Wrong for All the Right Reasons: How White Liberals Have Been Undone by Race by Gordon Macinnes

Author:Gordon Macinnes [Macinnes, Gordon]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Democracy, Political Science, Political Ideologies
ISBN: 9780814796382
Google: 6ZqsFQLQHuAC
Goodreads: 12782651
Publisher: New York University Press
Published: 1996-02-01T00:00:00+00:00

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THE HIGH COSTS OF CONSERVATIVE RULE

Conservative Republicans were, for most of this century, a quaint group in American politics. They were tagged as the fathers of the Great Depression with telling effect by Democrats; they whined about big government and deficit spending, and terrorized the nation with tall tales about a domestic communist conspiracy. Conservatives were mostly white, Protestant residents of small towns, and they had limited political power. Even in the Republican party it was liberal Republicans who usually decided who would run for president on the GOP ticket.

Then, in 1964 the conservatives took over the Republican party and nominated Arizona’s Barry Goldwater, “Mr. Conservative,” as their presidential candidate. The debris was everywhere after the 1964 elections: LBJ took 61 percent of the vote and carried all but five states. Fifty-two percent of Americans identified themselves as Democrats; only 25 percent labeled themselves Republican.1 Polls showed that the bipartisan civil rights agenda was widely supported; Goldwater, who had opposed the measures, represented a defeated, isolated minority. In the weeks following his defeat, the label “conservative Republican” seemed to move from “quaint” to “endangered.” The New York Times’s James Reston, the nation’s most influential political commentator, summarized what would quickly become the popular wisdom: “Barry Goldwater not only lost the Presidential election … but the conservative cause as well. He has wrecked his party for a long time to come.”2 Not quite. The Republicans went on to take the White House in five of the seven subsequent elections.

Moreover, in 1980, conservative Republicans demonstrated their mastery of coalition politics with the election of Ronald Reagan. His landslide reelection in 1984 and George Bush’s victory in 1988 proved that, in sixteen years, conservatives had progressed from laughingstock to unbeatable. The 1994 midterm elections, which gave the GOP control of Congress for the first time in forty years, suggested that Bill Clinton’s 1992 presidential victory was an aberration that would not be repeated in 1996.

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