The 3rd Three-quarter Century: the 5th and 6th party paradigms, an overview with the editors

As noted (

The 2nd Three-quarter Century: the 3rd and 4th party paradigms

), the fifth party paradigm of the two-party system in America was in place, with the progressivist model of securing a lasting prosperity having been put in action—by implementing technically sound fiscal and monetary policies to fend off deflation and keep money circulating at an adequate level in order to form and sustain “a basis where all from the top to the bottom share in the prosperity”. The New Deal coalition—its major composition being in the Democratic Party, and with support by some Republicans—primarily backed the implementation of this model, and the conservative coalition—with major representation in the Republican Party and significant support by some Democrats, especially in the South—mainly opposed it. This fifth party paradigm is even sometimes referred to as the New Deal party system.

For years, it’d been clear that a great war in Europe was approaching, and with international alliances and colonization, it could become global. On the 1st day of September 1939, World War II—so far the most destructive war in human history—began. For the rest of his presidency (the rest of his life), Roosevelt had to focus on this, as it truly became—beyond even the danger of the United States losing a part of itself to secession in the Civil War—the first totally existential threat to the nation since the Revolutionary War.

There was a widespread isolationist, anti-interventionist sentiment in the US, not least of which because of memory of the horrors of the First World War and of how the country’s goals, in that war, of fighting to ensure a “just and secure peace” had been so unsuccessful. And FDR had to take on the task of getting support for giving aid to those countries that were being overrun by murderous tyrannies and for building up America’s own preparedness.

As previously noted (

The Foreign Wars in US History: One Win out of Seven

), when the war ended, just weeks after he died: America had become the greatest superpower in the world, having a globally dominant sphere of influence for itself and its allies; unlike at the conclusion of World War I, with the US being much more committed this time to supporting its purpose and activities, a global organization chartered with maintaining peace around the world (the United Nations) was created; and the UDHR (the Universal Declaration of Human Rights)—articulating and setting an unprecedented standard for the world’s nations to uphold—was established, with the US as a driving force in its international adoption.

At the war’s end, the attitude in the United States government was that this was now a bipolar world, with the Free World (also called the Western Bloc) faced off against the Communist Bloc (also called the Eastern Bloc). The concept was that the US, its allies, and other countries in its sphere of influence were engaged in the Cold War against the Soviet Union, its allies, and those in its sphere. With very little strong political opposition to this policy in America, the strategy of containment—the determination to keep communism from spreading further—was developed. This was gonna remain one of the most constant driving forces in US foreign policy until the end of the Cold War, which comprised the collapse of the Soviet Union, more than 40 years later.

Upon the death of Franklin Roosevelt, his vice president, Harry Truman, had become president. Throughout the New Deal, much of the progress its progressivist policies and programs made had been denied to blacks and other minorities. The year after the war ended, Truman issued an executive order creating a committee to investigate the status of civil rights in America and to come up with ways to strengthen them and protect them. A year later, the President’s Committee on Civil Rights made its report and disbanded. He sent the report to Congress, urging them to implement its recommendations.

And on the 26th day of July 1948, Truman issued an executive order to desegregate the federal work force and also issued one to desegregate the armed forces. This outraged Southerners, however Truman stated that it was true that his “forebears were Confederates” (he was from Missouri), “but my very stomach turned over when I had learned that negro soldiers, just back from overseas, were being dumped out of Army trucks in Mississippi and beaten.”

A large contingent of Southern Democrats broke away and founded a new party, referred to as the Dixiecrats (the States’ Rights Democratic Party), which nominated a candidate in the ’48 presidential election. He got electoral votes in five Southern states and, as can be seen in the graph [

*16] [

*18], came away with over seven percent of the Electoral College total—more than any third-party candidate had ever gotten in US history other than in the 1860 election just as the Civil War was breaking out (even the 1912 Republican candidate, who came in third, didn’t get nearly as high a percentage). Though most rejoined the party after the election, this revealed a huge crack in the Solid South.

The former Supreme Commander of all Allied Forces in Europe during the Second World War, Dwight Eisenhower, who—fashioning himself as a New Deal progressivist—ran in the next two presidential elections, is the only Republican who would win that race in an almost 40-year-long stretch beginning with the onset of the First Great Depression.

He continued all the major New Deal programs still in operation, especially Social Security, extending its benefits to 10 million additional workers. He opposed right-wingers in the Republican Party and is quoted as stating that he had just one purpose, “and that is to build up a strong progressive Republican Party in this country. If the right wing wants a fight, they are going to get it”; he went on to say, “before I end up, either this Republican Party will reflect progressivism or I won’t be with them anymore”. [

*1] Eisenhower also wrote, “Should any party attempt to abolish social security, unemployment insurance, and eliminate labor laws and farm programs, you would not hear of that party again in our political history. There is a tiny splinter group, of course, that believes you can do these things”, and he added, “Their number is negligible, and they are stupid.” [

*6]

Truman’s executive order to desegregate the armed forces had not been finished, and Eisenhower undertook to get it done; he met resistance, including from his first secretary of the Navy. On the ninth anniversary of D-Day, four and a half months after he’d taken office, he wrote, “We have not taken and we shall not take a single backward step. There must be no second-class citizens in this country.” [

*10]

Plessy v. Ferguson is a ruling that the United States Supreme Court made in 1896. Homer Plessy was a New Orleans resident who had one black great-grandparent, and in 1892, he had ridden in a railroad car that by Louisiana law was restricted to only white people. He was charged with violating this law, and he pled that it violated the 14th Amendment’s guarantee of equal protection under the law. John Ferguson, the judge in his trial, ruled that it didn’t; Plessy appealed, and his appeals had eventually reached the Supreme Court. With only one justice dissenting, the Court decided against him by ruling that even though he was treated in a different way because of his race, it was constitutional so long as it was equal treatment—the principle of “separate but equal” was now established throughout the country.

In 1951, the public school district in Topeka, Kansas, was using this principle in refusing to let black kids attend schools for whites. Oliver Brown was a local black resident who wanted his daughter to be able to attend the school nearest to where they lived. He and a dozen other families there sued the Board of Education of Topeka in federal court, using the same argument that the 14th Amendment was being violated. When they lost in US district court, they appealed it. And the Supreme Court agreed that it would hear the case of Brown v. Board.

The Supreme Court completely repudiated itself; they said that they had totally screwed up 58 years earlier in their Plessy v. Ferguson decision. The ruling was that “separate but equal” was an absolutely untenable and ridiculous principle that flew in the face of blatant reality. Their unanimous decision stated that “separate educational facilities are inherently unequal” and therefore of course violate the Equal Protection Clause of the US Constitution’s 14th Amendment. We cannot even scratch the surface of fathoming the ramifications of this watershed ruling, because two thirds of a century later, the reverberations of its impact not only have not subsided but have not even reached their full crescendo.

When the governor of Arkansas refused to obey a specific court order in 1957 to allow the Little Rock Nine to attend Little Rock Central High School and failed to protect them from a mob of over a thousand whites who confronted these nine black kids, this had become the first big test of whether the Supreme Court’s ruling in Brown v. Board would be enforced. The governor sent troops from the Arkansas National Guard to support the mob. The next day, Eisenhower famously took command of the whole Arkansas National Guard away from the governor, and used a contingent of them to defend the students.

His handling of foreign affairs doesn’t seem to have been progressivist at all. Eisenhower supported numerous dictatorial regimes in order to bring their countries into the American sphere of influence. He also made use of covert methods to destabilize or topple democratic governments, so as to ensure access by US corporations to the natural resources, notably petroleum, of those nations. And he sometimes turned to overt military action for these purposes. The Bay of Pigs invasion, hatched in his administration, was left for his successor to deal with. And he drew the US more deeply into taking over in France’s colonial domination in Vietnam.

At the Democratic Party convention in 1960, John Kennedy, a US senator from Massachusetts won the nomination for president. He chose the Senate majority leader, Lyndon Johnson, to be his running mate. There are differing theories as to why he did so; the most widely accepted is that picking someone from a former Confederate state could help in getting votes from Southern Democrats—Johnson was from Texas. The Republicans nominated the incumbent vice president, Richard Nixon.

The popular vote results in the general election were very close, with Kennedy beating Nixon by less than ²/10 of 1%, but Kennedy won the Electoral College in a big landslide—by a margin of more than 15%. The margin in 16 states was less than three percent, with Nixon winning in four of those and Kennedy in 12; the difference in six states was less than one percent, with Kennedy taking five of those and Nixon winning his own home state of California by barely half a percent. As it turned out, of the Southern states that Kennedy carried, three were by less than five percent—including South Carolina by less than two and a half percent and Texas by just two percent; had the results been different in the South, the election could’ve gone the other way.

Continuing on with Roosevelt’s New Deal program of progressivist initiatives to secure a lasting prosperity for people at all levels, Truman had referred to his initiatives as the Fair Deal; now Kennedy’s program was called the New Frontier. As in the past, many of these initiatives were stymied by the conservative coalition. Early in his presidency, he did not introduce civil rights legislation, and he refrained from taking a prominent stance in the growing civil rights struggle. This was largely because he thought this would anger the Southern Democrats and thereby further harden the conservative coalition’s opposition to his other programs.

Photography had been common going well back into the 1800s and used in magazines and newspapers throughout the 20th century. The moving image had been commonplace for decades, with the public having become familiar with seeing newsreels in local theaters. Americans had long seen countless pictures of the mangled corpses of black women hanging from trees and of the charred carcasses of black children and men who’d been tortured, with their remains put on public display in Southern towns as a warning of the price for even a single moment’s failure to show the deepest abjection before the white person. News had been widespread of mobs in Northern cities having burst forth and beaten to death small black children who had accidently stumbled into neighborhoods or other public places that were not for them. And none of this had managed to move the soul of the nation to action. Then came a change.

In 1950, 10 percent of US homes had a TV set in them; in 1960, 90 percent had one. The awesome power of this new media technology to bring the immediacy of these moving images of reality into their living rooms and at their kitchen tables had rocked their world and fundamentally transformed the psyche of the American public in an almost completely unpredicted way.

With the civil rights movement’s continuing efforts in pursuit of blacks being able to exercise their constitutional rights, and with the increased atrocities in response by local and state governments and much of the white populace, especially in the South, Kennedy was being pushed to act, and in June 1963, he launched his initiative for civil rights legislation to enforce and defend these rights. He had been right; the conservative coalition immediately blocked other legislation that he’d introduced.

Just three months after taking office, President Kennedy ordered the invasion of the Bay of Pigs in Cuba that the Eisenhower administration had concocted—one and a half thousand exiled Cubans opposed to Fidel Castro, the communist dictator who had recently taken power in a revolution, had been trained and were sent by the US in the attack, with the confident expectation that it would spark a widespread uprising to overthrow Castro. It didn’t; no uprising broke out, and the United States, and Kennedy in particular, were humiliated around the world. It turned out that the British ambassador to the US had warned the CIA (Central Intelligence Agency) that British intelligence analysis showed that the Cuban people overwhelmingly supported Castro and that there was almost no chance there would be any uprising. [

*14] Kennedy fired the head of the CIA, and he became less confident in the reliability of advice from them or his military leaders or the State Department.

Cold War machinations continued, and a year and a half later, Cuba was again the focal point. The US discovered that the USSR had stationed missiles there, potentially with nuclear warheads. This became what is possibly the greatest immediate existential threat to the United States in its history. Kennedy announced that there was this standoff with the Soviet Union. Millions of Americans anxiously waited for days, watching the skies, waiting to see if Russian missiles would appear, bringing their doom.

As it happens, later disclosures revealed that their fears were not really as great as they should have been; the two superpowers came closer than was realized at the time to destroying each other in nuclear annihilation. Maybe because of his wariness of the advice he was getting—some of Kennedy’s military leaders were urging him to go to the brink and assuring him that the Russians would certainly back down—he took an extremely cautious approach and took advantage of the slightest opportunities to reach some accord. In the end, with the Soviets having nuclear missiles in Cuba, essentially just off America’s shores aimed right at it, an agreement was reached for them to be removed in exchange for the removal of nuclear missiles in Turkey that the Americans already had, essentially just off Russia’s shores aimed right at it.

By 1963, the president of the government in South Vietnam, which the United States had been propping up since the French defeat and withdrawal from there in the early years of the Eisenhower presidency, was becoming more and more unpopular with the Vietnamese people. When the leaders of the South Vietnamese military asked for support to overthrow and take over the government, Kennedy’s administration told them that the US wouldn’t oppose it, and the CIA provided them with funding. [

*11] In the beginning of November, the military staged the coup and killed the South Vietnamese president and his brother. What went around came around, and within three weeks, Kennedy himself was assassinated (and less than half a decade later, his own brother would be assassinated also).

The nation was in massive trauma. In the nearly three years of his presidency, the public had become very familiar through television and other media with him and his young family, and notwithstanding any political differences, many had grown enamored with his and their personal charm. It’d been over six decades since a president had been assassinated. And now there was wall-to-wall TV coverage for days of every detail, including the elaborate state funeral and the live broadcast with close-ups of his presumed assassin being shot to death.

President Eisenhower had proposed the Civil Rights Act of 1957 in order to begin federal protection of black voting rights in the South; it created the Civil Rights Division of the US Justice Department and a temporary commission to investigate civil rights violations. While the conservative coalition in Congress weakened many of its provisions before it was passed, causing it to have little immediate effect, it was the first federal civil rights law since 1875, a year before Reconstruction was ended. He had then proposed the Civil Rights Act of 1960, which when passed, managed to close some of the loopholes in the 1957 law. President Kennedy had supported the passage of the 24th Amendment to bar poll taxes—a way to tax blacks, other minorities, and poor whites for voting, which essentially kept any poor people from being able to vote—and it had passed the Congress in August 1962 and been sent to the states for ratification.

Johnson now took office, and much of the country was grieving and looking upon Kennedy as their martyred president. Two months and a day after his death, the final one of the required number of states ratified the 24th Amendment. The civil rights legislation Kennedy had proposed became the basis for the civil rights bill that Johnson was now attempting to get enacted. It passed the House in February by a vote of 290-130. The conservative coalition in the Senate was blocking it from coming to a vote there. After months of wrangling, and with the significant work of Northern Republican senators helping to break through, its supporters were able to bring it to the floor for a vote; with an amendment, it passed 73-27 in late June.

On the 2nd day of July 1964, the House agreed to the amendment, and that day, President Johnson signed it into law. It barred unequal voter registration requirements, outlawed discrimination in public accommodations, prohibited the segregation of public facilities, enforced the desegregation of public schools, gave new powers to the civil rights commission from the Civil Rights Act of 1957, prohibited discrimination by programs or activities that get federal funding, guaranteed equal employment opportunity, and created several processes to enforce these and other civil rights. The final section of each of these constitutional amendments comprises the declaration that “Congress shall have” the “power to enforce” the 13th, the 14th, the 15th, the 19th, the 23rd, the 24th, and the 26th Amendments “by appropriate legislation”. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 was perhaps the most sweeping such “appropriate legislation” in the 99 years since the first of those amendments had become a part of the Constitution of the United States of America.

The next evening, Johnson told one of his aides, “I think we just delivered the South to the Republican Party for a long time to come”. [

*5] They certainly had. The transition to the sixth party paradigm of this two-party system in America was fully underway.

A week and a half later, the Republican Party nominated Barry Goldwater for president, one of the few Republican senators who’d voted against the Civil Rights Act—saying that it was an example of too much “big” government—and someone who, when President Eisenhower (from his own party) was in office, had criticized him for being too strong a supporter of New Deal policies. Johnson won with more than 90 percent of the Electoral College vote. His popular vote percentage is the highest ever in recorded history since the final election in which less than 70 percent of the states conducted popular voting for president more than 200 years ago. Goldwater won his home state of Arizona and all five of the Deep South states: South Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, and Louisiana. Johnson carried every other one.

There had been riots in Harlem that summer, and major riots broke out in other black neighborhoods over the next few years. The following summer saw the Watts riots in Los Angeles. In the summer of ’67, there was rioting in Newark and Detroit. And after the assassination of Martin Luther King in April 1968, there were riots in over a hundred cities. When Johnson’s press secretary lamented the violence, Johnson said, “What did you expect? I don’t know why we’re so surprised. When you put your foot on a man’s neck and hold him down for three hundred years, and then you let him up, what’s he going to do? He’s going to knock your block off.” [

*8]

The president had continued Kennedy’s New Frontier initiatives, greatly expanding those and giving his program the name of the Great Society, which included further civil rights legislation and what he called the War on Poverty. By one count, in this four-year term, 226 out of the administration’s 252 major legislative proposals had been passed. [

*15] These included Medicare and Medicaid; federal education funding; environmental protection, such as of water quality, clean air, wilderness, and endangered species; housing and urban development; combatting rural poverty; consumer protection; urban mass transit, high-speed rail, and traffic and vehicle safety; endowments for arts and humanities, PBS (the Public Broadcasting Service), and NPR (National Public Radio).

In foreign relations, the Cold War mentality along with the dedication to keeping and increasing unfettered access to global natural resources continued to affect the attitude toward nations and people around the world. In its practical application, the policy of containment had for the most part essentially come to entail maintaining client states—who could be counted on to acquiesce to what would be decided was in the interest of the US government—that would be propped up regardless of how undemocratic or unresponsive to the needs and well-being of their own people the governments in these countries were.

And that of course found one of its starkest expressions in Vietnam. Three weeks after the Republicans had nominated Goldwater in the ’64 presidential election and two and a half weeks before the Democrats were gonna convene to nominate Johnson, the Congress passed the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, authorizing the president to use military force in Vietnam, or anywhere else in Southeast Asia, without any further declaration of war. Two senators voted against it, and 88 voted for it. In the House, there were 416 votes for it and not a single one against. The people of the United States—through their representatives in the government of the nation that thought of itself as the champion of freedom and justice and human rights and democracy throughout the world—had spoken.

Half a century earlier, in Woodrow Wilson’s Fourteen Points, he articulated the principles (a specific application of what is called Wilsonianism) by which he contended that progress toward a more secure and just international peace could be made. Two decades after that, having established the progressivist model of securing a lasting prosperity for all people in a society, and with the world having plunged into the next even more devastating world war, Franklin Roosevelt, as previously noted (

He Dealt with Crisis—Whither the Trajectory He Left Us on?: a diamond jubilee remembrance of FDR’s passing

), further focused progressivist principles for international relations with his Four Freedoms—emphasizing for each of these foundational freedoms that it was essential that it be applied “everywhere in the world” and declaring that this would make secure the “kind of world attainable in our own time and generation”. And in his final days as the war was concluding, he outlined the principles and goals, as previously noted, that led to the establishment of the UDHR (the Universal Declaration of Human Rights) and its applicability in conducting a progressivist foreign policy.

By the time of the Johnson presidency, these principles seem to have even become actually quaint. With these no longer providing a dynamic guiding force, a different principle was now being adhered to: the US just couldn’t allow itself to lose this war. Over time, more and more American force was applied. It was often said that what was needed was to find a way to win the “hearts and minds” of the Vietnamese people. That clearly never worked out. At home in America, the exorbitant costs of the war were thought to be choking off the ability to pay for the Great Society. Johnson was tryna find a way to pay for both “guns and butter”, the saying went.

At the end of January 1968, North Vietnam launched a major offensive, demonstrating that they were far from defeated. Walter Cronkite, the CBS Evening News anchorman who was often described as “the most trusted man in America” then went to Vietnam to report on it. There he met with General Creighton Abrams, the commander of all US forces in Vietnam; when he was a war correspondent in World War II, Cronkite had gotten to know him during the Battle of the Bulge and as the tank commander of the 2nd Armored Division in the invasion of Nazi Germany. Abrams told him, “we cannot win this Goddamned war, and we ought to find a dignified way out”! [

*7] When he returned at the end of February, Cronkite hosted a documentary report in which he stated, “To say that we are mired in stalemate seems the only realistic, yet unsatisfactory, conclusion.” [

*3] At the end of March, Johnson announced that he wouldn’t run for reelection.

Not only had adherence to—or even any interest in—progressivist principles in foreign affairs dissipated quite some time before now, support for domestic progressivist programs had long been eroding as well. A different ideology—one that had been a constituent of the New Deal coalition from its inception—was emerging with a stronger voice in the Democratic Party, as support for progressivism was waning. That ideology was liberalism.

When FDR’s administration got Congress, as noted, to enact the massive new spending program at the end of the 1930s, which brought America out of the second wave of Great Depression I, it had unleashed a prosperity wave. As Roosevelt had told the American people, it was “going to cost something to get out of this recession this way, but the profit of getting out of it will pay for the cost several times over”. And it certainly did.

When the US entered World War II, Congress enacted another massive new spending program that created what was called the “Arsenal of Democracy” that America and its allies needed in order to win the war. This unleashed another prosperity wave on top of the one that had just been created. These had both been financed using the technically sound fiscal and monetary mechanisms, which, as previously noted [

*13], the Federal Reserve Bank of New York chairman, among others, had explained during the Second World War.

With many millions of Americans in the military, this created a huge need for more workers, including for many highly technically advanced jobs. Two groups in particular, American females and American blacks and other minorities, were now recruited in numbers far beyond what they had ever been before. The talents of these groups that had never been taken advantage of to such a degree greatly added to the skills, experience, and quality of the American labor force. This propelled another prosperity wave that further compounded the ones that had just been unleashed.

In the last year of his life, President Roosevelt signed into law what some consider one of the last of his New Deal programs: the GI Bill. Among the benefits it gave to veterans when they returned from the war were payments of tuition and living expenses to go to college, vocational school, or high school, low-interest loans to start a business or farm, and low-cost mortgages. Because of racist discrimination, blacks and other minorities didn’t get as much benefit as whites, but almost half of all veterans got some benefits, and this let loose another prosperity wave that added even more to the ones that had already been built up.

The year after the war ended, a dozen-and-a-half-year-long phenomenon occurred that is called the baby boom. Due to the prosperity waves, a significant number of these kids grew up at least somewhat more affluent than their parents had, and they often had better educational opportunities than their parents; both of these were of course exactly what those parents would hope for. While they surely wouldn’t be aware that their greater prosperity was brought about by progressivist macroeconomic monetary mechanisms (nor would their parents in many cases), they would of course tend more toward liberalism. Certainly not every individual—but as an overall trend, abundance causes more organisms in a population to be left-wingers, and scarcity causes more to be right-wingers in the population of any sentient species: if you have to compete just to survive, you’re a lot likelier to adopt conservatism (or even, in the most dire circumstances, to adopt the most radical of ideologies: extreme middle-of-the-road moderatism).

A lot grew up with those images that television would bring them of what was happening in the world. They started to come of age in the half decade when a slew of assassinations—of prominent public figures and of everyday people, such as four little black girls in a church—were filling the news, when two enormous specters loomed in front of them: the civil rights struggle and the war in Vietnam. The effects of the one could take place in their own cities and towns and neighborhoods, and many of them were confronted with being drafted and put right in the middle of the other.

As the late ’60s proceeded, they (and everyone else) watched each of these sink into an ever greater morass of horror. They had been brought up in a culture that extolled its own virtue of having just rescued all of human civilization from regimes that had decimated or tried to exterminate entire races of people and been bent on overpowering the entire world in the most unimaginably grisly subjugation. Now they were faced with tryna square the moral ethos they were raised to uphold and the actions they saw their society taking towards people at home and abroad. Demonstrations against the war got huger and more frequent and more vociferous in cities across the country, and especially on college and university campuses.

Many of their parents’s generation were right there with them and spoke out as well. A huge number of them though, particularly blue-collar workers and others in the middle and lower-middle classes, resented the affluence of the young generation and the rejection of the trappings of that success that they themselves had not been able to attain and maybe had not been able to achieve for their own kids. And along came politicians who sensed a cultural and class-based clash that they could exploit.

Beyond culture and class, there was of course also race. Again politicians realized there was another resentment, and huge fear, that they could exploit. All of America was deeply segregated, enforced de facto and even de jure by governments and businesses and entire industries; redlining was only one egregious example. Whites in the North knew that if there was integration, such as having blacks or other minorities move into white neighborhoods or having their kids attend white schools, that the whites there would then suffer the same harmful treatment by the institutionally systemic racism.

And of course as time went on, and as the anti-war and civil rights movements—recognizing their common ground—often would work more closely together, this then would spark more resentment or fear, from those opposed to or afraid of the one who would then focus their opposition on the other also. Naturally politicians again found grist to take advantage of in this too.

One of them was Richard Nixon, who would declare that he was appealing to the “silent majority”. In the 1968 presidential election, the Republicans nominated him again. He is also reputed to have used what was called the “Southern strategy”. One of his political strategists, a researcher of ethnic politics, described a part of it, which has been called an outer Southern strategy, aimed at capturing Florida, Tennessee, North Carolina, and Virginia. “Your outer Southerners”, he said, “have always had different interests than the negrophobe plantation owners of the Black Belt” (another term for the Deep South); he further stated that they were less extreme, and he continued by saying, “It adheres with other Republican constituencies across the country and can be appealed to without fragmenting the coalition.” Nixon did win those states. And the ethnological strategist also gave longer-term advice on the Deep South, “The more negroes who register as Democrats in the South, the sooner the negrophobe whites will quit the Democrats and become Republicans. That’s where the votes are. Without that prodding from the blacks, the whites will backslide into their old comfortable arrangement with the local Democrats.” [

*4]

20 years after the Dixiecrats had run a presidential candidate, another segregationist party was formed. It nominated a Southern governor who won most of the Deep South, picking up a higher Electoral College percentage than the Dixiecrats had. And he got over 13 percent of the popular vote nationwide—the most of any third-party candidate in over 40 years.

The popular vote difference between the Democrat and Republican was not quite as close as in 1960 but was still less than three quarters of a percent. But Nixon won the electoral vote in a huge landslide: more than a 20-percent margin. And the only Southern state that the Democrat carried was Johnson’s home state of Texas. It was the first time that the Democratic presidential candidate won fewer than half a dozen Southern states since the end of Reconstruction.

Nixon ran for reelection in the next race. This time the Democrats did nominate a candidate whose major stance was to immediately end the war—in essence, to have all US forces simply pick up and leave Vietnam. This was thought of as the liberal position—an indication of just how far the viewpoint of liberalism had diverged from that of progressivism in the quarter century since the death of Franklin Roosevelt in the final days of the Second World War. Nixon beat him in a crushing lanslide by a margin of more than 23 percent of the popular vote and with over 96 percent of the electoral vote. As regards the war in Vietnam, once again the American people had spoken.

Nixon’s victory was so enormous that it makes it ironic that he had cheated in the election process. He had approved a break-in of his opponent’s campaign office, and when the burglars were caught, he helped to cover it up. After many months of investigations, the evidence came out proving conclusively that he was guilty. The House was getting ready to impeach him immediately. And many of the top senators in his own party went to him and told him that even they were gonna vote overwhelmingly to convict him and remove him from office. Attempting to steal a presidential election was a crime so great—even though he had been certain to win it anyway—that the Republican senators just could not allow it even by a president in their own party.

The vice president was sworn in. In less than a month, he gave Nixon a full and unconditional pardon for any crimes he might have committed against the United States while president. This shocked much of the nation. It was a major factor in dooming the bid he would make a little over two years later to be elected to the presidency in his own right.

The transition from the fifth to the sixth party paradigm of the country’s two-party system was complete. A different brand of Republican, whose ideological stance—and dynamic personality—would dominate the political scene, was on the horizon. And during this sixth party paradigm, the only presidential candidates whom the Democrats were gonna be able to elect would be from the South.

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In 1964, Goldwater’s strongest competitor for the Republican presidential nomination had been the governor of New York, Nelson Rockefeller, who had become a symbol of what was thought of as the wealthy, Eastern-establishment, liberal wing of the party. This Eastern establishment was considered by many Republicans (and others) to be snobbish and condescending, with a sense of intellectual and moral superiority over the less affluent and those who had not attended the most prestigious schools or who lived elsewhere in the country, and they had generally dominated the party’s nominating process for decades. They were, in fact, often referred to as “Rockefeller Republicans”, and they were greatly resented by many in the party.

When Goldwater—running on a platform opposing overreaching “big” government—lost that race in such a huge landslide, winning the Deep South along with only his own home state, much of the Republican Party establishment looked on that defeat as evidence that Goldwater’s stance had been repudiated by the voters for being too right-wing and too radical. After Nixon’s resignation, his successor had chosen, to be the replacement for himself as vice president, none other than: Nelson Rockefeller.

And then, this Republican commander-in-chief—who had taken over from Nixon not even nine months earlier—in essence, had all US forces simply pick up and leave Vietnam. The United States had been propping up the government in South Vietnam for 19 and a half years, and once the US left, it did not take years for it to collapse—or months, or weeks, or even days. Within minutes it crumbled—and with all the American people watching it live on TV.

Tens of thousands of Americans had been killed, hundreds of thousands more been mamed and disabled, millions of Vietnamese children and women and men been killed, their country been ravaged, and the slaughter and carnage been extended into the neighboring countries. The cost in American treasure had been vast, and the cost in the prestige and—all the more so—the esteem of the rest of the world for the fortitude, the trustworthiness, and the morality of the nation was incalculable. All this sacrifice had been made for a cause that presidents and members of Congress and other government officials in both the major parties had for years said was absolutely necessary.

Now less than two and a half years after the American voters had agreed by an overwhelming majority to continue to bear this burden until an honorable conclusion could be reached, they saw that the United States hadn’t been able, as General Abrams called it, to find at least even—far short of honor—a mere dignified way out. Indeed it seemed to so many that the US had instead decided to just turn tail and run and had abandoned the Vietnamese people whom they had supposedly been defending at such a high cost for so long. The American people, as previously noted (

Liberation of Saigon Day, Fall of Saigon Day: lessons & mislessons of America’s begotten & misbegotten war, on the 45th anniversary

), still have yet to come to terms with this—all these decades later.

This successor of Nixon’s, even as the incumbent president, had to face very strong competition for the ’76 Republican presidential nomination. That strong competitor was the former governor of California, Ronald Reagan, who also was now campaigning against the overreach of “big” government. He came so close to taking the nomination away from the sitting president that it wasn’t clear who would get it until the party convention delegates had started voting. (This is the most recent time that a major party’s nomination was still undecided when voting at the convention began.)

The Democrats nominated Jimmy Carter, the former governor of a state in the Deep South—Georgia. He ran as being an outsider from the Washington establishment—and he ran very much as not being a racial segregationist. As noted, he beat the incumbent president; no incumbent had lost in 44 years—when FDR won in the first presidential election following the start of Great Depression I.

During Carter’s term, there was much anxiety about the economy and about inflation. And in ’79, a revolution broke out in Iran, whose democratic government the United States had overthrown more than a quarter century earlier in order to ensure that US corporations could maintain access to petroleum resources there. The US had installed a murderous dictator in Iran and had propped up his tyrannical government for all that time. When he was given refuge in the US after having to leave the country, an enraged mob stormed the US embassy in Iran and took dozens of Americans captive, with the revolutionary government not helping to get them released. A huge part of the American public was outraged, especially given the very recent memory of America’s crushing defeat—and humiliation—in Vietnam. And as Carter failed to get these hostages freed, this undermined his credibility as a competent president.

The Republicans did nominate Reagan in the 1980 presidential election, and although he was painted as a far-right-wing radical, with Carter’s image in such shambles, Reagan beat him by more than nine percent in the popular vote and with over 90 percent of the electoral vote. And the Republicans took control of both houses of Congress, the first time for them to control either house in a quarter century—though the Democrats took back the House in the next midterms, and they regained control of the Senate four years after that.

In his inaugural address, Reagan famously declared that “government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem”. “It is time to check and reverse the growth of government”, he went on to say. “It is no coincidence that our present troubles parallel and are proportionate to the intervention and intrusion in our lives that result from unnecessary and excessive growth of government.”

A major approach of his was called supply-side economics, and sometimes referred to as “Reaganomics”, with features including lower tax rates, economic deregulation, and reduced government spending. He was able to get much of his program enacted by Congress, and not just by the Republicans but with some Democratic support too.

In the ’80s, the Democrats flirted with expanding their ideological identity beyond just liberalism but never were able to find the “beef”—never were able to pose an effective, comprehensive articulation of progressivist principles. When Reagan ran for reelection in ’84, he defeated the Democratic candidate by a popular vote margin of over 18 percent and with more than 97 percent of the electoral vote. This was the second time in a dozen years that the nominee of the Democratic Party got less than four percent of the Electoral College total and the third out of four elections that the Democrat received less than 10%. Only two other times since before Reconstruction ended almost a century and half ago has either the Republican or Democratic presidential candidate failed to get at least 10% of the electoral vote: in 1936, when Franklin Roosevelt was first reelected after having started to dig the country out from Great Depression I, and in 1912, when Teddy Roosevelt ran as the Progressive Party candidate and came in second.

Prior to going into politics, Reagan’d had a career in acting and in public speaking. The skills acquired in and talents applicable for those fields served him well in public office. He had charm and was affable and was well-spoken in articulating and advocating his positions. For a great many who share some of those positions, he remains iconic as a spokesperson for them and as a model of leading in those causes.

George H. Bush had been one of the contenders for the presidential nomination in 1980. He came from an illustrious line of wealthy, industrialist businessmen who had been among those Eastern-establishment, liberal Republican politicians (his father, Prescott Bush, had served as a US senator from Connecticut for more than a decade) whom so many of the “common folk” had been so resentful of—and whom the “Reagan Revolution” had finally displaced as the ascendent wing of the party. “Voodoo economics” was a term that Bush had often used in that campaign to mock Reagan’s advocacy of supply-side economics. Bush came in second in the primaries, and Reagan chose him to be his running mate—most likely as an attempt to assuage that constituency and shore up its support in the general election, even though Reagan had in effect purged it from being any kind of political force in the party.

The handwriting on the wall could easily be seen, and Bush got in step; he would eschew being referred to as liberal from then on. As the sitting vice president, he got the nomination at the end of Reagan’s second term, and he won in the general election with close to 80 percent of the electoral vote—giving the Republicans three presidential terms in a row. This was the first time that presidents in the same party would win more than two terms in a row since Truman won four decades earlier—at that time, making it five terms in a row for Franklin Roosevelt’s and his administrations.