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9. Culture Wars, Politics, and Power
- University of Pennsylvania Press
- Chapter
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chaPTer 9 culture Wars, Politics, and Power california has always been a political outlier. as most of the united states was waking up in november 1964 to a Johnson landslide and massive majorities for democrats in congress and in statehouses across the land, californians awoke to a new republican senator, the repeal of the state’s fair housing law by way of Proposition 14 on the state ballot, and the spectacle of a state democratic Party rapidly descending into a deeply factionalized, impotent mess. even if democrats could take comfort from Johnson’s huge victory over Barry Goldwater, historians have recently demonstrated that the Goldwater movement represented the stirrings of a powerful right-wing sensibility in state and national politics that would help elect ronald reagan governor in 1966 and a return to a republican majority coalition nationally in the years after 1968.1 reagan’s successful campaign in 1966 demonstrated that the state GoP had learned from the mistakes of 1962, and also benefited from damaging divisions within the democratic Party and the political wounds inflicted on the Brown administration by the Watts riots and the social turmoil that seemed to characterize the mid-1960s.2 This chapter will advance several propositions that complicate this picture of california politics in the 1960s. First, the case study of the battle over fair housing demonstrates that the economic battle over government interference in the market, infused as it was with the politics of race prejudice and antistatism, is an example of how successful liberals had been in reshaping political debate to take much greater account of the diversity of society. The backlash was very real, but california democrats had successfully placed questions of social citizenship and equality at the center of state politics to the extent that the state supreme court had the opportunity to overrule Proposition 14 and change the legal standing of minority groups in a way that would have enormous consequences for political life in california. This argument 206 chapter 9 tackles head-on the thesis that there was some sort of liberal heyday prior to the 1960s, when too many interest groups entered political life and ruined the democratic Party and liberalism generally. it also finds much to criticize in the work of anyone using the term “consensus” for the period between World War ii and the 1960s: as i have tried to show, the period between 1945 and the 1960s was in california a time when a modern era of political party cleavage over major issues of ideology came into being.3 second, though full account is taken here of the devastating internal debates within democratic Party circles in the 1960s, i also analyze the extent to which different shades of leftist politics coalesced in the period to shape the character and dominant political themes of the democratic Party in its post-cold War liberal form. Many politicians in california whose careers took off in this period went on to influential positions of leadership and influence, and their political teeth were cut in debates over abortion, the Vietnam War, gay rights, women’s rights, welfare rights, and managed economic growth that would shape the democratic Party even if they would have less traction in the nation at large. it is not at all clear that california entered the 1970s a less liberal place than it had been ten years before, and in any case we can see in the political struggles of the mid-1960s the makings of the contemporary democratic Party.4 fair housing and the rise of the culture Wars in 1963 prospective home buyers in the east Bay might have found themselves drawn to a home for sale at number 7940 Winthrop street in oakland. For an asking price of $18,950 it was possible to buy this “nice family home, hill view, beauty pleat drapes . . . covered patio.” an electric stove was included. There was one drawback if you happened not to be white: the real estate listing stated “caucasians only.”5 Though the liberal block in the legislature had passed a raft of legislation between 1959 and 1961 establishing a state FePc, outlawing discrimination in the provision of services, and forbidding discrimination in the allocation of public housing, the regulation of the private economic marketplace remained deeply controversial. Housing was a particularly hot topic, as to try to restrict the seller’s freedom of maneuver struck at the heart of many americans’ sense of economic well-being and self-sufficiency : what if...