Despite obvious continuities, Starr stresses, importantly, that conservatism in the era stretching from Goldwater to Reagan differed markedly from its current incarnation. The former, he maintains, represented “only an intermediate step toward the truly right-wing reactionary movement that has emerged in recent years and taken over the Republican Party.” During the 1964 Goldwater campaign, he writes, Republicans had seen a rising opportunity to “turn themselves into the nation’s majority party by appealing to racial and cultural backlash, though they had to use carefully modulated and coded language to avoid alienating more centrist voters.” In 1968, that strategy helped peel off enough Southern Democrats to send Richard Nixon to the White House. But if Republicans hoped to foment a counterrevolution, they only partially succeeded when it came to governing. During the Nixon-Reagan-Bush era, Starr asserts, “[M]ajor elements of the liberal rights revolution and the progressive project remained in place, and some even advanced,” including federal laws, policies, and programs conservatives had long opposed and hoped to gut, such as Medicare and, under Nixon, environmental protection.
It is, indeed, depressing to revisit the Nixon Administration with Starr and to be reminded of how moderate and even liberal several of its initiatives appear to us today, given the all-out assault on the regulatory state that has followed. The Reagan-Bush years, Starr argues, did not involve a wholesale attack on the federal government, though unions were badly weakened and tax “reform” rewarded the richest Americans, whose share of the national income increased enormously. The rise and growing influence of the religious right within the Republican Party injected abortion and so-called “family values” into partisan politics. Nonetheless, Starr observes that even as Republican Presidents appointed ten successive Supreme Court justices between 1969 and 1991, they did not succeed in rolling back cultural change or dismantling the laws and policies that had advanced gender and racial equality.
The ground shifted dramatically in the 1990s, Starr contends, when an era of fierce partisanship got underway and Democrats and Republicans became locked in a struggle in which neither could keep the upper hand for long. Republicans, led by Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich and like-minded conservatives, spearheaded an effort to demonize liberals and even moderates who rejected their agenda. The harshness of these attacks, which characterized those who disagreed as “anti-American” and immoral, violated long-standing political norms and deepened the discord ever more apparent among a closely divided and often dispirited electorate. New right-wing radio and television outlets, including Fox News, provided a platform that not only enabled but encouraged, exploited, and, it must be added, profited from extremism. No longer did Americans get their news from the three major television networks that broadly observed shared reportorial standards designed to convey some degree of objectivity. Partisanship began to rule the airways.