Essays in American History: From the end of World War II to the Election of Reagan
The Golden Age of Capitalism and its Downfall
The Postwar Consensus
After World War II, even mainstream Republicans like Eisenhower considered most New Deal programs, and the new set of mutual expectations between government and governed it had ushered in, to be a permanent part of the American scene. As Eisenhower famously said, "Should any political party attempt to abolish Social Security, unemployment insurance, and eliminate labor laws and farm programs, you would not hear of that party again in our political history." Eisenhower even added to the New Deal by expanding Social Security to agricultural workers; launching the largest public works project in American history, the interstate highway system, along with others like the Saint Lawrence Seaway; and, post-Sputnik, for the first time, instituting federal support for higher education. Military Keynesianism was riding high as well, as all presidents and congresses during this period built up to one degree or another the military-industrial complex that Eisenhower was to (fruitlessly) warn against in his farewell address. We'll deal with the foreign policy reasons below; here we note simply that whatever one thinks of those reasons, American elites (and not just elites) were terrified that the end of war production would reintroduce the catastrophe of the Great Depression.
The Bretton Woods system described in the previous chapter introduced (or perhaps sanctified) a mixed economy, a somewhat social-democratic welfare state (more so in Europe than the U.S.) and an international institutional framework both designed to counteract the cyclical, boom-bust nature of raw capitalism. Again, the almost Black-Death level of human and property destruction of World War II no doubt helped fuel the postwar boom, just as the Black Death itself had done in Europe centuries before. Disasters like the Black Death and World War II are akin to the ecological succession that follows a fire: they provide opportunities for those who survive. But it's hard to deny that a system of high taxation; supportive social programs later labeled "entitlements"; relatively strong unions helping to ensure relatively low levels of inequality; a vibrant public sector concentrating on providing what a free-market system can't or won't, including infrastructure and, perhaps most crucially, basic research and development provided one of the most broadly shared economic booms in world history.
Presidents from Truman through Nixon added to the New Deal's legacy. Truman and later LBJ argued for something TR had proposed as early as 1912, the kind of universal health coverage that was then being provided by most developed nations. LBJ got Medicare and Medicaid out of the appeal as part of his neo-Rooseveltian Great Society, but that's about where the century-long drive for universal health care has ended at least as of June, 2017. Other parts of the Great Society included a public television and radio network (today's PBS and NPR); increased funding for education and urban development; a new, quota-abolishing immigration regime; new departments and agencies like Transportation, Housing and Urban Development, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, the National Endowment for the Arts and another for the Humanities; and above all a War on Poverty prongs of which were the introduction of food stamps, Head Start, and a domestic version of JFK's Peace Corps, VISTA. The combination of LBJ's legendary mastery of parliamentary and other forms of political power and national shock over the assassination of JFK to which much of the desire for a Great Society was, accurately or not, attributed allowed this ramp-up of the New Deal to make it through Congress. But even the Kennedys' bête noire, the cold warrior Nixon, founded (or allowed to be founded by Democrats without vetoing) the Occupational Safety and Health Administration and the Environmental Protection agencies, as well as signing the Endangered Species Act and, unthinkable today, instituting wage-and-price controls to control inflation and even proposing a universal basic minimum income in the form of a "negative income tax" for the poor. Finally, a bipartisan space program that culminated in the Moon shot in 1969 was itself a fully public, government-funded effort.
There were indeed strange, now extinct animals abroad in those not-so-far-off days: liberal Republicans and racist Southern Democrats, the latter called Dixiecrats, who even ran their own presidential candidate in 1948, as did the left wing of the New Deal, who in FDR's former vice president Henry Wallace someone they saw as more worthy of FDR's mantle than Truman. To be sure, both Eisenhower and Nixon were not as enthusiastic about the consensus as Truman or LBJ (Nixon in particular tried to fight back by developing one of his many constitutionally dubious habits of impounding funds authorized for expenditure by Congress, one of many issues that came to a head during Watergate, discussed below.) But just as we will see that post-Reagan presidents all more or less accepted his rightward shift, so, too, did post-FDR presidents mostly honor that president's leftward shift.
The Neoliberal Reaction
How did this consensus fall apart? A combination of internal contradictions and conscious policy choices began the process. Both the internal contradictions and the policy choices were noted or predicted as early as 1943 by the economist Michael Kalecki who argued that if full employment is policy goal, then how one pays for it in a capitalist system becomes a problem. Employers must pay those wages by lowering profit, moreso as wages rise. In order to pay rising wages, employers must (it was argued) raise prices, as there's only so much efficiency one can wring out of any production system, which would trigger demands for higher wages to maintain not only an expected standard of living but an expected increase in the standard of living (a.k.a., "The American Dream"). This inflationary wage-price spiral did indeed occur in the late 60s and early 70s, exacerbated by a spike in oil prices discussed below. In fact, and surprisingly to most economists of the time, inflation was accompanied by high unemployment -- the so-called stagflation that seemed to disprove the postwar consensus.
Kalecki even mostly predicted what would follow -- something now referred to as neoliberalism -- in which the investor and business class would attempt to break out this cycle by reducing labor's power in a variety of ways. Domestically, capital would fund and otherwise support a shift of university and government economists to market-friendly economic ideas that would ultimately undo the labor movement, recategorizing citizens and workers as consumers. The idea was thus to shift the definition of "freedom" away from the two of FDR's four that were most threatening to profit (freedom from want and freedom from fear) to that of consumer choice, a freedom intended to trump the increasing precariousness of employment. Employment's increasing precariousness would be further secured by reducing or eliminating benefits via increasing outsourcing to freelancing independent contributors; shifting from defined benefit pensions to market-based 401(k)s; and increasingly eroding cultural expectations of work-hour limitations. (Kalecki of course did not specifically name such things as 401(k)'s; the author is merely filling in details of what Kalecki generally foresaw.)
Speaking generally (exceptions and countercurrents always exist), capital would also encourage (that is, lobby) the government to deregulate finance and remove all dams on capital flow, jump-starting profitable investment at home and abroad, which would inflate stock markets. At the same time maintained or even increased controls on international labor flow through tightening immigration policy would increasingly create a captive workforce, something actually anti-capitalist, if Adam Smith is anyone to go by. As profits rose, lobbying contributions would, too; this investment in future profits was rightly deemed to be wise. In fact, the progressive removal of what little regulation on lobbying and campaign contributions existed would further increase capital's power at labor's mostly-expense. Rather than the maintenance of full employment, the overriding goal of the Fed and government would be the control of inflation -- even when not much of it is around, as has been the case for years now. Internationally, business, especially multinationals, would increasingly globalize and offshore production and supply chains, using the lower wages of undeveloped countries to discipline labor by threatening, quite plausibly, to move production abroad. Ideally, all required business-cycle fixes, if any were desired, would be monetary not fiscal, as budget deficits would be recategorized as uniformly harmful -- even wasteful -- regardless of the stage of the business cycle. All of this would have the extra added benefit, it was supposed by many like the future justice Lewis Powell in a 1971 memo to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, of not only rebooting public respect for business (while downgrading labor's reputation) but also redisciplining an aroused public increasingly taking advantage of its democratic power, as will be reviewed below.
Powell's rightish reaction to the social and economic upheaval of what this author calls "the long sixties" was mostly mirrored on the leftish side of a spectrum moving ever-rightward beginning in the late 1960s. The Trilateral Commission, a group of center-left liberals out of which most of the Carter administration was drawn, had itself noted in the mid-1970s that a "crisis of democracy" threatened U.S. elites's accustomed role of steering the ship at home and abroad. Nixon's crushing of the truly progressive George McGovern was seized on as the death knell of the old Democratic New-Deal-Great-Society center. From now on, and increasingly in the post-1980 period, "New Democrats" would "triangulate" (that is, tack, rhetorically and in actual policy) to the right which itself pushed the Republicans further to the right as they had removed their former ability to tack left. Carter himself began aspects of what Reagan massively ramped up: both a new military buildup and deregulation. In order to complete this bipartisan project, public attention would have to be drawn away from economic issues and toward cultural issues and identity politics. As we will see in the next chapter, both post-Reagan Democratic presidents helped complete the rightward, neoliberal shift.
The Cold War
By one estimate, total U.S. military expenditures from 1946-2017, including war spending, totaled $25 trillion (in 2000 dollars). Estimates vary for many reasons but the order of magnitude is almost certainly accurate, however much the fluctuation within it. Twenty-five trillion dollars is, as they say, real money. During our period, and a decade into the next, the publicly maintained reason for this massive expenditure (and indeed the primary privately held reason, among others less advertised) was the perceived need to fight "international communism" which was taken to be monolithic and controlled by Moscow. How did the U.S. and U.S.S.R go from allies who jointly helped to defeat Hitler to mortal enemies?
The Balance of Terror
Much, though how much is impossible to know, stemmed from the death of FDR in 1945. Under FDR, in 1933, the U.S. had finally recognized the Soviet Union. FDR had forged a working relationship with the awful but, at least in terms of foreign policy, rational Stalin, recognizing the reasonable Soviet-Russian desire for buffer states between it and Western Europe from which three assaults, each of which had destroyed much of the country, had originated over the past century and a half. The last one had very nearly led to the end of Russia as a nation-state. What Hitler would have wrought in a defeated Russia with a network of death camps and Slavs long in his sights for near-elimination to provide "living space" for Aryans was not hard to imagine. FDR, that is, seemed to appreciate Russian security needs and historical fears. His successor, Truman, especially after the success of the Manhattan Project which initiated America's short-lived nuclear monopoly, did not.
To be sure, Stalin's regime was only marginally less appalling than Hitler's. He was a dire threat to his own people, and any other within his reach. But especially in an age of endless, self-appointed moral policing of the globe to eradicate foci of evil wherever they arise thus to make said globe safe for democracy, one should keep firmly in mind those regimes with which the U.S. has had no problem working. These include its longest standing Middle-East ally, Saudi Arabia, author of the fanatical Salafist Islamism the spread of which it has funded for decades, and any number of other appalling regimes, as will be reviewed in the next chapter. Indeed, much of the Cold War seems in retrospect an odd shadow play, in which a nation-state that claimed to be communist, but wasn't, found agreement in that description from the other main power on earth, which claimed to be democratic, but wasn't. This is not to equate the two systems: the U.S.S.R. was a dungeon society with a guaranteed social floor beneath which few could fall, whereas the U.S., whatever else it has been -- and it had been specifically designed not to be democratic -- has not been a dungeon-society.
Whether the confrontation was warranted or not, however, it certainly came about, and quite quickly, after the war. By 1947, Truman had announced his containment doctrine, by which he meant that whatever the U.S.S.R. had gained from the war, it would keep, but not an inch more anywhere, by any means (including the ballot box), was to be "given up." Keep in mind that all left-of-liberal social movements and parties were lumped with communism -- which meant Stalinist totalitarianism -- either out of ignorance or knowing propaganda. Subsequent presidents (and Congresses, and most of the elite commentariat) took containment seriously, including to the point of near-nuclear war, as JFK demonstrated in the Cuban Missile Crisis, during which, literally, one Soviet submarine commander, Vasili Arkhipov, saved civilization by refusing to follow what he correctly took to be a false order to fire his nuclear missiles.
Cuba's revolution in 1959 had been (and remains) a deeply annoying, even frightening, prospect for a superpower generally devoted to a Roosevelt-corollaried Monroe Doctrine -- and, at least between FDR and Nixon, equally devoted to denying the U.S.S.R. any similar doctrine of its own. Though both Khrushchev and Castro added much to the general autosuicidal insanity of the Cuban Missile Crisis, the U.S. was already seemingly constitutionally incapable of tolerating any form of dissent from its putative example anywhere on earth. The U.S.S.R., of course, was as active as it could afford to be with its shorter reach in trying to push this or that third-world nation away from the other superpower's influence and toward its own. It disciplined its satellites when they showed too much of a desire for political freedom -- notably in Hungary in 1956 and Czechoslovakia in 1968. In fact, a nonaligned movement among third-world nations arose in the fifties to avoid both American Scylla and Soviet Charybdis. In general, both sides tended to interpret as a dire threat, conveniently as well as honestly, any deviation from what each side took to be its near-messianic historic purpose.
In the U.S., a form of slippery-slope argumentation known as the domino effect held that since communism was a monolithic ideology the adoption of which instantly vaporized any pre-existing national, historical, or geopolitical interests, the fall of any state to that ideology, however small and marginal, threatened to knock down neighbors till the entire globe was be-hammered and en-sickled. What did occur when a country like China was "lost" was a decrease in potential and actual American (and Western) penetration into its markets, though trade of course did still go on. This was a limitation on profit, and unwelcome. (Let us pause for a moment to reflect on what it means for a country not China to have a debate, as the U.S. did in 1949 and 1950, over who inside the country that was not China was responsible for "losing China." One can only lose what one owns, if only as a kind of trust; this is evidence of the still-regnant view that the U.S. if not owns certainly by default governs the entire world.)
Aside from inoculating Europe from its initially popular though hardly dominant postwar communist and socialist parties (after all, many of the anti-Nazi and anti-fascist partisans had been one or another species of socialist), the first major act of containment came in Korea, an intervention -- or, as Truman called it, setting a precedent, a "police action" that required no formal declaration of war -- the effects of which persist to this very minute (again, early June, 2017). Communism had to be stopped; a brutal war was fought to do so, one which brought in China and ended in a stalemate. How brutal? Well, what is referred to as "the forgotten war" killed three million Koreans, two million of whom were civilians, as well as 33,000 Americans. Many of the civilians had been starved to death after America bombed the dams that irrigated the country.
By this time, of course, America had lost its nuclear monopoly. The weaponry would continue to spread with utterly dire risks ever-proliferating along with the technology itself, but what was called the balance of terror did put a ceiling on allowable violence. However criminally horrific the level of violence underneath that very high ceiling was, whoever the perpetrator, it paled in comparison to what would happen during the half-hour or so that would constitute a full nuclear exchange between the two superpowers. Faced with almost certain extinction since the 1950s, and blessed with a series of lucky breaks that one analyst has called "a miracle," the human race has managed to keep from killing itself off, an issue we will return to in the next and final chapter.
Around the same time as Korea heated up, Eisenhower stepped in for France after it had lost Vietnam to Ho Chi Minh's left-nationalist revolution. The war in Vietnam, later expanded to include Laos and Cambodia, was an unmitigated disaster. It undermined LBJ's domestic program, added to inflationary pressures, and by far most importantly killed somewhere around two to three million Southeast Asians as well as 58,000 American military personnel -- and for reasons and goals no one could ever quite make clear. One horrifying statistic that captures the scale of the American onslaught is that the U.S. dropped more bombs on Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia than had all the armies in all the battles of World War II. The increasingly obvious lies by Democratic and Republican administrations alike, along with the revelations of Watergate and later of the Church Committee that declassified much of the CIA's and other agencies' activities, undermined, if not shattered, many Americans' view of their government.
Less spectacular but often equally consequential interventions abounded during this period and beyond, many authored and executed by the Central Intelligence Agency which had grown out of the wartime intelligence service. Tasked with both gathering and analyzing intelligence as well as paramilitary counterinsurgency, with or without local help, the CIA began to specialize in encouraging, supporting, and even effecting rightwing coups d'etat all over the world, with nationalist or more or less social-democratic regimes always in its sights. Examples are legion, from Iran in 1953 and Guatemala in 1954 to Indonesia in 1965 and Chile in 1973 and many besides, each with its own death toll and geopolitical echoes that often reverberate to this day. All of this activity -- from large-scale, long-duration, and full-on wars to smaller coups and other actions -- was essentially (though the adjective to follow is controversial) extra-constitutional insofar as they were almost entirely at the executive's mostly oversight-free pleasure, with no declaration of war ever required, an aspect of what came to be called the imperial presidency.
Oddly enough, the old cold warrior Nixon, an overly secretive and imperial president if ever there was one, began to shift U.S.-Soviet relations away from containment per se to something called détente, a French word that means "a relaxing of tension." Nixon visited "lost" China, organized with his secretary of state Kissinger a series of summits with the Soviet leadership, and generally showed a willingness to negotiate, even to the point of SALT I's reduction of nuclear weapons. (Kennedy and Khrushchev had, post-missile-crisis, inked a test-ban treaty in 1963 and the U.S. had coauthored the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty in 1968.) Carter followed up with SALT II in 1979 but the progress was too slow for a worldwide nuclear freeze movement that got going toward the end of our period but persisted well beyond.
Carter also supplied yet another codicil to the Monroe Doctrine, his own Carter Doctrine that followed two massive oil-price-shocks organized by OPEC and promised U.S. military action if ever the main energy reserves in the Persian Gulf were threatened. This threat was also related to the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979, which seemed too close to the Gulf for comfort, and which also spurred yet another covert action, again ramped up by Reagan, by which fanatical foreign Muslim fighters were encouraged to go to Afghanistan to fight against the infidel Soviet invader, an action the blowback from which we are still contending. During this period, the state of Israel was founded and, after 1967, became a key ally, along with Saudi Arabia, in the main energy-producing region of the world; in 1978, Carter oversaw the Camp David Accords peace deal between Israel and Egypt.
Modes of McCarthyism
The war against communism, like all wars, had a home front. Starting with loyalty oaths under Truman, continuing with the full-throated return of Wilson's moral-panic Red Scare this phase of which goes by the name of its most appalling practitioner, McCarthyism, but which extended into both parties as well as much of the general culture, American civil liberties took a very strong hit, not the first and hardly the last. Lives were ruined, even ended, by various career-destroying, often evidence-free accusations, black lists, and the like.
McCarthy was taken down, finally, but what the historian Richard Hofstadter called the paranoid style of American politics continued, flaring up over and over again during this period and up to the present day. Until the late 1980s, anticommunism was the justification. All things deemed bad by those who deemed them thus were labeled "communist," which was becoming a kind of all-purpose swear-word. Civil rights protestors were communists; Hollywood was filled with communists; even the Air Force was infiltrated by communists. After the fall of communism, other enemies were quickly tried out and rejected, as we shall see in the following chapter.
A key example of the paranoid style was the administration of Nixon. Elected with a secret plan to end the Vietnam War he felt unbound to reveal, Nixon instead extended it (moving increasingly to air power while pulling out American troops -- "Vietnamization" it was called). Additionally, he went beyond even the usual dirty tricks of American electoral politics through the various crimes, including surveillance, that go under the blanket term Watergate, including most catastrophically for Nixon, the cover-up of those crimes that caused a real constitutional crisis averted only when Nixon resigned in the face of near-certain impeachment and senatorial conviction. Those crimes, incidentally, excluded the prosecution of the Southeast Asian war. Nevertheless, despite this public turn of events and a flurry of congressional investigations, the presidency has remained imperial to this day. Surveillance, in fact, has been massively improved through the information technology revolution and, post-9/11, embedded apparently for all time in law and even custom, as will be detailed in the next chapter.
The "Long Sixties"
The "long sixties" is the author's term of art for the rise of massive social and cultural movements, first on the left but soon on the right as well, that has marked American politics since the mid-1950s. Our period ends in 1980, just when a grassroots rightwing reaction was about to gain national power; the story will be continued in the next chapter.
The New Left
Many of the movements we still recognize today -- for racial justice of all kinds; for women's rights; against war and specific wars; and for environmental protection -- have deep historical roots. Some, such as gay and trans liberation, do not but have followed the model of first the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s and later the antiwar, feminist, and environmental movements of 1960s and 1970s.
Following World War II's fight against a racist society that believed in a superior white race, and despite segregation throughout the armed forces for the duration of that fight, soon after the war ended, stirrings began of what a few years later would become a national movement to finally reconstruct the South and the entire country. In the 1950s, Martin Luther King, Jr., a gifted orator and inheritor of Thoreau and Gandhi's civil disobedience tactics, became the face of a movement that had started spontaneously when black students began challenging Jim Crow segregation at diners, in buses, and elsewhere. It spread like wildfire, was soon organized by groups like the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, and within a decade had achieved a measure of legislative success, such as the Civil Rights Act of 1964, with the sometimes foot-dragging assistance of LBJ.
But even by then, demands were running ahead of legislative victories. In fact, the movement bifurcated along a few dimensions: between nonviolence and violence; between political rights and economic justice; between integration and Black-Power-esque separation. Malcolm X for most of his life embodied the second of each of these three binaries; late in life, after a visit to Mecca (he was a devout Muslim, first of the racially separatist, Black-Muslim ilk, later of the more general international kind), he had a change of heart cut short by his assassination in 1965. Some still much-debated combination of nonviolent pressure like boycotts and mass marches and violent outbursts like the many riots that broke out in urban centers in the sixties, especially after the assassination of King in 1968 (followed only a couple of months later by that of Robert Kennedy), led to major changes in the political and even economic fortunes of many African Americans, though social statistics of all kinds still reveal the lack of equality despite many important gains.
The antiwar movement soon experienced a similar set of tensions as peaceful protest was not only seen to be ineffective at stopping the war but was often met with violent repression, as at the 1968 Democratic Convention in Chicago outside of which, on live national television, a peaceful if deeply irreverent protest was met with a violent police riot. Other movements, for Indian rights, for Latino/Hispanic rights, even the beginnings of gay rights, followed close on the heels of the civil rights and antiwar movements, often interpenetrating, if not always smoothly.
This was all occurring against a backdrop of an exploding youth culture, best symbolized by the rock music into which rock 'n' roll had matured, thanks to Bob Dylan, the Beatles, and many others, and its many utopian festivals so reminiscent of a former age's Great Awakenings. Not only was this youth culture far more racially integrated than ever before, it was also far more sexually open, thanks in large part both to penicillin and The Pill but also to rapidly changing mores, than most Americans were used to. It's hard for the young today to appreciate just how revolutionary the whole rock "scene" was in the decades before it became commodified, corporatized, and, some would argue, neutered. Sexual behavior; gender roles and traditions of dress; drugs of choice (acid and weed over cigarettes and booze); racial categorizations and behaviors -- a whole range of expected behaviors were not only ignored but scorned. It had started in the fifties with the Beats, but, fueled by a Baby Boom generation with more widely distributed disposable income than had been the pre-Golden-Age norm, dissent of all sorts exploded in the mid-sixties. Often it was a politically unspecific declaration of the right to be an individual, to refuse to conform to social mores.
The New Right
Not everyone was thrilled with what seemed at the time, and in fact in large measure was, a thoroughgoing, light-speed shift of the nation's mores. So, while many then and now saw the counterculture as on balance a deeply civilizing set of movements, others then and now saw it as a moral collapse. That was the reaction of a deeply religious conservative to long hair on men and short skirts on women; lascivious dancing; race-mixing; strange-drug-taking; "government hand-outs" for "entitlements" that were seen as consistently taxing the besieged and dwindling number of upstanding people who still worked for a living; and all the rest -- in short, a barbaric revolt against the flag, the social order, and even God Himself, even to the point of legalizing abortion in 1973. The wildly popular and surprisingly confrontational sitcom All in the Family that ran throughout the 1970s both reflected and perhaps even influenced this burgeoning culture war, one usually conceived on both sides in moral (or, perhaps, moralistic) terms that has continued into the present. This culture war, though far from unique (perhaps such things are ubiquitous and constant in at least modern human history, with its rapid pace of change), has been duly puffed up by a conflict-loving media system, and has become quite useful to the rightward policy shift of both parties, especially after this period, as we shall see. (As a somewhat exaggerated preview, the American satirical-comedy duo, Elaine May and Mike Nichols, put their finger on it in 1960, archly commenting on how people justified a moment during the 1950s when all eyes were focused on the critical issue of congressional investigations into TV-quiz-show cheating:
Nichols: "It's a moral issue. It's a moral issue!"
May: "Yes! Yes! It is a moral issue, and to me that is always so much more interesting than a real issue.")
This was at least the image of the silent majority at which Nixon directed his 1968 campaign, the "normal" Americans horrified to one degree or another (the preceding paragraph's "reaction" is of course a composite) by tree-hugging, self-indulgent hippies and other un-Americans. Even white allies of the civil rights movement began drawing the line at sharing a neighborhood or school, let alone a daughter or son, with African Americans. In the face of court-mandated busing and other attempts at a still-unachieved thoroughgoing racial integration, many whites took to the ever-expanding suburbs. White flight it was called, and it was both internal to metropolitan areas and interstate: the Sun Belt gained population and thus wealth and political influence. Nixon knew as well as LBJ that any real civil rights progress would hand the former Confederate states, and some Western states, too, to the Republican party in a reversal that still dominates national politics. He initiated what has become a usually Republican (but not always) campaign tactic, known originally as the Southern Strategy, that consists of racist and other traditionalist "dog-whistles" -- coded language -- designed to satisfy the knowing part of the target audience while not alienating the (supposedly) unknowing, swing-voter part.
Deeply important to subsequent Republican and even national politics was the rise of another Great Awakening in the 1970s, a politicized evangelical movement still very much with us. Toward the end of this period, particularly energized by the legalization of abortion, evangelicals, who had long stayed out of politics, began to form the mass base of the Republican party. Its most sophisticated leaders adopted many of the tactics and even some of the tone of the countercultural movements it decried; protest of all kinds became "de-liberalized," to coin a phrase. Figures like Jerry Falwell, with his Moral Majority, an echo of Nixon's silent majority, became national power brokers and a critical part of the victory of Ronald Reagan, a story we will pick up the next and final essay.