Before the Storm (2 page)

Go back to 1952. When the first Republican President in twenty years was elected, liberals feared Dwight D. Eisenhower would try to roll back the Democratic achievements of the New Deal—minimum wage and agricultural price supports; the Tennessee Valley Authority, that massive complex of government-built dams that brought electricity to entire swatches of the Southeast that had never seen it before; Social Security; and many, many more. Instead, the Republican President further institutionalized and expanded such programs. He created the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare, championed low-income housing, chartered the federal interstate system, proclaimed Social Security as much an American institution as the free enterprise system—and extended its reach more than Roosevelt or Truman ever had. Black Americans' legal status as second-class citizens was beginning to be dismantled; it seemed only logical to assume that the racial attitudes that undergirded segregation would also wither once the general prosperity, and increased help from Washington, lifted white Southerners from their status as economic pariahs. Meanwhile,
Senate Majority Leader Lyndon Johnson and the President were tripping over each other to declare their comity over matters of national defense. And under their shared watch another broad consensus formed: that the Soviet Union might be evil, but nothing “so dangerous to the United States that we can afford to burn up the world over it,” as Walter Lippmann put it. America's history of ideological disputation seemed to be over. The nation had settled into a governing equilibrium. And commentators began speaking of the American “consensus.” There was no alternative. New complexities brought new needs; government had to change—grow—to respond to them. “To meet the needs of the people,” as
The Atlantic Monthly
neatly summarized the consensus's tenets, “the federal government must contribute to a solution of the manifold problems of modern urban life—housing, education, welfare, mass transportation, health, and civil rights—and it must promote policies that stimulate a healthy economy.”

This was not ideology. This was
reality.
One did not argue with people who denied reality. Which was why the pundit Stewart Alsop wrote that conservatism was “not really a coherent, rational alternative at all—it is hardly more than an angry cry of protest against things as they are”; and why the Columbia University historian Richard Hofstadter joked that he welcomed the Goldwater-for-President movement when it sprang up because it was providing conservatives “a kind of vocational therapy, without which they might have to be committed.”

 

 

Men like this did not detect the ground shifting beneath their feet. They didn't notice that year by year, crisis by crisis, America was slowly becoming more divided than it was united.

In 1961 John F. Kennedy scaled back an exile invasion of Cuba to overthrow Fidel Castro. Castro stood his ground. The next year the Soviets tried to make Cuba a base for nuclear missiles trained on North America. Millions of Americans were thus converted to the right-wing doctrine that any weakness in the face of the Soviets was an accommodation with evil, bringing the Communists one step closer to their goal of world domination. On the other hand, millions were converted to the left-wing position that the Soviets must be met halfway lest the world court Armageddon.

Blacks staged sit-ins at Southern lunch counters, rode through Dixie on buses alongside whites in defiance of local laws and in accordance with the rulings of the United States Supreme Court, marched through the streets of Southern cities in ever-escalating confrontation with the customs and codes of segregation. Millions thrilled to the moral transcendence of these heroic warriors for freedom. Millions of others decided that rabble-rousers—perhaps
Communist dupes—were spitting on law and order, overturning tradition, and might not stop until they had forced their way into their own Northern white neighborhoods.

Experts stepped forward to manage and coordinate people's problems; more and more people decided they wanted to be left alone. Union power was turning a proletariat into a middle class—and union members began wondering how much of their dues went to subsidize civil rights groups that were eager to break up their neighborhood school districts. Millions stirred to Lyndon Johnson's visions of governmental expertise distributing the bounty of an abundant society to those who had been left behind. But millions also looked at the bottom line on their tax returns and wondered why these people couldn't help themselves. They wondered why, when they tried to impress on government what they considered
their
interests, they were met with indifference, or incompetence, or were swallowed inside a bureaucratic maze—or were called extremists and reactionaries, even borderline mental cases. City councils proudly passed laws outlawing the refusal to sell property to people on the basis of their race. And in places as diverse as Seattle, Berkeley, Phoenix, Detroit, and Akron, citizens used any direct democratic means at their disposal to strike them from the books. They were slowly disproving the Establishment cliché that an increasingly complex, urban society would necessitate politicians committed to finding solutions for the manifold problems of modern urban life. The cliché was based on a demographic error anyway, which few noticed: perhaps half the people the U.S. Census Bureau classed as “urban” lived in the suburbs. And suburbanites would demand a different kind of politician.

If the Restons and the Lippmanns and the James MacGregor Burnses had tugged at such loose threads, they would have seen another entire, unwelcome story revealed beneath the upholstery. America was becoming a different place from the one they thought they knew. The best measure of a politician's electoral success was becoming not how successfully he could broker people's desires, but how well he could tap their fears.

This is a book, also, about how that story began.

 

 

Scratch a conservative today—a think-tank bookworm at Washington's Heritage Foundation or Milwaukee's Bradley Foundation (the people whose studies and position papers blazed the trails for ending welfare as we know it, for the school voucher movement, for the discussion over privatizing Social Security) ; a door-knocking church lady pressing pamphlets into her neighbors' palms about partial-birth abortion; the owner of a small or large business sitting across the table from a lobbyist plotting strategy on how to decimate corporate
tax rates; an organizer of a training center for aspiring conservative activists or journalists; Republican precinct workers, fund-raisers, county chairs, state chairs, presidential candidates, congressmen, senators, even a Supreme Court justice—and the story comes out. How it all began for them: in the Goldwater campaign.

It was something more than just finding ideological soul mates. It was learning how to
act
: how letters got written, how doors got knocked on, how co-workers could be won over on the coffee break, how to print a bumper sticker and how to pry one off with a razor blade; how to put together a network whose force exceeded the sum of its parts by orders of magnitude; how to talk to a reporter, how to picket, and how, if need be, to infiltrate—how to make the anger boiling inside you ennobling, productive,
powerful,
instead of embittering. How to feel bigger than yourself. It was something beyond the week, the year, the campaign, even the decade; it was a cause. You lost in 1964. But something
remained
after 1964: a movement. An
army.
An army that could lose a battle, suck it up, regroup, then live to fight a thousand battles more.
Did You Ever See a Dream Walking?
—that was how William F. Buckley entitled an anthology of conservative writings in 1970. Later that year, his brother won a Senate seat from New York with the backing of the state's Conservative Party. The dream was walking. Maybe it wasn't even just an army. Maybe it was a moral majority.

America would remember the sixties as a decade of the left. It must be remembered instead as a decade when the polarization began. “We must assume that the conservative revival is
the
youth movement of the '60s,” Murray Kempton wrote in 1961, in words that would sound laughable five years later. Forty years later, these are words that are, at the very least, arguable.

 

A new academic discipline formed in the early sixties that perfectly captured the liberal establishment's mood: “futurism.” In the presidential year of 1964, the movement even spun off a parlor game, as the sociologist Daniel Bell lamented: “The year 2000 has all the ingredients for becoming, if it has not already become, a hoola-hoop craze.” Lyndon Johnson was a prime offender. “Think of how wonderful the year 2000 will be,” he would gush on the campaign trail. “I am just hoping that my heart and stroke and cancer committee can come up with some good results that will insure that all of us can live beyond a hundred so we can participate in that glorious day when all the fruits of our labors and our imaginations today are a reality! ... I just hope the doctors hurry up and get busy and let me live that long.”

Perhaps it is a blessing that he didn't live that long. History humiliated Lyndon Johnson. It was as a young boy, he told a crowd on the steps of the
Texas State Capitol in Austin in the closing days of the 1964 campaign, that “I first learned that the government is not an enemy of the people. It is the people.” Three decades later, half of all Americans would be telling pollsters that “the federal government has become so large and powerful that it poses a threat to the rights and freedoms of ordinary citizens.” In 1964 those who rejected the dominant vision of liberalism were classed as vestiges, soon to be overwhelmed by the inexorable spread of things as they are. In the year 2000, political pros would dismiss those who held on to that same creed as “paleoliberals.” Which, along with its antonym, “neoconservative,” would once have sounded as oxymoronic as “zebra elephant.”

So it is appropriate that this story should begin with a little circle of political diehards whose every move was out of step with the times, who lived in a mental and social world presumed to have been in its death throes ever since Sinclair Lewis's
Babbitt
had driven a stake through its heart in 1922, but who managed to set the spark that lit the fire that consumed an entire ideological universe, and made the opening years of the twenty-first century as surely a conservative epoch as the era between the New Deal and the Great Society was a liberal one.

I
magine you live in a town of twenty, or fifty, or one hundred thousand souls—in Indiana, perhaps, or Illinois, or Missouri, or Tennessee—with a colonnaded red-brick city hall at its center, a Main Street running its breadth, avenues rimmed with modest bungalows and named for trees and exotic heroes and local luminaries, interrupted at intervals by high-steepled churches. On the outskirts of town are factories. It is June 1959, and, three shifts a day, they throw up great clouds of smoke, churning out vast pools of cement, cords of lumber, spools of rolled steel, machine parts of every size and description. Although no one who didn't have to would ever venture inside one of these factories, locals point to them with pride, because they are what make their little town prosper, and because all over the world foundries use machine parts inscribed with the town's name.

Imagine you are the proprietor of one of these concerns. Your father founded it; perhaps to start things up he cadged a loan from the father of the man you bank with now. Probably, by dint of their shared membership on any number of company boards and fraternal orders and community chests and church committees, the bank let it slide when your father—who had made sacrifices to expand his plant in the hopes that the town's grandchildren, too, might enjoy its fruits—was late a time or two paying off a note.

You grew up reading the adventure novels in the “Mark Tidd” series by Clarence Budington Kelland, an author prominent in the national Republican Party, and your favorite was the story in which a group of boys take over a rundown sawmill and get it to turn out a profit: “Up till then a river didn't mean anything to me but a thing to fish or swim in,” the narrator said, “but before I was many months older I discovered that rivers weren't invented just for kids to monkey with, nor yet to make a home for fish. They have business, just like anybody else, and they're valuable just like any other business, getting more valuable the more business they do.” Calvin Coolidge once said, “The man who
builds a factory builds a temple; the man who works there worships there.” You agreed. You liked Calvin Coolidge.

By the time you took over the plant, the additions you built were too expensive to finance through any of the banks in your town, which was now a small city. More and more you found yourself trudging to New York, hat in hand, for money. New York, after all, controlled over a quarter of the nation's banking reserves. Your letterhead soon bore an address in Manhattan as well as the one in your town, but it galled you what it took to get the Wall Street boys to take you seriously (you had worked much harder than any of them when you went to college with them back East).

When the union rep came by to try to sign up your men (there are hundreds, but you know most of them by name), you told the workers stories of the sacrifices your father made for their fathers; you reminded them of the times you kept everyone on the payroll when business was slack, of how you were always ready with an advance to help with the new baby or a sick mother. For fifty years they had seemed perfectly happy without a union, but when FDR signed the Wagner Act, the organizers came again, this time with a slogan: “The President wants you to join a union.” A union came.

You hated Franklin Roosevelt. In 1932 he ran on a platform of balanced budgets, less bureaucracy, and removing the federal government from competition with private enterprise. Then the New Deal threw money at everyone and everything—everyone and everything, that is, but you and your plants. You thought it was a godsend to industrialists who managed thousands of workers, instead of hundreds, and their friends on Wall Street. Roosevelt's National Recovery Administration authorized executives in every industry to regulate their own. The men he picked were inevitably from the biggest companies, no one you knew. You had no say when they set floors so high that they destroyed the only edge you had over them in accessing the market—you could no longer undercut their prices. You had no say when your taxes ballooned to pay for Roosevelt's deficits, which you knew would only bring inflation.