Bruce J. Schulman, Julian E. Zelizer, eds. Rightward Bound: Making America Conservative in the 1970s. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2008. ix + 373 pp. $22.50 (paper), ISBN 978-0-674-02758-9.
Reviewed by Stephen R. Ortiz (Asst. Prof. of History, SUNY--Binghamton)
Published on H-Policy (February, 2012)
Commissioned by Douglas J. Forsyth (Bowling Green State University)
Imperfectly Stanching Liberalism: How Modern Conservatives Shaped Policies Before Reagan
Not too long ago, Alan Brinkley lamented the dearth of historical studies on American conservatism.[1] After fewer than twenty years, American conservatism, especially its modern “movement” iteration, no longer remains an underdeveloped topic of historical scholarship. Academic press catalogues now overflow with new offerings on the origins and rise of modern conservatism, locating more and more distant ideological sources and pushing the chronology of its origins further and further away from the period 1968-80. Luckily, two of the most prominent political historians active today, Bruce J. Schulman and Julian E. Zelizer, have edited a collection of essays that refocuses the attention back to the specific context of the 1970s as the crucible from which modern conservatism emerged. By assembling an impressive roster of junior and senior scholars that reads as a “Who’s Who” of the field, Schulman and Zelizer’s Rightward Bound is a decisive and lasting contribution to American political history, and, more important to this audience, offers many policy insights into the late twentieth-century United States.
The two most important collective themes stressed in Rightward Bound are about timing and tensions. Schulman and Zelizer’s introduction provides a strong articulation of why the success of modern conservatism as a political force must necessarily be tied temporally to the 1970s. They describe the decade as “the critical turning point in American history that established the foundation for current policy debates ... and [that] fundamentally reshaped America by moving the nation out of the New Deal and Cold War period” (p. 2). Only in this era, they argue, would “the Right coalesc[e] into a full-scale political movement and forg[e] durable connections between state and society” (p. 3). Schulman and Zelizer also insist on the incomplete victory of modern conservatism over “sixties-style” liberalism; in their view, the Right’s electoral ascendancy took shape in constant tension with liberalism, as a persistent social, cultural, and, indeed, political force. Put differently, conservatives continued to win political power, even while, perhaps precisely because, they continued to lose in the cultural and social arena.
Schulman and Zelizer divide Rightward Bound’s fourteen essays into two sections: “Mobilizing the Movement” and “The Battle Over Policies and Politics.” While the word “policies” only comes into play in the second section title, H-Policy readers will be keen to see very significant interplay between policy and politics throughout the volume. Multiple chapters demonstrate how both the domestic and foreign policies that materialized in the 1970s provoked sustained, overlapping political mobilizations against them by the political Right. Despite the election of the Republican Richard M. Nixon to office in 1968 on the anti-liberal, “Silent Majority” theme, conservatives soon experienced frustration and disillusionment as a number of Nixon’s domestic and foreign policy initiatives drew their ire. As the decade wore on, President Jimmy Carter’s domestic and foreign policy added partisan gasoline to the fire of the conservative countermobilizations already underway. Indeed, throughout the book, Rightward Bound’s authors often reverse the customary causal relationship between grassroots movements and federal policies, identifying elite policymaking as the source of politicization, not the result of it.[2]
In some essays, the relationship between policy and politics is framed in the classic “backlash” narrative. Marjorie J. Spruill examines the imbroglio over the1977 national conference held in Houston on the United Nation’s International Women’s Year to demonstrate how federal support for feminist goals proved to be a net negative for feminism as a political force. By detailing how federal actions provoked a violent and widespread countermobilization of social conservatives in defense of “family values” traditionalism, Spruill contends that the politicization of social conservatives in opposition to the feminist movement transformed both gender and electoral politics for the foreseeable future. Similarly, essays by Zelizer and Jeremi Suri delve into the growing discontent with the “post-Vietnam” foreign policy of détente. Whether practiced by the Nixon, Ford, or Carter administrations, what Zelizer calls a “centrist national security agenda” (p. 265), based on détente with the Soviet Union, galvanized a hawkish, bipartisan foreign policy opposition that eventually came to power with the election of Ronald Reagan. Nuclear arms limitation treaties, the transfer of the Panama Canal, and an increasingly assertive Soviet Union all served as rallying points for foreign policy conservatives to critique and to help defeat the centrists within the Republican Party first and, later, the Democrats in the 1980 election. While this foreign policy backlash reads more like a restoration of pre-Vietnam Cold War attitudes, the bipartisan centrist support for détente during the decade clearly melded conservative Republicans and “neo-conservative” Democrats together to form a potent constituency within the Reagan coalition by 1980.
Other essays in Rightward Bound eschew a typical backlash narrative by offering insights into the oblique ways federal policies shaped the rising conservative movement and by addressing the changes in civic society and in political culture fostered by conservative activists. Joseph Crespino, for example, adds a wrinkle to the racial backlash narrative by describing the results of federal policies which were designed to eliminate racial discrimination at the South’s “white academies,” the private, often evangelical Christian, all-white schools that arose in response to mandated desegregation. Crespino deftly argues that the Internal Revenue Service’s denial of tax exemption to schools that practiced racial discrimination (a policy that originated in the Nixon administration) inadvertently led to the politicization of evangelical and fundamentalist Christians in defense of their institutions, from what was perceived as federal (and liberal) persecution of religion. He adds that rather than just provoking a simple backlash against racial policies, the IRS furor caused a “strange displacement,” with “disaffected conservative groups focus[ing] their animus not against African Americans or historically disadvantaged groups, but rather against ‘liberal elites’ and ‘unelected bureaucrats’” (p. 92). Having located common enemies, evangelicals became much more receptive to secular conservatives’ other anti-statist arguments as well.
Essays by Matthew D. Lassiter, Bethany E. Moreton, and Alice O’Connor demonstrate how conservatives rallied against what they believed was liberalism’s capture of American political culture, and civic, educational, and philanthropic institutions. In exploring the foundations of the “family values” rhetoric and its importance to the emergence of modern conservatism, Lassiter points to the ways in which conservatives’ cultural models of “traditional” family decline catapulted over Great Society-styled economic models, “setting the terms of public debate and determining the direction of public policies” (p. 16). Moreton and O’Connor investigate the ways in which conservatives strived to create counter-institutions and cultural forces that would combat liberalism’s entrenched ideological biases, elitism, and anti-business attitudes on college campuses (Moreton) and in policy think tanks and philanthropic institutions (O’Connor). O’Connor explains that in financing a “counterrevolution,” conservative activists and donors sought to build a “wide-ranging conservative ‘counter-intelligentsia’ to break what they saw as a left-liberal stranglehold on American politics and culture” (p. 152). Moreton likewise describes the institutional countermobilization at those bastions of liberalism, American college campuses. Moreton argues that conservative donors funded a wholesale (retail?) effort to change American college students’ negative opinions about business and the free enterprise system. While Moreton nods to the changing economic conditions of the 1970s as a reason for shifting attitudes, she argues for a more important ideological transformation: “campus missionaries were well on their way to rehabilitating the free-market capitalism and its managerial representatives on the cultural battle turf of the American campus” (p. 52). In other words, the yuppies of the 1980s, and the cultural shift yuppiedom signified, were carefully cultivated on campus during the 1970s.
Finally, but alas, not exhaustively, Meg Jacobs’s contribution demonstrates how conservatives shaped public policy in the 1970s even with limited electoral power. Jacobs examines free-market conservatives’ initiatives within the Nixon administration when confronted by the energy crisis of the 1970s. While Congress and the public were keen on taking steps to end the crisis with strong government action, a group of free-marketeers sought new ways to deflect those calls and hamstring any federal response pushed upon them. Jacobs explains that this small, but influential, group believed it to be its responsibility to “transform the crisis in oil into a crisis in governance--that is, the challenge was to use the crisis as a way to discredit government activism and to renew faith in the free market” (p. 194). This shift from an oppositional role outside of the loci of power, to a very limited one from within them, becomes a decisive moment to Jacobs in the expansion of “an increasingly hollow state.” At this moment, she writes, “conservatism was transformed from an opposition ideology premised on radically eliminating government to an ideology of officeholders who struggled to contain and gradually undermine the government they so vehemently mistrusted” (p. 205). Americans, as it turns out, like many government programs and still call for government responses during crises. Jacobs gives great insight into how conservatives have attempted to override this stubborn residue of liberalism’s glory years.
Rightward Bound is one of the most significant and accessible single volumes on the ascendancy of modern conservatism and on the decade of the 1970s. The editors deserve a great deal of credit for the cohesiveness of the book. Like every collection of this nature, it includes essays that do not all fit together seamlessly. But given the diversity of the approaches and topics, they are rather limited in number--and interesting just the same! Moreover, the essays are uniformly well written, tightly argued, and economical in size, making this book an excellent choice for course assignment. I do not write this as a hypothetical: I successfully assigned it to undergraduate seminar students, who found it very readable and interesting. Indeed, more than interesting; they found the persistence of the policy debates and recurrence of the political forces and the political actors gobsmacking. For those interested in policy history, the volume consistently addresses the intersection of policy and politics in late twentieth-century American life in sophisticated and rewarding ways. It should be honored with a wide readership.
Notes
[1]. Alan Brinkley, “The Problem of American Conservatism,” The American Historical Review 99, no. 2 (1994): 409-429.
[2]. This perspective is, of course, hardly a new one. For two relevant examples, see Andrea Louise Campbell, How Policies Make Citizens: Senior Political Activism and the American Welfare State (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2003); and Paul Pierson, “When Effect Becomes Cause: Policy Feedback and Political Change,” World Politics 45 (1993): 595-628.
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Citation:
Stephen R. Ortiz. Review of Schulman, Bruce J.; Zelizer, Julian E., eds., Rightward Bound: Making America Conservative in the 1970s.
H-Policy, H-Net Reviews.
February, 2012.
URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=35277
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