The Triumph of Conservatism

excerpted from the book

The Paradox of American Democracy

by John B. Judis

Routledge Press, 2001, paper

p137
The Triumph of Conservatism

In 1969, Kevin Phillips, an aide to Nixon's Attorney General John Miuhell, published a book, The Emerging Republican Majority, declaring that the election of 1968 had ushered in a "new era" in American politics that would be dominated by Republican conservatives rather than Democratic liberals. Nixon's landslide in 1972 appeared to prove Phillips right, but then Watergate came. In the 1974 elections, Democrats captured a two-to-one majoriq in the House of Representatives and a thirteen-seat majoriq in the Senate, which they maintained in I976, when Democrat Jimmy Carter was elected president.

These Democratic victories set the stage for a final conflict that would help define American politics and democracy for the next decade, and in some respects for the rest of the century. On one side was what remained of the old liberal movement, led now by an increasingly desperate AFL-CIO. On the other side were the lobbies, think tanks, and policy groups created by business and their conservative allies in the early 1970s. The battleground was the U.S. Congress.

The Liberal Rout

As Carter took office, liberal politicians, the AFL-CIO, Nader's Congress Watch, and civil rights groups drew up a far-reaching legislative agenda, some of which Carter enthusiastically supported, but none of which he opposed. The leading group in the liberal coalition was the AFL-CIO. During the sixties, it had been overshadowed by the antiwar and civil rights movements, but as these movements lost their fervor, the labor federation reemerged as the key player in the liberal coalition.

The AFL-CIO saw Carter's election as an opportunity to reverse through legislation the setbacks it was suffering in the workplace. Organized labor's share of the workforce had steadily fallen-from 34.5 percent in I956 to 30.7 percent in I964 and to 25.I percent in I978. The decline in union membership was partly President George Meany's fault. When the two federations merged in I955, union leaders expected that the merger would facilitate organizing and bring in new recruits by eliminating jurisdictional disputes between rival AFL and CIO unions. But Meany, a former plumber who had never walked a picket line, quickly lost interest in funding recruiting drives. Before the merger, the rival federations had spent almost half of their dues income on recruiting new members. Afterward, the new federation spent I I.2 percent its first year, 4.9 percent in I957, 2.4 percent in I959, and less than I percent by I974.5 Meany made the federation's Washington office into a kind of labor Vatican that devoted more resources to foreign policy ventures than to domestic organizing.

But Meany's indifference to organizing explained at most the slow erosion of support during the federation's first fifteen years. The precipitous decline that took place in the I9705-from 27 percent of private sector workers in I973 to 22 percent in I979-was the result of American businesses adopting more aggressive tactics to keep out or get rid of unions. Management began hiring anti-labor consultants to contest organizing campaigns, and, in violation of the Wagner Act, began firing union organizers to intimidate workers. According to NLRB statistics, the number of employer unfair labor practice charges tripled between I960 and I980, and the number of workers ordered to be reinstated because of being fired illegally rose fivefold in the same period. To block these tactics, Meany wanted a labor law reform bill that would increase the penalties on companies that violated the law and eliminate arduous appeal processes that companies used to evade holding or accepting the results of union elections.

Meany and the civil rights movement also backed a full employment bill sponsored by Senator Hubert Humphrey and Representative Augustus Hawkins to commit the government to reducing unemployment to 3 percent-if necessary, through government job creation. The backers of these bills maintained that they would restore the balance between business and labor that had been undermined by business's new offensive and the decline of union membership. Humphrey-Hawkins's economics was suspect-it is doubtful that the country could have achieved 3 percent unemployment in the I9705 without provoking further inflation- but labor law reform was a justifiable defense of democratic pluralism.

While the AFL-CIO's chief priority was labor law reform and Humphrey-Hawkins, Nader and the consumer movement were pressing for a new federal office of consumer representation that would consolidate all the different government consumer departments, represent consumers before federal agencies and courts, and conduct research on their behalf. Nader and the unions also backed tax reform that would remove the loopholes for oil profits, capital gains, and overseas profits. And they supported a national health insurance bill that Senator Edward Kennedy was sponsoring.

Carter championed the new consumer agency and tax reform. He was more hesitant about the labor measures and Humphrey-Hawkins, but he promised to sign whatever bill the Democrats passed. He also introduced a comprehensive energy plan that would regulate prices and production; he opposed national health insurance as too far-reaching, but proposed a bill to hold down the rapid rise of hospital prices; and he enthusiastically backed campaign and lobbying reform. Carter and the Democrats believed they would get their bills. The Senate had already passed a bill establishing a consumer protection agency in I970 and I975; and the House had passed a similar proposal in 1971, I974, and I975, only to see final approval blocked by a Republican White House.

The Business Roundtable led the opposition to Nader's idea for an office of consumer representation. It established a Consumer Issues Working Group of 400 businesses and organizations including the Chamber of Commerce and the NAM. It got plant managers and CEOs in the districts of vulnerable House members to pay them personal visits. It hired former Watergate counsel Leon Jaworski to produce a public statement opposing the bill that it then ran in advertisements. The Roundtable also paid the North American Precis Syndicate to send around editorials and cartoons to 3,800 newspapers and weeklies that they could run for free. All in all, the business organizations spent several million dollars fighting the bill. By contrast, the Consumers Federation of America, Nader's Congress Watch, and the National Consumers League, the three main supporters of the bill, spent $352,000.

The business groups claimed that the tiny $I5 million agency would contribute to "big government"-a ludicrous charge that nonetheless proved effective. The bill did not even make it through the House of Representatives. In explaining the defeat of the consumer agency, Mark Green, who headed Nader's Congress Watch, told Congressional Quarterly that House members repeatedly informed him, "I'm with you on the merits, but I can't convince my constituents that this bill is not a move toward big government."

Labor law reform looked more promising. The House quickly passed it in I977. But then it got held up in the Senate in the winter and spring of I978 as the debate over the Panama Canal treaty dragged on. That delay allowed business to mobilize against it. The Chamber of Commerce, the NAM, and the construction industry trade associations set up a National Action Committee that ran ads and distributed editorials. Together, the organizations got their members to inundate Congress and the White House with eight million letters. In the last week of the debate, 97 percent of letters to the White House opposed the bill.

The committee's editorials charged that the bill was inflationary and would tip the balance of power of the country toward labor. "The last thing we need now is to amend the NLRB to tilt it more on the side of the labor monopoly," declared one of the editorials circulated by the coalition. The coalition made the issue the survival of small business, even though the measure exempted small businesses from its provisions. Two political scientists commented on the lobbying strategy:

Business succeeded in capturing the political center by portraying the issue as a union power grab and the union movement as greedy. In particular, the elevation of the small businessman to the exalted position of potential victim of big labor-even though the bill's impact on small business would have been minimal-was a skillful exploitation of a key American value.

The Business Roundtable, many of whose firms were unionized and wanted to retain an amicable relationship with labor, was initially neutral, but in August I977, its policy committee, prodded by Sears Roebuck, voted to oppose the measure. In the last week of the debate, Roundtable CEOs flew into Washington on corporate jets to lobby against the bill. The AFL-CIO tried to get unionized businesses to endorse the measure, but the business community, which had been mildly sympathetic to union issues in the I9505 and I9605, was now united against labor. Recalled AFL-CIO secretary-treasurer Tom Donahue, "It was a matter of absolute solidarity. The auto companies sent out letters to their suppliers saying they should not break ranks. It was an unbroken chain of employers." Altogether, business outspent the AFL-CIO by $7 million to $2.5 million. In the final tally, the measure could not get the sixty votes it needed in the Senate to stop a filibuster by the bill's opponents.

Carter's proposals for hospital cost containment, public financing of campaigns, and stricter disclosure by lobbyists were also defeated. Humphrey-Hawkins finally passed, but only after business lobbyists had forced its sponsors to remove the provisions requiring government to meet the 3 percent target. Richard Lesher, the president of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, accurately described the final bill as a "toothless alligator." Carter's energy program ended up deregulating rather than regulating prices. The president's tax reform package made out worst of all. Its fate summed up the liberal rout.

Carter's initial proposal raised the rate on capital gains taxes, which he aptly described as "tax windfalls for millionaires," and limited business deductions for entertainment and meals. This time, the lobbyists didn't just block the administration's bill, they rewrote it. The key player was Charls Walker. In March I978, Walker, Ed Zschau, the president of the American Electronics Association, and Mark Bloomfield, the deputy research director of Walker's Council for Capital Formation, met with Republican Representative William Steiger, a member of the House Ways and Means Committee. At the meeting the three men persuaded Steiger to sponsor an amendment that Walker and Bloomfield wrote up cutting the capital gains tax in half. When Steiger's amendment ran into trouble in Russell Long's Senate Finance Committee, Walker got Democrat Henry Fowler, a member of the council's board, to negotiate a suitable rewording with Long. The final bill lowered the effective tax rate on capital gains from 49 to 28 percent, preserved business tax exemptions, and lowered corporate tax rates.

Together, these defeats dealt a death blow to the democratic reform movement that had begun early in the century, foundered in the I9205, revived in the I9305, survived in the I9505, and then flourished in the I9605. Reform had required using the power of unions and, later, of the consumer, environmental, and civil rights movements to win government measures regulating and limiting the behavior of private corporations. By convincing the public that "big government" was to blame for all the nation's ills, the business lobbyists undermined the argument for reform. Emboldened by their victories in the first two years of Carter's term, they now began to target the reforms adopted in the I9605. Toward that, they made common cause with a group of politicians and political activists whom, in the past, they had kept at arm's length.

The Conservative Movement

In the early twentieth century, there was no such thing in American politics as a conservative movement. The right was an unwieldy collection of anti-Semites, libertarians, fascists, racists, anti-New Dealers, isolationists, and Southern agrarians who were incapable of agreeing on anything. It was only in the mid-I950s that a coherent movement began to emerge. Its intellectual voice was William F. Buckley, Jr.'s, National Review and its political champion was Arizona Senator Barry Goldwater. These conservatives were united by opposition to the New Deal, including Social Security, and to any accommodation with the Soviet Union, which they viewed as an immediate threat to America's survival.

Their basic outlook combined nineteenth-century corporate individualism, set forth by Milton Friedman and other economists, and militant Cold War anti-Communism, expounded by former Communist Whittaker Chambers and former Trotskyist James Burnham. The conservatives opposed progressive taxation, including the income tax, and most federal government spending except on the FBI and the military. They blamed unions for unemployment and higher prices and blamed welfare recipients for the persistence of their own poverty. They wanted not merely to contain but to roll back Communism-by the threat, if not the use, of nuclear weapons.

There was an integral connection between the conservatives' opposition to Communism and their opposition to domestic liberalism. Communism was, to the conservative view, what would occur if liberalism were allowed to grow unchallenged. Chambers summed up this connection in Witness:

When I took up my little sling and aimed at Communism, I also hit something else. What I hit was the force of that great Socialist revolution which in the name of liberalism, spasmodically, incompletely, somewhat formlessly, but always in the same direction, has been inching its icecap over the nation for two decades.

The early conservative movement was limited in its popular appeal. As Goldwater discovered in I964, most Americans didn't want to get rid of Social Security or go to the brink of war with the Soviet Union. Over the next sixteen years, however, America changed in ways that made the conservative message more palatable. School integration drove white Southerners into the Republican Party-the Deep South was the only region Goldwater won in I964. Busing, affirmative action, and rising welfare costs, coming in the wake of the ghetto riots, split the New Deal coalition in the North and made many white ethnic Democrats receptive to conservative appeals. Conservatives, who had opposed the civil rights acts out of either racism or support for state's rights, suddenly found their political base immeasurably widened. Northern whites also became more receptive to conservatives' harsh message on welfare and crime.

The U.S. defeat in Vietnam, coupled with advances in Soviet influence in Africa and Central America, made the conservatives' militant message on Communism far more credible, while the economic downturn that began in the late I960s lent credence to conservative arguments for freemarket capitalism. And the court rulings on abortion and school prayer, along with the continued spread of the counterculture and the women's movement, produced an entirely new constituency for conservatism.

Conservative politicians and intellectuals also adapted their own message to take advantage of these opportunities. In his I966 California gubernatorial campaign, Ronald Reagan exploited the historic distrust of government and of elites to rally voters to his side. He reminded voters that he had once been a union leader, while directing his fire at students, whom he described as "elitists" disrupting the universities that middle-class taxpayers were financing. He didn't attack welfare capitalism itself, but attacked welfare cheaters (invariably black or Mexican-American in voters' minds). He didn't openly favor segregation, but he opposed a fair housing measure on the ballot. Because Reagan was running for governor rather than senator, he didn't have to take positions on the old conservative bugaboos of Social Security or nuclear war.

In the early I970s, a group of young conservatives, who became identified as "the new right," tried to take advantage of the backlash against the civil rights movement and the counterculture. Instead of railing against budget deficits, they focused on the "social" issues that had emerged during the sixties, including abortion, busing and racial integration, drugs, school prayer, and gun control. Their motives were tactical: they recognized the political limitations of the older conservative movement and wanted to create a politics that could unite business conservatives with working-class Democrats disillusioned by the civil rights movement, antiwar protests, and the counterculture of the sixties.

Richard Viguerie, the son of a Texas petrochemical executive, came to New York from Texas in I963 to become executive secretary of the Young Americans for Freedom (YAF). He became expert in using direct mail to finance campaigns. In I968 he worked as a fund-raiser for George Wallace and from I973 to 1976 raised money for Wallace's American Independent Party through the mailing lists he created. Unlike other conservatives who disdained Wallace's racism and anti-elitism, Viguerie was drawn to his campaign. "My working with Wallace was the beginning of my thinking in terms of coalition politics," Viguerie recalled. In I975, Viguerie began using his rapidly growing mailing lists to raise money for a conservative movement that would attract Wallace supporters.

Viguerie helped raise funds for Howard Phillips, a Harvard graduate and founder of YAF who began the Conservative Caucus; for John "Terry" Dolan, who founded the National Conservative Political Action Committee (NCPAC); and for Paul Weyrich, who, after leaving the Heritage Foundation, established the Committee for the Survival of a Free Congress, and was also meeting with Wallace. Between I976 and I980, hundreds of conservative groups sprouted up in Washington, many of them funded from Viguerie's lists. Most of these organizations were different from the older membership groups like the AFL-CIO and Chamber of Commerce. They were directed by their staffs and financed by whatever they could raise in the mail. The membership consisted primarily of direct mail donors, who in return received newsletters.

The new right scorned the older politics of precinct workers and party organizations. It understood the importance of gaining the attention- favorable or unfavorable-of the media. Viguerie, Weyrich, and other activists poked at the open wounds created by court decisions on abortion and busing and by a decade of fierce battles on Capitol Hill. Perhaps their greatest success was achieved when, because of their focus on social issues, they were able to recruit white Fundamentalists and Pentecostals into conservative Republican politics.

In the early twentieth century, Protestantism had split into two camps. On one side were the liberalizers and modernizers who believed that biblical doctrine had to be adapted to modern conditions and scientific discoveries, including the theory of evolution. On the other side were the Pentecostals, who stressed faith-healing and speaking in tongues, and the Fundamentalists, who believed in biblical inerrancy. A political division was superimposed on this theological division. While many of the modernizers and liberals, working through the Federal Council of

Churches (later the National Council of Churches), espoused the progressive social gospel, many Fundamentalists and Pentecostals rejected politics altogether. They were premillennialists who believed that Christ would spirit away the true believers before Armageddon and the millennium took place, and they aimed to be among those who ascended to Heaven with Christ while the earth was consumed in flames.

Those Fundamentalists who did participate in politics identified with the extreme right wing of the Republican and Democratic parties. In I94I, Carl Mclntire established the American Council of Christian Churches, from which he attacked the National Council for its support of the New Deal. In the I9505, Mclntire and Billy James Hargis were at the front of anti-Communist crusades that charged that Communists with infiltrating the U.S. government. But most of the Fundamentalists and Pentecostals had no interest in politics. The Rev. Jerry Falwell declared in I965, "I would find it impossible to stop preaching the pure saving gospel of Jesus Christ, and begin doing anything else-including fighting Communism or participating in civil rights reforms."

Falwell and other religious conservatives began to reconsider their abstention from politics when the Carter administration ruled that segregated Southern private schools would lose their nonprofit tax exemption. The Fundamentalists and Pentecostals had established religious schools in the South, which, after Brown v. Board of Education in I954, became outposts for white parents not wanting to send their children to integrated schools. A group of ministers, including Falwell and Robert Billings, wanted to organize in protest, and they began discussions with Weyrich and Phillips, who suggested to them that they found a new political organization.

The new organizations that emerged-Falwell's Moral Majority, Christian Voice (which pioneered the tactic of sending out report cards rating politicians' morality based on their voting record), the Religious Roundtable, and Billings's National Christian Action Coalition-would enjoy a genuine mass following, organized through the ministers and their churches. Falwell, using the mailing list from his television series, "Old Time Gospel Hour," had recruited 300,000 dues-paying members, including 70,000 ministers, by mid-I980. The organizations focused on abortion and school prayer, but they also aligned themselves with the economic individualism and militant anti-Communism of Republican conservatives and the new right.

While the new right and their newfound allies in the Moral Majoriq attacked the Supreme Court's decisions on abortion and school prayer, another group of conservative activists took aim at rising federal and state taxes. Federal taxes had increased primarily because of "bracket creep," as inflation forced taxpayers into higher brackets without increasing their real incomes. State taxes had grown because of the growing budget for social services. The National Taxpayers Union, which was founded in I969, had 200 chapters by the end of I979. In California, Howard Jarvis, a classic free-market conservative, led a successful referendum campaign in June I978 for Proposition I3, leading to a drastic cut in property taxes. "We are telling the government, 'Screw you,' " Jarvis declared that year.

The intellectual rationale for the conservative tax cutters came from economist Arthur Laffer and Wall Street Journal editorial writer Jude Wanniski. In Irving Kristol's journal The Public Interest, Wanniski argued that by cutting taxes and tightening the money supply, the government could raise revenue, increase investment, create jobs, and curb inflation. Most economists regarded this theory, called "supply-side economics," as crackpot, but it gained a wide following among conservatives because it allowed conservatives to advocate tax cuts without abandoning their opposition to budget deficits. In March I976, Congressman Jack Kemp, who was influenced by Wanniski, and Senator William Roth introduced a bill in Congress cutting tax rates by 30 percent. After the victory of Proposition I3, the Republican Party officially adopted the Kemp-Roth bill as its main campaign issue and organized a three-day, seven-city tour to publicize its virtues.

The final ingredient in this new conservatism was ex-liberals and -leftists like Kristol, who turned right sometime between I968 and I972 as the Democratic Party became more identified with opposition to the Vietnam War, support for affirmative action, and toleration of urban violence. The neoconservatives, Kristol quipped, had been "mugged by reality." But while the neoconservatives became staunch opponents of Johnson's Great Society and the regulatory reforms of the first Nixon administration, they never repudiated New Deal programs like Social Security, which, they argued, provided a "safety net" for the poor and aged. Their conservatism was directed at the liberalism of the late sixties rather than the New Deal or even the early sixties. In this way, they provided an important bridge to voters who were alienated by the explosion of the welfare state, but continued to back Social Security and Medicare.

The first indication that the new conservative movement was nationally viable came in I978. That fall, Republicans picked up 3I9 state legislative seats, 6 governorships, I2 House seats, and 3 Senate seats. The most impressive gains were by Republican conservatives. In Colorado, lowa, and New Hampshire, Republicans identified with the party's far right and defeated liberal Democratic incumbents. In Mississippi, a Republican- the first since Reconstruction-succeeded Democrat James Eastland. In Georgia Newt Gingrich was elected to Congress that year.

Reagan and Business

Before the I978 election, business lobbies and corporate political action committees had tended to divide their contributions equally between Democrats, the incumbent party, and Republicans, the more probusiness party. But in that election, PAC contributions began to shift toward Republicans. From January I to October I,1978, corporate PACs split their contributions between Democratic and Republican Congressional candidates; but during the last six weeks of the elections, as the potential for Republican upsets loomed, corporate PACs gave 72 percent of their money to Republicans, particularly to those challenging Democratic incumbents. This infusion of cash was an important factor in the Republican successes.

As the I980 elections approached, business leaders and PACs decided to cast their lot with the Republicans, but for the presidential nomination they were still leery of supporting a full-blown conservative like Ronald Reagan. Most business leaders had backed Gerald Ford against Reagan in the 1976 primaries. In 1980 they backed either John Connally or George Bush against Reagan. They doubted the seventy-year-old Reagan's competence as a chief executive. They were uncomfortable with his blustering statements about the Soviet menace. And they were worried that under the influence of Kemp and Wanniski, he would prove as fiscally irresponsible as the Democrats. But once it became clear in the spring of I980 that Reagan had sewn up the nomination, the Californian and business leaders began to move closer to each other.

Reagan formed a policy council chaired by George Shultz and including Alan Greenspan, Ford's chair of the Council of Economic Advisors, Burns, Simon, McCracken, and Walker. He asked Greenspan to draft his speeches and to accompany him during the campaign. The economists and former economic officials provided legitimacy for Reagan's promise that he could raise defense spending, cut taxes, and still balance the budget. In September they would conceal their own doubts as they stood behind him as he introduced a highly implausible plan for balancing the budget by I983. (Arthur Burns told Herbert Stein that he endorsed the plan because "if you dissented from it, your whole usefulness in the organization was lost.")2' Reagan also created a forty-member business advisory group that included CEOs and chairmen from many of the top banks and Fortune 500 corporations. Sensing that they would get much of what they wanted from his administration, the business leaders lent their support. Businesses also threw their support to Republican Congressional candidates, helping Republicans win the Senate in November I980. During I979 - 80, corporate PACs gave $I2.29 million to Republicans and X6.87 million to Democrats. By the last month of the election, the Republican Senatorial Campaign Committee had outraised its Democratic counterpart by twenty-five to one.

Once in office, President Reagan fulfilled business's fondest wishes. Reagan's tax program included the supply-side cuts, but it also featured a set of generous business tax cuts devised and lobbied for by Walker, whom Reagan had put in charge of his transition team on tax policy. Administration members who imagined they could defy their business allies got a rude awakening. Reagan's budget director David Stockman thought he could modify Walker's proposed cuts for business in order to make room for other cuts. But he discovered business's power on K Street: "Within days . . . Walker, the Chamber of Commerce, and most of K Street would come at us like a battalion of tanks. The firing lasted four days, then abruptly stopped. Walker got everything he wanted." Some of Walker's cuts were so egregious that they had to be repealed the next year when Robert Mclntyre of Citizens for Tax Justice revealed that they were allowing some large and profitable corporations to pay no taxes at all.

The individual tax cuts enacted under the new administration were just as egregious. Earlier in the century, progressives had fought to create an income tax because, in contrast to a sales tax or tariff, it could be used to reduce economic inequality. Reagan's tax cuts increased economic inequality. From I980 to I985, the share of after-tax income of the top 5 percent increased, while the share of the bottom four-fifths fell. The effective federal tax rates on the top I percent of earners fell from 3I.8 percent in I980 to 24.9 percent in I985, while the tax rate on the bottom four-fifths rose from I6.5 to I6.7 percent.

Reagan attempted to gut the regulatory agencies established during Nixon's first term. He cut the budgets of the Consumer Product Safety Commission by 38 percent, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration by 22 percent, and the EPA by I0 percent. He used the timeworn strategy of putting foxes in charge of the chicken coop. He appointed Thorne Auchter, the owner of a Florida construction company that OSHA had repeatedly cited for violations, to head the agency; and two outspoken opponents of the environmental movement, James Watt and Anne Gorsuch, were put in charge, respectively, of the Interior Department and the Environmental Protection Agency. The three appointees drastically reduced the budgets for enforcement. Watt reversed federal land policies. While he could not sell federal lands directly back to ranchers or miners, he transferred over 20 million acres back to state control, where they could be given or sold to private interests.

The new administration went after regulatory policies that dated from the Progressive Era. The budget of the Federal Trade Commission was cut by 28 percent and it was discouraged from pursuing antitrust cases. Reagan sent a clear message to business and the labor movement by firing and then refusing to rehire striking air controllers. He appointed probusiness conservatives to the NLRB who consistently ruled against unions in cases that came before the board. Under the Ford administration in I975-76, the board had favored business 35 percent of the time. In I983 and I984, it favored business in 72 percent of the cases.

These policies represented a repudiation of the reform tradition that began in the Progressive Era and a return to the principles of corporate individualism that governed America in the late nineteenth century. While Reagan had given a nod to pluralism in his campaign-boasting of his own union past-his administration made a mockery of democratic-pluralism by throwing its weight behind business and attempting to crush business's adversaries. Reagan would sometimes compare his administration with that of Eisenhower, but it did not show a trace of the "balanced" government that Eisenhower and Arthur Larson had advocated. It was a throwback not to Eisenhower, but to Coolidge and to the corrupt post-Civil War administrations.

Reagan also revived a nineteenth-century view of the federal government that was consistent with business's antiregulatory stance. He portrayed government as the enemy of popular democracy. In his first inaugural address, he declared:

In the present crisis, government is not the solution to our problems; government is the problem. From time to time, we've been tempted to believe that society has become too complex to be managed by self-rule, that government by an elite group is superior to government for, by, and of the people. Well, if no one among us is capable of governing himself, then who among us has the capacity to govern someone else?

He also fiercely attacked what he referred to as the "bureaucracy"- the permanent civil servants that since I883 had replaced patronage appointees. Accusing them of "bureaucratic sabotage" of his programs, he lamented "the permanent structure, that they've been here before you got here and they'll be here after you're gone and they're not going to change the way they're doing things." Like Reagan's denigration of government, his attack against the bureaucracy implied that the alternative was individual self-rule, but Reagan's promise of "self-rule" was a cruel hoax. What it really meant in practice was dominance over government decisions by business and K Street lobbyists-by the "issue networks" that had grown up around Washington in the I9705.

The Conservative Mood

From I978 to I986, Republican conservatives and their business allies thoroughly dominated American politics. One reason they prevailed was that business itself was united. Faced with fierce competition from abroad and from the labor, environmental, and consumer movements at home, all the different sectors of business-small, large, Northern, Southern, service, industrial, and agricultural-united against what they perceived was a common enemy. That had occurred in the early I9205 and occurred again in the late I970s.

The liberal movement was also divided and in disarray. George Meany and Lane Kirkland, who succeeded Meany as head of the AFL-CI0 in I979, disdained the movements of the sixties. In the wake of the legislative defeats in I978, the new United Auto Workers president Douglas Fraser attempted to create a new coalition called the Progressive Alliance that would unite labor with the movements of the sixties. But the AFL-CIO undermined Fraser's effort by discouraging its unions from joining. In I980, Fraser and other leaders of industrial unions, along with many of the consumer, civil rights, and community organizing groups that had come out of the sixties, backed Senator Edward Kennedy's primary challenge to President Carter, while Kirkland and many of the Democratic politicians stood by Carter. The split weakened the liberal movement and made Reagan's victory in I980 more likely.

There was no doubt that in his first term Reagan and his policies also had popular support. Reagan and the Republicans were able to do to Carter and the liberal Democrats what Roosevelt had done to Hoover and the Republicans: associate them with whatever unpleasantness had happened in the prior decade. Voters blamed Carter and the Democrats for everything from stagflation to America's loss of face internationally, and they saw in Reagan's policies hope for change. Identifying activist government with what they took to be Carter's failures, the public also backed Reagan's Jacksonian view of government. From September I973 to February I98I, the percentage of Americans agreeing that "the best government is the government that governs least" rose from 32 percent to 59 percent.

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... There was, however, one other factor that accounted for the triumph of business and Republican conservatives. In the past, elites and elite organizations had remained steadfast in their support for a politics that sought to reconcile democratic ideals of equality with the fact of corporate capitalism. Even in the hostile environment of the I9205, the elite organizations had persevered. But that did not happen in the late seventies and the eighties. Far from providing a counterweight to corporate individualism and to the attack against pluralism and government, they came to reinforce it.

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