The New Conservatism and the Fate of the Great Society

American Decades

THE NEW CONSERVATISM AND THE FATE OF THE GREAT SOCIETY

The Great Society and Its Opponents

Except for the Vietnam War, no other political issue left over from the 1960s was as controversial as the Great Society. The New Deal and the liberal social legislation that followed World War II had elevated millions of working-class Americans into the ranks of the middle class. In the 1960s politicians such as Johnson, Humphrey, and McGovern attempted to use similar government-sponsored programs (often called the Great Society for what they were trying to achieve) to elevate the living conditions of a new group of poor Americans. In the 1960s perhaps 20 percent of Americans remained in poverty. Through educational and legal assistance, through job-training programs and expanded welfare benefits, supporters of the Great Society hoped to bring poor people into the middle class. Even though the Great Society benefited poor whites, to many middle-class white Americans it appeared the government was devoting select attention to racial minorities. Conservative politicians such as Gold-water and Reagan asserted that this was not the proper function for a government of all the people. They agreed with the liberals that America should be a land of equal opportunity for all; they disagreed with the liberals as to the extent of inequality in society. They also disagreed about the role of government in redressing that inequality.

The Great Society and the Decline of the Middle Class

Public support for the Great Society dissolved as inflation, unemployment, and other economic woes of the 1970s struck the middle class. These economic troubles undermined the goodwill upon which so much of the Great Society rested. In times of prosperity the middle class could afford attempts to eliminate poverty; during an economic downturn the middle class did all it could to stay out of poverty itself. Conservative politicians used this economic pressure to political advantage. Ignoring revenue losses caused by subsidies and tax breaks given to big businesses, they argued that the government could not afford the Great Society. They also maintained that the Great Society unfairly rewarded the poor at the very time when the middle class saw little reward for their work. This argument had enormous political impact. In the 1970s conservative politicians found the Great Society useful as a scapegoat for the nation's economic miseries.

Busing and the Great Society

No aspect of the Great Society generated more controversy than the attempt by the federal government to desegregate American schools. Despite fifteen years of court orders to desegregate American schools, by 1970 the majority of schools remained segregated. The problem fundamentally stemmed from the segregated living patterns of Americans: white schools remained predominantly white because neighborhoods tended to be predominantly white; the same was true of nonwhite schools. Some school districts developed elaborate busing programs, transporting black and white students out of their neighborhoods and across town. In many places federal courts ordered school districts to initiate busing. In 1974, when the courts ordered schools in Boston, Massachusetts, to begin busing black students into a predominantly white neighborhood, riots broke out. Simple racism was a factor in such disturbances, as it was in opposition to busing generally. But to many busing opponents, such programs also compromised the integrity of the neighborhood and violated the tradition of locally run schools. Bostonians in the working-class Irish neighborhood of Southie, where the black students were bused, pointed out that the federal courts had ordered poor blacks bused into their neighborhoods rather than into the suburban neighborhoods of more affluent whites. They believed they were being used as guinea pigs in social experimentation. Politicians such as Wallace expressed their anger, castigating so-called "limousine liberals" (liberals who expected other people to enact their principles) and calling for an end to busing.

Affirmative Action

Many voters similarly resented affirmative-action programs. Taking note of historical patterns of racial discrimination, these programs required by law that businesses, public-service occupations, unions, and universities hire specific percentages of non-whites. Many whites argued that affirmative action put them at a disadvantage when competing with nonwhites for regulated positions. In 1970, for example, 30 percent of all construction workers were occasionally unemployed, one third of those for more than four months. Under that kind of economic pressure, white construction workers became infuriated when the government forced construction companies and unions to meet hiring quotas of nonwhites. Politicians, notably Reagan and Wallace, tapped into this anger and argued that affirmative action was unfair. The federal courts were ambiguous on the matter: in the 1978 Regents of the University of California v. Bakke decision the Supreme Court ruled that while affirmative action was legal, setting quotas to achieve it was not.

Nixon and the Great Society

Nixon was also ambivalent about the Great Society. On one hand, he hoped to use governmental programs to redress social inequalities: he assigned funds for urban renewal and attempted an overhaul of the welfare system designed to guarantee the poorest Americans a minimum income. On the other hand, Nixon realized the political capital to be made by opposing the Great Society: he slashed Great Society programs, he attempted to abolish the Great Society's administrative agency, the Office of Economic Opportunity, and he went so far as to impound funds Congress had appropriated for social welfare—an act of questionable constitutionality. More dramatically, Nixon refused to enforce court-ordered desegregation, again on questionable constitutional grounds, and repeatedly voiced his opposition to busing. Nixon also blamed the Great Society for being a source of economic woe. These techniques worked, and in 1972 Nixon garnered much of his land-slide from those Americans disgruntled with the Great Society.

Reagan and the Great Society

Presidents Ford and Carter failed to take political advantage of a growing backlash against the Great Society among working-class and middle-class white voters. With conservative political figures leading the drumbeat of criticism against the Great Society, many voters blamed it for the economic dislocations of the 1970s. Carter, a moderate liberal, remained committed to the objectives of the Great Society, but, like Ford, he found himself trimming back its budget in an effort to control federal spending. Reagan, who outflanked both men on this issue, had a far simpler solution: abandon the Great Society altogether. On the strength of this position, as well as on a somewhat belligerent posture in foreign policy, Reagan led the neoconservative movement, the most significant political insurgency of the 1970s.

Proposition 13

Reagan represented conservatives who, since the days of Herbert Hoover, had argued that social programs create dependent individuals and undermine private-sector initiative. They were opposed to government spending for Social Security, Medicare, libraries, parks, and schools—programs that had the support of the majority of voters. On one hand, Reagan's anti-Great Society rhetoric had whittled away some of the support for these programs; on the other hand, conservatives attacked social spending by concealing their opposition to it in the form of a tax revolt. Led by Howard Jarvis, a retired California businessman, Republican conservatives attacked social programs by cutting off their tax funding. Downplaying their philosophical opposition to social spending, they argued that taxation was too high and government too inefficient. Cutting taxes, they argued, would force government to act more efficiently, but conservatives also understood that, with less revenue, government would be forced to cut the social programs they opposed. The tactic worked. In 1978 in California voters passed the ballot initiative Proposition 13, which cut California property taxes by 57 percent. Several states followed with proposals of their own, and in Congress a bill to cut taxes by one-third was introduced by Rep. Jack Kemp (R-New York) and Sen. William Roth (R-Delaware). Carter was forced to compromise the revenue act of 1978 and cut taxes for the wealthiest 2 percent of Americans. Many bills failed, including Kemp-Roth, but the tax revolt symbolized the first surfacing of growing conservative political strength.

The New Conservative Coalition

Since the New Deal, American politics had been dominated by a coalition of southern conservatives, northern liberals, blue-collar ethnic voters, and blacks, all uneasy cohorts within the Democratic party. In the 1970s the New Deal coalition fragmented, and a new conservative coalition, located in the Republican party, was born. It would come to dominate politics in the 1980s. The new conservative coalition drew strength from three sources: traditional conservatives, who backed Reagan throughout the 1970s and pushed Proposition 13; a new, politically active group of religious fundamentalists, especially evangelical Christians; and a small group of disenchanted former liberals and radicals known as neoconservatives, who formed the intellectual backbone of the conservative coalition.

Evangelicals and Neoconservatives

Unlike traditional conservatives, both the new religious Right and the neoconservatives formed in reaction to the 1960s. The evangelical Christians who organized the bulk of the new religious Right were led by ministers such as Jerry Falwell, a Virginia televangelist who created the conservative group Moral Majority in 1979. Shocked by the counterculture of the 1960s and the cultural permissiveness it inspired, wedded to Old Testament axioms of behavior, and stunned by the Supreme Court's 1973 Roe v. Wade decision legalizing abortion, Falwell and preachers like him used sophisticated advertising techniques and television ministries to turn his Christian congregations toward social activism. Increasingly, the religious Right was less concerned with personal salvation than with opposition to the Equal Rights Amendment, pornography, gay and women's liberation, humanistic school textbooks, and the candidacies of liberal Democrats. Similar concerns animated the more academic neoconservatives. Angered by the countercultural threat to the status quo, neoconservatives launched a broad repudiation, in the pages of journals such as Commentary and National Review, of liberal political and economic positions they had formerly embraced. They turned on the Great Society, demanded it be dismantled, and provided the intellectual justification for a new economic philosophy, "supply-side economics," that sought to promote growth by providing tax breaks for the well-heeled. The fiscal and social proposals of conservatives, the religious Right, and the neoconservatives offered certainty during a decade when traditional political certainties—prosperity, equality of opportunity, America's preeminent place in the world—disappeared.

The End of the Great Society

The Great Society was the chief victim of such uncertainty. After the tax revolts and conservative victories of the 1978 elections, even liberal Democrats shifted to the Right, and Carter focused on balancing the federal budget by slashing the social programs of the Great Society. His actions anticipated those of Reagan in the 1980s—a shift of budget priorities from social spending to defense and the creation of massive federal deficits to be paid off by eliminating social programs. Sen. Edward Kennedy, an unabashed supporter of the Great Society, criticized Carter's turn to the Right. "The administration's budget," he complained, "asks the poor, the black, the sick, the young, the cities and the unemployed to bear a disproportionate share of the billions of dollars of reductions in Federal spending." Kennedy's complaints were in vain. The growing conservativism of Carter's agenda after 1978 anticipated the policies that would end the Great Society in the 1980s.

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