Michael Lind: How Reaganism Actually Started with Carter
[Michael Lind is Policy Director of the Economic Growth Program at the New America Foundation and is the author of "The Next American Nation: The New Nationalism and the Fourth American Revolution."]
The hundredth anniversary of Ronald Reagan's birth has produced disagreement over his policies among conservatives and liberals, but agreement on one point: Reagan's presidency marked the end of one era in American politics and the beginning of a new one. An epochal shift indeed took place -- but it happened in 1976, not 1980. The Age of Reagan should be called the Age of Carter, in politics and policy alike.
In politics, both Carter and Reagan sought to exploit the "white backlash" in the aftermath of the civil rights revolution that had led many white Southerners and white Northern "ethnics" to defect from the Democrats to support third-party populist candidate George Wallace. Reagan did so by beginning his general election campaign in 1980 in Neshoba County, Miss., where white supremacists had recently fire-bombed a black church and had earlier murdered two Northern civil rights activists, Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner. In a thinly disguised appeal to white Southern racism, Reagan declared, "I believe in states' rights."
Jimmy Carter used similar coded language in fishing for votes from white ethnics in the North who objected to blacks moving into their neighborhoods. In an interview with the New York Daily News in April 1976, Carter said: "I see nothing wrong with ethnic purity being maintained. I would not force a racial integration of a neighborhood by government action." A few days later, questioned about this remark, Carter elaborated: "What I say is that the government ought not to take as a major purpose the intrusion of alien groups into a neighborhood simply to establish their intrusion." Jesse Jackson called this "a throwback to Hitlerian racism." Carter not only won a majority of the Southern vote but also did well among white ethnics. (The quotes are from Steven F. Hayward's "The Real Jimmy Carter.")...
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The hundredth anniversary of Ronald Reagan's birth has produced disagreement over his policies among conservatives and liberals, but agreement on one point: Reagan's presidency marked the end of one era in American politics and the beginning of a new one. An epochal shift indeed took place -- but it happened in 1976, not 1980. The Age of Reagan should be called the Age of Carter, in politics and policy alike.
In politics, both Carter and Reagan sought to exploit the "white backlash" in the aftermath of the civil rights revolution that had led many white Southerners and white Northern "ethnics" to defect from the Democrats to support third-party populist candidate George Wallace. Reagan did so by beginning his general election campaign in 1980 in Neshoba County, Miss., where white supremacists had recently fire-bombed a black church and had earlier murdered two Northern civil rights activists, Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner. In a thinly disguised appeal to white Southern racism, Reagan declared, "I believe in states' rights."
Jimmy Carter used similar coded language in fishing for votes from white ethnics in the North who objected to blacks moving into their neighborhoods. In an interview with the New York Daily News in April 1976, Carter said: "I see nothing wrong with ethnic purity being maintained. I would not force a racial integration of a neighborhood by government action." A few days later, questioned about this remark, Carter elaborated: "What I say is that the government ought not to take as a major purpose the intrusion of alien groups into a neighborhood simply to establish their intrusion." Jesse Jackson called this "a throwback to Hitlerian racism." Carter not only won a majority of the Southern vote but also did well among white ethnics. (The quotes are from Steven F. Hayward's "The Real Jimmy Carter.")...