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On March 26, 1968, Ben Carpenter, then president of the conservative Texas and Southwestern Cattle Raisers Association, delivered a speech at the organization’s annual membership convention. Carpenter used the occasion to describe what he considered the slippery slope of American moral decline. He delivered a fourteen-page address on the dangers of “liberal moral relativism,” which had “permeated and threatened to destroy society .” “We pussyfoot among a lot of high-sounding names,” Carpenter told his audience. “We call drunkards ‘alcoholics,’ . . . homosexuals ‘deviates,’ slackers ‘pacifists,’ . . . and criminals ‘victims of society.’ . . . I think the time has come when we should and must draw a line separating compassion from softheadedness, permissiveness and timidity.” Citing Edward Gibbon ’s study on the rise and fall of the Roman Empire, Carpenter compared America’s decline with the dissolution of “the great political force which had held the civilized world together for more than 500 years.” Where did the Roman Empire go wrong? Its decline resulted from excessive government spending, an unwillingness of the young men to bear arms in defense of their country, widespread sexual immorality, the spread of effeminacy, and a social and cultural disregard for religion. Carpenter warned of rising crime rates, particularly rampant rape, and said that regardless of the “liberal ” perspective, America had not always been “that way.”1 Carpenter’s speech reflected both the evolution of the conservative worldview since 1964 and numerous themes that would continue to pepper conservative political rhetoric in the coming decades. The hypermasculine posturing of men like Carpenter also grew out of notions of white southern honor and the impulse to protect family, home, and tradition against “invasion.” In the context of the mid-1960s, perceiving liberalism as not only a threat to family and to individual liberties, but also as the political embodiment of weakness, affected Texans’ relationship between party and philosophy. Between 1965 and 1968, the fear of rising crime rates intermixed with Reconstructing Conservatism Chapter 3 Antiliberalism and the Limits of “Law and Order” 68 Antiliberalism and the Limits of “Law and Order” 69 images of riots and violence to fuel the potency of a reinvigorated conservative rhetoric. The momentum generated by these images emerged as a tool far more useful to conservative Republicans than had been the case just a few years earlier. Very quickly after Goldwater’s rejection as an extremist in 1964, Republican conservatives succeeded in putting the extremist shoe on the other foot, using images of frequent violence, disruptive civil disobedience , antiwar and civil rights protests, and urban chaos to vilify national Democrats and liberals. During that same time, as “law and order” emerged as the standard mantra of conservatives in both parties looking to rally electoral support across Texas, intraparty factionalism continued to plague candidates who aggressively fought to label and vilify their opponents’ weaknesses before themselves being labeled and vilified. The struggle to avoid being perceived as extreme persisted, but it also quickly became bipartisan.2 Repackaging Republicanism For many Texans, the fear that America was slipping into a violent abyss during the mid-1960s seemed very real. These fears were intensified by the routine coverage incidents such as race riots and protests received from national and local media. Each night, Texans with access to television could, before sitting down to their dinner, be reminded that not only was the world still the dark and foreboding place it had been throughout the cold war, but that all across America, challenges to the social order were becoming more common while crime seemed to be on the rise. Rising crime rates may not have been caused by such challenges to stability, but there is little doubt that the tumultuous landscape of the mid-1960s coalesced, for many, into a singular image of chaos and disorder.3 These images affected public perceptions, causing disillusionment and fear, and, in powerful ways, extended into a political culture that was rapidly polarizing along ideological grounds. Conservative Republicans hoped that by associating such images with liberalism, they could shift Texans’ critical focus onto the perceived dangers of liberalism and the Democratic Party connected to that philosophy. At the same time, conservative Texas Republicans argued that government’s failure to deal with the growing climate of lawlessness, disorder, and violence was evidence of Democratic liberalism’s failure—and Lyndon Johnson’s.4 Johnson’s response to rising crime rates, which largely embraced new research associating structural poverty with urban decay and crime, gave Texas conservatives ammunition in the battle to equate liberalism with [3...

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