Michael Lind: Relax, liberals. You've already won
... For 40 years, the radical right tried to destroy the domestic and international order that American liberals created in the central decades of the 20th century. The people who are known today as "conservatives" are better described as "counterrevolutionaries." The goal of Barry Goldwater and the intellectuals clustered around William F. Buckley Jr.'s National Review was not a slightly more conservative version of the New Deal or the U.N. system. They were reactionary radicals who dreamed of a counterrevolution. They didn't just want to stop the clock. They wanted to turn it back.
Three great accomplishments defined midcentury American liberalism: liberal internationalism, middle-class entitlements like Social Security and Medicare, and liberal individualism in civil rights and the culture at large. For four decades, from 1968 to 2008, the counterrevolutionaries of the right waged war against the New Deal, liberal internationalism, and moral and cultural liberalism. They sought to abolish middle-class entitlements like Social Security and Medicare, to replace treaties and collective security with scorn for international law and U.S. global hegemony, and to reverse the trends toward individualism, secularism and pluralism in American culture.
And they failed. On every front conservatives have failed, completely, undeniably and irreversibly. The failure of the right has left the structure of 20th-century American liberalism standing, battered and cratered but still intact.
The counterrevolutionary right failed first in the "culture war." From the '60s onward, conservatives lost every major battle. Conservative Republicans paid lip service to opposition to abortion and appointed strict constructionists to the federal bench. But the Supreme Court has not repealed Roe v. Wade and, because of its allergy to repudiating precedent, is not likely to do so. (Yes, even if John McCain appoints the next justice or two.) Nor has it restored prayer in public schools. What is more, in 2003 the Supreme Court struck down anti-gay sodomy laws nationwide. Conservatives responded by successfully supporting many state laws or state constitutional amendments to ban gay marriage, in addition to the federal Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) enacted in the Clinton years. The recent state Supreme Court decision legalizing gay marriage in California may yet be overturned by a popular initiative. But many of the goals of the gay rights movement have been achieved far sooner than anyone could have imagined as recently as the 1990s. Meanwhile, conservative campaigns to censor movies and TV and music were doomed first by cable TV and then by the Internet.
While it serves the purposes of single-issue groups on the left to claim that the threat of the socially conservative right is growing, the leaders of the right themselves know better. In the 1990s, Jerry Falwell shut down the Moral Majority and Pat Robertson dissolved the Christian Coalition, whose membership numbers turned out to have been grossly inflated.
In 1999, Paul Weyrich, president of the Free Congress Foundation, wrote in a public letter to his fellow social conservatives: "I believe that we probably have lost the culture war ... [I]n terms of society, we have lost. This is why, even when we win in politics, our victories fail to translate into the kinds of policies we believe are important." According to Weyrich, conservatives should admit that they are a moral minority in America and form their own counterculture, like "a band of hardy monks who preserved the culture while the surrounding society disintegrated." If Weyrich is right, instead of taking back America, traditionalists should ask only for their own reservation, like the Amish or the Navajos. What started as a counterrevolution has ended as a counterculture.
Having lost the culture wars by 2000, the counterrevolutionaries of the right persisted in their radical efforts to repeal the New Deal. The control of both the White House and Congress by Republicans from January 2001 to January 2007 (excepting the brief respite provided by Jim Jeffords) gave conservatives an even better chance to achieve their economic goals than they had experienced during the Reagan era of divided government. Buoyed by War on Terror hubris, aided by inflated Congressional majorities and a distracted public, the Republicans were able to get their counterrevolutionary anti-entitlement agenda on the docket at last -- and it died a miserable death....
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Three great accomplishments defined midcentury American liberalism: liberal internationalism, middle-class entitlements like Social Security and Medicare, and liberal individualism in civil rights and the culture at large. For four decades, from 1968 to 2008, the counterrevolutionaries of the right waged war against the New Deal, liberal internationalism, and moral and cultural liberalism. They sought to abolish middle-class entitlements like Social Security and Medicare, to replace treaties and collective security with scorn for international law and U.S. global hegemony, and to reverse the trends toward individualism, secularism and pluralism in American culture.
And they failed. On every front conservatives have failed, completely, undeniably and irreversibly. The failure of the right has left the structure of 20th-century American liberalism standing, battered and cratered but still intact.
The counterrevolutionary right failed first in the "culture war." From the '60s onward, conservatives lost every major battle. Conservative Republicans paid lip service to opposition to abortion and appointed strict constructionists to the federal bench. But the Supreme Court has not repealed Roe v. Wade and, because of its allergy to repudiating precedent, is not likely to do so. (Yes, even if John McCain appoints the next justice or two.) Nor has it restored prayer in public schools. What is more, in 2003 the Supreme Court struck down anti-gay sodomy laws nationwide. Conservatives responded by successfully supporting many state laws or state constitutional amendments to ban gay marriage, in addition to the federal Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) enacted in the Clinton years. The recent state Supreme Court decision legalizing gay marriage in California may yet be overturned by a popular initiative. But many of the goals of the gay rights movement have been achieved far sooner than anyone could have imagined as recently as the 1990s. Meanwhile, conservative campaigns to censor movies and TV and music were doomed first by cable TV and then by the Internet.
While it serves the purposes of single-issue groups on the left to claim that the threat of the socially conservative right is growing, the leaders of the right themselves know better. In the 1990s, Jerry Falwell shut down the Moral Majority and Pat Robertson dissolved the Christian Coalition, whose membership numbers turned out to have been grossly inflated.
In 1999, Paul Weyrich, president of the Free Congress Foundation, wrote in a public letter to his fellow social conservatives: "I believe that we probably have lost the culture war ... [I]n terms of society, we have lost. This is why, even when we win in politics, our victories fail to translate into the kinds of policies we believe are important." According to Weyrich, conservatives should admit that they are a moral minority in America and form their own counterculture, like "a band of hardy monks who preserved the culture while the surrounding society disintegrated." If Weyrich is right, instead of taking back America, traditionalists should ask only for their own reservation, like the Amish or the Navajos. What started as a counterrevolution has ended as a counterculture.
Having lost the culture wars by 2000, the counterrevolutionaries of the right persisted in their radical efforts to repeal the New Deal. The control of both the White House and Congress by Republicans from January 2001 to January 2007 (excepting the brief respite provided by Jim Jeffords) gave conservatives an even better chance to achieve their economic goals than they had experienced during the Reagan era of divided government. Buoyed by War on Terror hubris, aided by inflated Congressional majorities and a distracted public, the Republicans were able to get their counterrevolutionary anti-entitlement agenda on the docket at last -- and it died a miserable death....