It soon became shorthand for those white Americans who, shaken by crime and appalled by radicalism, turned against the Democratic Party in the 60s and 70s. For Americans with an ear for historical parallels, the return of that eras phrases and images suggests that a powerful conservative backlash is headed our way.
At least, that was my thesis when I set out to write this essay. I came of age in the 80s and 90s, when the backlash against 60s liberalism still struck terror into Democratic hearts. I watched as Ronald Reagan moved the country hard to the right, and as Bill Clinton made his peace with this new political reality by assuring white America that his party would fight crime mercilessly. Seeing this years Democratic candidates crumple before Black Lives Matter and shed Clintons ideological caution as they stampeded to the left, I imagined the country must be preparing for a vast conservative reaction.
But I was wrong. The more I examined the evidence, the more I realized that the current moment looks like a mirror image of the late 60s and early 70s. The resemblances are clear, but their political significance has been turned upside down. There is a backlash against the liberalism of the Obama era. But it is louder than it is strong. Instead of turning right, the country as a whole is still moving to the left.
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Centrist Democrats believed that Reagan, for all his faults, had gotten some big things right. The Soviet Union had been evil. Taxes had been too high. Excessive regulation had squelched economic growth. The courts had been too permissive of crime. Until Democrats acknowledged these things, the centrists believed, they would neither win the presidency nor deserve to. In the late 1980s and the 1990s, an influential community of Democratic-aligned politicians, strategists, journalists, and wonks believed that critiquing liberalism from the right was morally and politically necessary.
George W. Bush wiped this community out. Partly, he did so by rooting the GOP more firmly in the SouthReagans political base had been in the Westaiding the slow-motion extinction of white southern Democrats that had begun when the party embraced civil rights. But Bush also destroyed centrist Democrats intellectually, by making it impossible for them to credibly critique liberalism from the right.
In the late 1980s and the 1990s, centrist Democrats had argued that Reagans decisions to cut the top income-tax rate from 70 percent to 50 percent and to loosen government regulation had spurred economic growth. When Bush cut the top rate to 35 percent in 2001 and further weakened regulation, however, inequality and the deficit grew, but the economy barely didand then the financial system crashed. In the late 80s and the 90s, centrist Democrats had also argued that Reagans decision to boost defense spending and aid the Afghan mujahideen had helped topple the Soviet empire. But in 2003, when Bush invaded Iraq, he sparked the greatest foreign-policy catastrophe since Vietnam.
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By the time Barack Obama defeated Hillary Clinton for the Democratic presidential nomination in 2008, in part because of her support for the Iraq War, the mood inside the party had fundamentally changed. Whereas the partys most respected thinkers had once urged Democrats to critique liberal orthodoxy, they now criticized Democrats for not defending that orthodoxy fiercely enough. The presidency of George W. Bush had made Democrats unapologetically liberal, and the presidency of Barack Obama was the most tangible result.
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But thats only half the story. Because if George W. Bushs failures pushed the Democratic Party to the left, Barack Obamas have pushed it even further. If Bush was responsible for the liberal infrastructure that helped elect Obama, Obama has now inadvertently contributed to the creation of two movementsOccupy and Black Lives Matterdedicated to the proposition that even the liberalism he espouses is not left-wing enough.
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When academics from the City University of New York went to Zuccotti Park to study the people who had taken it over, they found something striking: 40 percent of the Occupy activists had worked on the 2008 presidential campaign, mostly for Obama. Many of them had hoped that, as president, he would bring fundamental change. Now the collapse of that hope had led them to challenge Wall Street directly. Disenchantment with Obama was a driver of the Occupy movement for many of the young people who participated, noted the CUNY researchers. In his book on the movement, Occupy Nation, the Columbia University sociologist Todd Gitlin quotes Jeremy Varon, a close observer of Occupy who teaches at the New School for Social Research, as saying, This is the Obama generation declaring their independence from his administration. We thought his voice was ours. Now we know we have to speak for ourselves.
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This is even true among Republican Millennials. The press often depicts American politics as a battle pitting ever more liberal Democrats against ever more conservative Republicans. Among the young, however, thats inaccurate. Young Democrats may be more liberal than their elders, but so are young Republicans. According to Pew, a clear majority of young Republicans say immigrants strengthen America, half say corporate profits are too high, and almost half say stricter environmental laws are worth the costanswers that sharply distinguish them from older members of the GOP. Young Republicans are more likely to favor legalizing marijuana than the oldest Democrats, and almost as likely to support gay marriage. Asked how they categorize themselves ideologically, more than two-thirds of Republican Millennials call themselves either liberal or mixed, while fewer than one-third call themselves conservative. Among the oldest Republicans, that breakdown is almost exactly reversed.
