The Nation : POLITICS : And the Beat Goes On: The Continuing Power of the Liberal ‘60s

As the 2000 election campaign approaches, it appears that the 30 Years’ War in American politics is over and the spirit of the ‘60s has won--not the radical ‘60s, now broadly condemned by the right, but the liberal early ‘60s. The belated triumph of the tradition of ‘60s liberalism is one of the remarkable political phenomena of our time. All the more remarkable, perhaps, because it has not been pointed out.

The liberal ‘60s began, cautiously, under President John F. Kennedy, who came into office with a razor-thin plurality and was initially far more interested in foreign affairs than domestic matters. In our memory of that transformative decade, the radical second half of the ‘60s, 1965-1970, overshadows the liberal ‘60s of 1960-1965. But it is amazing how much was achieved in those first years, in conjunction with the 88th and 89th Congresses.

By the end of 1965, using powers of the federal government, racial segregation had been effectively outlawed, and America’s racist immigration policy had been transformed, all in the name of the liberal integrationist ideal. Though the effort to provide universal health care was defeated, Medicare and Medicaid helped to round out President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal. These epochal reforms were not the work of politicians alone; civil-rights activists, federal judges and ordinary citizens played crucial instigating roles, pushing elected officials to move faster and farther than they were, at first, prepared to go.

The window of opportunity for reform was brief: The escalation of the war in Vietnam divided liberals, while the 1966 midterm elections registered the first wave of the conservative backlash against the civil-rights revolution and President Lyndon B. Johnson’s Great Society. Nonetheless, by the end of 1965, the ‘60s liberals had laid many of the foundations of the America we now live in.

Despite the conventional political wisdom on both right and left, the major achievements of ‘60s liberals are virtually sacrosanct today. Consider three major legacies: federally enforced civil rights (including protection for women under Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act); Medicare; and a liberal internationalist foreign policy based on such alliances as the North Atlantic Treaty Organization.

Today, liberals and conservatives debate affirmative action and the merits and extent of racial gerrymandering--but not the basic federal civil-rights protections established by the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Medicare financing is a subject of contention, but its legitimacy is accepted by both Republicans and Democrats. Just as no mainstream conservative proposes to abolish federal civil-rights protections, none is prepared to repeal the federal commitment to providing health care to the nation’s elderly; the debate, rather, is over whether to extend that commitment by having Medicare pay for prescription drugs. No mainstream liberal or conservative proposes dissolving NATO.

Not that every far-reaching reform came about in the liberal early 1960s. Late ‘60s radicalism left its own enduring legacies, chiefly in the areas of abortion rights and gay rights. On the other hand, the abolition of Aid for Families with Dependent Children by the controversial welfare act of 1996 would seem a glaring exception to the rule that the ‘60s liberal legacy is untouchable. Yet, the history of AFDC is more ambiguous than many commentators allow.

Begun as a small, temporary, emergency New Deal program in 1935, the program survived after World War II, under GOP and Democratic administrations, then greatly expanded in the 1960s due to court decisions that relaxed eligibility requirements. Calls for shifting the emphasis from welfare to getting jobs began in earnest in the late 1980s--and came from such echt-’60s liberals as New York Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan. Contemporary antipoverty programs, meanwhile, such as AmeriCorps and state-level workfare are very much in the tradition of Johnson’s Job Corps and Roosevelt’s Civilian Conservation Corps.

Sixties liberalism has, then, stood up over time, but has done so partly by default. For many years, what stalwart liberal Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. called the “vital center” looked fatally wishy-washy, as much of the radical left and the reactionary right denounced ‘60s liberalism. New-left radicals viewed what they called “corporate liberalism” as the ideological rationale for imperialism abroad and gross inequality at home. Goldwater-Reagan conservatives denounced New Deal-Great Society liberalism as the thin edge of the wedge of socialism and communism. The redical left’s hatred of liberals was just as intense as the radical right’s contempt for meddlesome reformers.

Kennedy-Johnson liberals also found themselves in the cross-fire in foreign-policy debates. To leftist opponents of the Vietnam War and other Cold War struggles, the vital-center liberals were bloodthirsty militarists and counterrevolutionaries; to the anticommunist right, they were weaklings and appeasers.

The collapse of the ‘60s liberal tradition was most evident in civil rights. The goal of most liberal civil-rights reformers both inside and outside government was an integrated America and a melting pot to which all immigrants would contribute. After 1965, however, the integrationist idealism of Martin Luther King Jr. and Bayard Rustin seemed to lose its way, superseded by the separatist impulses of the black-power movement. A similar divide between countercultural radicals and integrationist liberals later appeared in the feminist and the gay-rights movements, both first inspired by the black civil-rights struggles. Hard-line multiculturalism seemed to displace the transracial liberal ideal--itself an affront to the white-supremacist right--with a vision of the United States as a coalition of separate ethnic nationalities.

The decline of liberal integrationism permitted opportunistic conservatives to pose as champions of what they called the colorblind ideal. While some conservatives who quoted King and lauded the Civil Rights Act were sincere, many others combined public praise for integration with attacks on welfare that were thinly disguised race-baiting.

Liberalism, meanwhile, had transmogrified from a term of honor into a term of abuse, the dreaded “L-word.” After his narrow victory in 1968, President Richard M. Nixon (who started out in politics in 1946 as a “practical liberal”) still needed to win over millions of conservative quondam Democrats. So instead of attacking Democrats per se, he won a second term by berating liberals. The anti-liberal formula could not stave off GOP defeat (or prevent Democratic liberals from overreaching) after the Watergate scandals, but it worked wonders for Ronald Reagan and George Bush in the ‘80s.

Yet, times have changed. Recently, it has been the far right--concentrated in Congress--that has overreached, leading to the government shutdown of 1995 and the failed effort to remove President Bill Clinton from office. Today, more than at any time in decades, the American electorate seems receptive to the idea of activist government.

It was Clinton, in 1992, who began the painful process of moving U.S. politics back to the vital center once occupied by the Rooseveltian liberals and their Rockefeller Republican counterparts. While he has defended abortion rights and gay rights--lasting reforms of the radical ‘60s--Clinton has also revived and modernized something similar to the experimental reformism of Roosevelt and the liberal domestic spirit of Kennedy and Johnson. Dismaying both the statist left and the free-market right, he has tried to reconcile fiscal conservatism with increased social investments. Rejecting extremist multiculturalism and anticlericalism, he has managed to revive an old-fashioned patriotic and biblical liberal rhetoric, refusing to cede God to the Christian Coalition and Country to the country club. In foreign policy, he has been the first Democratic president since Vietnam to rehabilitate liberal internationalism.

Texas Gov. George W. Bush’s “compassionate conservatism” sounds as if it has been designed as a GOP alternative to Clinton’s “third way.” Will Bush truly challenge his party (as Clinton did his) to remake itself, or will he merely soften the GOP’s antigovernment rhetoric as a campaign ploy? If Bush is serious, the content of compassionate conservatism will certainly differ from the messages of either Al Gore or Bill Bradley. But even then, conservatives as well as liberals will have come to share a commitment to preserving, if not necessarily extending, the achievements of ‘60s liberals, from civil rights to federal aid to education.

As ever in our history, there is still abundant room for passionate debate across the political spectrum about America’s future. However, a new consensus does seem to be taking shape about the past. The civil-rights laws and the major social legislation of the 1960s will not be repealed, nor will the U.S. repudiate the liberal internationalist tradition of mid-century liberals in favor of a left-wing or right-wing version of isolationism.

Today’s mainstream conservatives, as well as centrist liberals, will, if they are wise, proclaim themselves the heirs of the ‘60s liberals, who, like the New Dealers, the Progressives and Abraham Lincoln’s Republicans, have become the shared political ancestors of all Americans. Just as former House Speaker Newt Gingrich was shrewd enough to claim the legacy of Roosevelt for the GOP, so tomorrow’s conservatives, as well as tomorrow’s liberals, would be well advised to invoke the legacy of Kennedy and Johnson, King and Rustin as their own, and mean it. “We are all republicans; we are all federalists,” Thomas Jefferson announced in 1801. In 2001, the winner of the presidential contest might well declare, “We are all ‘60s liberals now.”*