Overview: Post WWII to 1980

Understanding our current circumstance of governance and politics in America requires a historical view of the path that was taken to get us to the current moment. This approach takes a genealogical look at the near antecedents helped produce our current circumstances. We will start our quick genealogy at the end of WWII, roughly covering the years 1947-1980.

Unlike our past wars there was no complete demobilization of the military after WWII. Communist expansion, the “Iron Curtain,” the continued development of atomic and hydrogen bombs and sophisticated weapons, required both military spending and military-industrial-scientific partnerships. In 1947, President Truman wanted to provide substantial money to assist Greece and Turkey fight a possible communist takeover. Republican Senator Arthur Vandenberg advised Truman that he should “scare the hell out of the American people.” Americans supported the postwar Truman Doctrine largely because they feared the global spread of totalitarian regimes. In the same year, Congress enacted legislation to create the Department of Defense, the Central Intelligence Agency, and the National Security Council.

The Korean War and Senator Joseph McCarthy’s very public investigation into the role of communists in American government, which generated a short-lived populism, bolstered the fear of communism. Anti-communism characterized much of the tenor of the 1950s. The launch of Russia’s Sputnik satellite in late 1957 fueled this fear of communism. A year later, a retired candy manufacturer, Robert Welch Jr., founded the John Birch Society. Among the co-founders, who were largely businessmen, were Fred Koch, founder of Koch industries, and Harry Lynde Bradley, co-founder of the Allen Bradley Company. The Birch Society supported limited government and opposed wealth distribution, economic interventionism, collectivism, totalitarianism, communism, and socialism. The Birchers asserted that socialism was infiltrating the federal government and regarded Dwight Eisenhower as “a tool of the Communists.” The John Birch Society was perhaps the first conservative or radical business-sponsored conservative organization in postwar America, foreshadowing the formation radical and reactionary political organizations.

The claim of presidential nominee John Kennedy of a missile gap with the USSR (there was no gap as Kennedy discovered after he was elected president in 1960) reinforced the American fear communism. In one of his last events as president, Eisenhower in January 1961 warned the country about the rise of a military-industrial complex. He described this complex as “an immense military establishment and a large arms industry” for which the country’s technological revolution was largely responsible. The anticommunism motif continued in the early and mid-1960s with the Cuban missile crisis and the Vietnam war. However, by the end of decade the failure of the Vietnam military campaign overshadowed the success of the Cuban Missile crisis.

The Civil Rights Act of 1964, enacted the year following Kennedy’s assassination, dramatically enhanced the exit of Southern Democrats from the Democratic Party. It also bolstered the presidential ambitions of Barry Goldwater. By the early 1960s several key Republicans eagerly wanted to see Barry Goldwater become the Republican presidential nominee. William Buckley, Jr., who founded the conservative journal National Review and hosted the Firing Line television program, was an early Goldwater supporter. He, among others, saw the ultra-conservative John Birch Society’s support of Goldwater as a barrier to Goldwater’s nomination. Buckley, the most prominent conservative voice in America, penned an article in the National Review that excoriated Welch. Goldwater, in pre-arranged fashion, supported Buckley’s article. Showing Buckley’s power, the article chased the John Birch Society from the conservative wing of the Republican party.

Buckley essentially purged the conservative movement of its extreme elements and enfolded the other various factions of conservatism to focus their common opposition to liberalism. Goldwater was nominated but lost in 1964 in a towering landslide to Lyndon Johnson. The conservative push then seemed to be put into a deep freeze from which it was unlikely to recover.

Johnson obtained significant domestic legislation, including two significant civil rights bills, the Medicare and Medicaid programs, support for higher education, employment training, food stamp programs, and an extensive set of “war on poverty” programs. Johnson also significantly increased American military presence in Viet Nam.

But Johnson soon faced a society that appeared to be disintegrating, especially during the civil disorders or urban violence of the mid- and late 60s. These divisive events included the Black Power movement, the evaporation of significant support for the Vietnam War, the counter-cultural revolution’s focus on permissive sex and recreational drugs, the rise of feminism, and more generally the rejection of authority, growing opposition to school integration and forced busing. The assinations of Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King, Jr. magnified these societal divisions. Less visibly perhaps, the population evidenced a growing concern for environmental degradation and  worker safety.

The late ’60s and ’70s witnessed violent turmoil in the Middle East, two rounds of oil and gas crises, and economic “stagflation.” It is almost impossible to underestimate the impact these 10 or so years. This turmoil sharpened and broaden antagonism to liberalism to the detriment of the Democratic party and to the benefit of the Republican party.

Johnson declined to run for a second term in 1968. In the ’68 election the moderate Republican candidate running with a veneer of conservatism, Richard Nixon, defeated Democrat Hubert Humphrey and George Wallace, running as the nominee of the American Independent Party. Four years later, Nixon soundly defeated the liberal antiwar candidate of the Democratic party, Eugene McCarthy, an event which seemed to push the liberals into a deep freeze. Nixon turned out to be a pragmatic Republican who promoted some bipartisan legislation with a liberal tint, such as creating the Environmental Protection Agency and the Occupational Safety and Health Administration. The more conservative portion of the Republican electorate was upset if not outraged by the more liberal legislation, which played on their disappointment, especially that of wealthy businessmen, of Goldwater’s defeat.

Upon resigning after the Watergate affair, Nixon’s vice president, the Midwestern moderate conservative Gerald Ford, became president for two years. Ford focused on tax reduction and energy, again a somewhat mixed bag of accomplishments for conservative Republicans, who were probably most upset at the selection of the liberal Republican, Nelson Rockefeller, as vice president. Jimmy Carter defeated Ford in the 1976 election. Carter was a southern Baptist from Georgia, perhaps slowing the exit of southern conservatives from the party. Carter is perhaps best remembered by his “malaise” speech, the difficult time he had dealing with the Iranian revolution, and the creation of two new federal cabinet agencies, the Department of Energy and the Department of Education. The Iran hostage affair and high unemployment joined with high inflation signaled the end as Carter was roundly defeated by Ronald Reagan in 1980.