All Along The Watchtower
Progressive Realist
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« on: February 17, 2012, 06:01:16 PM » |
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« edited: February 17, 2012, 06:06:12 PM by IDS Legislator Progressive Realist »
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After WWII, the largest middle class in American history was created by the Depression-era generation. However, this new (at the time) middle class was homogenous in terms of culture (not just race, but also the shared experiences of the Depression and WWII)-so this group of people becoming very conservative and protective of their own status was, in retrospect, predictable.
Thus, when liberal leaders and intellectuals in the institutions of American society pushed for extending the same opportunities that the white middle class enjoyed to black people (and other marginalized minority groups), a type of right-wing grassroots populism was activated and mobilized. This was also a response to other cultural phenomenons in the 60s, including women's rights, the counterculture movement, the New Left, and the general protest culture surrounding Vietnam.
However, that right-wing populism was actually an updated version of the right-wing movements of the 50s, which included the John Birch Society, Young Americans for Freedom, and other groups that collectively made up the grassroots base that propelled Barry Goldwater to the Republican nomination. But while those earlier conservatives were limited in their appeal to certain parts of the country (mainly the Southwest and the Deep South-the 'Sun Belt") and were ultimately discredited because of their rigid fanaticism and conspiratorial views regarding communism, the populist conservatives that followed them after 1965 were able to avoid being tagged with the "extremist" label. Suddenly, the mainstream American middle class was the main base of the conservative movement.
Concerns over civil rights, out-of-touch "liberal elites", busing, an alleged breakdown in "moral values", "law and order", "welfare chiselers", student radicals, and other more immediate concerns other than (and in addition to) Communism were what changed the white American middle class in the 1960s from being vaguely supportive of the liberal state, to, in the following decades, becoming much more hostile to it. Government, and the liberal intellectuals and leaders associated with it, was becoming more and more of an "enemy" in the eyes of the white middle class-and many outside of it as well. Meanwhile, many on the Left were equally disgusted with racial violence, the war in Vietnam, and poverty at home, and they blamed liberals in government as much as they blamed conservatives for all of those problems.
The end result of all this; liberal policies that had broad, but not very "deep" support, among the white middle class became discredited in favor of Reagan-style conservatism. I suppose the Presidency of George W Bush and the actions of the Tea Party Republicans have done a lot to discredit "conservative" policies in the more diverse electorate of the modern day.
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