For the last couple of days, I’ve been reading Rick Perlstein’s book, Reaganland. This is the fourth in a series of histories written by a progressive historian about the modern conservative movement. Before the Storm was about the rise of Goldwater. Nixonland was about the 1968 election and Nixon’s first term. The Invisible Bridge was about the fall of Nixon and Ford’s presidency (with a heavy dollop of Reagan emerging onto the scene). Reaganland is about Carter’s presidency and the 1980 election of Reagan to his first term.
This is a wide and deep series. It attempts to chart how we moved from the 1964 landslide election of LBJ over Goldwater and the wide spread consensus that New Deal liberal politics stands without opposition, to the 1984 landslide election of Ronald Reagan over Walter Mondale, cementing the conservative hold on American politics.
Each volume is about a thousand pages. Since I’m only a third of the way through Reaganland, this won’t be a review of the book. There is so much depth that I just wanted to write an interim blog because I’ve found it all so interesting.
The first thing to note is how dead the Republican party was after the Watergate debacle. In Carter’s election of 1976, the Republican party held both houses in only four states. They were only fourteen Republican governors. Only eighteen percent of Americans considered themselves to be Republicans. There was serious discussion regarding whether or not the party was in a irreparable death spiral.
So, how did they manage to start pulling themselves out?
First, much credit must go to Richard Viguerie, a person that today is largely forgotten. He essentially invented the idea of political mass mailing. His direct mail campaigns, featuring false but full of red meat allegations about how the liberal Democrats were destroying the American way of life, inspired millions of dollars in contributions. In turn, he applied his fund raising skills to the most aggressive conservative candidates running for office. His mailings were the rocket fuel that fed many fiery conservatives.
Republican women also played a huge role. The Equal Rights Amendment seemed to be sailing to an easy passage. After all, considering the sad history of women’s treatment in America, what could actually be wrong with enshrining in the Constitution that women have equality with men? Well, after Phyllis Schlafly was done, equal rights for women were equated with same sex bathrooms, abortion on demand, compulsory daycare (?!), women getting drafted into the military, and worse of all, rampant lesbianism. As with Viguerie, the message was that the sacred American way of life was imperiled by these perverted, Godless heathens.
To conservatives, after the failure in Vietnam, Watergate, the apparent rot of New York City, and the protests of the 1960s, they longed for a strong, virile America that bestrode the planet like a superpower colossus. To them, nothing seemed more symbolic of America’s weakness than Carter’s decision to turn over the Panama Canal to the Panamanian government. This wasn’t just Carter. This had been a treaty that had been in negotiation for over ten years. The conventional point of view was that this was one of America’s remaining symbols of imperialism. After all, the original canal deal had been made in a New York Hotel between some Americans and the failing French company that was trying to build it. There wasn’t a Panamanian in the room. In fact, the US government pretty much arbitrarily created the nation of Panama for the purpose of creating an entity that would allow the construction to take place. Although an amazing tribute to engineering skill and doggedness, it was a blot on our Central American historical policy. Turning it over to Panama would be a strong symbol to Central American nations.
Of course, the conservatives had a different point of view. They had a much simpler perspective: “We built it, we paid for it, it’s ours, and we’re going to keep it.” Although the treaty was ultimately approved by the Senate, this was an inspiring issue for all conservatives to gather around. In the year 2021, it seems ridiculous that this arose such passions in the 1970s.
This was a time that saw the rise of evangelicals as a political force. Not only heavily involved in the effort to block the ERA, issues such as abortion and gay marriage inspired their efforts. Starting from issues like that, evangelicals also supported political subjects such as a balanced budget amendment that did not seem to carry as much moral weight.
Finally (and this is about where I’m at in the book), we see the rise of supply-side economics. With Judd Wanniski writing articles about the Laffer curve, the Republicans moved from their previous sober positions of fiscal restraint, not to mention Keynesian economic theories of managing inflation and unemployment. The Republican party became the economic equivalent of Big Rock Candy Mountain. Cutting taxes became this magic elixir that decreases unemployment, increases economic growth, increases tax revenues, and balances the budget!
One thing that came out of my reading is that, believe it or not, liberal Republicans and conservative Democrats were once were a thing. There were Republicans that were very pro civil rights. There were Republicans that supported government regulation. After all, it was during the Nixon administration that the Department of Energy and the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) were created. Often bills were passed with huge bipartisan super majorities. On controversial issues where the votes would be much closer, the majority and minority leaders would work together to whip enough votes to squeak out a bare bipartisan majority. When I think of the COVID relief bill that just passed with not a single Republican vote, it makes me sad that our leaders now put party above country. It’s clear that over the ensuing 40 years since the events of this book, the parties have self selected themselves into homogeneous islands.
Just my opinion, but the conservative attacks that placed a premium of story over fact that started taking place during this time was a big driver for this metamorphosis. These lurid tales inspired a flood of money that poured into the coffers of those that got most red faced spouting off about how the liberals were destroying America. These are now our leaders and they know where their money is coming from.
Now here we are in the year 2021, where some insane percentage of Republicans think mass election fraud has taken place (with absolutely no real evidence to back this up), that Democrats are raping children in the basements of pizza restaurants, and quite literally tried to violently take over our federal legislature.
Given all that has happened over the last four years, it’s really hard for me to read Perlstein’s book without getting angry. Forty years later, I see the poisoned fruit of these seminal efforts.
dorkenstein 