about the White House's involvement.
• The question was, what did the president know, and when did he know it?
• Nixon had a habit of taping all of his conversations he had in the Oval Office.
• Nixon claimed he was constitutionally protected by the right of executive privilege.
• Nixon tried to fire a series of people investigating him.
• The house of representatives impeached him and charged him with obstruction of justice and abusing his presidential powers.
• The Supreme Court ruled that Nixon could not withhold information.
• On the tapes you can hear the president authorize a cover up plan.
• Nixon became the first US president in history to resign.
• The lies told by the federal government during the Vietnam War and the Watergate scandal tested Americans' faith in the federal government.

Impact on Subsequent Presidencies

• Ford and Carter inherited a dramatically weakened presidential office.
• Congress moved rapidly to rein in presidential power.
• Jimmy Carter won the presidency in 1976 because he seemed honest, but neither candidate gained much enthusiasm.

Carter's Presidency

• Beset by domestic and foreign crises.
• OPEC again raises gasoline prices in 1979.
• Carter calls for greater taxation of gas companies like Exxon who were making a lot of money during this crisis.
• Carter delivered a speech widely called the malaise speech.
• America, he said in this speech, was in a moral and spiritual crisis. The nation had gone from a nation that had celebrated hard work, close knit communities, strong families, to one that worshiped consumption and self indulgence.
• Combined with a foreign policy crisis in Iran in which 52 Americans were held hostage from 1979 until Carter left office in January of nineteen eighty one.
• The presidencies were unsuited for the time and unsuited for the American mood.

Political Visions and Presidential Power

• For Nixon, essentially, privilege shielded the president from doing anything illegal.
• A government of laws was on the verge of becoming a government of one man.

Ronald Reagan's Rise

• Initially a Democrat, head of the Screen Actors Guild.
• Politics went distinctly to the right over the next twenty years.
• Win in the 1980 election against Jimmy Carter capped off a two-decade resurgence of right-wing politics.

Reagan's Coalition

• Creation of a new conservative coalition.
  • Merged the new right with the old
  • Religious and social conservatives, people who are upset with abortion, people who are upset with, gay rights, people who are upset with the decline of traditional the traditional family, of more women in the workplace, of the erosions of religious liberties in schools and other public places merged with more Goldwater esque small government libertarians
  • People who believe that government was the problem, that the New Deal coalition and the New Deal vision of government had created a a bloated bureaucracy, had created a society in which millions of Americans were on the public dole, were on welfare, and people who believed in free markets, free market conservatives, people who did not believe that the government had a a role in regulating what businesses did.
• Waves of former Democrats left the party.
  • Working class Democrats
  • Southern Democrats, people who are angry over court ordered integration and busing. * People who are angry over affirmative action programs and rising crimes in Rust Belt cities.
    New alliances among different groups with different concerns the new right.
• Reshaped the Republican Party from a more center right party that believed that government had certain roles to play.
  • Eisenhower vision of, you know, using government contracts and defense industries of of sponsoring the interstate highway program, using the federal using the National Guard to help integrate Little Rocks High School.
• It's important to remember that the New Deal coalition was not just Democrats. It was also moderate and liberal Republicans.

Reagan's Policies

• Right wing media is created which propel ideas that were one on the margins.
• Cutting income and corporate taxes, reducing social welfare spending, and fighting communism.
• Embraced supply-side economics (trickle-down economics).
  • Letting business owners keep more profits would fuel economic growth.
• Critics derided this as trickle down economics, stealing from the poor to give to the rich, designed to starve the federal budget.
• The top tax rate was dropped from 70 to 50%, which would be lowered again to 28 19 80 six.

Economic and Social Impact

• Redistribution of wealth, spiraling income inequality.
• The average CEO made 40 times more than the average factory worker in 1980, and by 1989, CEOs earned 93 times more.
• America's bought a lot on a level that rivaled the kind of post war spending boom of the nineteen fifties that we talked about a few weeks ago.
• Poorest Americans were not living as well as the richest, and, yes, the gap between the rich and the poor was widening.
• Consumption increases and more Americans could buy high end products like VCRs,
  microwave ovens.

Drawbacks and Criticisms

• Debt tripled during his tenure.
• More wealth concentrated and fewer hand.
• Wage growth for Americans paled in comparison to what CEOs how the revenues for CEOs and corporations were growing.

Foreign Policy

• Presidencies of the seventies were seen as uniquely weak
• The war in Vietnam was seen not just within not just amongst large swaths of Americans, but also a a number of allies as being a ware war kind of an imperialist war.
  and Carter move away from America acting unilaterally to contain communism to what is called multipolarity in detente.
• resetting the relationship, the kind of heated relationships with in particular, with China and the Soviet Union.
• First strategic arms limitation treaty in 1972 prevents both countries from building defensive missiles..
• Countries needed to leave themselves as exposed as possible to nuclear attack because it would deter one or the other from launching a nuclear assault because it would ensure that essentially both of them, because they had no defense systems, it would ensure that both countries would be destroyed.
• Carter emphasized promoting human rights and democracy abroad.
• Normalizes diplomatic relations with China in 1979.

Carter's Doctrine

• The US will use force to preserve the Persian Gulf to keep it out of Soviet hands.

• In Afghanistan, the Carter and Reagan administrations fund Osama bin Laden and the Mujahideen movement in Afghanistan throughout the nineteen eighties.

• The biggest foreign policy scandal and perhaps the biggest scandal period of Reagan's presidency is the Iran Contra scandal in 1986.

• Sold American arms to Iran And use that money from arms sales funneling that money to the Contras to get around to contravene that ban, that congressional ban on using federal money to support the Contras.

• Calling the Soviet Union an evil empire, a a stark departure from the detente of Nixon, Ford, and Carter.

• Aggressive arms increases, The United States' nuclear arsenal.

Reagan's Policies and Soviet Relations

• Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI) in 1983.
• Satellites would protect the American homeland from nuclear assault using lasers.
• The Soviet Union cannot keep up, leading to a crisis.
• Mikhail Gorbachev came into office in 1985.
• instituted a program called Glasnost and Perestroika, which are essentially a two pronged attempt to liberalize the Soviet economy by bringing in more free market ideals and to increase transparency within the Soviet government to make it more responsive to the Soviet people.
• Helped achieve a thaw, not only in The US Soviet relations, but also helps to achieve putting the Soviet Union on the path to disintegration.

Was There a Revolution?

• Historical perspectives on whether Reagan truly changed the New Deal coalition.
• Primary foundations of the New Deal architecture were still in place. Social Security was still strong as ever and popular as ever. Medicare and Medicaid were still there.
• He presided instead over a profound shift in political vision.
• government was often the problem and not the solution.
• Government was not afraid of flexing America's muscle, whether they had allied support or not.