Discuss.
http://www.salon.com/2014/01/11/the_rac ... residency/" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;Today Reagan is a folk-hero of the right and center and is so widely popular that Barack Obama often feels obliged to invoke Reagan’s name reverentially. Why this obeisance to Reagan? At least partly it reflects a sense widely shared among liberals that the United States is historically and at heart a conservative country, requiring genuflection at the feet of conservative icons. For an example of this liberal belief in the country’s bedrock conservatism, consider an essay published several weeks before the 2012 presidential election, when the portents indicated an uncertain Democratic victory. Editorialist Frank Rich argued that whether Obama won or lost, conservatism would triumph in the end: “This is a nation that loathes government and always has. Liberals should not be deluded: The Goldwater revolution will ultimately triumph, regardless of what happens in November.” Is Rich right? Was Reagan a first step away from the exceptional politics of the New Deal era and back toward a more fundamentally conservative America? Are we at root a conservative country, moving inexorably in the direction of Goldwater’s repudiation of liberal governance?
The simplest way to answer this question may be to look at public attitudes toward government’s role in solving major social problems. In 2009, the political scientists Benjamin Page and Lawrence Jacobs exhaustively reviewed survey data on American attitudes toward activist government, compiling the results in a book entitled Class War? What Americans Really Think about Economic Inequality. Here are some of their findings:
87 percent of the public agrees that government should spend whatever is necessary to ensure that all children have really good public schools they can go to.
67 percent agree that the government in Washington ought to see to it that everyone who wants to work can find a job.
66 percent agree that the Social Security system should ensure a minimum standard of living to all contributors.
73 percent agree it is the responsibility of the federal government to make sure all Americans have health care coverage.
68 percent agree that government must see that no one is without food, clothing, or shelter.
78 percent favor their own tax dollars being used to help pay for food stamps and other assistance for the poor.
These hardly come across as the cold-hearted responses of a conservative polity wedded to Goldwaterite principles. Instead it is Lyndon Johnson’s vision, not Goldwater’s, that seems represented even today in the above opinions.
...During the Reagan era, for the first time since the onset of the Great Depression, significant cultural space opened up to present government—rather than concentrated wealth—as the greatest threat to freedom faced by the middle class. In turn, massive tax cuts were sold as the appropriate way to restrain a looming, intrusive state. On one level, of course, the tax revolt of the 1980s was more precisely targeted towards preventing the transfer of resources to “them,” the “undeserving poor,” who were disproportionately people of color. More than this, though, opposition to taxes came to mean opposition to government meddling. The point is not that Reagan or other Republican administrations have reduced the size of government (on the contrary, they’ve repeatedly vastly expanded federal power and dramatically increased the national debt, not least through unsustainable tax giveaways to the rich). The point, rather, is that they sold tax cuts for the rich, and indeed the whole agenda of reduced regulation and slashed services, as an expression of hostility toward liberal government. The anti-tax insurgent Grover Norquist has been widely quoted as saying: “I’m not in favor of abolishing the government. I just want to shrink it down to the size where we can drown it in the bathtub.” But what makes many voters sympathetic to the idea of extinguishing government in the first place? For many, this seething hostility toward government is rooted in racial narratives of freedom in jeopardy.
