In 1964, President Lyndon Johnson announced his intention to embark on a bold agenda of national reforms to create what he declared would be a “Great Society.” Over his presidency, his Democratic Party would push through a dramatic burst of initiatives, moving into new areas like civil rights, poverty, environmental protection, and education. These initiatives came to symbolize a new Democratic Party, replacing a party of economic policy and labor unions with one crusading to reform and remake America. In 1968, Richard Nixon also announced a new direction for his party. He would push back against the “permissiveness” leaking into the culture as a growing counterculture attacked cultural norms. Nixon would promise to restore national stability after a surge in violent crime, an outbreak of riots in major cities, and the rise of angry protest movements. Speaking in his own moral terms based in concepts like patriotism, tradition, and personal morality, Nixon pledged to restore law and order for the benefit of the “Silent Majority” he believed the Democratic Party had abandoned.
At the start of the Fifth Party System under Franklin Roosevelt, the Democratic Party was a party of workers. It was the party of city machines run by recent generations of immigrants, and organized labor, and working people across the economically struggling Solid South. The Republicans were a party of corporate magnates, professionals, business people, and the well-to-do. Today, we define professionals, college professors, and educated activists as the Democratic Party base. We assume rural and working people to be Republicans. The once Democratic Solid South is now solidly Republican, and the former Republican base in the Northeast is the heartland of the Democrats. We trace the source of this political transformations to the 1960s, since it's during the 1960s when these worlds began to flip. It's when America's parties started talking differently and attracting different people. It's when they started taking on new issues they hadn't cared about before. It's when the anger, the polarization, and the culture war began creeping into the politics and the culture of America. It was the start of America's Fourth Great Awakening, and it changed everything.
HOW THE 1960s TURNED THE WORLD UPSIDE DOWN
When America elected John Kennedy president in 1960, the country was at the height of its postwar boom. This was the America of housecoats, neat suits, pillbox hats. At the end of the Second World War, many Americans feared that, when the nation demobilized, it would fall back into depression.1 Instead, the economy soared, delivering to ordinary Americans an extraordinary degree of peace and prosperity they would have never dreamed possible during the Depression and the war. Many Americans came to assume a level of comfort they would have found unthinkable in the hard times of their youth—a middle-class house in the suburbs with new appliances and a car in the garage.2 America was now a global superpower and world leader. During Kennedy's presidency, America even decided to build a rocket to the moon—imagine Franklin Roosevelt announcing such a thing during the Great Depression! After several harrowing decades of desperation and war, America was happy and hopeful. The country was safe, society was stable, and the future looked bright. Then all that peace and prosperity vanished and America descended into a scary new era of economic troubles and social instability.3
America through the 1960s and 1970s tumbled through a series of shocking events, national crises, and eruptions of social discontent. Popular political figures were assassinated one after another—John Kennedy, Bobby Kennedy, Martin Luther King. Crime suddenly spiked. Racial discontent flooded into the open, and riots broke out in the streets of major cities, burning neighborhoods to the ground. Anger over the Vietnam War shook the nation with sometimes violent protest. Young political radicals claimed to declare war against the United States and celebrated “Days of Rage.” In 1968, young protesters crowded the streets of Chicago to protest at the Democratic National Convention. They wore long hair, shouted slogans, and had complete disdain not only for the political establishment of the party they supported but for the establishment of every institution in America. Chicago's mayor, the boss Richard Daley, a product of the traditional working-class Democrats of Chicago, held these rowdy protesters in contempt and sent thousands of police to repress and neutralize them. The two armies clashed, sparking the Battle of Michigan Avenue, in which a flurry of police batons battered angry protesters, along with anyone else unlucky enough to get in their way. Americans watching the political convention on television witnessed this “police riot” and saw the forces of the establishment breaking the bones of protesters who refused to recognize their authority. The confident and stable America of the early 1960s had turned into a nation in social turmoil within less than a decade.
The Democratic Party in 1960 was still a party of unions and labor regulations fighting for Franklin Roosevelt's industrial policy. By 1968, it was fast becoming the party of the raucous young protesters preoccupied with issues like opposing the war in Vietnam, cleaning up the environment, empowering women, and advancing civil rights. When Nixon first ran for president in 1960, he ran as the heir of Eisenhower. In 1968 he ran on a new law and order agenda centered around issues like crime, welfare spending, supporting the military, and curbing social “permissiveness.” Over the following years, the Democrats changed from a lunch-pail party of autoworkers and shop clerks into the party of Silicon Valley CEOs, professors, and college-educated professionals. The Republicans changed from a country-club party of doctors, lawyers, and bankers into a party of blue-collar workers and small-business people from the heartland. The Solid South gradually transformed from a Democratic Party bastion into a Republican one. The once Republican Northeast became the new Democratic base. It was as though the nation flipped over.
The dramatic changes in the way America's parties looked, talked, and presented themselves over the 1960s and 1970s are so astounding they have obsessed us ever since. Except that so much also stayed the same. The Democrats never abandoned their old issues or Franklin Roosevelt's ideology of New Deal liberalism. They merely expanded on it, adding new issues and priorities, like the status of women, the importance of the environment, and the expansion of civil rights. Republicans never gave up on anti-big-government conservatism. They maintained their old commitments—indeed, they doubled down on them—while adding new ones, like crime, welfare, and the breakdown of traditional cultural rules and social order. So much had changed, and yet the basic framework of our parties' ideological debates remained essentially the same.
The 1960s mark an important change in America, one that affected its parties profoundly. America's political culture shifted from pragmatism to moralism. It happened because, in the middle of the 1960, America's Fourth Great Awakening began. It's perhaps the most misunderstood event in American politics—and a driving force of the realignment that's inevitably to come.
LYNDON JOHNSON AND THE GREAT SOCIETY
In May of 1964, in advance of his coming presidential campaign, President Johnson announced his intention to usher in an ambitious new program to rival that of Franklin Roosevelt. He announced in a speech at the University of Michigan his plan to create a “Great Society.” Johnson claimed such a society “demands an end to poverty and racial injustice.”4 It would be “a place where every child can find knowledge to enrich his mind and enlarge his talents.” It would be “a place where the city of man serves not only the needs of the body and the demands of commerce but the desire for beauty and the hunger for community.” It would be “a place where man can renew contact with nature” and “a place which honors creation for its own sake and for what it adds to the understanding of the race.” The speech, reflecting the work of Johnson's residential intellectual, Princeton professor Eric Goldman, was an intentional shift in tone and priorities.5 Goldman, whom Johnson brought into the White House to discover new policies in a role similar to Kennedy's Arthur Schlesinger, had reached out to liberal intellectuals in the beginning of 1964 to distill a new direction for the Johnson administration.6 Their overwhelming answer was to cast off worries about material progress for questions of values. As Goldman came to believe, “the nation had reached a general affluence that permitted it to give attention not only to the quantity but also to the quality of American living.”7
The agenda we call the Great Society actually began before Johnson's speech gave it a name, almost as soon as Johnson assumed the presidency in November of 1963 after John Kennedy's shocking assassination. Johnson's first priority upon becoming president was to pass the stagnant legislative efforts that Kennedy had sent to Congress but couldn't or wouldn't get Congress to pass—most importantly a tax cut and a civil rights bill.8 Johnson's decision to actively push civil rights was startling because his entire public career to that point had been as an avowed racist and segregationist. Johnson was known as a strong segregationist and champion of the Southern Senate Old Bulls, who had installed him as Senate leader expressly to protect the South's interests.9 Just a few years before, Johnson led the effort to defang Eisenhower's 1957 civil rights bill by stripping out its enforcement provisions,10 letting the toothless and watered-down bill pass because, as he said to Doris Kearns Goodwin, he and the Senate segregationists thought, “These Negroes, they're getting uppity these days” so “we've got to give them a little something, just enough to quiet them down, not enough to make a difference.”11
In contrast to his image and the mythology surrounding him, Kennedy had done very little for civil rights during his presidency beyond symbolic gestures. His focus had mainly been administering the New Deal apparatus, fighting the Cold War, and championing a tax cut. As a Northern liberal, Kennedy supported civil rights in his public pronouncements, but he did little to advance it throughout his career. In Congress, he even quietly cooperated with the campaign of Southern Democratic leaders to strip the most meaningful provisions out of the 1957 Civil Rights Act.12 As president, he told civil rights leaders that, while he supported them in principle, he couldn't afford to alienate Senate segregationists whom he needed to pass other priorities. As his friend and close advisor Arthur Schlesinger wrote, Kennedy “had at this point, I think, a terrible ambivalence about civil rights. While he did not doubt the depth of the injustice or the need for remedy…he had a wide range of presidential responsibilities, and a fight for civil rights would alienate Southern support he needed for other purposes (including bills, like those for education and the increased minimum wage, of direct benefit to the Negro).”13 Needing to win over Northern liberals before he faced a renomination battle in 1964, maybe one against Bobby Kennedy, Johnson resolved he “had to produce a civil rights bill that was even stronger than the one they'd have gotten if Kennedy had lived.”14
Whatever the reason behind his public conversion on segregation, Johnson's decision to push through a major civil rights bill was a significant milestone for America. At first, Johnson attempted and failed to convince segregationist leaders in the Senate to accept a strong civil rights bill, arguing it would eventually happen anyway. “We're friends on the q.t.,” Johnson told Southern senators, “Would you rather have me administering the civil rights bill, or do you want to have Nixon or Scranton?”15 They rejected his offer, so Johnson put the full weight of his office behind the single most important civil rights bill in American history since Reconstruction. The bill would finally end segregation; end restrictions used to stop African Americans from voting; prohibit state and local governments from denying access to facilities to people on the basis of race; prohibit private hotels, restaurants, theaters, and public accommodations from discriminating on race; and prohibit racial discrimination in employment.
Outraged at Johnson's perceived betrayal, the segregationists resolved to fight Johnson's bill with everything they had. Needing more votes, Johnson turned to the Senate's Republican leader, Everett Dirksen of Illinois, to spearhead his effort in Congress. Dirksen had a strong civil rights record and controlled the votes of thirty-seven Republican senators key to breaking the inevitable segregationist filibuster.16 In winning Dirksen's support, Johnson had enlisted the Republican Party as a critical ally for his bill. Johnson maneuvered a strong bill through the obstruction of segregationists in the House, winning the support of 80 percent of House Republicans and 61 percent of House Democrats. West Virginia Democrat Robert Byrd led an epic fifty-four-day filibuster on the Senate floor—a significant event in an age in which filibustering meant actually talking day after day to continually hold the legislative floor. The bill's supporters rallied the necessary votes to break the filibuster by a vote of 71–29, with 82 percent of Senate Republicans voting to break the filibuster as well as 66 percent of the Senate Democrats. It was a long overdue but important national achievement.
After passing his Civil Right Act, Johnson won reelection and then over the next two years initiated and passed through Congress one of the most ambitious packages of federal-government-led initiatives and programs in American history. Johnson launched a federal “War on Poverty,” spending billions of dollars on new programs to expand welfare benefits for the poor, improve education, and train people from poor communities for jobs. He emphasized improving education, traditionally an area left to states, creating new funding, new educational programs like Head Start, and aid for bilingual education. He created new environmental laws such as the Clean Air Act and Endangered Species Act. He spearheaded new federal initiatives for consumer safety, passing new laws and programs for cigarette labeling, food packaging, child safety, and consumer lending. He increased spending on infrastructure and mass transit projects, created a cabinet-level Department of Transportation, and strengthened motor vehicle safety. He sponsored new cultural spending, creating the National Endowment for the Arts and the National Endowment for the Humanities, as well as the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. In perhaps the most famous Great Society achievement, Johnson created Medicare.
Both the scope and the raw number of Johnson's Great Society reforms was staggering. Mixed within the well-known major efforts were also a stream of less notable policies and programs of real significance. A few other Great Society efforts included: Medicaid; the Office of Economic Opportunity and its related antipoverty efforts, like Job Corps, Community Health Centers, Upward Bound, Indian Opportunities, Migrant Opportunities, and Food Stamps; national volunteering agencies, like VISTA and the Legal Services Corporation; the National Highway Transportation Safety Administration; chemical labeling; national meat inspecting agencies; the Truth-In-Lending Act; environmental efforts, like the Endangered Species Act; the Aircraft Noise Abatement Act; the National Historic Preservation Act; and the National Environmental Policy Act.17 Just as Goldman said, the Great Society was a coordinated push to move the Democratic Party away from questions of economic policy into areas of moral policy. It took interest in new issues—the environment, consumer protection, poverty, education, health, and civil rights—and wrapped them in a new moral urgency. The earth needed to be saved, the poor needed to be uplifted, the powerless needed to be educated, and the marginalized needed to be brought fully into the national community.
The question that ought to perplex us is why Lyndon Johnson, of all people, launched this revolution in the Democratic Party. Johnson was an old school, hardscrabble, rural, socially traditionalist Democrat who had made his career on economic populism and segregation. He was the protégé and champion of the segregationist Old Bulls of the South, with a long record of disgustingly racist views continuing long past his public conversion on civil rights.18 He wasn't young, a social progressive, a dreaming visionary, a hippie, or a liberal intellectual. Not only were the young protesters of the New Left not his political base, the New Left loathed him for expanding the Vietnam War.19 It's now well-established that he was corrupt, having used his influence in politics to build a lucrative radio empire in his wife's name, winning his first Senate election almost certainly with the help of fraudulent votes, sitting at the center of the Bobby Baker scandal, and more.20 He was often cruel, demanding, and a kiss-up kick-down sort of guy.21 He was personally crude, flagrantly cheated on his wife and bragged about it, and liked to humiliate aides by taking meetings while seated on the toilet.22 Johnson wasn't even looking for a new direction for his party; he didn't even like the name “Great Society,” which people criticized as naive and utopian.23 As he saw things, his Great Society wasn't a break with Democratic tradition but simply a second New Deal applying the New Deal philosophy to his own era's problems.
Johnson didn't change the face and direction of his party because of who he was. He did it despite of who he was. His administration and his party got caught up in a new spirit in the air, one that was nudging it along whether Johnson and his staff realized it or not. That spirit arrived through the counterculture and its political vehicle, the New Left.
THE COUNTERCULTURE AND THE NEW LEFT
In the middle of the 1960s, a dramatic movement erupted among America's youth. It seemed to come out of nowhere. When the postwar generation finally settled down after the hell of the Depression and Second World War, with the specters of starvation, desperation, and death burned permanently in their minds, they built a neat world of predictability and order. When their children, the baby boomers, came of age in the middle of the 1960s, they found that stability and order stifling.24 In 1960, while America was still enjoying the national stability of the postwar boom, young people dressed neatly, cut their hair short, and were expected to call their elders sir and ma'am.25 This new movement of young people refused to dress up, with men wearing their hair long and growing scraggly facial hair while women wore flower-power dresses.26 They rejected buttoned-up mainstream culture, embracing message songs and attending lively rock festivals like Woodstock that attendees treated like religious events.27 Many embarked on quests for meaning, flirting with new-age spiritualism and declaring the “Age of Aquarius.” Their parents built a stable, orderly, prosperous society to protect against how horrific the world could be. Their children dreamed about how much better it could become. The very order and predictability their parents valued as a means to stave off the wolves of the world, their children believed locked in injustices and wrongs.
In a few short years, a new, radical, and rowdy youth culture burst onto the scene, committed to turning America upside down. The changes combusted spontaneously, with no obvious leader, occurring with no clear cause and flowering among countless interrelated leaders, thinkers, organizations, and social movements, who all demanded that society change. It was a wild new spirit in the air that flourished just as the children who had grown up amid unprecedented stability and prosperity after the Second World War came of age. People called this generational rebellion the “counterculture.”
The young Americans of this counterculture visibly, and often ostentatiously, rejected the postwar society their parents built. They rejected its manners, trading in housecoats and neckties for clothes that emphasized casualness and individuality.28 They rejected its cultural tastes, seeking out entertainment and music that emphasized meaning and novelty instead of easy fun and tidy tunesmithing.29 They questioned the middle-class economic order of nine-to-five jobs, corporations, and men in gray flannel suits and traded in the establishment middle-class values of getting married and securing stable jobs to undertake personal quests for meaning. They rejected older notions of sexual morality, becoming increasingly open to casual sex and a more sexualized culture.30 Some explored Eastern religions like Buddhism and Hinduism and practices like yoga and meditation.31 Others delved into astrology and New Age mysticism, leading to the popular label the “Age of Aquarius.”32 Still others flirted with the occult, sparking the growth of neopaganism and Wiccan religion. Some embraced an ethic of “free love,” looking for meaning by giving themselves to others in sexual experiences.33 Others joined the “Jesus Movement”—often derided as the “Jesus Freaks”—who saw the hippie lifestyle's ethos of peace and love as a purer reflection of Christ's message.34 Many sought enlightenment through psychedelic experiences, creating an explosion in the popularity of drugs such as hallucinogenic mushrooms and LSD.35 They followed the advice of psychologist Timothy Leary, advocate for the use of psychedelics, who famously suggested they “turn on, tune in, drop out.”36
Most important, this new generation questioned the values of the society their parents defended. They questioned America's commitment to fairness in its acceptance of racial discrimination. They questioned its compassion, resolving to fight poverty. They questioned its humanity, with its Cold War, nuclear weapons, and military interventions in places like Vietnam.37 They questioned its purity, insisting society do more to “save the earth to reverse what they believed the ravages commercialism and industrialism had inflicted on the earth's environment.”38 They questioned the fairness of traditional gender roles, committing to women's liberation and a sexual revolution.39 They created new rights movements, such as the gay rights movement and the Native American rights movement.40 They founded movements against nuclear weapons and nuclear power. They took up causes like poverty, advocating for more active government assistance for those living in the poorest slums in the nation's urban core.41 They picked up the civil rights torch from their elders, advocating for racial equality in areas beyond anything the original civil rights generation had imagined. These “hippies” and their counterculture asserted that the entire postwar American social order was, in almost every aspect, unjust and immoral.42
Out of this new spirit grew a new force in politics called the New Left. It had its roots in counterculture-aligned activist movements, from student groups to the antiwar movement. In 1960, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee formed as a student organization, which acted as ancillary support to the broader civil rights movement and later grew into a major civil rights organization. The students of the SNCC helped organize sit-ins and the “freedom rides” against segregated busing, supplementing the actions of older civil rights activists like Martin Luther King Jr.43 In 1962, a young college group called Students for a Democratic Society, which had evolved from an earlier socialist organization interested in Old Left issues of labor and workers, held its first convention at a United Autoworkers camp in Port Huron, Michigan.44 They set out a vision in a manifesto called the Port Huron Statement that proclaimed an intention to remake both the Democratic Party and America. It declared that while “many of us began maturing in complacency” young Americans should now, given the injustices and troubles of the late twentieth century, particularly racial segregation and the Cold War, seek to renew democracy to “replace power rooted in possession, privilege, or circumstance by power and uniqueness rooted in love, reflectiveness, reason, and creativity.”45 As SDS rose in prominence to become the heart of the New Left movement, the Port Huron Statement came to be seen as the movement's founding principles.46 Among its chief goals from the beginning was to remake the Democratic Party into a more “liberal” party, driving away elements it found wanting to create a demographic realignment.47
As more members of the baby boomer generation reached political adolescence and maturity, student activism became a stronger force. Young activists took up the new issues and joined the new movements springing up around them. In 1962, Rachel Carson published her book Silent Spring, which helped to launch a new environmental movement.48 In 1963, Betty Friedan published The Feminine Mystique, which served as a rallying point for a modern feminist movement.49 Within a few years she helped found the National Organization for Women, which fought “to bring women into full participation in the mainstream of American society now, exercising all the privileges and responsibilities thereof in truly equal partnership with men.”50 By the end of 1964, after Johnson significantly escalated the war in Vietnam in response to the Gulf of Tonkin incident, an explosion of war protests broke out among students and other young Americans. In 1965, racially charged riots broke out in the Watts section of Los Angeles that left thirty-four dead and wrecked portions of the city with looting and arson.51 Over the next few years, similar destructive riots broke out in cities across America, mainly in Northern industrial cities like Detroit, Newark, and Washington, DC.52
After 1965, student activism became not only more widespread but more confrontational and radical. Many student activists, enraged by an escalating and in their view immoral and unjust Vietnam War, and furious at the draft that could force them to risk their lives fighting in it, increasingly believed that aggressive, confrontational, and even extreme methods were morally justified, if not essential, to advance their causes and remake a debased America. In 1966, in the wake of the Watts riot, Stokely Carmichael replaced John Lewis as the leader of the SNCC, representing a significant change in the organization's approach. Carmichael preached a total reform of society, sought direct confrontation with racism, and broke with his organization's prior commitment to nonviolence. The activists called their new approach “black power.”53 Around the same time, after a fierce internal battle, a new faction rose to the leadership of SDS. The new leaders counseled direct action, confrontational politics, and more militant activism.54 This new faction eventually evolved into more radical groups, including the violent radicals who called themselves the Weathermen and who declared formal war against the United States, staging “Days of Rage” in which young radicals rioted and destroyed property.55 New groups favoring this new approach to politics formed, too, such as the Youth International Party or “Yippies,” which formed in 1967 to advance the spread of the hippie culture and engaged in confrontational protests combined with performance art like running a pig named Pigasus as a candidate for president.56
By 1968, when New Left protesters flooded Chicago for that year's Democratic National Convention, Lyndon Johnson was now deeply unpopular due to the escalation of the Vietnam War. Johnson was personally bewildered by his liberal critics and the rowdy young protesters of the New Left who had come to despise him. “What in the world do they want?” Johnson would complain.57 What, he wondered to the people around him, would make the favored children of America's middle and upper classes, after he had accomplished so much that was important to them, rebel and riot? Johnson declined to run for reelection, knowing he would certainly lose the nomination. The Democrats would instead nominate Johnson's vice president, Hubert Humphry, once known as a bold and forward-thinking liberal—in 1948 he bravely led an unsuccessful demand for civil rights at the Democratic National Convention—but whom the New Left protesters now viewed as an establishment crony complicit in Vietnam. Chicago's mayor, Richard Daley, a creature of the Old Left, found the young protesters who poured into his city distasteful. The protesters hated Daley in return. They saw him, and his entire labor-Democrat machine-politics part of the party as the very problem they hoped to defeat. Daley first sought to discourage protesters from coming to the city. When they arrived anyway, Daley hoped to sideline them to maintain public order. Rowdy protesters, some like Abbie Hoffman's Yippies hoping to stir trouble, crowded into Grant Park. Scuffles broke out. Daley unleashed the police, creating a “police riot.” Open warfare broke out in the streets. The police beat protesters with nightsticks. Young protesters threw bricks and bottles, fighting back. As the Democratic Party made its presidential nominating speeches, America watched on television as policemen loyal to a Democratic mayor beat young Democratic activists bloody.58
That clash in Chicago became a symbol of a new power struggle, a literal war for the soul of the Democratic Party. On one side, the Old Left of Daley's unions and labor and working-class politics. One the other side, this New Left of student activists. The Old Left was pragmatic and focused on interests. The New Left was moralistic and interested in dreams. As the 1960s and 1970s progressed, the Great Society and its ideals would spread through an entire generation of Democratic activists. They would gradually, as they came of age, capture the party's institutions, first nominating candidates of their choice like McGovern in 1972, and later becoming the candidates themselves.59 Before long, this rowdy group of activists in Chicago would succeed in their desire to push the Old Left off center stage. The Democratic Party would no longer be a pragmatic party of labor. It would be a moral party led by a new generation of zealous crusaders looking to change the world and defeat their enemies.
The counterculture was a great moral revival. The New Left was its political arm. As a new generation came of age, it turned away from pragmatism for new moral questions. It embraced a new movement linking spiritual revival, creating a nationwide community mixing its beliefs with entertainment, socializing, and art. It embraced a new agenda of social and moral reforms it believed were essential to remake America into a more just and moral nation. Then it marched off to enact those reforms on the political battlegrounds of America.60 As New Left leader Tom Hayden wrote, “Like the American revolutionary period, the awakening of the early sixties was a unique ingathering of young people—many of them potential leaders—to proclaim and then try to carry out a total redemptive vision…. The gods of our parents had failed or become idols. Then a new spiritual force came in 1960, to move the world. We felt ourselves to be the prophets of that force.”61 While the movement flourished with these young Americans, the spirit it embodied quickly spread across America. The ideas and priorities it introduced seeped into the culture of the liberal political coalition, carrying along politicians, intellectuals, and public officials—even those as far from the counterculture's ideals as Lyndon Johnson.
That's why the intellectuals Eric Goldman surveyed suggested the Great Society and why Johnson and his administration embraced its ideals. We're not accustomed to thinking about the activism and unrest of the 1960s this way, but it looks just like an awakening.62 It was only getting started.
NIXON AND THE RISE OF THE SILENT MAJORITY
When Richard Nixon ran for president for the second time in 1968, he faced a country in a very different mood from the one he faced in 1960. In 1960, Nixon campaigned against John Kennedy as a Republican in the mold of Eisenhower, the president he had served as vice president.63 This younger Nixon presented himself as a moderate, traditional, establishment Republican like Tom Dewey and Nelson Rockefeller. He promised to continue the peace and prosperity of the Eisenhower years and campaigned hard for the African American vote as a member of the NAACP. He was a strong supporter of Eisenhower's pioneering 1957 Civil Rights Act, and a vocal proponent of Brown v. Board of Education.64
By 1968, however, the country had changed. The effortless peace and prosperity of the postwar boom had suddenly begun to fray. After years of growth, jobs, and increasing wages, the economy began to slow, an economic slide that would continue into the 1970s.65 Adding to that worry, there was the ever-increasing stream of violent incidents and threats to national stability. Over just a few years, America had stumbled through a seemingly unending string of shocking political assassinations. Violent crime had inexplicably spiked to alarming levels.66 America had entered a bloody and unpopular war, spurring sometimes violent protest. The 1965 Watts riots shook America, and many similar racially charged riots followed it, with protesters breaking windows, smashing storefronts, and setting things alight.67 Violent and radical groups like the Weathermen declared their “Days of Rage.” Over the next few years, some young radicals even joined terrorist groups, staged robberies, planted bombs, kidnapped people, and murdered police officers. America had also, all of a sudden, curtly brushed aside ancient social norms over sex, drugs, and family roles. Drug use went from a hidden vice to an increasingly open one. Adultery and divorce went from hidden and rare events to an accepted practice, if not a new norm. In a few short years, America had become a nation fearful of rising crime, national assassinations, declining opportunity, and unpredictable social change. Many people felt that the very fabric of the nation was rapidly coming undone.68
From where we all now stand, it's hard not to look back at the middle of the twentieth century without recognizing all the positive changes and the reforms everyone agrees made things better—the end of segregation, the pushback against racism and gender discrimination, the cleanup of industrial pollution in our shared air and water. We all know, however, how the story ends. We know the economy that slowed in the middle of the 1960s would eventually get better, that the go-go 1980s were right around the corner, and the stable and prosperous 1990s were soon to come. We know crime would fall again in the 1990s, and the graffiti-spattered subway cars would once again be clean. We know most of the young rabble rousers would age and mature, becoming a new middle class raising families in suburbs and holding office-park corporate jobs. Most of all, we know the social disruptions of the 1960s and 1970s would leave behind positive changes because some of what America ripped down over those years needed to go. It's easy to forget that people then had no way to know whether the breakdown in postwar stability and prosperity would end, or whether the rapid disintegration of social stability would just get worse.
Throughout his pre-1968 political career, Nixon was known as a moderate, neither part of the conservative movement like Goldwater and Reagan nor part of the Eastern establishment like Rockefeller. He won the Republican nomination in 1968 mainly because, after turmoil of the Goldwater campaign, he had the rare ability to move between both groups without alienating either of them.69 Nixon also wasn't a conviction politician, a policy wonk, or an ideologue. He was an insider who always felt like an outsider. He was obsessed with winning to prove he deserved the respect he craved, and willing to use whatever strategy worked. Looking at the electorate in 1968, Nixon saw two interrelated things. First, many ordinary Americans were now worried about the turbulence rocking the country—the student protesters, the crime, the Vietnam War, the riots, and in certain parts of the nation fierce backlash to federal intervention to create integration and advance civil rights. Second, many traditionally Democratic groups were alienated from their party and potentially open to a Republican campaign. Nixon had on his staff a young lawyer named Kevin Phillips who wrote a widely circulated memo to the campaign titled “Middle America and the Emerging Republican Majority,” which in 1969 he would develop into a blockbuster book, The Emerging Republican Majority.70 Supporting Nixon's instincts, Phillips argued that various groups traditionally part of the Democratic base—rural voters, blue collar laborers, Southern voters, and recently “bourgeoisified” “white ethnics” such as Irish and Italian Catholics—were poised to drift into the Republican Party over the coming years. His analysis was supported by another Nixon advisor, political scientist Harry Jaffa, who believed America was at the tip of its next major political realignment.71
Recognizing the country was changing, and the Republican Party with it, the Nixon team in 1968 devised a different electoral strategy, one on which Nixon would build throughout his presidency. Nixon recognized that many Americans—particularly those from the generations finally enjoying peace and stability after some hard years—were scared. It was more than the weight of so much social change battering society. Nor that such vast change happened so fast. It was that the change came laced with radicalism, unpredictability, and violence. Nixon and his team saw constituencies that had long voted Democratic had grown alienated from their party and might be open to a Republican message. If he and his campaign could develop a message speaking to their concerns, Nixon believed he was poised to lead a national realignment, becoming the next FDR. In a landmark May 1968 radio address titled “New Alignment for American Unity,” Nixon set out his vision. He proclaimed that five distinct groups—traditional free-enterprise Republicans, “new liberals” like Daniel Moynihan, a “new South” that wanted economic growth, “black militants” who wanted opportunity, and a “silent center” who disliked social radicalism—were, despite their disagreements, poised to become the base for a new Republican party. They would unite under a new agenda, fighting against not only the economic big government of Frankl in Roosevelt but also against the social big government of Lyndon Johnson.72 Of these, the most important to Nixon were the silent center, the people whom he, in his acceptance speech at the Republican National Convention, called “the great majority of Americans, the forgotten Americans, the non-shouters, the non-demonstrators,” who “are not racist or sick” and “are good people, they are decent people, they work and they save and they pay their taxes and they care.”73
In his 1968 campaign, Nixon would build a new Republican theme of “law and order,” pushing back against crime, radicalism, and perceived social breakdown. He promised to return America to prosperity, stability, and strength by reinforcing traditional American values. This wasn't Nixon's idea alone, but the theme of most American politics in the unsteady air of 1968. As political reporter Theodore White wrote:
Wherever candidates paused to speak, wherever people gathered to listen, there could be no doubt in any bystander's mind that law-and-order was indeed a legitimate issue. The two surest applause lines in any candidate's speech were always his calls for “law-and-order” at home and “peace” in Vietnam. This is what the American people—poor and rich, white and black—wanted to hear.74
Nixon left the Deep South to Alabama governor George Wallace, who was running a third-party segregationist campaign. Nixon instead concentrated his attention on the states of the Upper South, which had already proved more willing since the 1950s to consider voting Republican. Eisenhower won several Upper South states in 1952 and most of the region in 1956.75 While losing the Deep South to Wallace, Nixon ultimately beat the now unpopular Hubert Humphrey in 1968 taking most states outside the Northeast.
Early in Nixon's first term, his new strategy began to solidify. In 1970, two Democrats, Ben Wattenburg and Richard Scammon, wrote a book called The Real Majority, warning Democrats they were losing a significant part of their coalition due to “The Social Issue.”76 The book became central to Nixon's thinking in the 1970 and 1972 campaigns.77 Nixon and his staff believed the Democratic Party's new social policies and cultural positions had opened a door for Republicans to peel off important constituencies. Between the expensive and ambitious experiments of the Great Society, the brash young radicals of the New Left declaring revolutions, and the stream of controversial rulings from the liberally aligned Warren Court, the Democratic Party seemed increasingly in the hands of people cheering as progress changes that other Americans believed signs of the very breakdown in stability they feared. Many Americans after 1968 were genuinely troubled that the nation was coming apart, that social disorder was growing, that the postwar boom was ending, that order and stability were under assault, that the country was becoming more dangerous, that radicals were seeking power, that powerful groups were seeking untested policies in every area with unknown consequences, and that the Democratic Party as an institution was cheering it all on as a fair cost for progress. Nixon would now pitch his appeal to the people he famously called in a 1969 speech America's “Silent Majority.” To court them, Nixon remained committed to the traditional Republican message against “big government,” favoring lower taxes and less regulation, and opposing the expansion of New Deal–style programs. He would simply add new issues centered around the rise of what he called “permissiveness.”
Nixon's new message would define the rest of his presidency. Going forward, Nixon's chief rhetorical enemies would no longer be socialists or economic centralizers but rampaging criminals, angry war protesters, and disorderly counterculture hippies. Nixon would decry permissiveness, meaning the abandonment of rigor and decline of moral duty, which he blamed for the spike in crime, the violent protests, the rise in drug use, and the spread of pornography and obscenity. He would talk about crime, values, and the breakdown of social stability. He would talk about drugs and protesters. He would talk about welfare and spending that ignored the needs of the middle class. His rhetoric would become more resolutely patriotic, voicing strong support for the military and national institutions. He would attack the wastefulness of Democratic social welfare programs and talk more about devolving power to the states. Nixon promised to push back against the social upheaval and to restore prosperity and stability though an agenda of law and order.78 In a 1973 book, Nixon advisor Patrick Buchanan explained the approach like this:
There exists a range of issues, a panoply of concerns and attitudes, where the President and socially conservative Democrats are aligned on one side, and liberal Democrats on the other…. On and on, the issues could be enumerated. The ideological fault that runs beneath the surface and down the center of the Democratic Party is as deep as any political division in America. From their respective views on the military, marijuana, school prayer, welfare, campus disorders, the “Greening of America,” George Wallace, civil disobedience, foreign aid, the United Nations—the Catholic and ethnic and Southern conservative foot soldiers who gave FDR those great landslides are in fundamental disagreement with the isolated, intellectual aristocracy and liberal elite who now set the course of their party. While the Nixon landslide was a victory over McGovern, it was also a victory of the “New American Majority” over the “New Politics,” a victory of traditional American values and beliefs over the claims of the “counter-culture,” a victory of “Middle America” over the celebrants of Woodstock Nation.
This reality makes the long-projected realignment of parties a possibility and could make Mr. Nixon the Republican FDR.79
This rhetoric was an assertion of a moral vision completely counter to that of the New Left. While it, too, claimed to want to create a more moral America, it defined morality in starkly different terms, such as patriotism, tradition, and the responsibilities of citizenship.
Nixon wasn't the only person campaigning on these themes. Seeing the same trends, Wallace, in his 1968 segregationist campaign, mixed his open racism with Nixon-like demands for law and order, attacks against hippies, disdain for elites, contempt for out-of-control judges, and populist appeals lionizing the working class. When he ran again in the 1972 Democratic primary, Wallace downplayed the open racism but continued these social themes to great success. Wallace won the Michigan primary and placed well with more than 20 percent of the vote in states like Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Indiana, and Maryland, before a would-be-assassin put him in a wheelchair for life, ending his campaign. (Nor was it the first time Wallace had done well among Northern Democrats, having won about a third of the vote in the 1964 Democratic primaries in Wisconsin, Indiana, and Maryland.)80 Nixon's campaign explicitly hoped Wallace might serve as a waystation for unhappy Democratic voters concerned about the Social Issue. They hoped these voters might, over time, turn to a Republican Party that echoed similar themes but without the overt racism of Wallace's segregationist brand.81
Nixon's law and order agenda remains highly controversial under the name that came to define it, the Southern Strategy. It's a somewhat misleading label because, while cracking the Democratic Solid South was the great prize, Nixon's goal was just as much to win working-class and rural Democrats in Northern cities and suburbs as in the South. The idea of a Southern strategy was controversial at the highest realms of Nixon's Republican Party at the time.82 Everyone understood that a significant number of Southern voters in 1968 were angry about federal intervention in civil rights—not just the dismantling of official segregation in the South, but also newer issues like school busing to end school segregation. The issues of social breakdown, national turmoil, permissiveness, and backlash were thus intricately intertwined. For some voters, issues like enforced integration, school busing, urban riots, and radical movements were in fact parts of what they perceived as social breakdown. When Republicans campaigned on restoring law and order, opposing radicalism, reducing spending on Great Society social programs, and pushing back against permissiveness, some voters associated those themes with policies like school busing, integration, civil rights protests, and the urban riots.
Nixon never campaigned directly on racist themes—quite the contrary, he insisted in public that he continued to support expanding civil rights. His administration took some positive actions to advance civil rights, including defending racial quotas in the Philadelphia Plan, creating minority small business programs, and expanding the power of the EEOC,83 and Nixon strongly championed policies to encourage African American small business—“black capitalism,” as he called it—even though he knew it wouldn't help him or his party, because he genuinely believed in it.84 At the same time, Nixon's administration dragged its feet on school desegregation, fired HEW's Leon Panetta when facing strong Southern opposition to Panetta's efforts to desegregate schools, and sought to appoint a Supreme Court nominee later exposed to have a segregationist past.85 After 1968, moreover, Nixon was unwilling to invest much time on civil rights, particularly after his bitter disappointment in 1960 when he failed to win more than thirty percent of the African American vote against Kennedy despite what he saw as his clearly superior civil rights record.86 Nixon judged the African American vote lost forever to the Democrats, given the mixture of Democratic economic policies and New Left civil rights activism.87 He was also pessimistic about his own generation's ability to help solve it at all.88 Most important, campaign operatives knowing the dark beliefs lurking within some voters' hearts also cynically sought to exploit the backlash against civil rights for votes.89 Kevin Philipps, in the belief that politics mainly turned on “who hates who,” openly promoted the idea that African American support for Democrats would benefit Republicans as white Southern voters angry about desegregation drifted toward the Republicans in response, without regard to policy.90
Americans have fiercely debated ever since the extent to which voters responded to Nixon's law and order strategy due to the issues it directly raised, or due to racist sentiment. It remains a subject of great partisan and academic debate.91 While the facts aren't in much dispute, the narrative and interpretations one finds within them greatly depend on how you weigh those facts, the moral standards you expect from people living then, whether you choose to accept at face value what people said about their intentions, and what you suspect lurked unsaid in millions of people's hearts. Whether people were responding to social breakdown, rising crime, worries about the moral values of a changing country, backlash, or whether those were all just related aspects of the same thing, is a question on which our generation, still immersed in our era's partisan loyalties, will likely never reach agreement. Regardless of the narrative you accept, however, it's impossible to say Nixon's Social Issue actually changed his party ideologically. Moreover, whatever weight you assign these issues in your narrative, they all ultimately flow from something else looming over America—the national shift toward the moral politics of an awakening.
Nixon's Social Issue ultimately didn't change the core ideology of the Republican Party any more than the Great Society changed the ideological foundation of the Democrats. The Republican Party before Nixon united around an ideology fighting New Deal big government. After Nixon, the Republicans were still organized around fighting the same “big government.” What Nixon's new approach had done, just like the Democrats' Great Society had done, was adapt the party's agenda drawing on the political language of morality—in the Republicans' case, values like fairness, patriotism, and guardianship. Nixon's Republicans thereby added a second agenda of social issues to their existing economic causes like taxes and regulation, just as Johnson's Democrats had added a second moral agenda to their economic and labor agenda. Johnson, in his Great Society, had launched a new moralistic platform for the Democrats. Nixon then proposed a moralistic platform of counter-reforms to fight what Great Society Democrats had sought to do.
America's shift toward moral politics in the 1960s and 1970s still had profound effects. As Americans grappled with new issues in a changing country, and as each party emphasized new issues and policies, the principles and values that spoke to different demographics changed over time. It was a process that played out over a generation or more, driven less by people changing their own views than by younger generations forming different allegiances than their elders, which over time caused national demographic changes as one cohort replaced another.92 Nor is it a surprise that people might prioritize different principles and values in light of changing issues. It's hardly a surprise, for example, that people looking for federal protection from institutional discrimination would, over time, gravitate toward the party ideologically committed to social changes that benefit the least well off. Neither is it surprising that people unhappy with federal interventions might over time move toward a party whose ideology was wary of active government interventions on principle. These things happened not because America's leaders changed their parties' ideologies, but because they left them intact in the midst of such a major shift in the nation's priorities. It wasn't the parties that changed, but America.
Nixon's Social Issue was ultimately a mirror of Johnson's Great Society. As an awakening spirit swept across the country, America took new interest in morality, reform, and spiritual questions. Each party responded, employing their existing ideologies to these new moral concerns, developing new moral agendas to add to their existing economic ones. As America moralized its politics and new issues came to the fore, each party focused on new issues and concerns. Democrats leveraged New Deal liberalism to create a reform agenda to create a more moral America. Republicans leveraged conservatism to do the same, just emphasizing a different and clashing set of moral values, like patriotism, respect for authority, and tradition.93 There was no sharp break, much less a realignment. Republicans and Democrats both simply took their existing ideologies and unleashed them on questions of culture, morality, and what sort of nation they wanted America to become. The Democrats extended New Deal liberalism to create social New Deal liberalism. The Republicans went from opposing economic “big government” to also opposing social “big government.” In embracing the Social Issue, Nixon was just responding to the effects of an awakening. Nor did it stop there.
THE AWAKENING OF THE EVANGELICAL RIGHT
When Nixon adjusted the Republican Party's message and agenda toward themes of morality, he unwittingly welcomed another new movement into his party. While America was paying attention to the hippies of the counterculture, a second spiritual movement was quietly building under the surface. Every past awakening has sparked a revival of religious passion among American Protestants. These revivals see the sudden growth of more enthusiastic denominations and the decline of more establishment churches, the growth in a Christian faith community that intermingles worship with entertainment and community, and most importantly the influx of committed Christians in the public arena committed to a new agenda of morality and reform. This awakening was no exception. Along with the counterculture that grew out of the 1960s and 1970s, America's Fourth Great Awakening also birthed the evangelical movement, which gave rise to the “Religious Right.”
Throughout the 1930s and 1940s, as national religious enthusiasm burned out at the end of the Third Awakening, the fundamentalist movement that struggled under the shadow of the Social Gospel retreated from public view. This was the countertradition of Billy Sunday and The Fundamentals, which rejected social reformist Christianity, socialism, secularism, and modernism, while strongly defending the doctrine of biblical inerrancy—the belief that the Bible is the divine word of God without error.94 After the Scopes Monkey Trial in 1925 caused national ridicule and backlash, the fundamentalists retreated from the hurly-burly of politics to live according to a stricter interpretation of biblical law. Then a group of dissidents broke off to form their own faith community, which would build on fundamentalist teachings while believing it also important for Christians to engage with the culture and other denominations and faiths.95 They took on the name “evangelicals,” which before was a term used interchangeably within fundamentalism.
During the 1950s and 1960s, this evangelical community grew in visibility under pastor Billy Graham. While Graham maintained a mainly fundamentalist theology, he built a national constituency for his Christian message that crossed denomination and tradition through a series of revivals he called crusades. Without abandoning his strict biblical message, Graham engaged directly with the culture to minister to fellow Christians and convert minds. Graham became a national celebrity, ministering to and becoming close friends with presidents of both parties, such as Eisenhower, Johnson, and Nixon. Graham's brand of evangelicalism, however, still stayed out of direct politics.96 Evangelical leaders might weigh in on weighty public matters from time to time, but they didn't advocate for laws, politicians, or political parties.
Then, in 1976, evangelical Christians poured into the public square to elect fellow-evangelical Jimmy Carter president.97 The rest of America had no idea what to make of it. Out of nowhere, evangelicals who long believed it improper for Christians to muck about in Caesar's realm had jumped forth to exercise their collective muscle for a political cause. Newsweek magazine famously ran a cover story dubbing 1976 the “Year of the Evangelical.”98 After the election, these newly visible evangelicals didn't go away. Over the next few years, they threw themselves into political causes as if making up for decades of lost time. They took up opposition to legalized abortion, the defense of prayer in schools, and the maintenance of tax exemptions for religious organizations. They worried about the decline of the traditional two-parent family, the spread of the sexual revolution, the mainstreaming of pornography, and the secularization of public institutions. In 1979, popular preacher and televangelist Jerry Falwell founded a national organization to coordinate the political action of evangelicals, called the Moral Majority, and in 1980, soured on Carter due to his failure to fight for their moral causes, these evangelicals threw their full weight behind Ronald Reagan.99 A new powerful force had entered American politics and the Republican Party.
It's hard to remember that as recently as 1970, evangelical Christians played almost no visible role in American political debate. Neither political party courted evangelical Christians, or even considered them an important voting bloc. Organizations like the Moral Majority, the Christian Coalition, the Family Research Council, and Focus on the Family hadn't yet been formed. The pro-life movement didn't yet exist. In fact, many evangelical Christians were ambivalent about or even supported legalized abortion—people perceived it a Catholic issue.100 No one considered evangelical Protestantism to be either left or right, nor did they believe evangelical belief had anything to do with political liberalism or conservatism. Yet, by 1980, when the Moral Majority helped push Ronald Reagan into the presidency, the “New Christian Right” had suddenly become among the most important voting blocs in America, and its goals had become important signifiers of conservative politics.
This alliance between these newly active evangelicals and the Republican Party was hardly inevitable. The midcentury religious revival had flourished among many demographics that were traditionally Democratic. It was also in ways deeply populist, promoting issues and causes that America's national elite dismissed, like traditional family structures, space for religious teachings in the public square, pro-life policies, and traditional sexual morality. Upon entering politics, evangelicals initially supported Democrats and the evangelical Jimmy Carter. It's possible to imagine a universe in which evangelicals became a powerful constituency of moralistic and populist Democrats, sparring alongside the counterculture like fundamentalism had alongside the Social Gospel. By moralizing the Republican Party, however, Nixon had opened a door. When Nixon translated the Republican Party's anti-big-government agenda into one opposing the social “big government” of the New Left and the Great Society, he created a new moral language that intersected with the priorities of the religious revival. Nixon's Social Issue implied the values and concerns of the religious revival were a form of national virtue—not Burke's virtue that had strongly influenced the Republicans during the New Deal's early days, but the virtue of national reform. When evangelicals became disappointed with Carter, an influential group of Republican political activists, including Richard Viguerie, Howard Phillips, and Paul Weyrich, began building the infrastructure to court them. In 1978, they built one of the first “Christian Right” organizations, the Christian Voice, and in 1979 they convinced Jerry Falwell to start the Moral Majority. In 1980, evangelicals shifted their support to Reagan.101 They never looked back.
The year of the evangelical, however, hadn't actually come out of nowhere. While America stood mesmerized by the counterculture awakening during the 1960s and 1970s, an evangelical Christian revival had also been growing quietly as its counterpart.102 In the middle of the 1970s, about when its most enthusiastic members reached adulthood, it finally burst into public view. This revival looked a lot like the religious revivals of prior awakenings. New interest bloomed across America for enthusiastic Christian religion. Evangelical Protestants united under a cross-denominational identity. They formed new organizations to serve this new community, like Christian publishers and service organizations—by the mid-1990s America had over 2,500 Christian bookstores.103 They created new forms of worship, like megachurches, televangelism, and Christian rock music.104 They took new interest in religion in their daily lives, becoming involved in things like Bible studies and mission trips. American evangelicals built an entire evangelical subculture, with its own businesses, music, well-known stars, movies, music, book series, and community connecting them together across America.105 New and more enthusiastic denominations boomed, like the Charismatic movement.106 Most important, as in every awakening, this community plunged into America's political and cultural debates on a mission of national moral reform. The only key difference between this revival and previous ones was theological. The evangelical revival wasn't founded on the Social Gospel or the millennial ideas of the nineteenth century, but rather on ideas that originated with fundamentalism, like biblical inerrancy.107
As the boomers grew into full adulthood, this evangelical movement grew in power. After the first wave of evangelical political organizations, such as the Moral Majority, faded during the 1980s, a new generation of even more powerful organizations rose to take their place, including the Christian Coalition, Family Research Council, and Focus on the Family.108 With their growing influence, openly evangelical candidates with platforms trumpeting their faith—people like Mike Pence or Mike Huckabee—became commonplace. In 1988, a genuine evangelical minister, Pat Robertson, even made a credible run for the Republican nomination for president, winning the Iowa caucuses.109 By the early 2000s, evangelicals had become so influential within the Republican Party that their issues had graduated from factional ones to core party positions. Just as the Democrats had allowed an awakening movement to bring new moral issues into their party, so had the Republicans.
WHY A FOURTH AWAKENING
The cultural uprising of the 1960s and 1970s is strangely familiar. It exploded out of nowhere just as a new generation came of age. It rejected the status quo as immoral and wanting. It created new interest in spiritualism and sparked new spiritual movements. It gave birth to new social reform movements. It supercharged rowdy protests movements that sought to purify society and create a new order that was more just and moral. It dismissed worries about stability and order. It birthed new political issues based not around interests over which people might compromise but in stark clashes of morality. It celebrated ripping down imperfect and defective features of society to replace them with a more moral and just order. Most important, it bathed society in a new spirit of moral reform that replaced a largely pragmatic political era with a new one obsessed over moral questions. The era, in other words, looks exactly like the start of a great awakening.
America's Fourth Great Awakening, like every awakening, has been disruptive to politics. Awakenings infuse every debate with moral urgency and charge the entire society with the electric energy of possibility and change. They can inspire Americans to do amazing and difficult things prior generations believed impossible. They also, however, encourage citizens to take on divisive issues that tear at society's most painful spots. Compromise becomes difficult when those with whom we agree aren't simply allies but the righteous and those with whom we disagree aren't simply opponents but evil. Crusading zeal brought many of America's most important reforms, but it also helped break the Whigs and drove the nation into a civil war. Most of the common complaints about how American politics has become more angry, polarized, and unstable in some way trace back to the beginning of this awakening.
What has made this awakening particularly disruptive is it also hurled two competing moral visions into each other, igniting the clash we call the culture war. Two independent awakening movements, the counterculture and the religious revival, each took up its own brawling crusade for reform. One threw itself into a vast project of moral reform to tear down the postwar social order, which it thought oppressive. Its counterpart threw itself into a counterproject of moral reform to shore up those same institutions, which it thought upheld the nation's virtue. Each rival moral movement attached itself like a passenger to the party it believed best represented its interests, although neither was a perfect fit. The counterculture was based in progressive ideas, but it was also uneasy with the party's Old Left populists and, given its belief in self-expression and freedom from authority, was often comfortable with liberty. Evangelical reformers made uneasy allies with a liberty faction they sometimes saw as libertines but were comfortable with populism in its resentment of cultural elites. As these rival movements gradually gained in power, their feud—ancillary to and sometimes even clashing with the core New Deal debate—seeped everywhere into the culture and even into people's personal lives.
As the awakening spirit spread and the parties applied their ideologies to new issues, the sorts of people who responded to those ideologies and agendas also changed. In the 1940s and 1950s, the sorts of people attracted to populist and progressive arguments included a lot of working-class Americans and Americans across the Solid South. Then young progressives from the New Left flooded into the party, many from wealthy, educated, and professional backgrounds. Republicans in the 1940s and 1950s included a lot of wealthy and educated professionals. Then working- and middle-class Democrats from Nixon's Silent Majority and young evangelicals responding to new Republican positions on moral virtue flooded into the party. People who in one era might have grown up to become populists began thinking instead of virtue. People who in one era might have grown up to be liberty conservatives instead became progressives. As these issues played out over the 1970s and 1980s, the sorts of people we assumed to be Democrats or Republicans gradually changed—and not because the parties changed their ideologies or because the older generation abandoned prior allegiances. Younger voters focused on different issues and formed different attachments.
Weak and anachronistic parties can linger on for years going through the motions until some disruption shakes American politics hard enough for them to collapse. The Fourth Great Awakening is potentially that sort of disruption. America now has two crusading reform movements embedded in its parties, committed to tearing each other down. They seek to push and pull people across the normal New Deal political divides around a second set of issues that sometimes sits uneasily within the baseline New Deal debate. A political culture once pragmatic and interested in making deals is now almost completely a moralistic one, inspired to save the world, impose justice, and vanquish opponents seen as corrupt and evil. As it overwhelms the Fifth Party System, Americans become more eager to rip institutions down, charge into the fray, and tear each other apart in the name of the greater good.
The Fourth Great Awakening, like every awakening, was a revolution for America. It plunged the nation into significant projects of moral revival, social justice, and national reform. The civil rights revolution, the pro-life movement, the sexual revolution, the environmental movement, the late twentieth-century religious revival, the war on poverty, and nearly every other major social revolution over the last few decades is in some way connected to the Fourth Awakening. Many of these revolutions, just like those of prior awakenings, will without doubt leave a legacy of important and positive reforms that make America a better nation—one that is indeed more just, more fair, and more moral. Just as with prior awakenings, the Fourth Awakening has also destabilized American politics. It has made our disputes angrier, more zero-sum, and more unresolvable. It shifted the nation's attention from the sorts of pragmatic questions around which we can compromise to solve and toward the sorts of moral questions that we can only win or lose. It destabilized our party coalitions, not only by changing their demographic makeup but also by moving people into both parties who were not truly loyal to the ideology they adopted. It polarized not only our political debate but the entire culture, as its zealous uncompromising values seep slowly into everything.
That's why so much changed in America during the 1960s and 1970s. It's why the nation embarked on so many vital crusades for national reform. It's why our parties began to talk about new issues, attract different sorts of people, and often speak in different voices. It's why there was a political revolution even though our parties ideologically remained fundamentally the same. America began its Fourth Awakening, and it's still ongoing now. While this awakening significantly altered our parties' agendas and priorities, it also left them, for now, philosophically intact. That doesn't mean, however, that the Fourth Awakening wasn't also ultimately a destabilizing influence on our politics. Like every awakening in America's history, the Fourth Awakening also planted seeds that, as they grow, can crack the very foundations on which our party system stands.