What’s Wrong with the New Conservative History?

In the decade since Alan Brinkley and Leo Ribuffo issued their call for scholars to examine the history of conservatism,  a plethora of monographs have appeared exploring the history of the Right in America.  In the next few years we will see many more books and articles appearing—far too many to mention in passing.  Given this large body of literature that continues to grow, perhaps we should stop and take measure of where we are headed.

In this regard, I want to make two brief points in order to spur discussion:  First, I do not believe enough attention has been given to framing the history of conservatism more broadly within the context of modern liberalism. Second, we need to stop seeing the rightward shift in the electorate in the late twentieth century as simply a racial backlash.  Both points suggest that many historians working in this field simply are not getting the full story.

Let’s turn to the first point:  To understand the rise of the Right in postwar America we need to have a better understanding of liberalism.  We know a lot about civil rights protest, civil rights leaders, various aspects of the feminist movement, unions and organizing campaigns in the postwar period.  What we know less about is the role that liberal activists played in the Democratic party from primary campaigns, general elections, lobbying, and policy outcomes. We know little about large financial contributors who supported liberal candidates and who pushed liberal causes.  We know more about conservatism and these kinds of issues than we do about liberalism.

The rise of conservatism can only be understood in light of liberalism.  While historians have discussed the decline of the New Deal political coalition, much of this discussion has been given to the specifics of this break-up (often from a perspective of what could have been done to have sustained the progressive agenda). This is to say that more attention has been given to the political and ideological aspects of the breakup of the New Deal coalition than with the larger economic and social context that led to the breakup. The New Deal political coalition was premised on an industrial society composed of a unionized workforce earning high wages and benefits. A welfare system was designed to take care of citizens unable to work, and farmers were provided with subsidies and price supports. This political program was constrained by the Southern wing of the Democratic party. As a consequence liberals failed to enact national health insurance and failed to guarantee voting and civil rights for African Americans in the segregated South during the New Deal and Fair Deal periods.

In post-World War II America, the economy moved from an industrial basis to a post-industrial economy that undermined the New Deal liberal vision of a good society. In this economic transformation the American workforce became more white collar and less unionized. As the economy shifted to more high tech and service jobs, employers, burdened by alarming increases in local taxes and government regulation,  left Eastern cities for more favorable business environments in the Sunbelt. Deteriorating conditions in industrial East and Midwest , racial tensions, and opportunities for a better life led people to move to the suburbs and to the Sunbelt.

In the late 20th century, society underwent profound changes. The family was transformed as more women became college educated and developed professional careers. Marriage ages increased; family size decreased, and divorce rates went up.

The suburbanization of America, changing family structures, and a service economy pulled voters toward the Republican party’s political agenda of low taxes, strong national defense, and traditional social values. The New Deal’s political agenda based on an industrial society seemed antiquated to many voters living in the expansive Sunbelt. In 1970s, anxieties caused by changes in traditional families—and the move  by the left to promote secular values and gender issues—pushed many middle class white voters to the GOP.

The globalized economy intensified acute social and racial tensions within American society. Demands for racial, social, and political integration met with resistance, varying in intensity and form in both the South and the North. Racial tensions set a context for the rise of the GOP Right, but it is not the entire story. Historians writing on modern conservatism and the rise of the GOP right in the late twentieth century need to move beyond a story of racial backlash.  This view is too one dimensional and reflects, in my opinion, intellectual laziness because it oversimplifies the dynamics of basic social change, an increasingly mobile society, and changing technologies.      

  The transformation of the South into a Republican stronghold had already begun on the presidential level in the 1950s, followed by a shift on the district level in statewide races in the 1960s.  This shift was gradual and began in the suburbs. Worth noting is that from 1903 to 1960, there were no Republican Senators from any of the eleven Old Confederate states. In 1961, John Tower won a special election in Texas as a Republican. More importantly, a decisive class shift occurred in voting patterns among Southern voters in the post-1960 period.  Prior to 1960, the Democratic vote was drawn from the upper income groups, while those few Republican votes came from lower income groups.  After 1960, upper income groups switched to the Republican party. This coincided with demographic changes in the South, particularly the tremendous growth of suburbs outside of major Southern cities and the large influx of northerners to the South.  These suburban voters were concerned with issues such as low taxes, anti-unionism, and family values, and they moved into the Republican party.  As political scientists Byron Shafer and Richard Johnston demonstrate in The End of Southern Exceptionalism: Class, Race, and Partisan Change in the Postwar South,  it was economics, not race that won the South for the Republicans. The burgeoning suburban middle classes went Republican in 1980, and the elections which followed, because of promises of tax cuts and a smaller federal government.

   Especially interesting in this regard was the pattern of voting for Democratic presidential candidates, George Wallace in 1968 and Jimmy Carter in 1976 and 1980. In 1976, when Carter first ran for President, he picked up majorities in 79 percent of the districts in the South that had voted for Wallace in 1968, while picking up majorities in only 59 percent of the districts in the South that went for Nixon in 1968.  In the 1980 election, when Ronald Reagan swept the South, the majority of those districts that voted for Carter were those that had voted for Wallace in 1968. This suggests that Wallace was not a bridge-candidate for white voters in the South into the Republican party.

The rise of conservatism in America tells a larger comparative story. Contrary to social science predictions in the 1950s  that the United States would become more like European countries--social democratic and secular--Americans have remained nationalistic, patriotic and religious. This apparent American exceptionalism needs to be explained more fully. Framing the history of conservatism only in terms of racial or corporate self-interest keeps our understanding of conservatism incomplete—and sometimes just plain wrong.