The Paradox of American Democracy by John B. Judis

Author:John B. Judis [Judis, John B.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-8041-5062-0
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2013-05-22T00:00:00+00:00

The early conservative movement was limited in its popular appeal. As Goldwater discovered in 1964, most Americans didn’t want to get rid of Social Security or go to the brink of war with the Soviet Union. Over the next sixteen years, however, America changed in ways that made the conservative message more palatable. School integration drove white Southerners into the Republican Party—the Deep South was the only region Goldwater won in 1964. Busing, affirmative action, and rising welfare costs, coming in the wake of the ghetto riots, split the the New Deal coalition in the North and made many white ethnic Democrats receptive to conservative appeals. Conservatives, who had opposed the civil rights acts out of either racism or support for state’s rights, suddenly found their political base immeasurably widened. Northern whites also became more receptive to conservatives’ harsh message on welfare and crime.

The U.S. defeat in Vietnam, coupled with advances in Soviet influence in Africa and Central America, made the conservatives’ militant message on Communism far more credible, while the economic downturn that began in the late 1960s lent credence to conservative arguments for free-market capitalism. And the court rulings on abortion and school prayer, along with the continued spread of the counterculture and the women’s movement, produced an entirely new constituency for conservatism.

Conservative politicians and intellectuals also adapted their own message to take advantage of these opportunities. In his 1966 California gubernatorial campaign, Ronald Reagan exploited the historic distrust of government and of elites to rally voters to his side. He reminded voters that he had once been a union leader, while directing his fire at students, whom he described as “elitists” disrupting the universities that middle-class taxpayers were financing. He didn’t attack welfare capitalism itself, but attacked welfare cheaters (invariably black or Mexican-American in voters’ minds). He didn’t openly favor segregation, but he opposed a fair housing measure on the ballot. Because Reagan was running for governor rather than senator, he didn’t have to take positions on the old conservative bugaboos of Social Security or nuclear war.

In the early 1970s, a group of young conservatives, who became identified as “the new right,” tried to take advantage of the backlash against the civil rights movement and the counterculture. Instead of railing against budget deficits, they focused on the “social” issues that had emerged during the sixties, including abortion, busing and racial integration, drugs, school prayer, and gun control. Their motives were tactical: they recognized the political limitations of the older conservative movement and wanted to create a politics that could unite business conservatives with working-class Democrats disillusioned by the civil rights movement, antiwar protests, and the counterculture of the sixties.

Richard Viguerie, the son of a Texas petrochemical executive, came to New York from Texas in 1963 to become executive secretary of the Young Americans for Freedom (YAF). He became expert in using direct mail to finance campaigns. In 1968 he worked as a fund-raiser for George Wallace and from 1973 to 1976 raised money for Wallace’s American Independent Party through the mailing lists he created.

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