6.6 The 1980s – A “Conservative” Swing 

Speaking to Detroit autoworkers in October 1980, Republican presidential candidate Ronald Reagan described what he saw as the American Dream under Democratic president Jimmy Carter. The family garage may have still held two cars, cracked Reagan, but they were “both Japanese and they’re out of gas.”¹ The charismatic former governor of California suggested that a once-proud nation was running on empty. But Reagan held out hope for redemption. Stressing the theme of “national decline,” he nevertheless promised to make the United States once again a glorious “city upon a hill.”² In November, Reagan’s vision triumphed.

After the turmoil of the 1960s, the Kennedy assassinations, the Vietnam War, the economic downturn of the 1970s, Watergate, and Jimmy Carter, Americans were fed up. In 1980, they turned to Ronald Reagan who offered them a clear message promising a bright future. Reagan’s message was that taxes were too high, spending out of control, and that the government needed to get out of the way of its citizens. He cut taxes and attempted to cut the size of the federal government for the first time since the New Deal. On the other hand, he attempted to increase the size of the American military with massive deficit spending.

Conservativism

There had been a disparity between the “liberal” agenda of the Democratic left and the Christian conservatism of the Republican right since LBJ’s Great Society. Everywhere they turned, conservatives found themselves on the losing end of elections, court battles, and in the public eye. Yet, conservatism persisted and even increased in reaction to the chaos of the public protests, and the liberal agenda of the 1960s. Increasingly, many working- and middle-class citizens, those who once formed the core of the New Deal coalition, found themselves under onslaught from rising prices, growing taxes, and slowing wage growth. No longer was liberalism and the Democratic Party their path to prosperity, so they began to look for other political solutions.

This reaction is partly what led to the ascendance of Richard Nixon and his successor, Gerald Ford. Although both men were Cold Warriors, Republicans who advocated conservative policies at home and abroad, their administrations continued to support New Deal and Great Society welfare programs and other agenda items. Grassroots activism led to a voice for many of the disaffected. In 1979, Jerry Falwell, a Baptist minister from Lynchburg, Virginia, “founded the Moral Majority, an explicitly political organization dedicated to advancing a “pro-life, pro-family, pro-morality, and pro-American” agenda.”³ The Moral Majority inserted itself into politics and made itself a major force in the Republican Party.

In sum, several streams of conservative political mobilization converged in the late 1970s. Each wing of the burgeoning New Right—disaffected northern blue-collar workers, white southerners, evangelicals and devout Catholics, business leaders, disillusioned intellectuals, and Cold War hawks—turned to the Republican Party as the most effective vehicle for their political counterassault on liberalism and the New Deal political order. After years of mobilization, the domestic and foreign policy catastrophes of the Carter administration provided the headwinds that brought the conservative movement to shore.

Jimmy Carter’s election was a reaction to the scandals that rocked the Republican administrations of Richard Nixon. He was a breath of fresh air in Washington D.C. politics, but in many ways this was also his downfall.

Events outside Carter’s control certainly helped discredit liberalism, but the president’s own temperamental and philosophical conservatism hamstrung the administration and pushed national politics further to the right. In his 1978 State of the Union address, Carter lectured Americans that “government cannot solve our problems . . . it cannot eliminate poverty, or provide a bountiful economy, or reduce inflation, or save our cities, or cure illiteracy, or provide energy.” The statement neatly captured the ideological transformation of the county. Rather than leading a resurgence of American liberalism, Carter became, as one historian put it, “the first president to govern in a post–New Deal framework.”⁴

Carter’s reaction to world events, and decisions regarding his domestic agenda ended up alienating all his Democratic traditional supporters including organized labor, liberals, and minorities. Meanwhile Carter also came under attack from the religious right as he supported measures revoking the tax-exempt status of Christian schools. Then he faced backlash for unemployment and inflation rising, and the energy crisis. All of these events combined with those abroad, particularly the Iran Hostage Crisis and the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, hurt Carter’s chances for re-election. Meanwhile, conservatives had found a common message – they needed someone who would stand up for America and Americans.

The Election of 1980

These domestic challenges, combined with the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan and the hostage crisis in Iran, hobbled Carter heading into his 1980 reelection campaign. Many Democrats were dismayed by his policies. The president of the International Association of Machinists dismissed Carter as “the best Republican President since Herbert Hoover.”⁵ Angered by the White House’s refusal to back national health insurance, Massachusetts senator Ted Kennedy challenged Carter in the Democratic primaries. Running as the party’s liberal standard-bearer and heir to the legacy of his slain older brothers, Kennedy garnered support from key labor unions and left-wing Democrats. Carter ultimately vanquished Kennedy, but the close primary tally exposed the president’s vulnerability.

Carter’s opponent in the general election was Ronald Reagan, a former Hollywood actor who had served two terms as governor of California. Reagan ran as a staunch fiscal conservative and a Cold War hawk, vowing to reduce government spending and shrink the federal bureaucracy. Reagan also accused his opponent of failing to confront the Soviet Union and vowed steep increases in military spending. Carter responded by calling Reagan a warmonger, but the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan and the confinement of 52 American hostages in Iran discredited Carter’s foreign policy in the eyes of many Americans.

The incumbent fared no better on domestic affairs. Unemployment remained at nearly 8 percent.⁶ Meanwhile the Federal Reserve’s anti-inflation measures pushed interest rates to an unheard-of 18.5 percent.⁷ Reagan seized on these bad economic trends. On the campaign trail he brought down the house by proclaiming: “A recession is when your neighbor loses his job, and a depression is when you lose your job.” Reagan would then pause before concluding, “And a recovery is when Jimmy Carter loses his job.”⁸

Social and cultural issues presented yet another challenge for the president. Although a self-proclaimed “born-again” Christian and Sunday school teacher, Carter struggled to court the religious right. Carter scandalized devout Christians by admitting to lustful thoughts during an interview with Playboy magazine in 1976, telling the reporter he had “committed adultery in my heart many times.” ⁹ Although Reagan was only a nominal Christian and rarely attended church, the religious right embraced him. Reverend Jerry Falwell directed the full weight of the Moral Majority behind Reagan. The organization registered an estimated two million new voters in 1980. Reagan also cultivated the religious right by denouncing abortion and endorsing prayer in school. The IRS tax exemption issue resurfaced as well, with the 1980 Republican platform vowing to “halt the unconstitutional regulatory vendetta launched by Mr. Carter’s IRS commissioner against independent schools.”¹⁰ Early in the primary season, Reagan condemned the policy during a speech at South Carolina’s Bob Jones University, which had recently sued the IRS after the school’s ban on interracial dating led to the loss of its tax-exempt status.

Reagan’s campaign appealed subtly but unmistakably to the racial hostilities of white voters. The candidate held his first post–nominating convention rally at the Neshoba County Fair near Philadelphia, Mississippi, the town where three civil rights workers had been murdered in 1964. In his speech, Reagan championed the doctrine of states’ rights, which had been the rallying cry of segregationists in the 1950s and 1960s. In criticizing the welfare state, Reagan had long employed thinly veiled racial stereotypes about a “welfare queen” in Chicago who drove a Cadillac while defrauding the government or a “strapping young buck” purchasing T-bone steaks with food stamps.¹¹ Like George Wallace before him, Reagan exploited the racial and cultural resentments of struggling white working-class voters. And like Wallace, he attracted blue-collar workers in droves.

With the wind at his back on almost every issue, Reagan only needed to blunt Carter’s characterization of him as an angry extremist. Reagan did so during their only debate by appearing calm and amiable. “Are you better off than you were four years ago?” he asked the American people at the conclusion of the debate.¹² The American people answered no. Reagan won the election with 51 percent of the popular vote to Carter’s 41 percent. (Independent John Anderson captured 7 percent.)¹³ Despite capturing only a slim majority, Reagan scored a decisive 489–49 victory in the Electoral College.¹⁴ Republicans gained control of the Senate for the first time since 1955 by winning twelve seats. Liberal Democrats George McGovern, Frank Church, and Birch Bayh went down in defeat, as did liberal Republican Jacob Javits. The GOP picked up thirty-three House seats, narrowing the Democratic advantage in the lower chamber.¹⁵ The New Right had arrived in Washington, D.C.

Notes

1. Ronald Reagan, quoted in Steve Neal, “Reagan Assails Carter On Auto Layoffs,” Chicago Tribune, October 20, 1980, 5.
2. Ronald Reagan, quoted in James T. Patterson, Restless Giant: The United States from Watergate to Bush v. Gore (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005), 152.
3. Joseph Locke and Ben Wright, eds., “Chapter 29,” The American Yawp: A Massively Collaborative Open US History Textbook (Redwood City, CA: Stanford University Press, 2018), II. Conservative Ascendance, at http://www.americanyawp.com/text/29-the-triumph-of-the-right/.
4. Ibid., III. The Conservatism of the Carter Years.
5. William Winpisinger, quoted in Cowie, Jefferson Cowie, Stayin’ Alive: The 1970s and the Last Days of the Working Class (New York: New Press, 2010), 261.
6. James T. Patterson, Restless Giant: The United States from Watergate to Bush v. Gore (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005), 148.
7. Ibid., 148.
8. Ibid., 148.
9. Jimmy Carter, quoted in “Carter Tells of ‘Adultery in His Heart,’” Los Angeles Times, September 21, 1976, B6.
10. Joseph Crespino, “Civil Rights and the Religious Right,” in Bruce J. Schulman and Julian Zelizer, eds., Rightward Bound: Making America Conservative in the 1970s (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008), 103.
11. Patterson, Restless Giant, 163; Jon Nordheimer, “Reagan Is Picking His Florida Spots: His Campaign Aides Aim for New G.O.P. Voters in Strategic Areas,” New York Times, February 5, 1976, 24.
12. Sean Wilentz, The Age of Reagan: A History, 1974–2008 (New York: HarperCollins, 2008), 124.
13. Meg Jacobs and Julian Zelizer, Conservatives in Power: The Reagan Years, 1981–1989: A Brief History with Documents (Boston: Bedford St. Martin’s, 2011), 2.
14. Patterson, Restless Giant, 150.
15. Ibid., 150.