Bonjour and welcome back to the history of the US since 1877!
Today might be the day to shed a tear
because it will be the last lecture in
the series, one that will take us from
Ronald Reagan in the 1980s
all the way to the present. Be aware
however that historians are not too
comfortable dealing with very recent
events. One reason is that the dust has
not settled: we haven't had time to look
at all the evidence
because some things are still classified
when you deal with recent events.
Also, political passions have not cooled
quite yet. So think of it as they work in progress.
The first thing we'll look at
today is: why there is a rebirth of the
conservative movement in the 70s and 80s
when liberalism seemed to be triumphant in the 60s.
Then we'll try to see what
the agenda of these conservatives was
and how that differs from the earlier
periods of conservatism that we
have studied in the class. Then we'll
see whether that succeeded either at the
polls (whether that new conservatism was
able to get people elected) and whether
they were successful in terms of the policies being
implemented and resulting in positive achievements.
But first: what I call the
conservative backlash. The 1960s
really saw a triumphant liberalism,
trying to solve all of society's ills
through government action:
whether it's the inequality between
blacks and whites (that would be
through the Civil Rights Act and the
Voting Rights Act and others) or whether
it's the poverty gap (you have Medicare Medicaid
and the whole war on poverty) 
or the gap between women and men
(that was a whole point of the feminist
movement.) In many ways this agenda
has continued to define the liberal
branch of the Democratic Party
ever since. However by the 1970s all the
low-hanging fruit had been achieved.
It became more complicated to achieve full
equality. I described many of the
achievements of the 1960s as being a cup
half full half empty kind of situation,
where a lot of is achieved but full
equality is not obtained. So getting to
full equality might require moving away
from just giving everybody a fair chance
(and that's what the Civil Rights Act and the
Voting Rights Act were about) and towards
income redistribution. That
would lead to conservative complaints
about overreach by the Democratic
majority
or judicial activism. In the economic arena
the Great Society program is kind of an
expensive one, so that means the budget
expends and the taxes have to go up,
both of which are obviously quite
unpopular, especially in a country like the US
that had a long tradition of small government,
at least before the New Deal. So that led
eventually to complaints by taxpayers that
they had to finance all that. A key
element of that would be in California,
where people got upset that the property
taxes kept going up in the 1970s.
In California you have the
ability to have referendums that are
directed by the people, it's one of the
legacies of the Progressive era.
One of these referendums was known as prop
13 and it passed largely against the
will of the more liberal policymakers in
California who wanted to keep taxing people
and spend money on welfare
programs. That made a big dent in
spending by the California government
because the tax income did not come in.
So that was seen by conservatives
as an early important victory
to rein in out-of-control government
spending and to show that there was a
market out there for ideas that would be
more about small government.
In the foreign policy arena the conservative
movement was very much influenced by the
setbacks offered in the 1970s and that
we covered in the last lecture.
The US had lost control of Iran in 79, as
well as Afghanistan and Nicaragua, and Vietnam,
much of it was attributed to the
soft mushy policies of Jimmy Carter who
had said that he would promote human
rights as a guiding principle of US
foreign policy. So there's a desire to go
back to more hard-edged policy to defend
American interest rather than the human
rights of other people. In the class
we've looked at the divide between
interventionists who won't be active overseas
and isolationists who do not want to. In
that case it's a different divide between
interventionists on the liberal side who
want to promote human rights abroad, and
interventionists on the conservative side
who want to promote American national security,
whatever the cost might be. There is
a lot of sense too that society is
going down the drain, that crime
rates are going up, that going to
downtown in New York City is becoming like
going into a war zone, that you have
riots in Newark and Watts, that the
drug epidemic is out of control, and the
society is going to shreds, and that
all that is connected somehow to the
permissiveness of the 1960s: that by
telling young people "do whatever you
want to do, whatever feels good," then the
society has exploded as a result. So there's a
backlash against that as well.
Etymologically, conservatism means to
conserve things the way they are,
to not change things. The modern conservative
movement might be better described as
reactionary in the sense that it wants
to go back to an earlier period,
pre-1960s an ideal time when America was
still great. On a social level there's
also a sense that some of the measures
that were taken by the progressive
agenda in 1960s had gone too far. When
we talked about the civil rights
movement we began by explaining that
before the civil rights movement in the
south, there was often segregation of schools
along the color line and that this was
banned by the Supreme Court in the Brown v.
Board of Education decision in 54. Then you have a series of battles by the
mid 50s 60s to put that in practice.
By and large, overall, the US
population tended to support that.
By the mid to late 60s however, it
became clear that integration was not
completely done, mostly because they were
black neighborhoods and white
neighborhood, and if you recruit your
students locally, well even if the law
changes, there will still be white and
black kids going to different schools. So
some courts ordered what was called busing,
which is to take black kids going
from the poor neighborhood to a white HS,
and (which was even more
controversial) taking white kids from a
white neighborhood and taking them to
the high school in the black neighborhood.
That was extremely
unpopular with parents and led to a
lot of backlash in places like Boston.
Another policy that tended to be
quite controversial was affirmative action.
If you're not
familiar with the concept, it involves
giving preferential treatments for
members of minorities such as 
African Americans with a long history of
discrimination against them. That might mean giving
them a slot in universities, or maybe 
preferential hiring as a way to correct
the evils of past discrimination. Meaning
that, if you are from a family
from rural Mississippi, nobody in your
family has ever gone to college or even
graduated from HS, and you don't
have access to tutors or prep schools
and so forth, it's going to be pretty
hard to pass the ACT with a good score
and get admitted into an Ivy League
institution even though you might be smart.
So that's where you might
lower the scores a bit for a specific
group of people to kind of balance a
long legacy of social inequality.
So there is an argument to be made for
affirmative action, but it is also a
policy that has attracted a lot of
opposition.For one thing it seems to
violate constitutional clauses about the
equality of all Americans before the law
if you are giving preferential treatment
to one specific category. In practice
the courts have decided that it's okay
to include race as part of an admission
program at a university as long as it is
not the only criteria and part of a
larger package. On a more practical level,
if you start giving more slots to one
particular category of people, that means
you give you fewer to others, and for
competitive schools like Harvard,
that means that you have very
unhappy students and parents who got
sidelined in favor of a minority
applicant with lower test scores. Another
argument used against affirmative action
is more based on the time frame: that
this might have been a policy that was
justifiable in the 1950s and 1960s where
you have a whole generation of students
who were raised in poverty, but if you do
that for a whole generation, that's it,
you have corrected past wrongs. How
long do you need to still do affirmative action
if those racial policies
are are a thing of the past? As I mentioned
the courts have so far upheld
affirmative action policies, but this
might change in the future.
Currently there is an important lawsuit
going against Harvard University done by
Asian-American students who complain
that even though they have very high
test scores they tend to be under-represented
at Harvard University and
this is done in favor of other
minorities, specifically African-Americans.
There's also a complaint on the part of the
conservatives that the media (TV and such)
tends to be dominated by people who
went to college, who live in
California and NYC, and tend to be
more liberal than average, and whenever
some event is covered, whether it's a
riot in the streets an anti-war
demonstration, the journalists will
always pick the side of the liberals at
the expense of what was called the
'silent majority.' And there was some truth to that.
In the 1972 election, George McGovern
was the candidate for the
Democratic side, very liberal, very anti-war,
a darling of the media,
but when the ballots were counted,
Nixon won a huge majority, hinting that clearly there was indeed a more
conservative silent majority. Then, one
issue that really became important in the
culture wars of the 70s and 80s would be the legalization of abortion by
the Supreme Court decision Roe v. Wade in 1973, which, over the next 40 years,
for people who are more
religious and tend to view that as a sin,
became a big reason to vote against
whoever would support abortion.
Notice that all these issues involved race and
religion, so that made them quite
combustible, which is why we speak of
wedge issues or the culture wars.
How do they compare to the traditional
conservative agenda that we've seen before?
We went back all the way
to the Gilded Age when traditionally
conservatism was really about
a small government. There is still an
element of that in the modern
conservative agenda, where you try to
limit taxes, especially taxes for the
rich, and there's a long history for that.
When we covered the 1920s we saw that the
secretary of the Treasury back then, Mellon,
was very active in lowering the
top rates for the income tax under the
belief that if you cut taxes for the
rich, at that point they would go back
and invest, because they are
entrepreneurs, and the wealth would
trickle down all the way to employees at
the bottom. A more modern theory that
would go in the same direction 
would become known as the Laffer curve.
What it means is that the revenues, which
are on the horizontal axis, tend to grow
as the tax rates go up: if the government
has a tax rate for rich people of 10% of the revenue,
and then raises that to 20%, obviously there will
be more taxes coming in and so the
revenue there goes up. What Laffer added
however is that if the taxes keep going
up to 50 60 70 80 % of income, at some
point it becomes so prohibitive that
rich people will not want to work
anymore, because if the government takes
80% of what you make, what's the
point of getting up in the morning to go
working? So as a result when taxes
are too high, people will be working less
and you might be taxing 80 percent of
somebody's income, but it's a smaller
income, and the revenue will go down.
Which is the reason why on that graph you
see a bell curve where at some
point the revenue for the government
starts going back to eventually zero:
if you tax people 100 percent they will
never work and there will be no wealth to tax.
What that implied for conservatives is that it justified
cutting taxes, because not only would it
encourage people to invest, but in a way
it would be revenue neutral for the
government (or at least that's what the claim is)
meaning that if you went down from a
point high in the curve where you tax
people 80% of their income and they don't
work too much and then you cut the tax
rate to maybe 30 percent of their income,
well they will work far more and as a
result the government might be only
taking 30 percent of that income but it
will be a larger income and the total revenue
obtained from the government is larger.
So that Laffer curve (which is
theoretical, I want to emphasize, it was
not proved out in practice) became the
justification for the Reagan tax cuts and others:
They believed that you could at
the same time
cut taxes for the rich and somehow not
drown the federal government in red ink,
so you could be fiscally responsible at
the same time. Conservatives now as before
prefer a small government, which has led
them to embrace pro-business policies
and deregulation, which by itself is
quite traditional. The change in recent
years is that their focus has mostly
been on undoing regulations done by the
EPA for the environment and specifically
curbing any attempt to stop global
warming, which in turn has led many
conservatives to denounce the whole
global warming scientific consensus as a
hoax, and embrace anti
scientific views, which is quite different
from the conservative agenda of the late 19th c.
Anti-scientific views
when it comes to global warming
but also the teaching of evolution in
schools or maybe even in some cases
vaccinations, though you will see some
anti vaxxers on the far left as well.
Cutting taxes for the rich, supporting big
business, deregulating, all of these are
policies that are traditional in the
conservative side going back to 1920s or
the Gilded Age. What has been 
different with the modern conservative
movement is its emphasis on all these
cultural wedge issues that I mentioned earlier.
The Democratic Party had
traditionally been strongly
anti-communist. We saw Harry Truman
start the containment policy in the Cold War,
then Kennedy and Johnson dramatically
amp up American involvement in Vietnam.
But because by the 1970s many people in
the Democratic Party had turned sharply
against the Vietnam War,
or the use of force overseas in general,
or the US Army, or in some cases even
police, the Republican Party was able to
refashion itself as the one and only
true nationalistic patriotic
anti-communist party and a supporter of the
army the police and law and order.
A flashpoint in that regard was the matter
of
flag-burning, which some radicals who do
during demonstrations. Republicans
actively tried to ban that practice, but
the matter went all the way to the
Supreme Court, which decided based on the
First Amendment and the right of free
speech that burning the flying, however
distasteful an activity that might be,
was a way for people to express
themselves, and so it was not the
business of the government to ban that
activity. There were calls after that on
the conservative side to add an
amendment to the Constitution so as to
bypass the Supreme Court, but that effort
never really went anywhere.
Other similar wedge issues would include  prayer in school or the Roe v. Wade decision.
In both cases notice that the Supreme Court is a
main stumbling block, because it would be
opposed to having prayers in public
schools as it violates the 1st Amendment
(the non-establishment clause, separation of
church and state) and it would have
guaranteed a woman's right to have an
abortion before 12 weeks under the right
to personal privacy from the government.
It would be a good way to mobilize
your base, especially people called the
single issue voters who care about one
matter and can be reliably expected to
turn up to vote. The growing reliance on
cultural wedge issues could potentially
have two consequences. The first is a
growing polarization of politics, because
when you're dealing with matters like
how big or small the government should be,
or how high or low the tariff should be,
these are the kind of issues that you
can politely agree to disagree on. But if
you're talking about matters like
patriotism or race or God, then you can
easily hate the other side rather than
just disagree. That's an unfortunate
consequence of those wedge issues. The
second consequence is that it created a
strange dichotomy in the Republican
Party between the more traditional
country-club Republicans who were 
only about paying less taxes and
supporting big business, and the more
modern branch that was more interested in
prayers in schools or banning Roe v. Wade.
That second branch would often be
more socially disadvantaged and could
care less about cutting taxes for the rich,
these are often known as the Reagan
Republicans, people that were often
blue-collar workers who
traditionally since the New Deal had
been voting Democratic, but 
 changed sides during the 1970s and 80s
and embraced the Republican party. 
That creates an internal tension because
those Reagan Democrats would prefer to
have a continuation of big programs that
they benefit from, like Medicare Medicaid
and Social Security, at the same time
than the more traditional conservatives
of the same party would like to cut down
all these programs and cut taxes for the
rich. You'll see that in the maps
that I'm showing right now where you see
that some of the states that happen to
be richer per capita (meaning New York
California on the coast) are also nowadays
the more liberal ones, at the same time
than the poorer states per capita like
Mississippi are also ultra
conservative. This creates an odd
situation where the rich states pay more
in taxes than they get back from the
federal government in terms
of medicare/medicaid (that would be the
states in red on that map) whereas some
states that are poor pay a little in
taxes but get a lot of money back on
army bases or, again, Medicare and Medicaid.
These would be the ones
that are green on that map. So the
various states that benefit the most
from government programs (those in green)
would also be the conservatives ones
that tend to vote against all
these big government program, against
their own interest. By contrast those that
lose out the most from paying taxes to the
federal government (in red on this map)
would also be the ones that are more
liberal and want to encourage the
federal government to spend even more to
combat poverty in the very states that
vote conservative.
That is the topsy-turvy political world
in which we live. This led one author
to write a book called "What's the matter
with Kansas?" asking: why is it that 
farmers or poor people in Kansas who
generally are benefiting from government
aid, would also be the ones that are most
reliably Republican? And the answer to
the question was those wedge issues.
They might be voting
against their economic interests just so
that they make some progress on getting
more judges appointed to the Supreme Court.
That is quite a remarkable
turnaround where you remember that
Kansas was ground zero for the far-left
Populist party back in the 1880s and 90s.
So for liberal critics like Thomas Frank
there is a kind of con game going on
where one half of the Republican Party
(the Country Club part) lies to the other
half (the more anti-abortion pro-gun half)
just to get the votes for the election,
get the majority in Congress, passed the
laws that they really want to pass (which
is text cuts for the rich), make no
progress whatsoever on the other
cultural issues, just to save them for
the next election to get people to show
up to vote again. So that's kind of how
the conservative movement of today
operates. Some of it borrowed from much
earlier trends, some of it (the culture wars)
a product of a backlash against the 1970s.
Will that work in practice for
people to get elected to the White House
and Congress? And when they do
get elected,
what will they actually implement? Well
that's a whole other topic, which we'll
study in part two
of this lecture on the modern
conservative movement. Au revoir and goodbye.
