I look forward to reading Rick Perlstein’s The Invisble Bridge, his latest chronicle on the development of American movement conservatism since the 1950s. When reading Nixonland, his previous volume in the series, I was disturbed by how much I needed to reminded about what happened during the 1960s. But as I read through it, I remembered what it felt like as a teenager growing up in a Long Island suburb and to live during that tumult. Unlike the experience of kids today, there was a generation gap that shaped political opinions. Young people, at least in the mostly educated, relatively affluent world I grew up in were as likely to be attracted to the Liberalism of their mostly young, hip teachers in school, as to the conventional, not particularly thoughtful conservatism of their parents. But Nixon understood where most young people’s politics lay, and that’s why he pushed to lower the voting age in time for the presidential election in 1972.
My wife grew up in the Bronx in a working class, mostly Irish and Italian neighborhood. There was no ambiguity there because her community was on the front line of what was for them a racial war in which their neighborhoods were the battleground. They saw their low-crime, working class Shangri-La degrade before their eyes. They blamed the influx of poor blacks into their neighborhoods, and they blamed the Liberal politicians who weren't doing enough to protect them and their interests. Although they were life-long Democrats, Liberalism became a dirty name for people who grew up in working-class neighborhoods in urban America.
But Liberals were in a politically impossible predicament in the mid to late sixties. They were caught in the middle between, on the one hand, a had-it-up-to-here African-American community that sought to force change, and on the other hand, working-class, urban, white Americans who were scared to death they were seeing the beginning of a new, race-driven Civil War in which they would be on the front lines taking most of the casualties. Their concerns were dismissed as racist-by too many Liberal elites—the kind who wrote editorials for the NY Times, but those Liberals were not forced to pay the price the way these working class white ethnics were.
The term ‘Limousine Liberal’ was coined to describe the attitude of these Liberal elites, and there was justice in it. These Liberals paid no price for their glib opinions. It was easy for them to be sanctimonious about the racism of urban ethnic whites, to dismiss them as so many Archie Bunkers, and to see them the problem rather than as victims of historical happenstance. And so from the resentful ranks of these urban working-class whites, Nixon and later Reagan found the electoral pickens abundant.
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Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act into law on August 6, 1965, and the Watts riots began August 11. How was the juxtaposition of these two events interpreted at the time? From Johnson's and the Liberal white perspective: "This is how "they" thank us?" From the African American perspective: "What do you expect? It's too little, too late." From the southern and working-class white perspective: "We told you this was going to happen. You Liberals don't know what you're doing." Reading Perlstein convinced me that the racial politics of the sixties was the biggest reason for the de-legitimation of Liberalism on America’s “Main Street”, while also convincing me it was Liberalism's finest hour.
Now that we can look at it from the perspective of fifty years later, it’s hard to imagine that things should have or could have gone otherwise. What could a decent, intelligent governor or mayor have done once the rioting began? Read Perlstein’s history to learn how haplessly they flailed, but there was nothing more for them to do except contain the chaos, limit the damage, and wait it out. As we see now in retrospect, the violence did eventually subside, and we survived. But from the perspective of 1965, it looked like things would only get worse—and in the short run they did get worse. And so those law-and-order types who thought the Liberal, mostly Democrat (New York’s uber Liberal John Lindsay was a Republican) were too permissive were among the core of those who engineered the conservative backlash of the seventies, eighties, and beyond.
But the problems of the 1960s must be traced back to the many levels of failure by both the locals and the Feds in 1870s for which Black Americans paid an awful price. The Feds in the late 19th and early 20th centuries hadn't the political will to prevent enactment of the Jim Crow laws. So to use Rev. Wright's term, America's chickens were going to come home to roost sooner or later. However you want to understand the causes, the legal mistreatment of Black Americans was a boil festering on the American soul, and the civil rights legislation in the 1960s lanced it, and the riots were the necessary release of all the built-up infection that had festered for generations. Until the boil was lanced, no social healing could happen.
The Civil Rights legislation of the sixties was not a Jacobin program to engineer utopia; it was the simple insistence by the Federal government that Black Americans should get equal protection under the law when local governments in the South and elsewhere were unwilling or incapable of providing it. Healing could not happen until the boil had been lanced, so any talk of taking it slow or letting things evolve at their own pace was ridiculous in the mid-sixties. The riots were evolution taking its course, the age-old story of what goes around comes around, and all the violence blowback from a long history of legal and illegal white violence inflicted on Black Americans.
The Liberals were right to force the civil rights legislation. Does any sane person living today dispute it? And it was probably good that they were naive about the explosion they were triggering because they wouldn't have had the political will to pass the legislation if they were shrewder about the consequences. But they got the blame for the pain, and with it the bad name to this day associated with wishy-washy appeasement of lawlessness.
And so the Liberals who were in charge at the time looked like ineffectual fools. Liberalism got its bad name because Liberals became defined by their letting the demon out while refusing to use all the violent force at their disposal to put the demon back in it. You were a Liberal if you resisted the idea that the only way to treat the angry-African-American problem was the same way Americans treated the Indian problem in the 19th century: Force them back into that box and sit on the lid.
But we took our medicine in the sixties because the Liberal leaders of the time decided it was time for us to take it. It wasn't pleasant, but we're better off for it now. Had the legislation failed, the boil would have continued to fester, and today the American situation could very well look like the Israeli/Palestinian one. The sixties, for all their violence and chaos, were a necessary phase in healing the American soul. The election of Barack Obama has shown how far we have progressed since then, but also how deeply those old resentments still linger among certain sectors of White America, sectors that refused to take their medicine then and so still suffer from a kind of delirium now.
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From my reading advanced reviews of The Invisible Bridge, Perlstein’s newest book makes the argument that Ronald Reagan beat Jimmy Carter in 1980 in large part because Carter told Americans that they had to continue to take their medicine, and Reagan told Americans they didn’t have to. I’m sure Perlstein’s argument is not so simplistic, but I think it boils down to something close to that. And the results are clear. We have half the country willing to deal with hard realities like climate change, crumbling infrastructure, an absurd healthcare insurance system, and persistent structural poverty, and we have the other half that just doesn’t want to deal with it at all, or is willing to surrender responsibility to the market’s invisible hand.
We’ve seen this movie before. This is a lesson our grandfathers in the ‘30s and 40s learned the hard way, and now it looks like we will have to learn it all over again. Well, let’s hope we learn it because otherwise this is how great nations wither and die. And yes, we can trace the origin of our troubles now back to the sixties, but for reasons precisely the opposite to those given by Conservatives. Morning in America was in fact a refusal to wake up; it was a regression into a resentment-and-nostalgia-soaked dream.
[This is a revised, shortened version of a post entitled How Liberalism Got Its Bad Name, from 2008.]
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