I think it’s about time we voted for senators with breasts. After all we’ve been voting for boobs long enough.
—Claire Sargent, Arizona Senate
IN LESS THAN TWO DECADES, CLOUDS OF DISCONTENT, SPAWNED BY a series of unanticipated events, converged. A type of geomagnetic storm sprang up, causing fluctuations in the political field that affected our public discourse and overwhelmed our politics. Both political parties would be dislodged from their historic foundations. The voter base of each would be profoundly changed. The climate of bipartisanship and consensus that had anchored American politics since the Civil War would be shattered, radically altering the political landscape. What followed has been a quarter century of political polarization, which continues to this day.
The first storms appeared in the South as the struggle for civil rights moved from the courts to the streets. Television carried pictures that transported the evils of segregation from small Southern towns into living rooms and challenged consciences across America. The storm then moved north, igniting riots in the inner cities of Detroit and New York. In the Watts section of Los Angeles, a single incident between white cops and a black man triggered the largest race riot in American history. In 1968 Martin Luther King Jr. and senator Robert F. Kennedy were assassinated. Vietnam War protests erupted on college campuses, revealing a youth counterculture that had Grandma fleeing to the basement in horror.
Conservative supporters of Arizona senator Barry Goldwater wrenched control of the Republican Party from GOP moderates, only to give it back when Goldwater lost the 1964 presidential election in a landslide. Alabama’s segregationist governor George Wallace left the Democratic Party, making it easier for white Southern voters to abandon their lifelong commitment to the party that had dominated the South since the Civil War.
America lost her first foreign war, while at home the Supreme Court struck down state laws banning abortion. The exodus of Southern whites from the Democratic Party intensified as Congress and the federal courts overturned Jim Crow laws. A break-in at the headquarters of the Democratic National Committee led to a scandal that came to be known by a single word: Watergate. Richard Nixon became the first president to resign from office. A farmer from Georgia was elected president, and replaced four years later by an actor from California.
The women’s movement emerged as a political force. The importing of foreign oil became a major economic, as well as a political, issue. Rachel Carson’s book Silent Spring spawned an environmental movement that would clash with corporate America, while inflation in the 1970s eroded wages and profits. The Cold War between the United States and the Soviet Union continued, while China emerged as a serious economic and political power. A fragile peace in the Middle East was brokered by the United States, as a nascent and dangerous Islamic fundamentalism began to build.
The size of the federal government grew under both Democratic and Republican presidents. These new agencies and departments created a substantial increase in government rules and regulations, impacting citizens and businesses alike. The growth of government produced cadres of political activists who would descend on Washington, demanding (and getting) access to policy makers. Activists working for change were countered by an increase in the number of people who worked to protect the status quo. The result was a tenfold increase in the number of lobbyists and lawyers. Campaign donations became the means of access, as campaign costs skyrocketed. The federal budget, which would grow to more than $1 trillion by the end of the twentieth century, brought even more players to Washington. They sought jobs, government contracts, and a share of the fiscal pie.
American culture had dramatically changed. The 1950s Ozzie & Harriet and Leave It to Beaver TV image of America gave way to the 1960s “Summer of Love.” Elvis faded (temporarily), the Beatles were in, beer drinking gave way to LSD tripping, and the sexual revolution supplanted submarine race watching at the drive-in. Condoms were out, the birth control pill in. Summer camp took on a whole new meaning at Max Yasgur’s Woodstock farm in upstate New York. Valium helped some people in the seventies “make it through the night.”
Well-behaved black students on college campuses suddenly grew Afros, wore leather coats, and thrust clenched fists into the air. Nice, well-scrubbed white students grew their hair long, burned their bras, and took to the streets to protest the war in Vietnam. In rural America, guys in pickups played Sergeant Barry Sadler singing “Fighting soldiers from the sky, fearless men who jump and die. These are men of the Green Berets.” In VW campers from Ann Arbor to Harvard Square, Country Joe and the Fish could be heard singing “Be the first one on your block to have your boy come home in a box.”
Across America, the two-fingered peace sign was answered with a one-finger response. Everyone wanted power: black power, white power, brown power, red power, women’s power. Meanwhile most folks were just trying to pay the power bill.
Helicopters played a big role in the 1970s and early ’80s. One flew an American president away from the White House in disgrace. Another flew an American ambassador off an embassy roof in Saigon, fleeing for his life. Iranians seized the U.S. embassy in Tehran, taking Americans hostage; U.S. military helicopters collided and burned in the Iranian desert trying to free them. Movie lines were long, but not as long as gas lines. Blockbuster movies like Jaws and The Exorcist reflected the fearful public mood. Eight percent inflation helped to propel a new president to office, while nearly 14 percent inflation helped drive him out four years later. In 1980 a deadly virus began to infect the gay community.
The political storms from 1964 to 1980 upended much of our political and cultural past. For the next twenty-five years, America’s dominant political parties agreed on less and fought more. Like aging boxers past their prime, the parties kept pulverizing each other, seemingly oblivious to the pain they caused to themselves and to the country. Congressional bipartisanship and consensus broke down. It was replaced by a growing climate of polarization that threatened America with a civil Cold War.
No single event in the twentieth century changed the Democratic Party more than the civil rights movement. The dramatic shift occurred in 1960 when an overwhelming number of black voters—many loyal to the Republicans since Abraham Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation a century earlier—moved their allegiance to the Democrats. After the Kennedy assassination, President Lyndon Johnson sealed that allegiance by signing the Voting Rights Act, the Fair Housing Act, and the 1965 Civil Rights Act.
Johnson recognized the consequences of the civil rights bills by telling an aide he was signing away the South to the Republican Party. With his signature came the beginning of the end of the coalition that had made Democrats the dominant political party in America since 1932. Trickles of Southern Republicans were elected to Congress. By the 1970s, the trickle became a stream, and by the 1980s, the floodgates had opened.
To underscore how profound the political change was in the South after 1965, consider this: in 1960 JFK received 50 percent of the Southern white vote. By 1968 the white vote for Hubert Humphrey had shrunk to 10 percent. In 1960 there was not a single Republican senator in the thirteen states of the Old Confederacy. By 2007 only five Democrats remained in the Senate from the same thirteen states. The Democrats’ former stronghold had become the Republicans’ new base.
Politics in the South were changing even before the sweeping civil rights laws. A region that had been economically dependent on agriculture increasingly became more attractive to companies seeking cheaper, nonunion labor. The year 1965 marked the first year that more American workers wore white collars than blue collars. White-collar workers who followed companies south were mostly conservative in their politics and culture. The South provided a heritage and a history that reflected their values and viewpoints. Southerners attended church more often than citizens in other parts of the country and the churches they attended were mostly conservative and Protestant.
Strong support for the military has a long tradition in the South, going back to the Civil War. There is hardly a town in Dixie without a war memorial to a Confederate hero and a monument to fallen soldiers in every subsequent American war. Southern congressional Democrats—whose longevity in office assured them powerful positions on the Armed Services Committees—made the South home to more military bases and personnel than any other region of the country. As a result, the military became a dominant economic force in the region. But that mattered less to Southern white voters than the unraveling of American traditions embodied in the growing number of Vietnam War protesters and their counterculture movement. Since Democrats were “in charge,” they were blamed.
Just as the civil rights crisis appeared to recede after sweeping national legislation striking down Jim Crow laws was enacted, America’s involvement in Vietnam escalated. As the number of American “advisers” grew, so, too, did the antiwar movement. The South, on a per capita basis, sent more soldiers to Vietnam than any other region of the country. As a result, the South would experience the largest share of casualties.
Television, which brought pictures of Southern segregation into millions of homes, was now doing the same with antiwar protests. TV coverage of racist Alabama sheriff Bull Connor, with his fire hoses and dogs, inflamed non-Southerners. TV coverage of hippies burning the American flag and marching on the Pentagon evoked a similar reaction in the South. “America: Love It or Leave It” became the slogan of the traditional preservationists. “America: Save It or Screw It” responded the hippies and yippies.
As unacceptable as it was to oppose the war, to most Southerners the protesters’ assault on America was more than unpatriotic—it was ungodly. Their counterculture lifestyle profoundly and deeply offended citizens who affectionately referred to their region as America’s “Bible Belt.” The dominant churches in the South were Baptist and Methodist, the most conservative of the Protestant denominations, at least in that region. There were conservative Roman Catholic strongholds in Louisiana and among Latinos in Texas and Florida. Some pockets of Jews could be found in the few progressive cities of the South, like Charleston, South Carolina, and Atlanta. But it was conservative Protestants who dominated the cultural agenda, and increasingly the political agenda.
Disgust with the antiwar movement wasn’t limited to the South. In the vast ethnic blue-collar enclaves of the Midwest and Northeast, the counterculture lifestyle was just as unacceptable. Blue-collar workers, many still living in urban areas and who mostly voted for Democrats, would see their sons go off to war, while most children of suburban white-collar workers would go off to college. In the 1960s, the massive baby boom generation had swelled enrollment in the nation’s colleges and universities. As students, they were exempt from the draft until graduation. Despite their college deferments, thousands of suburban kids did, in fact, go to war, but the perceived disparity caused significant resentment among blue-collar families.
As the civil rights battles of the 1960s escalated in the South, more blacks migrated to Northern cities looking for work. The migration threatened blue-collar workers who feared competition for jobs and an increase in crime in their neighborhoods. Race riots in Detroit and New York, coupled with court-ordered school busing in the Northeast and Midwest, heightened fears of a dangerous breakdown of law and order.
For Democrats, all of these storms came to a head in 1968. The antiwar movement was growing and protests were spreading. In a March 1968 nationally televised address from the White House, Lyndon Johnson announced that he would not seek another term as president. The relatively peaceful and optimistic mood of the fifties and early sixties had given way to anger over the Vietnam War. The counterculture movement associated with the antiwar demonstrations provoked outrage and disgust in older Americans. Both the antiwar and counterculture movements would increasingly become associated with the Democratic Party. (This was a real culture war, not the culture war fabricated by polarizers two decades later.)
Doubts about the Democrats grew among voters in the sixties and seventies. Opposition to the Vietnam War raised questions about Democrats’ patriotism and commitment to national security. The party’s apparent indifference to, or involvement in, campus protests and street demonstrations, coupled with race riots and (as conservatives charged) liberal judges who gave light sentences or probation to violent criminals, prompted critics to suggest the Democrats were soft on crime. The support of labor unions, minority groups, and the growing feminist and environmental movements gave Republicans an opening to label Democrats as the party of special interests. All of these charges would haunt Democrats for decades.
The assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. caused radicals in the black community to challenge his tactics of nonviolence. The Black Panthers, who rejected passive protests and encouraged confrontation, were among the most vocal of the extremist groups. King’s death was followed within months by the assassination of Senator Robert F. Kennedy, who sought the Democratic presidential nomination on an antiwar platform. With the deaths of their heroes, the hope that burned within many of the “love generation” turned to despair and then anger. Protests became increasingly violent and TV caught it all.